Priscilla

1. Teaching, a Noble Profession-2

The dean was showing her to the door and shaking her hand. They both were smiling. Priscilla could hardly wait to write her father about how connected they all were to that little Mississippi Delta town.

There was much more to write home about than a distant connection between her academic dean and her father’s family.

Priscilla took pride in her letter-writing to family and friends. Everything—even the address of her new townhouse—was so fresh and new that she had to share it with those back home. Apalachee Parkway—“derived,” she wrote, “from the American Indian Apalachi tribe”—was the main thoroughfare to the capitol and the new state office twin towers. She wrote in plain language and in conversational mode, and she employed the descriptive and literary motives of the moment. Mostly, though, she wrote as if she had a captive audience. “Colorful flora, giant cacti and palm trees, not pines, adorn the grounds of this new housing complex,” she wrote about her new neighborhood. “Clusters of Spanish moss complement the landscape and dangle amid the dense woods that adjoin the old narrow roadways. But you don’t want to have car trouble around here, definitely not at night, because that’s when the eerie effects of such exoticism are most apparent.”

Yet she was not so rhapsodic a few days after she had moved into her new home, when she rushed to the manager’s office to report an emergency. “There’re these really big ghastly bugs swarming all over the place!”

“Sure, honey,” drawled the manager, not bothering to look up from his newspaper. “What’d you expect? This is, after all, Flawreeda. I’ll give ya the name of an exterminator. Here ya go. Give ’em a call.”

Priscilla cringed at the mere mention of the word “exterminator.” Never before had she had occasion to use the term. Now, she required the services of a bug killer! Yuck.

Several weeks later, she experienced another problem. “My menstrual cycle is out of sorts, and I’ve been bleeding profusely,” Priscilla said to the nurse who answered the phone at her doctor’s office. She had also, she said, been burnt to a bronze crisp while sunbathing by the pool at her townhouse complex. Her body ached to the touch.

Later, the doctor cautioned her. “This is the South. The semitropical South, at that. Your body needs time to adjust to this climate, especially to our heat and humidity. Stay out of the sun as much as possible. Lying around the pool unprotected from direct sunlight isn’t good for you. This is, after all, Flawreeda.”

Why, she fumed to herself, do these people talk to me like I don’t understand them or know where I am? This isn’t a foreign country. This is America. And they talk so slowly, sort of … like I don’t understand English.

But she had to admit she had probably had too much of this powerful Florida sun. She had spent too much time wading in the pool and lobbing tennis balls whenever she felt like it—often without sunscreen. In the doctor’s office, as she was getting dressed after his examination, Priscilla took a good look at her arms and legs. She was one of the relatively fair, though not the fairest-complexioned, of the five Austin sisters and brother, who varied in color from a striking ebony hue to white. What they all had in common were high cheekbones inherited from their mother’s Cherokee grandmother. Growing up, all of them had been conscious of the lightness or darkness of their individual skin tones. But their father had taught them not to dwell on skin color, and that they must never discriminate or mistreat someone because of the way they looked—especially their color. Even so, Priscilla had always been aware that lighter complexioned people fared better in society.

Again she stared at how her skin had darkened in the Florida sun. She laughed. She liked it darker. She was none too thrilled to discover, however, that burned skin hurt. She had assumed, incorrectly, that since she was black, the sun would not bother her, any more than the native speech patterns. But it did not take long for her to become accustomed to that piercing Southern accent and that slow Southern speech. Or sunscreen.

It was not long, too, before she hosted her first guests.

Only a few days after she moved into her townhouse, her father Nelson and his fishing companion, Oscar, arrived with Priscilla’s car, a 1976 crimson-and-metallic-gray Mustang hitched to Oscar’s old double-gas-tank truck. Nelson had offered “to do this small favor” of towing her car to her doorstep “to make your transition a smooth one.” At the time, Priscilla had never wondered if this trip was more to check up on her than to fish, as her father and Oscar insisted, their favorite watering holes along the Eastern Seaboard to the Gulf.

In anticipation of their arrival, Priscilla had kept watch from the veranda of her second-story bedroom, so before the men had even unhitched her car, she had run out to the parking lot to greet them. Like a child, she had urged, “Come on in and check out my new place.” But she was unprepared for what seemed to her to be their lack of interest. The two men fussed with the car and then their luggage. Finally, to appease his daughter, Nelson went upstairs and rushed through the dwelling as if he were searching for something he was unable to find.

“Ah, nice,” he finally said. “Really nice, Priscilla.”

She could have sworn, before he averted his head from her, that she saw a pool of tears fill his eyes. She was puzzled, however, when he showed little interest in the décor of her townhouse—and definitely disappointed when, a few moments later, he and Oscar said they were off to do some fishing.

But before he left, Nelson took his daughter’s expectant face between his hands. “I am so pleased that you have found reasonably secure and decent living quarters,” he said. Then he leaned down and kissed Priscilla on her cheek. “Sorry, kiddo, but we’ve got to get moving. Those fish aren’t exactly waiting on us.”

Priscilla clung to him. “Oh, come on, Daddy. You guys didn’t come this far to rush right off. At least let me prepare you some lunch.”

Oscar accepted her offer almost immediately. “Nelson, an hour or so won’t hurt.”

As her father wiped his eyes, he sat down at the head of her table, and Priscilla saw his tears and recognized them for what they were. It was not that he did not want to spend any time with her. She knew her Daddy. He was overwhelmed to see that she had settled in to her new life so well. Although, of course, he would be the first to see that as a result of his tutelage, Priscilla had developed into an independent woman right before his very eyes.

One of the first clouds in that bright Florida sky came when Priscilla least expected it: her first day of classes. In graduate school at Ohio State, she had been a teaching assistant (TA) and had lectured many undergraduate sessions, especially the large introductory classes. Everyone, her father included, had always told her she was a natural-born teacher; and so it was that she had settled into the Political Department at FAMU, too, with nary a problem. Her office on the second floor of Tucker Hall, with the other social and behavioral sciences professors, had already become her professional nest.

She had been confident, too, on her way to the first day of classes. It was customary for the newest member of the FAMU faculty to teach the introductory classes, each with an average enrollment of one hundred and fifty to two hundred students. With her experience as a TA at Ohio State as her framework, Priscilla was familiar with similar class sizes and well-prepared for her new assignment.

Priscilla followed the traditional style of lecturing. Before each class, she would enter the lecture hall, nod at her students, step up on the platform and commence writing notes on the chalkboard. The late seventies was a generation before the digital era.

But this first morning at FAMU, just as she was ready to begin her lecture on the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War, she heard the whispers and saw the students’ expressions of amazement even before she had turned to the chalkboard.

“Surely she’s not the professor,” one student muttered.

“No, she’s too young,” another answered.

“Must be a TA,” guessed another. “That’s all we ever get—teaching assistants.”

Priscilla had just decided to ignore those comments and had written “Watergate” on the chalkboard, when the harsh masculine voice of a student rang out in the lecture hall.

“What can you possibly tell me about Watergate or Vietnam, young lady? Not only am I older than you. I was there. I served in Nam. Besides,” the veteran shouted, “how old are you anyway?”

The whole lecture hall went silent. Neither Priscilla nor the other students seemed to know how to react. Priscilla looked the veteran over. He was wearing camouflage, and it seemed he thought she was enemy with whom he was at war. He’s fuming, Priscilla thought. Not a bad-looking fellow. But I’ve got to work this one carefully. Should I let this go and make nice with him? But he seemed to her a bully, and maybe she should begin her teaching by drawing the line at what she would accept and what she would not. She was aware that some folks at her undergraduate and graduate school had criticized her for being aloof. But she took pride in being her father’s daughter, and Nelson had taught her that being upright was right even if it was not popular. Maybe this vet—and the other students, too—won’t like me so much, but I’ve got to draw the line right here, and now, she decided.

Still she hesitated for another instant of reflection. FAMU was not Ohio State or any other mega-campus. Already she had noticed that the friendly campus ambience seemed to reward a personal style of teaching and interaction with the students. But—again, another lesson imparted from her father—standards were standards. She was a professor, not the social director on a cruise ship. Ideas were what inspired her, rather than interactions with people. Her mission in Tallahassee was to become a first-rate college professor, nothing more, and she would keep her mind on that goal. Priscilla took a deep breath. Finally, there was the unspoken fact that she was not only a young professor but a female one. Priscilla’s adoption of the new-age feminism made her even less likely to bend to the heckler in her class.

She was a picture of relaxed authority as she stepped out from behind the lectern. She briefly described her educational background, adding that, “like most other interested people,” she “had followed the Congressional hearings on television and had read about incidents related to the war and the scandal in the newspapers.” Then she walked toward center stage, looked up at the students in the inclined section in the rear of the hall and said, “My own father is a staunch Republican, poor fellow. And he was distraught over the horrible debacle, especially with President Nixon’s subsequent resignation for his a***e of power.”

Then, with the stride of a seasoned public speaker and with a little bit of what her sisters had often teased her was her Bette Davis kind of moxie, Priscilla locked into the gaze of her aggressor. “Now about my age …” She paused. Sometimes in the past, Priscilla had bumped up her age a notch or two, acutely aware that college students held greater respect for older, more seasoned professors. In fact, some students openly challenged, even outright disrespected, young or new professors—one of the ordeals of teaching at the college or university level. Oh, well, she thought. She was what she was. She would tell the truth. “Though it’s frankly irrelevant to my employment here, I’m twenty-five years old.”

She let that sink in, and then chose to ignore the muffled snickers before she continued. “The law says, ‘Though shall not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, and a few other variables.’” Again she paused. “And, oh yeah, I realize I might not look the stereotypical role of a professor—at least not of the type you maybe had when you first started college. But in this at least, Bob Dylan was right. Some things in this society really are changing. After all, isn’t that why you and the others are here—to improve your lot and do a little better than the previous generations?”

Priscilla smartly turned back to the chalkboard but then hesitated and faced the class again as though she had forgotten something. This time she spoke directly to the veteran who had challenged her. “Just one more thing. I have an older brother, about your age, who also served in the army in Nam, just like you did. Plus I have two sisters—career soldiers—serving in Uncle Sam’s Air Force and Navy. You’re not the only one with experience of Vietnam.” She nodded in finality. “Now … shall I continue with the class?”

She waited while the students opened their notebooks. And then, in earnest, she got down to the business of her new life as a college professor.