Page 88 of You've Got a Place Here, Too
C:What are you saying?
K:I look back up on the screen and our friend is shivering. We had to cut the Zoom short.
He’s sweating. And honestly, I assumed it was because he’d been told earlier that he was denied tenure by Jackson State and the decision is now in the hands of the president. Plagiarism.
C:I assumed that too.
K:It broke something in him when he went home and he saw the restaurant from the kitchen.
C:I don’t get it.
K:The JSU he went to and the JSU he worked at were two different places. He had no idea that the entire place was run by a committee of folks picked by the Republican governor, Tate Reeves.
C:Of course he did. He’s brilliant. But running the whole place can’t mean the whole place is truly run by Republican white folks. What about the Sonic Boom?
K:Okay, so this where it gets a little complicated. You know how our friend tried to grapple with your work in his tenure manuscript.
C:Grapple?
K:I mean, you wrote, “Instead of unilaterally championing the spectacularizing of suffering and death, I track the ways that the visual display of the body has been used by proponents of black freedom and dignity.”
And our friend wrote, “Instead of unilaterally championing the spectacularizing of suffering and death, I track the ways that the visual display of the body has been used by proponents of black freedom, dignity, and reparation.”
C:So “grapple” might be way too generous.
K:Yeah, he jacked your work and added the word “reparation.” And he got caught.
You wrote, “I am absolutely not considering these manipulations and utilizations of the black body in pain and death to be a consequence of black people’s intuitive response to suffering and injustice. Quite to the contrary. I am insisting that these choreographies of humane insight are deliberate.”
Our friend wrote, “I am absolutely not considering these manipulations and utilizations of the black body in pain and death to be a consequence of black people’s intuitive responseto suffering and injustice. Quite to the contrary. I am insisting that these choreographies of humane insight are deliberate and must be imitated.”
C:That’s wild. That’s why he got denied tenure, right?
K:Right. He jacked you and Therí Pickens. And it’s like he wanted to get caught. But why? Can you tell me why you think he did it and whether or not it makes sense to use your theory as the linchpin of his work?
C:Um, no. I don’t understand what his work is because he just uses my work and adds a few words at the end. Black man shit.
K:That makes sense. That’s kinda why I drove all the way up there from Mississippi a few weeks ago when he told me there had been an accident and he needed my help. And when I got there, Courtnay, I mean, some stories are way too big to tell.
C:Can you make it like a graphic novella but maybe more the SparkNotes version of that, and no pictures?
K:Yeah, I can try. After I tell it, will you tell me what happened at Harvard with those vampires?
C:He told you about that?
K:He told me about that.
C:I can try.
K:I get to the parking lot of our friend’s apartment at like four-thirty. It’s not dark but it ain’t light either. He lives in Baker Hall. I text him and tell him I’m in my car.
He comes out, moping. Head down, mask sagging below his nose, hands in his sweatpants pockets.
It was the first time I hadn’t seen him with his glasses on.
I asked him where his partner, Dionne, is. He says, “Dionne didn’t come home. Dionne hasn’t spent the night at home in the past three weeks.”
Our friend went in his backpack and pulled out this bluebook. “So yeah,” he says, “someone slipped this blue book under the door.” He handed it to me. “And when I opened the door, the person was gone.”
