We had been on a roll. We had been in the middle of our seminary education, developing big dreams and sharp minds for transforming the world, but we had to let all our half-finished work go now, with no knowledge of whether we would get to take it back up again. Now we lived by a strict daily regimen in a barracks and worked as conscripted labor in factories. Data factories. Doing manual labor of the mind.
Our only source of release was at the carnivals that they had built for us. We were permitted to go out on certain evenings and ride the Ferris wheels or those swinging arms that turn you upside down or the Tilt-A-Whirl, until we spun out into oblivion. I was surprised that they were generous enough to provide the carnivals, but it also made me wonder if our imprisonment was just as much through subtler manipulations as it was through direct force. Their idea, perhaps, was to take up our only free time with mind-numbing entertainment.
We were shuffling through the hallways on our way to lunch one day when I witnessed an infrequent spontaneous exchange between two of my friends. M., a deeply spiritual, gay black man asked N., a sugary-feminine conservative white girl, how she was doing.
"I wish you wouldn't ask me that," N. responded with her usual sing-songy cheer. "You know they don't let us speak our own mind in this hell-hole. Everything is controlled. I would get in trouble for being honest."
How did she get away with being so honest about not being able to be honest? Weren't they watching on cameras? Was she deliberately pushing the limits to see what she could get away with?
Maybe this is what gave me the courage to carry out my escape plan. My pregnant wife had managed to flee in the midst of the takeover, and I knew that she was living now in the house of a beloved professor couple who had always invited students over for creative dinner parties and stimulating dialogue. They had been killed in the conquest, but their house remained a haven of sorts, tucked deep in the forest, up in the hills, across the river from the alien city. I somehow knew she was hiding there, and I decided to try to reunite with her.
I slipped away as everyone else was heading out to the carnival. It was strangely easy. I made my way across the river and through the jungle-like forest until I reached the house. With each step deeper into the forest I breathed with relief. High above the river, I looked back and could see the alien city, its boxy metal buildings interspersed with patches of flashy, multicolored carnival rides. They looked beautiful, tragic and menacing all at once.
When I got to the professors' house, I found my wife and my two-year-old child there. I was not a man, but I had a wife who was such a part of my soul that she bore me a child. She greeted me with innocent bravery and the long, soft brown hair of a princess. She had kept the light in me alive out in the wilderness. My little boy was as beautiful as my articulate, Hallelujah-singing nephew with his deep dimples and his perfect arching eyebrows. Maybe from here we could escape to a different part of the world and live free.
I woke up the next morning to another day of class in carpeted, windowless rooms with roller chairs and straight rows of polyurethane tables that face towards a sleek, digitally-equipped podium. Our Methodist History professor, amidst the barrage of names, dates and institutional church decisions, discussed the curious case of a certain Bishop James O. Andrew and an enslaved woman named Catherine "Kitty" Boyd.
As tensions about slavery were building in the US in the mid-nineteenth century, northern Methodists took Bishop Andrew to ecclesiastical trial for his slave ownership, in an attempt to assert anti-slavery values as the norm of the church. The way Professor D. explained it to us, Bishop Andrew had inherited a slave named Kitty from his late wife. Professor D. painted the Bishop as ever the reluctant slave owner, caught between Georgia law (which would not let him free slaves), Kitty's own wishes (which were not to be sent off to Liberia through the American Colonization Society), and the insistence of northern church representatives that his slave ownership delegitimized his position as Bishop. Though Bishop Andrew was supposedly prepared to resign, the trial caused the split of the Methodists into two churches, North and South. The American Civil War ensued. As for Miss Kitty, the story goes that Bishop Andrew built her a nice little cabin on his property in Oxford, Georgia and allowed her to marry, raise children, and live the rest of her days "as in freedom."
Professor D. admitted that one scholar had made a convincing argument that Bishop Andrew had a "sexual relationship" with Miss Kitty. In my subsequent internet sleuthing, I found that Mark Auslander's work reveals a contradictory story to the one our professor decided to tell us. Auslander researched the way present-day blacks and whites in the town of Oxford recall and enact their mythology about Bishop Andrew, Miss Kitty, and the institution of slavery itself. He found that the whites of the town had co-opted all the physical memorials to Miss Kitty. They lead historical re-enactment tours of her cottage that imagine Kitty as the pinnacle of old-fashioned domesticity and maternal neighborliness. They care for her memorial in the Andrew family plot of the cemetery, as she was given the "honor" of being the only black person buried in the white section. In essence, whites uphold the story of Kitty's benevolent treatment and loyalty to her master as a way to weave "a deeply nostalgic narrative of tranquil antebellum race relations." Meanwhile, African-American residents of Oxford wince as they drive by "Kitty's Cottage," remembering Kitty as the coerced lover of Bishop Andrew, who had three children by her that he refused to recognize. They consider her to have been denied the basic elements of freedom throughout her life. They do not see race relations that allow one human being to legally own another as tranquil or benevolent. From a precursory skim of Auslander's website, I discovered that Bishop Andrew in fact owned many other slaves acquired from different sources, seriously calling into question the "accidental" nature of his slaveholding status. Why didn't Professor D. mention any of this in class?
Because maybe that would be a little too much critical thinking for the gray-green carpet to absorb. Maybe it's no coincidence that Oxford, Georgia was the original seat of Emory University, and Bishop James O. Andrew served as the first chairman of its Board of Trustees. Nor a coincidence that I had a dream about being enslaved by aliens at Emory the morning prior to learning about Bishop Andrew's sordid little "accident." Emory likes to market its academics as being on the cutting edge of progressive thought. And I know it has its enclaves. But on a whole it is just like any other university system: pitting you against hierarchical, alienating pedagogical models based on a competitive capitalist meritocracy, which reward conformity and maintenance of the status quo, as long as you innovate just enough to make it seem like you are doing something good for society. In this context, we spend much of our time absorbing and regurgitating information in efficient, boxy classrooms while our professors bring in carnival sideshows of YouTube videos and pop culture references to keep us entertained and appeased. It is a modern-day, white-collar form of slavery that sustains and is sustained by the slave labor of lower class jobs in this country and across the globe. Because we are too busy at the data factory and the YouTube carnival to notice that there is a forest within all of us waiting to be born.
