So I told her about the spooks business, told her that whole story then, and when I was finished she shook her head and said, straight out, "I don't believe I've ever heard of anything more foolish being perpetrated by an institution of higher learning. It sounds to me more like a hotbed of ignorance. To persecute a college professor, whoever he is, whatever color he might be, to insult him, to dishonor him, to rob him of his authority and his dignity and his prestige for something as stupid and trivial as that. I am my father's daughter, Mr. Zuckerman, the daughter of a father who was a stickler for words, and with every passing day, the words that I hear spoken strike me as less and less of a description of what things really are. Sounds from what you've told me that anything is possible in a college today. Sounds like the people there forgot what it is to teach.
Sounds like what they do is something closer to buffoonery. Every time has its reactionary authorities, and here at Athena they are apparently riding high. One has to be so terribly frightened of every word one uses? What ever happened to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America? In my childhood, as in yours, it was recommended that each student who graduated from high school in New Jersey get at graduation two things: a diploma and a copy of the Constitution. Do you recall that? You had to take a year of American history and a semester of economics-as, of course, you have to no longer: 'have to' is just gone out of the curriculum. At graduation it was traditional in many of our schools in those days for the principal to hand you your diploma and somebody else to give you a copy of the Constitution of the United States. So few people today have a reasonably clear understanding of the Constitution of the United States. But here in America, as far as I can see, it's just getting more foolish by the hour. All these colleges starting these remedial programs to teach kids what they should have learned in the ninth grade. In East Orange High they stopped long ago reading the old classics. They haven't even heard of Moby-Dick, much less read it. Youngsters were coming to me the year I retired, telling me that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black. What difference, I would ask them, if it's a black author or it's a white author? I'm impatient with Black History Month altogether. I liken having a Black History Month in February and concentrating study on that to milk that's just about to go sour. You can still drink it, but it just doesn't taste right. If you're going to study and find out about Matthew Henson, then it seems to me that you do Matthew Henson when you do other explorers."
"I don't know who Matthew Henson is," I said to Ernestine, wondering if Coleman had known, if he had wanted to know, if not wanting to know was one of the reasons he had made his decision.
"Mr. Zuckerman . . . " she said, gently enough, but to shame me nonetheless.
"Mr. Zuckerman was not exposed to Black History Month as a youngster," I said.
"Who discovered the North Pole?" she asked me.
I suddenly liked her enormously, and the more so the more pedantically teacherish she became. Though for different reasons, I was beginning to like her as much as I had liked her brother. And I saw now that if you'd put them side by side, it wouldn't have been at all difficult to tell what Coleman was. Everyone knows... Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid Delphine Roux. One's truth is known to no one, and frequently—as in Delphine's very own case—to oneself least of all. "I forget whether it was Peary or Cook," I said. "I forget which one got to the North Pole first."
"Well, Henson got there before him. When it was reported in the New York Times, he was given full credit. But now when they write the history, all you hear about is Peary. It would have been the same sort of thing if Sir Edmund Hillary were said to have gotten to the top of Mount Everest and you didn't hear a word about Tenzing Norkay. My point," said Ernestine, in her element now, all professional correctitude and instruction—and, unlike Coleman, everything her father ever wanted her to be—"my point is, if you have a course on health and whatever, then you do Dr. Charles Drew.
You've heard of him?"
"No."
"Shame on you, Mr. Zuckerman. I'll tell you in a minute. But you do Dr. Drew when you have health. You don't put him in February.
You understand what I mean?"
"Yes."
