Her name was Helen Dole. She was 26. She was unmarried. She was born in South Korea, and had grown up in what was then West Berlin. She held a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Berlin. Her father had been a Master Sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps of the Regular Army, serving in Korea and then in our Army of Occupation in Berlin. When her father retired after 30 years, to a nice enough little house in a nice enough little neighborhood in Cincinnati, and she saw the horrible squalor and hopelessness into which most black people were born there, she went back to what had become just plain Berlin and earned her Doctorate.
She was as badly treated by many people over there as she would have been over here, but at least she didnt
have to think every day about some nearby black ghetto where life expectancy was worse than that in what was said to be the poorest country on the planet, which was Bangladesh.
This Dr. Helen Dole had come to Scipio only the day before the prison break, to be interviewed by Tex and the Trustees for, of all things, my old job teaching Physics. She had seen the opening advertised in The New York Times. She had talked to Tex on the telephone before she came. She wanted to make sure he knew she was Black. Tex said that was fine, no problem. He said that the fact that she was both female and black, and held a Doctorate besides, was absolutely beautiful.
If she had landed the job and signed a contract before Tarkington ceased to be, that would have made her the last of a long succession of Tarkington Physics teachers, which included me.
But Dr. Dole had blown up at the Board of Trustees instead. They asked her to promise that she would never, whether in class or on social occasions, discuss politics or history or economics or sociology with students. She was to leave those subjects to the colleges experts in those fields.
I plain blew up,¨ she said to me.
All they asked of me,¨ she said, was that I not be a human being.¨
I hope you gave it to them good,¨ I said.
I did,¨ she said. I called them a bunch of European planters.¨
Lowell Chungs mother was no longer on the Board, so all the faces Dr. Dole saw were indeed of European ancestry.
She asserted that Europeans like them were robbers with guns who went all over the world stealing other peoples land, which they then called their plantations. And they made the people they robbed their slaves. She was taking a long view of history, of course. Tarkingtons Trustees certainly hadnt roamed the world on ships, armed to the teeth and looking for lightly defended real estate. Her point was that they were heirs to the property of such robbers, and to their mode of thinking, even if they had been born poor and had only recently dismantled an essential industry, or cleaned out a savings bank, or earned big commissions by facilitating the sale of beloved American institutions or landmarks to foreigners.
She told the Trustees, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his peoples becoming slaves in their own country.
This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.
He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.
He was told that of course there were.
In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didnt want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel.
She told them about Indonesian women who threw their jewelry to Dutch sailors coming ashore with fire-
arms, in the hopes that they would be satisfied by such easily won wealth and go away again.
But the Dutch wanted their land and labor, too.
And they got them, which they called a plantation.
I had heard about that from Damon Stern.
Now,¨ she said to them, you are selling this plantation because the soil is exhausted, and the natives are getting sicker and hungrier every day, begging for food and medicine and shelter, all of which are very expensive. The water mains are breaking. The bridges are falling down. So you are taking all your money and getting out of here.¨
One Trustee, she didnt know which, except that it wasnt Wilder, said that he intended to spend the rest of his life in the United States.
Even if you stay,¨ she said, you and your money and your soul are getting out of here.¨
So she and I, working independently, had noticed the same thing: That even our natives, if they had reached the top or been born at the top, regarded Americans as foreigners. That seems to have been true, too, of people at the top in what used to be the Soviet Union: to them their own ordinary people werent the kinds of people they understood and liked very much.
What did Jason Wilder say to that?¨ I asked her. On TV he was always so quick to snatch any idea tossed his way, cover it with spit, so to speak, and throw it back with a crazy spin which made it uncatchable.
He just let it lie there for a while,¨ she said.
I could see how he might have been flummoxed by this little black woman who spoke many more languages than he did, who knew I ,000 times more science
than he did, and at least as much history and literature and music and art. He had never had anybody like that on his talk show. He may never have had to debate with a person whose destiny GRIOTTM would have described as unpredictable.
He said at last, I am an American, not a European.¨ And she said to him, Then why dont you act like one?¨
38
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es, and now the Japanese are pulling out. Their Army of Occupation in Business Suits is going home. The prison break at Athena was the straw that broke the camels back, I think, but they were already abandoning properties, simply walking away from them, before that expensive catastrophe.
Why they ever wanted to own a country in such an advanced state of physical and spiritual and intellectual dilapidation is a mystery. Maybe they thought that would be a good way to get revenge for our having dropped not 1 but 2 atomic bombs on them.
So that makes two groups so far who have given up on owning this country of their own free will, mainly, I think, because so many unhappy and increasingly lawless people of all races, who dont own anything, turn out to come along with the properties.
It looks like they will keep Oahu as a sort of memento of their empires high-water mark, just as the British have kept Bermuda.
Speaking of unhappy poor people of all races, I have often wondered how the Tarkington Board of Trustees would have been treated if Athena had been a White prison instead of a Black one. I think Hispanic convicts would have regarded them as the Blacks did, as aardvarks, as exotic creatures who had nothing to do with life as they had experienced it.
It seems to me that White convicts, though, might have wanted to kill them or at least beat them up for not caring what became of them any more than they cared what became of Blacks and Hispanics.
Dr. Dole went back to Berlin. At least that is where she said she was going.
I asked her where she had hidden during the siege. She said she had crawled into the firebox under an old boiler in the basement of this library. It hadnt been used since before I taught here, but it would have cost a lot of money to move. The school hated to spend money on improvements that didnt show.
So during the siege she was only a few meters away from me while I sat up here and engaged in the wonderful new science of Futurology.
Dr. Dole sure didnt think much of her own country. She ranted on about its sky-high rates of murder and suicide and drug addiction and infant mortality, its low rate of literacy, the fact that it had a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country except for Haiti and South Africa, and didnt know how to manufacture anything anymore, and put less money into research and primary education than Japan or