Heads of the Colored People Read online

  “What about a desk lamp?”

  “Desk lamp.” She spit the words out like they were made of metal.

  “It’s a little light that sits on your side of the office, for overcast days.”

  “I know what it is. I will think about it,” she said, turning back to her computer. She did not offer to turn off the lights. “It is cold in here,” she said, pulling her sweater around her chest.

  • • •

  When Reggie called Randolph that afternoon to check on him, Randolph tried to describe the environment accurately, starting with DIY. “She’s at least seventy and limps along the hallways with a cane, flashing warnings at visible and invisible offenses. She’s not the department chair, but you’d think so,” he said.

  “Sounds like Black Crazy personified,” Reggie said, though he said that about nearly anyone he saw as overworked, and about most female academics who happened to be black. Reggie had served as Randolph’s assigned faculty mentor at Preston through the Minority Mentoring Program. He was about ten years older than Randolph, and had written a book called Black Crazy: Tipping Points in Black Literature, 1874–1974. He took Randolph to lunch once a month, observed his classes a few times, and wrote a recommendation letter that would sit in his Interfolio queue should Randolph choose “not to fool around after this little experiment is over and get a real job at a research university.”

  “She’s Black Crazy all right. I’ll tell you about her later. But look, Reg, I want to pick your brain about my new office mate.”

  He described Isabela as “a wall with a nose,” hoping to avoid a lecture.

  “Good. I’ve told you before—”

  Reggie repeated his stock advice, the same advice Randolph’s parents and all his other mentors, formal and informal, repeated: “Don’t screw it up. Err on the side of passivity. Don’t date anyone in the humanities departments. Don’t even look at those women’s legs when they pull out their short skirts in the spring or when they prance up the stairs in those leggings.” Lost in his lecture, Reggie failed to give Randolph any useful suggestions about the light situation.

  Randolph assured him that there was no chance of him dating Isabela and said goodbye. Before he hung up, he heard an incredulous “Mhhhm,” though Randolph supposed he could see why Reggie wouldn’t believe him. At Preston, Randolph had broken two of Reggie’s rules at once by dating Crystal—both colleague and white woman—and a third when he told him he wanted to take a break from the research setting and get a teaching job at a liberal arts school for a couple of years. “You’re on your way to Black Crazy,” Reggie said with a shrug. “If your students don’t kill you, the four-four load will.”

  The teaching load was heavier than Randolph expected, even after hearing Reggie’s stories of lost colleagues and “scholars who showed so much promise early on,” but the environment bothered Randolph the most, the cramped classrooms, the oldness of the place, its sharp luminance. In meetings, Randolph pouted while DIY sat on her elevated chair whispering, the women leaning in, straining to hear her. That’s how they all were, Randolph concluded, making you lean into them and accommodate their every whim, their eccentricities. Randolph had begun to hate the whole lot of them.

  • • •

  When he returned to his office—their office—after class the next day, the door was open and the lights were on. Randolph thwacked his folder and a stack of papers on his desk without looking at Isabela.

  “You can turn the lights off,” she said without looking up. She was wearing one of those sweaters with a low-cut oval neck that usually look good on really skinny girls, yet somehow it did not, Randolph insisted, look good on Isabela.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  “No, I did not know if you were gone for the day or for a class. It’s okay.” She frowned, nodding toward the light switch.

  “I’m only going to be here for a few more minutes. It’s fine.” Randolph fumbled through his desk drawer for a bottle of Aleve and his prescription pills, looking from one bottle to the other, as if making a decision about which level of migraine he had. He rattled the pills around and poured one into his hand. He could feel her mouth mocking him, even with her head turned, her little beak scrunching up.

  “It’s a real condition, you know,” Randolph started, loudly, “overillumination. I literally get headaches from these lights, all fluorescent lights.”

  “Hmm.”

  He pointed to his head. “You’ve never had a migraine, I guess.”

  “No. It’s okay, turn off the light.”

  • • •

  Randolph asked his three o’clock class how they would deal with “an inconsiderate roommate who, for instance, made a lot of noise while you were trying to sleep.”

  Someone said, “Mind games.”

  Another said, “Man, I’d tell him to keep it down. When I gotta study, I don’t have time to play.”

  “Just ask for another roommate,” someone else said.

  “Like that would work,” several people seemed to say at once.

  • • •

  On Monday, he got up twenty minutes early to beat Isabela into the office. When she came in, she smiled and said hello as though nothing had changed between them. Randolph made small talk, taking the opportunity to build a bridge, if a bridge is defined as the path to getting one’s own way.

  “Would you like me to get you the desk lamp?” he started. “You know, this was my idea, and I feel bad about adding an expense. I can buy the lamp.” That sounded fine, he thought, not too pushy, but hopefully rhetorically manipulative enough to remind her of the gravity of the situation.

  “That is fine.” Her mouth went from neutral to something else. They didn’t speak again that day.

  • • •

  The morning Randolph presented her with the lamp, in what he hoped was a cute mosaic pattern, Isabela did not smile. She paused with tight lips and said, “Thank you,” leaving the lamp untouched.

  She beat him to the office for the next couple of weeks and turned on all the lights except her desk lamp. Whenever one left, the other adjusted the lighting to his or her preference. Randolph researched overillumination, looking for ways to convince Isabela of her insensitivity. Two of the friends he polled said he was making a big deal out of nothing; she probably just didn’t understand. Two other friends said she was being a jerk, and there was no way she could misunderstand. Jerry, a mutual friend of Reggie’s, said, “This is the kind of petty drama that can only happen with a woman. She’s the aggressor, but watch out now, or she’ll make it all look like your fault.” Reggie said this was about power and that Randolph could only lose, whichever way he played it. If he acted aggressively, he became what “they” always knew he would be, and she won. If he let her have the office, she won. “How do you think I went from Reginald to Reggie?” he said. “You can’t win, brother.” The Richter needles in Randolph’s temples charted small hills.

  What else could Randolph do? He’d tried reasoning and compromise. He fantasized about driving Isabela out of the office, delighting in her expression at the sight of a fake rat spinning in her chair or a Spanish-English dictionary on her desk. He’d seen people on reality television rub their testicles on their housemates’ mattresses or pillowcases and brush the inner rim of a toilet with their toothbrushes. The victims never found out until they met for the reunion episodes and watched the footage together. Randolph wasn’t ready to pull his balls out over this, nor did he like the way they could implicate him in a potential misreading of the situation, but he thought about it.

  • • •

  One late morning while she was still in class, Randolph went over to Isabela’s desk and flattened the bag of trail mix she always kept there, crunching a few of the nuts with his thumb and watching their oil streak the plastic. As quickly as he could, he removed all but a few of the yogurt-covered raisins and put them into his pants pocket. He flicked the desk lamp on and off three times and returned to his desk to
eat the raisins before they melted into a mess, the cream and hydrogenated oils thick and sweet against his gums.

  When he returned from class, Isabela was out of the office, and a book called Microaggressions had been left on Randolph’s desk. He tossed the book to her side of the office, not caring where it landed. When he pulled his lunch bag out of his desk drawer, he found his sandwich spotted with four abnormally large dimples on each side of the bread, like deep fingerprints. Randolph removed the bread from his sandwich, placed it back into the paper bag, and ate the smoked turkey directly from the plastic.

  At his urban middle school in Chicago, a kid was shot for allegedly stealing someone’s lunch. At Wil U, a faculty member was caught going through another one’s desk drawers, and a fistfight broke out in the hallway. The woman won. At Wil U, a boy had been jumped for leaving the library at the wrong time. At Preston, Randolph found that people with money committed these assaults but left fewer traces, the violence psychological. He heard stories of girls saturating tampons with ketchup and sticking them into other girls’ thousand-dollar handbags. They published anonymous glossy newsletters accusing male professors of roving eyes or worse and tucked them into faculty mailboxes. Caracas or not, Isabela didn’t know how Randolph’s dual schooling had prepared him to get ugly. She didn’t know with whom she was fooling.

  In fact, Randolph would call his problem one of duality, twoness, though not in the purely DuBoisian sense, but in the sense that he was of two minds about most things, and very few of those things converged. He maintained two social media pages, one for colleagues and one for old friends who knew him when. Both included the phrase “it’s complicated” under his name. Reggie would say that the tyranny of whiteness both emasculated him and expected him to adopt hypermasculinity. Randolph could find no nonbinary position on the continuum. He could only flip-flop.

  • • •

  Randolph didn’t tell Reggie about his sandwich or the raisins, but he told him that the migraines were getting worse, even with the dose of amitriptyline he’d been prescribed. Reggie said, “Those headaches will go away once you stop feeling like you have to be some kind of standard, once you just let it all out. The problem is once you do that, you won’t have a job. For me it’s nosebleeds. I call ’em my monthly cycle. The pressure has to come out some kind of way.”

  • • •

  On a Tuesday, while Isabela and the lights were out, Randolph sneaked over, again, to her side of the office. She had apparently hidden the trail mix, because it was not in sight. In the silver-framed picture on her desk, she hugged her toddler nephew and wore a red cocktail dress. Randolph fingered the floral-print cup that held her collection of number 2 pencils, most of them yellow and sheathed in those soft cushions that slide over the top. He pulled the sheath off one of the pencils and squished it around in his hand. The pencils were freshly sharpened, the goldenrod, brown, and black contrasting attractively. Randolph took a sheet of Isabela’s scratch paper, then used each pencil in succession, dulling the lead by pressing hard as he drew little spirals, each stroke of the pencil a little ecstasy. He hid the blackened paper in his messenger bag and removed any dust or traces of broken points that had landed on the desk and rearranged the pencils as he remembered them. He didn’t want to be the next blip on the text-alert system. Alert: robbery and assault in office of non-tenure-track female faculty member. Suspect: tall black male, generally thought handsome, accused of keeping the lights off in a suggestive manner, eating fourteen yogurt-covered raisins, and breaking a desk lamp and eleven pencils.

  He returned to his own desk, locking up the blackened scratch paper, his lunch, and all his office supplies. He noted the spot where the blue edge of his bonsai’s pot lined up with the silver crack in the file cabinet.

  • • •

  The Monday before Thanksgiving, Randolph arranged a mentoring meeting with DIY, hoping to feel her out about the potential for a new office. He planned to discuss his upcoming annual review and then to casually bring up the situation with Isabela. He knocked and stepped into the office carefully, but she whispered, “Just have a seat. You don’t need all that false formality with me. How is your semester going?”

  “It’s okay, an adjustment.”

  She watched Randolph’s face too carefully, for too long, before she said, “You don’t like that office mate, do you?”

  Randolph laughed, debating whether he should tell her the truth, unsure what she would do with it. “I just don’t want to make her uncomfortable,” he started, and felt compelled to apologize for this dishonesty, “but actually she’s making me uncomfortable.” DIY didn’t stir. He looked away from her eyes; their cloudiness reminded him of marbles you might trade away. “You’re a woman,” he began again, feeling like a liar, for her femaleness seemed, to him, buried far beneath the nest of thinning hair, the severe black clothes. “I don’t want it to look bad, you know, like I’m doing some kind of exercise in male domination.” He chuckled.

  DIY made a pfff noise with her mouth and leaned back before she leaned in. She took deep inhalations from the back of her throat and exhaled the words without parting her teeth. “That’s your problem,” she said. “You’re afraid of the light.”

  He started to speak, but she gave him a withering look.

  “You think you’re too good for this school. It’s obvious to me. You don’t want to be exposed, so you overcorrect in some places, but it all comes out somewhere else.”

  “I don’t think I follow,” Randolph said, the word “overcorrect” pinching his ego.

  “That’s one of your other problems.” She paused her rebuke for a moment before trying again, “There’s this saying in law, ‘mutatis mutandis,’ ‘the necessary changes have been made.’ It doesn’t apply to you.”

  “And how exactly is this relevant?” The veiled hints and analogies were too much for Randolph’s migraine.

  “Sometimes the problem is the environment; sometimes you are the environment. In your case, you think you’re making changes, but you take the problem with you, like you did exchanging your old job for this one.” She gestured with one hand for him to leave.

  Randolph left the meeting furious with DIY, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. He asked Carol about the new office that day, and though it looked like another demotion of sorts, it represented, for him, a battle he won, growing a pair.

  • • •

  As he walked out of a faculty meeting one wintery afternoon, Randy paused near the adjunct who’d moved in with Isabela, a skinny guy with adult acne. “How do you like the new office?”

  “It’s good,” he said. “Nice windows.”

  “Why do you guys have the lights off? Are you a migraine sufferer?”

  “No, Isabela’s idea,” the adjunct said. “She gets really hot, so she keeps them off. You know, boiler’s right under us.”

  BELLES LETTRES

  Dr. Lucinda Johnston, PsyD

  Johnston Family Therapy

  1005 Knightcrest Rd, Claremont, CA 91711

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1991

  Hello Monica,

  I’m sure you remember me from the class field trip to the Getty in September. It has been brought to my attention by Mrs. Watson that Fatima may have started a nasty rumor about my Christinia. I hope to clear this up, as we both know how ugly these things can get. It is true that Christinia’s hamster died recently, but it is absolutely not true that it died at Chrissy’s hand. At no time has Chrissy ever put Hambone or any of her previous hamsters in the microwave, dryer, or dishwasher. What kind of child would make up something like that?

  It sounds—and I say this respectfully, so I hope you won’t be offended—like Fatima has had a very hard time getting acclimated here, and that’s understandable, but I do hope you will deal with her before any such incidents become frequent. Children who start lying young often end up with longtime patterns of dishonesty.

  All best,

  Dr. Lucinda Johnston, PsyD


  Licensed Therapist

  Welcome Wagon, Westwood Primary School

  Events Coordinator, Jack and Jill, Claremont Branch

  • • •

  Monica Willis, PhD

  Associate Professor of Education

  University of La Verne

  1950 Third Street, La Verne, CA 91750

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1991

  Dear Lucinda,

  I apologize for my late reply, but I only found your letter at the bottom of Fatima’s backpack when I did my weekly cleaning.

  Thank you for writing to me, though I have already spoken with Mrs. Watson, who made it very clear that she never heard Fatima say a thing about Christinia or her dead hamster(s). It was Renee Potts who claimed that Fatima started the rumor. Fatima says she only repeated what Christinia herself told her.

  Many of Fatima’s stories about Christinia this year and last—which I won’t recount here—have been disturbing to say the least, but none as disturbing as Christinia’s enjoyment of torturing rodents. Fatima has a strong imagination and writes beautiful lyric poetry—which she started reading at age four—but she does not have a history of lying or telling gruesome stories. And unlike Christinia, she has no history of running off with other girls’ shoes while their feet dangle from the monkey bars. I’m absolutely sure that Fatima wouldn’t tell stories about Christinia, the hamsters, or the microwave incident if they weren’t based on something Christinia had said first.

  I appreciate your concerns about Fatima, and even though Christinia has made it much more difficult for her to find friends at Westwood, Fatima will acclimate soon. She’s going to a sleepover at Emily’s this weekend. Is Christinia going? If so, I hope you will encourage her to play nice.

  Best,

  Monica Willis, PhD

  P.S.

  It is true that liars who start young often end up with psychological and social problems of the sort that Christinia has demonstrated over the past year. How lucky for you (and for Christinia) that she has access to psychotherapy through your practice.