The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  There was applause. Naomi was sitting in the back, an open notebook on the flip-up armrest, but she hadn’t written anything down. She had grown a tiny bit uncomfortable during the talk, though not because Robbins had done anything wrong. She was trying to remember their first meeting, that lunch at the Webster Inn. He’d eaten a burger and drunk iced tea. She hadn’t felt a thing. She was sure of it. Well, she wasn’t really sure of it. Not at all. At any rate, she wasn’t sure of it now.

  Just under eight hundred Native students since Sarafian’s inauguration in ’66, Robbins was saying, with more than one hundred fifty tribes represented. Since 2000, between thirty and forty Native students had matriculated each year.

  “I really believe that Webster is a place where Native culture can thrive, which is so wonderfully ironic given that the whole point of this place was to kill that very culture. And before we go any further I’d like to express my gratitude to President Roth for conceiving of this gathering and frankly forcing me and the others onto the committee.”

  They all laughed. They turned to Naomi and smiled and raised their clapping hands but she didn’t want to be looked at. She didn’t want him to look at her. How old was Petavit, anyway? Had they ever established this? Not younger than her, she was sure. But not much older, either. She was relieved when that was over and the first panel began.

  Six men from the early years. They were an odd group, neatly divided between tribal representatives and attorneys, the former with long hair and dressed in jeans, the latter attired for court. Petavit, who was moderating, introduced them by name and tribal affiliation, and by the year that they’d matriculated at Webster. None of them, it would quickly become clear, had actually graduated, at least not from Webster College. The first to speak had arrived as a freshman from the Pacific Northwest, alerted to the college and its newfound interest in Native applicants by the father of his basketball teammate, an alum. He’d come in the fall of ’69, delighted not to be in basic training but otherwise at sea. Inside of three months he was floundering, academically and socially, and had all but moved up to Worcester, where he had a girlfriend who worked at the Webster Inn. “And basically,” said the man, whose name was Thomas Dark Feather, “for the next couple of years I’m dropping in and then dropping out. And you know, they were always okay with me coming back, which now I look back on and think that’s kind of amazing. But I kept wanting to try and they kept saying what do you need to make it work? Like, tutoring? Or a single room? But I didn’t know what I needed, and finally I gave up and went home. I did go to the community college in Ashland, Oregon. But I didn’t blame Webster for what happened. I just never got my feet under me.”

  Not a promising beginning, then, but Naomi imagined it might have been worse. The first women at Webster had had their dormitories surrounded by drunken men in the middle of the night, calling for the “co-whores” (their favored term for female students) to go home. The first openly gay students in the ’80s had had their meetings secretly recorded by writers for the Heritage Review, Milton Russell’s odious gang. For the most part it sounded as if these early Native students had not come in for outright opposition, only clueless neglect. Of the others on the panel, two had transferred to four-year schools close to their homes, one had left education entirely after completing half of his Webster degree, and two had limped in and out of the college for years, finally finishing credits at their state universities, where they’d also stayed on to attend law school.

  Still, the lack of ill will shown by Thomas Dark Feather was echoed by the others. It hadn’t been Webster’s fault, was the general feeling; the school had tried to do something good, however uninformed it might have been on complex tribal issues and the weight of Native history, particularly when it came to Indians and education. Naomi found herself very moved by this lost first batch of Native students at Webster, this sacrificial pancake on the griddle of Sarafian’s noble intentions. That all six panelists appeared healthy and engaged in meaningful work was, of course, not inconsequential, but she couldn’t help feeling that the college owed them a bit more than airfare and a weekend at the Webster Inn.

  When the discussion turned toward the Indian symbol in the following panel, that general benevolence only continued. In fact, she was quite surprised to learn, the first Native student arrivals at Webster had not unanimously been in opposition to the Webster Indian, an image that might have been drawn from a John Ford Western. This caricature Indian had been attending Webster games for decades before it first appeared on an official college document, but its having been grandfathered into the college culture didn’t make Webster any less culpable. The story Naomi had always heard, and that Robbins had confirmed, was that Native students confronted Sarafian after their very first football game, and firmly requesting that no Indian mascot should ever again emit its deeply inauthentic war whoop in front of a crowd. This was not untrue; the meeting had taken place, and one participant on the panel, a Legal Aid lawyer in Montana, had actually attended it. But feelings about the symbol had not by any means been unanimously held. “I know it was a problem for some of the others,” the man beside the Legal Aid lawyer explained. He’d identified himself as Hopi/Navajo, and he was a drug and alcohol counselor at a reservation facility in New Mexico. “But for me, it was kind of a part of the history of the place. I thought of it as a tradition, and tradition was something I’d been brought up to respect. So even though I knew people were organizing about it, and some of my friends were organizing, I never joined. I guess I wasn’t ready to be that militant at that time.”

  The man to his left took the microphone. “My feelings were, yeah, this is important, and it was annoying to see kids who weren’t Indian dressed up like somebody in a Western, and we were just starting to talk about how Indians were being portrayed in movies.” His name was Roger Vasquez, and he built commercial real estate in Tulsa. “But at the same time, I remember thinking: Aren’t there a lot more pressing issues for us going on? Not just nationally but also at Webster in particular. Like I had this anthropology class where the professor would come in dressed up as a Plains Indian, and we’d walk into the classroom and he’d be sitting there cross-legged on the floor. We were supposed to ask him questions and he’d answer them as a Sioux, and the point of this was to say something about how hard it was to talk to people who were from a different culture. I was kind of horrified by the whole thing, actually. He was doing this ‘silent Indian’ act, which is a big cliché about us, and I was very, very offended by it, but my friends didn’t want to do anything until we’d gotten rid of the symbol. So yeah, there were a lot of us who were totally focused on the symbol, but some of us were just, you know, ‘What an idiotic thing.’ Just stupid crap, but we weren’t that worked up by it. Now I think that Webster was kind of behind the curve on social change in general. But from what I can see now, on campus, eventually you really caught up. This is my first time back and I really just can’t believe it’s the same place.”

  Naomi smiled. So not every Native student was enraged by what was waiting for them at Webster. Perhaps not every Webster alum had rent his garments over the symbol’s loss, either. Everything was grayer than you first believed, when you looked closely. That was the point of looking closely. She realized, all of a sudden, that she was missing her own academic work.

  After lunch, which she ate beside Petavit but mainly with her back to him (he was being monopolized by a widely built man in a green ribbon shirt), they returned to the conference hall for the afternoon sessions. First came a look back at the Native American studies program and an evaluation of its current status, chaired by Francis Kinikini and resolutely positive. The program had been important since its inception in the ’60s; and was now routinely ranked in the top two or three undergraduate programs nationally. It had six faculty members, four of whom had dual appointments with other departments, in anthropology, environmental studies, history, and English. She had nothing to fear from this panel, and used the time to go over
her own notes for the panel she herself would be moderating to close out the formal portion of the gathering.

  These were current undergraduates, a group she’d handpicked to talk about life as a Native student at Webster today. They comprised two young women, a freshman Chippewa from Minnesota named Millie and a Shinnecock senior called Lila from the ancestral patch of land now more commonly known as the Hamptons. The two boys were Lawrence Yona-Rusk, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, and Joe Driggs, who was Seminole and from southern Florida. All four of them, she saw, had dressed for the occasion in clothing that did not really distinguish them from other Webster students. The girls were both in jeans and zip-up sweatshirts (one said JUICY; the other WEBSTER WOMEN’S CREW) and the boys in button-down shirts, but unbuttoned over T-shirts and not tucked in. The Seminole, Joe, had a First Nations Center hat, but that was the extent of their sartorial Native identification. Naomi wondered what it meant, then decided it didn’t mean anything.

  She introduced them. They nodded as they were described, looking forward. The Shinnecock looked nervous; the others seemed pleased to be in front of a crowd. “Before we begin, a small piece of information we’re pretty excited about.” In the current admissions cycle, she announced, the college had offers out to more than ninety Native American applicants. If every one of them said yes—which was unlikely, but still possible!—Webster would have a 5 percent Native enrollment for the new class, roughly five times the national rate for four-year institutions and a record for Webster itself. Which was amazing, really, given where they’d started. Over in the college cemetery behind the chapel, she told the room, Samuel Fairweather was probably howling in his grave.

  Weirdly, nobody laughed.

  Which also didn’t mean anything, she told herself. But her thoughts were already rushing ahead.

  They started at the far end: The Cherokee had turned down a lacrosse scholarship at Oklahoma State to come to Webster, a move that confounded his parents. He lived at the First Nations Center and captained the lacrosse team, but he was far and away the strongest player on the team, which was currently in eighth place in its central New England league. In the summers, he said, he traveled the festival circuit with some cousins who had a stall that sold books and music. He would probably major in government.

  The girl from the Hamptons did not participate in First Nations activities at all, and after the freshman week welcome reception she hadn’t set foot in the place. The previous fall she’d been to Florence with the art history department, and she hoped that her post-Webster life, which was now imminent, would mostly consist of advertising, or PR. Millie, the Chippewa girl, was pre-med and a cox for the women’s eight. Her main concern, she said with a thoroughly straight face, was organic chemistry. “Passing it and understanding it.” This panel was the first non-homework and non-rowing-related thing she’d done since before Christmas, she said, to general amusement. Lawrence Yona-Rusk had been in Naomi’s freshman seminar on Second Wave feminism. He hadn’t said much in class, but his papers were solid, and even showed some curiosity about the politics of protest and change. He’d said at the time that he wanted to write novels.

  “I’m wondering,” said Naomi when Yona-Rusk had finished, “what it’s been like, listening to these older alumni. How do you relate the Webster they describe to the Webster you’re attending?”

  They looked at one another. Only Joe Driggs had been there earlier; the others hadn’t been sufficiently interested, or were busy.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of an interesting question, because on one hand that stuff about the professor dressing up like a Native, and the Indian symbol, that couldn’t happen today. No way would somebody do that, I mean not even on Halloween or something, any more than they’d dress up like a Nazi. Webster students, like, pride themselves on how sensitive they are. And they are,” he insisted, as if the audience were challenging him on this point. “Like, for example, we have these days where everyone eats what the typical African eats on an average day, which is like fourteen hundred calories. And there’s tons of sensitivity training when the freshmen get here. Cultural sensitivity, religious tolerance, sexual harassment training. But you know, it’s hard when there’s an endemic issue at the institutional level.”

  Naomi looked over at him. She couldn’t be sure she had heard him correctly, but she was suddenly terrified to ask him to repeat what he had said. Joe Driggs sat, nonchalantly scanning the audience.

  “Uh…would anyone like to comment on what Joe just said?”

  “I mean,” said the Shinnecock, “like, I’m kind of fortunate because I always attended, like, a regular school. I actually went to boarding school in Connecticut, and I know my tribal side, which is super important to me, is something I can choose to display or not display, so I’ve really made decisions about when I want to be Lila from Southampton or Lila the proud Shinnecock through my mom’s side. And I haven’t been, like, that involved. But have I felt threatened here in some ways? Absolutely.”

  “Threatened?” Naomi said. She couldn’t stop herself.

  “I wrote this story for my creative writing class last year,” Lawrence Yona-Rusk jumped in. “It was about this teenaged boy who tries to kill himself. And he’s not an Indian, he’s just this normal teenager who lives in a cul-de-sac in anywhere suburbia. And my professor spends half the class trying to explain why the story doesn’t work because I haven’t been honest when I wrote it. Because if I’d been honest this would have been a Native kid on a reservation, with alcoholic parents and a wise old grandparent who wants to do a smudge ceremony or something and bring him back into the fold of his people. And I said, ‘Hey, would you be telling me this if I weren’t Native American?’ Like, are we only legitimate if we’re excavating our own ethnicity every single second? Because, like, that means Winston Burberry the fourth from Charleston over there better start writing about plantation life before the War of Northern Aggression, because if he doesn’t he isn’t going to produce anything worth reading.”

  At this, all four of them laughed. Naomi knew she’d gotten lost, but exactly when had that happened? She was backtracking frantically, but they were moving on without her.

  “The problem,” said the Chippewa freshman, “is that Webster has like two centuries of impacted racism. You don’t just flush that out even in a couple generations. You can overlay it, and it’s obvious to me that there’s been a lot of effort in that direction, but we’re walking over it all the time. We’re walking over all the people who weren’t allowed to be part of Webster for hundreds of years. And we’re walking over dead Native people.”

  “Oh, wait,” said Naomi. “I don’t think that can go unanswered.”

  Someone in the audience had raised his hand. She called on him, immensely relieved. He was a man in his thirties. She’d met him the night before, in the dining hall, one of the twenty or thirty Petavit had introduced her to. He was from somewhere in the south, a physician. Or, no, a researcher. Drugs.

  “I’m curious,” the man said, sounding so eminently reasonable. “What’s your take on the student protest we were hearing about this winter? Was that about racism?”

  “It was about a professor in the anthropology department,” said Lila, the proud Shinnecock. “Nick Gall. I had him freshman year and he was amazing. But he got turned down for tenure, and they tried to say it was because he’d plagiarized.”

  “Who said that?” someone in the back asked. Someone who hadn’t raised a hand.

  “The board or someone. They kind of leaked it then they denied they’d done it.”

  “And they got rid of the kid who was leading the protest,” Lawrence Yona-Rusk said. “He was a Palestinian kid. His whole family was murdered by the Israelis, and he got himself to America. The whole thing was peaceful, but they kicked him out anyway.”

  “That is not what happened,” Naomi said. She said it into the microphone. She hadn’t meant to.

  “And don’t forget the basement of the Sojourner Truth House.” Joe Driggs was
leaning forward. “I belong to the community at Sojourner. I have black forbears also. There were escaped slaves who took refuge with the Seminole, I’m sure you know. So I identify as black also. And the fact that this could happen at Webster just made us sick.”

  “What happened?” said the man in the green ribbon shirt.

  “Somebody wrote the N word on the walls of the basement,” a voice shouted.

  “In shit,” said Joe Driggs. “And of course the campus police didn’t do anything.”

  “They don’t know who did it,” Naomi said lamely. She was reeling. “Can I just say”—her voice rose—“that we’ve gone through something very difficult these last six months. What happened at Sojourner Truth does not represent our values or our students’ values.”

  Her eye fell on Petavit. He sat in the front row, one leg crossed over the other. He was folding and unfolding a plastic straw in his left hand. He looked grim.