Eli began with Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Compromise,” in which he’d urged Black Americans to delay direct engagement with the white establishment (aka “the establishment”), both in general and on the issue of civil rights in particular, and focus instead on their own education and financial security, in order to become such hardworking, wealth-accumulating model citizens that even the most recalcitrant racists in even the most Confederate states would see no reason not to share the harvest of American liberties with them. Eclipsed in due course by W. E. B. Du Bois’s more aggressively oppositional outlook, Washington had fallen, over time, into a historical trench of Uncle Toms, to the point that he and his Tuskegee Institute stood for nothing so much as a notion of self-negation. The Walden School had entirely written Booker T. Washington out of the shining story of the Civil Rights Movement, suggesting that the rise of Black Americans jumped directly from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King.
Booker T. Washington’s long game, Eli argued, had been perfectly calibrated. In 1895, American Negroes (as Washington identified this group, and self-identified) were not in a position to oppose, let alone impact, white America; indeed, that would remain the case for decades to come. The notion of using those intervening years to build power and self-reliance within their own community was sound strategy, not capitulation. And, said Eli, looking out at his audience, Black Americans’ abandonment of this strategy in favor of Du Bois’s alternate path had only demonstrated this to be so.
“It’s perhaps an American trait,” said Eli, in conclusion, “that when we want something, we want it now. Separation from England? Dump the tea in the harbor. Somebody turns up a nugget of gold in California? Everybody head west. It’s understandable that freed slaves should want the whole menu of rights and opportunities before the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation was dry. But Booker T. Washington played what we might call today a multilevel game of chess, always aware that he had opponents on all sides of the board, including the one that was nominally his own. Now, could his vision for Black progress have held? If those generations had risen through education to the professions, and then to politics and wealth and influence, would American society at the rim of the twenty-first century truly be equal, colorblind, and meritocratic? How can we know, because we went another way. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the goal is further away now, in 2001, than it was in 1895.
“But still!” Eli said, gathering his pages. “We beat on, don’t we? Because we believe in the green light, this American utopia where we’re judged by the content of our character and our work ethic and our God-given abilities. You know, I’m frequently asked if I’m trying to be some kind of example to ‘my people.’ This is a serious question, so I want to be very precise when I answer. I ask them: Do you mean the people of western Virginia?”
The two men behind Harrison chuckled.
“Do you mean people born under my astrological sign, Aquarius?”
Applause and laughter. Harrison sat up in his chair. His neighbor, none other than the lauded Princeton historian, was thumping his hand down on Harrison’s forearm, unable to contain his own mirth.
“Or perhaps you mean my people, the left-handed. A sinistra? Or we of the tribe who delude ourselves into thinking the Orioles will one day win the World Series! Or those of us born in 1982, the Chinese Year of the Dog. So I’m confused. Because all I want is what Booker T. Washington wanted. I want an America in which it wouldn’t occur to anyone to suggest that my accomplishments are anything but fully my own. No lower standard. No … affirmative action. You want to know who my people are? People who work hard, and innovate, and take pride in their accomplishments, those are my people.”
“Yes!” someone to Harrison’s left shouted. The Princeton professor had removed his thumping hand from Harrison’s forearm. He was standing, clapping loudly.
“Told you,” said a voice, somewhere on his other side.
“Fuck, yes,” someone else responded. Harrison turned to see who’d spoken, but they were all on their feet, banging their hands together, and no one seemed to be talking.
They broke for more drinks, more coffee, the audience drifting away to the bar. Harrison stayed in his chair. He told them that he wanted to go over his talk one more time, but in fact he couldn’t even bear to look at what he’d written about American Jews and their political shape-shifting. It wasn’t that he took no pride in what he’d pulled together, just that now he couldn’t remember why he’d settled on this topic. There was a reason he was here, and surely it wasn’t to explain how socialism was relinquishing its grip on American Jews. They probably knew that already, and if they didn’t there were any number of scholars, far better credentialed than himself, to tell them. No. He wanted to tell them something he was better equipped to tell than anyone else in the room.
He left his pages behind in his chair when he went to the podium, and over the clinking of new ice cubes in replenished drinks, he explained that he wanted to tell them a story about watermelon. “Not just because it’s a ridiculous story, and you’re going to be entertained, but because it demonstrates so much about what’s wrong with the education I had, until a year ago.”
The Walden School, he told them, had been his alma mater all the way back to kindergarten, and represented, in his hometown of New York City, the bright shining lie of progressive education. At Walden, they’d been taught about the European genocide against Native Americans, about the enslavement of Africans, about eugenics and lynch mobs and the unmitigated evil of the Republican Party, all while fanning the flame of their own goodness. They’d been taught to genuflect before the notion of free speech while shunning anyone who didn’t agree with them. They’d been encouraged to trample traditional values, denigrate the Western Canon, and generally amplify the non-white and non-male and non-heterosexual and non-traditionally gendered, informing those of European descent and Caucasian ethnicity and normative sexuality that their opinions were not required.
In the audience, many of them nodded as he spoke.
“My friend Eli wrote, in his wonderful book, that autodidacticism is a gift, from ourselves, to ourselves, but also a response to the vacuum where an institutional education is supposed to be. In his case, there was no institutional education. In mine, a completely inadequate one, because there was such a powerful orthodoxy at work in my school.” Unlike Eli, he told them, he’d had an upbringing of privilege, with a front-loaded expectation that he’d graduate from high school, attend college, and likely earn a graduate degree. Yet even in his premier institution, with its low admission rate and absurd tuition, with its credentialed teachers and penchant for the seminar table and “politically alert” student body, he’d still reached the hard conclusion that he’d have to educate himself. And because, at Walden, there had been no celebration of disagreement, educating himself had meant learning both sides of every argument. That, it turned out, had been a very useful thing.
The watermelon story had begun as a senior prank, a few days before his own graduation. Senior prank was a Walden tradition, in which graduating students would arrive early to string toilet paper through the trees on either side of the school’s front door, or paint the elegant iron bars pink with poster paint. One year a pet ferret had been loosed in the Commons, and Harrison remembered a vat of viscous red slime strategically hidden inside the faculty lounge. The plan, when his own class was about to graduate, was for each senior to bring in a watermelon, delivering the fruit to a hallway outside the art room where the rinds would be coated with oil. From there the watermelons would be distributed around the campus and left to be discovered (and hopefully lifted!) by persons unknown, leaving cracked-open explosions of red flesh and seeds everywhere in an obvious expression of senior pride!
What could go wrong?
Teenagers, tearing toward the end of school, have a lot on their minds, which possibly explained the fact that only four seniors remembered their watermelons. (Another possible reason, which Harrison did not add, was that they had already received their college acceptances, and were stoned out of their wits.) When the pair of students in charge saw how few watermelons they had to work with, they made an executive decision to consolidate them, placing all four in the office of their class dean.