Greg Lipscomb had written the following:
I fear the white folk
Who want to nibble my skin like licorice;
Peel my ebony armor down
To where it’s squeaky white bone;
Cook my heritage until it’s as tame as a muffin
They can dip moist in their milk
And blithely swallow in torn pieces; Boil my muscle into ukulele strings
To play my life like a jingle
Strummed on a cooking show
On color TV.
It was an astonishing piece of work, an angry voice of black indignation, fright, and cynicism. Warden said so in a comment on the paper and hoped that perhaps with enough encouragement the boy would start to believe in his own capabilities. So far Warden had not been able to establish any rapport with him. He did his work faithfully and beautifully, but he seemed to mistrust Warden’s praise of his accomplishments.
Warden was alone in his classroom on the third and top floor of Fleming Hall, the academic building. Daylight from the large arched windows helped the overhead neon lamps to brighten and cheer up the place, despite the gloom of the winter clouds outside. Cynthia’s touches were everywhere in this room—in the geraniums by the windows, in the neatly tacked posters of the English Lake District on the bulletin board, in the postcards of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters she had taped to a couple of windowpanes. Through those high windows in his corner room, he could survey the elliptical lawn around which the school was built, the lawn known on campus as the Quad, even though it was more rounded than quadrangular. He had brought her to this room on her first visit to Montpelier in June two years ago. She had laughed aloud with the delight of seeing the place, and she had made him laugh, had made him see the school afresh.
Ostensibly, he had been the one giving her the tour of the campus, but it had been she, not he, who had led them from building to building. His classroom in Fleming Hall was in the lower southeast corner, at five o’clock if the Quad were a clock face. Next door, sprawling from five to six o’clock was Stringfellow Hall, the main building that housed a bit of everything—the headmaster’s office, admissions, alumni relations, the dining hall, the student activities rooms, the post office, the laundry rooms, the school store, and, upstairs, even some dormitories. They had walked clockwise around the campus: at seven o’clock, Lee House, the infirmary; at eight o’clock, the headmaster’s residence; at nine o’clock, the chapel; at ten and eleven o’clock, because it was so big, the gym and its various appendages; at twelve o’clock, the Homestead, the squat frame house remaining from Montpelier Plantation, where the Stringfellow family had lived when the school was born, and where Warden’s friends the Somervilles lived now.
Cynthia had stood on the white-painted wooden steps of the Homestead in the summer humidity and had seen everything, had admired the flowers bordering the sidewalks, as well as the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western horizon, had noticed the symmetry of the trees on the Quad and the evenness of the roof lines and the way the brick on all the buildings, new or old, matched up perfectly with that of Stringfellow. She had insisted upon visiting every building on the Quad, even the dormitories: Clifton House and Kean House, back to back at one o’clock on the imaginary dial; Stratford House and Siddons House at two o’clock; Dupont House at three o’clock, and behind it, Bradley Hall, the large arts center built in the late 1960s. At four o’clock Hathaway Library and, directly behind it, providing a jowl or sideburn to the oval face of the campus, Reid Hall, the science building. Then they had walked the entire course again, this time on the outside of the Quad. She had held his hand and tugged him along the vaguely circular road that divided the central campus from the playing fields, tennis courts, maintenance buildings, faculty houses, parking lots, and woodlands that constituted the rest of the school grounds. They had finished their tour at his home, which then happened to be the smaller of the two apartments in the gym.
It was quiet here in Fleming during recess. He could hear noise from the English office down the hall, where somebody was using the loud clackety printer for their computer. The term “word processing” sounded dreadful to Warden, who refused to use anything but his electric typewriter. Cynthia had bought a computer with some money they had received as a wedding gift. Cynthia. He could not help worrying over her, and yet he felt foolish for not using the time she had given him more productively. He was impressed with how easily he could sit here at his desk and at least appear, despite his distracting anxiety, to be following his normal routine. It was remarkable that the human soul continued to function even in the face of despair.
Now he sounded like an English teacher, a trite one.
Warden stood up and walked down the hall toward Horace Somerville’s classroom. Horace was Warden’s best friend in the world, though Horace was a generation older and had once terrified Warden as his European history teacher. Warden had been Horace’s student in this very building, back when the floors were of dark tile rather than brown carpeting, when the hall lights were white globes suspended on black cords rather than these banks of fluorescent lamps stuck into the ceilings like inverted ice cube trays.
Still, despite its renovations,
