When Demons Float. Susan Thistlethwaite
the day and get back to class or meetings. It is all the way across campus.” Then Adelaide gave a deep sigh.
“Well, until we can figure out something permanent, what about giving Abubakar a key to Hercules’s office so he can pray in private?” Hercules Abraham, retired Professor of Judaism, was away visiting his family in France for this whole fall semester. He still had an office because he did teach part-time for us despite being over eighty.
Adelaide had a considering look on her face. I knew she was torn by having such a large office still occupied by a retired professor, but he did help out a lot with our diminished teaching staff.
She nodded.
“It’s a good idea. Let me email Hercules and ask him if that’s okay, and then I’ll run it by Aduba.”
Adelaide opened her computer as if to put act to word, but I still sat there, thinking.
She looked at me quizzically, her bushy, grey eyebrows raised.
“What are you thinking about now?” she rasped, not seeming at all happy I was still thinking.
“I was thinking we need a more permanent solution,” I said. “What about renovating that empty storage room right next to the faculty assistant’s office and making it a permanent prayer room? There’s nothing in it now that the cleaners bring their own equipment.”
Not, in fact, that much cleaning ever did happen on our floor, but two years ago the university had hired an outside firm to do whatever cleaning did get done, and they seemed to bring what they needed each time.
“Well . . . .” Adelaide said, considering. “We do need a permanent solution, but there’s no budget for that, Kristin, and we can’t just stick someone in a dirty, old closet to pray.”
I wrestled with myself and then blurted out, “I’ll donate the money to fix it up, but it has to be anonymous, okay?”
Adelaide knew about my inherited wealth, though I hoped she was the only one of my colleagues who did. She also knew I was touchy about it.
Before she could reply, however, I had a genuinely good idea.
“Let’s name the prayer room for Ay-seong Kim. We could, you know, do it really well, and dedicate it to her.”
Ah-seong was a student who drowned on campus the previous year. She had been a lovely young woman, and she had suffered a lot of abuse in her short life.
“Oh, Kristin, what a lovely thought. Really, really lovely.” Adelaide looked down at her veined hands, now clenched on the desk. I knew the reasons that dedication would be very meaningful to Adelaide herself, as well as difficult. She had suffered some abuse as well.
I coughed a little, choking back my own emotion.
“Alright then,” I said, trying for a neutral tone. “If you’ll get permission from whomever, I’ll contact my lawyers. We can have it designed and built this fall and then schedule the dedication. Tell the powers-that-be there’s an anonymous donation for it.”
I got up to leave.
Adelaide looked up at me, tears behind her thick glasses. She just nodded.
Look at that. Necessity could be the mother of compassion.
✳ ✳ ✳
I looked around the seminar table. The students were going through their usual motions of doing one last check of their phones for any breaking text messages, getting out their books, putting laptops on the table, and slurping beverages from to-go cups, but I didn’t think I was imagining their tension. Cups were gripped a little too tightly, shoulders were up around their ears, and their eyes were looking everywhere but at me. I hooked up my own computer to the overhead projector, and the screen automatically came down at the far end of the room. The hum it made in descending sounded abnormally loud.
“You’ll not need your own computers and not even the book right now,” I said. “But you will need your cell phones.”
That got a reaction. A few people looked up quizzically. Zhang Mei, a Chinese student, looked up in alarm. I was actually surprised to see her face. Normally her long dark hair hung down on either side of her face, hiding it as she bent over her computer, taking careful notes. I knew from a couple of short book reviews I had already assigned that her written English was excellent, but she had never spoken in class except when I had called on each student to introduce themselves. She was a Christian, and, if she were typical of the Chinese Christian population, likely conservative Protestant. She had said she was a math major. I wondered at that brief look of alarm. Did she know something about what had happened yesterday?
I looked around at the whole class, waiting for them to settle. Before I formally started this class, I wanted to tell them up front what was going to happen and give each one of them the freedom to decide if this was something they could take. I was a big believer in what were called “trigger warnings,” that is, letting people know that distressing issues would be brought up and letting them opt out if they wanted. This university was famous for its supposed tough stand against faculty taking care to warn students about troubling topics ahead of time. I personally thought that was idiotic. I knew trauma and what it could do to you. I knew it all too well from times I had been on the receiving end of violence.
It was only natural that today was going to be hard on everybody, including me. My main educational goal in this class was to show lynching for what it really was. It was terrorism of the most brutal kind. And I was not going to let them stay a century or more away. We’d start with our own campus, as I’d planned early this morning.
I took a breath and looked around the table. They were back to hiding from me and perhaps from each other. A few thousand students is actually a pretty small community in the age of social media. I wondered what, if anything, they really knew about who hung yesterday’s noose.
I cleared my throat and began.
“You know what happened on campus yesterday. A noose was hung on a tree on the main quadrangle.”
I could hear their breathing change, with sighs, small gasps, and one sharp intake of breath.
“Today will be a difficult class, and you know I respect the effect of trauma on people. If you feel at any point this class is becoming too hard for you, you may step out with no questions asked, and you will get full credit for the class.”
I looked around. Everyone except Jordan Jameson, a computer major who, for some reason, was taking another religion class with me, was looking down. Jordan was looking right at me, and he actually looked a little bored. Probably because there was nothing in what I was saying he dared make a joke about. “Not yet, anyway,” I told myself and sighed inwardly.
I waited, giving them time to take in what I had said. There were a couple of students I was worried about. Emma Olson was a Philosophy and Religion major. She was from Wisconsin, and she’d been in my classes before. She was a Protestant liberal and planning on going to seminary. She had told me privately she was a survivor of sexual assault, and I was concerned that perhaps this campus incident could hook some of her bad memories.
I glanced at Jayden Johnson, a junior. Her African American mother was a faculty member here in the Center for Race, Politics and Culture. Her white father was a lawyer, I thought. In her self-introduction in the first class, she had been very clipped, very clear that she wanted a career as an activist, not an academic. I imagined she knew the history of lynching well, but that was no safeguard against pain.
A couple of the others I thought would be okay, though distressed, with what would be presented. John Vandenberg, also a Philosophy and Religion major, was of Dutch ancestry and had gone to a very religiously conservative undergraduate school in western Michigan. Shouldn’t project, though, should I? I told myself. I realized I had no concrete way to know what John’s feelings about this class might be.
Two other international students rounded out the group. Vihaan Acharya, a senior, was from India. He was an economics major, and I had assumed he was in the class because