Miles opened his mouth to speak to Alicia, but the words disintegrated like snow that melts before it hits the ground. He tried again, but was cut off by Mr. Chamberlain.
“All we ask is to be let alone,” Chamberlain repeated a little louder. Miles took that as a sign to let Alicia alone. Mr. Chamberlain repeated it a third time, and then asked, “Do any of you know who said that?”
“Yeah,” Brad Canby said, slouched at his desk. “Everybody in this class.”
Many of the students laughed, some even being obnoxious enough to bang on the desks as they howled. But Miles didn’t even crack a smile. He couldn’t afford to. Literally.
For a moment his mind drifted. He thought about what Tripley said about spiders representing the connection between the past and the future, and wished he could somehow apply that to getting his job back. Taking the past firing and connecting it to a future of reemployment.
Maybe I could just beg Dean Kushner.
Maybe I could ask to be put on probation and given a chance to prove myself.
I mean, I’m basically a straight-A student. That’s gotta count for something, right?
“No, Mr. Canby,” Mr. Chamberlain said, totally ignoring the disrespect. “Actually it was Jefferson Davis.”
Maybe I could—wait, what?
And the cloud in Miles’s mind instantly vanished at the sound of his father’s name.
Jefferson Davis?
Buzz.
Then Miles said it out loud. “Jefferson Davis?” Managing his nausea was starting to become normal. He knew he wouldn’t die. It would just feel like death, like panic, like his brain was being held over a flame and his stomach was in the spin cycle. Spidey-sense, ignored.
Mr. Chamberlain opened his eyes. “Morales, have you forgotten classroom decorum? Raise your hand if you want to speak.” Again, Miles stared into his eyes.
“But Brad didn’t…” Miles closed his mouth, fuming. There was no use.
Alicia shifted in her seat as Mr. Chamberlain continued. “And, yes, Jefferson Davis. The president of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The man who appointed Robert E. Lee general of the Army of Northern Virginia, to lead the most important Confederate army.” Mr. Chamberlain closed his eyes again. “The quote is a simple one, but it means so, so much. It’s simply asking that the people of the South be allowed to govern themselves. That the way things were was just fine.”
“Unless you were a slave,” Brad blurted out, rolling his eyes.
“Seriously,” Alicia said under her breath. Chamberlain opened his eyes just for a moment and shot her a glare. But he didn’t say anything. Just burned Alicia with his eyes. Then he snapped them shut again, took a deep, annoyed breath, and with his hands still pressed together, and without any finger-wagging or scolding, he replied to Brad. “Well, Mr. Canby, it’s a bit more complicated than that.”
While Alicia shook her head every few minutes, flustered by Mr. Chamberlain’s words, Miles drifted in and out of the lecture, not only dealing with the sandalwood leaping from the back of Alicia’s neck, but also the fact that his father’s name was the same name as the man who was fighting to keep slavery alive. And Chamberlain kept the Jefferson Davis quotes coming—Wherever there is an immediate connection between the master and slave, whatever there is of harshness in the system is diminished—as he preached from the front of the class to the two or three students scribbling in their notebooks and about fifteen other students who were listening to music, playing on their phones, or, like Brad Canby, had their heads on their desks, asleep. But Miles was neither writing nor sleeping. Instead he was sitting there, letting every word dagger through his mind.
“We underestimate the bond between slave and master. So many slaves were comfortable with being enslaved. Happy even. Later this week, maybe I’ll bring in some images to better illustrate my point.”
“Images?” Again, Alicia sparked up. “No disrespect, Mr. Chamberlain, but don’t you think that’s…I don’t know…taking it a bit far to illustrate your point?” Chamberlain didn’t budge. Alicia looked around the room for a supportive face, but most people had already checked out. She turned and glanced back at Miles, but he was staring down at the fake wood grain of his desk, fighting to keep Are you serious? trapped behind his lips. Too much going on. Too much at once. The buzzing was now a burning, the heat of frustration spreading throughout his body, but Miles just tapped his fingers on the desk, trying his best to keep his composure. He continued to sit, quietly stewing, as Mr. Chamberlain dug his heels into this ridiculous lecture. Miles wondered if at this point Chamberlain’s Civil War lesson was all just a bait-fail, because no one cared enough to engage except Brad, who was just playing around, and Alicia, who was simply ignored. But Chamberlain kept pushing.
“An interesting way to try to understand this is to think about dogs. Dogs don’t mind being on leashes—being in cages.” Mr. Chamberlain, in a rare instance, broke his statue-like stance, removed his blazer and set it on his desk in the corner of the room. Then he unbuttoned his cuffs, and flipped them so that his wrists were exposed. And that’s when Miles saw it. The dark outline of a cat on his left wrist. A tattoo he had seen other times but paid no attention to because Mr. Chamberlain was weird enough to have a tattoo of a cat on his wrist. The type of guy who had pet cats with complicated historical names, which he pretended were his children. That guy. But this tattoo was familiar. It wasn’t an actual image of a cat—it was a symbol. A cat with a bunch of tails. Like the cat Miles had dreamed about the night before.
Chamberlain took a step forward and placed his eyes right on Miles again. “And every time the dogs see their owners—the people who put those leashes around their necks, and feed them scraps—they wag their tails, happy. Some would even say…grateful.”
Grateful? Miles wasn’t sure because his brain had gone static, but he could have sworn Alicia had said it out loud at the exact same time he was thinking it. Grateful? And if she had said it, which, judging by Chamberlain’s brief pause and pinched lips, she had, Chamberlain again paid Alicia no mind. No reply. But that word, combined with the tattoo on Chamberlain’s wrist and the buzzing inside of Miles, was enough of a spark to light a fuse in him. Miles’s tapping fingers become a clenched fist. He raised it and slammed it down on the desk, splitting the wood and buckling the metal legs. Everyone jumped, including Alicia, who whipped around to see what had happened. Miles looked into her eyes, his chest heaving.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. Then to Mr. Chamberlain, “I’m sorry.”