“No,” he said, his fu-manchued chin tilting down like a shovel that would dig out the younger white woman’s forehead. “The left condemns significant and arguably foundational acts in our nation’s history not because they’re willing to renounce their citizenship but because they imagine it affords them some kind of innocence.”
She wished he’d back up, but dared not back up herself. It was the new America First Party’s world now, and this was the so-called First Amendment Referee assigned to her university. He’d just been flown in from Texas. Laura Wise taught at a northeastern university, an R1 institution with a history nearly as old as the United States itself. The stakes were nothing less than her tenure, which was no longer the linchpin of job security it used to be.
She was a professor of literature and writing. This was a reception for Referee Dundor upon the assumption of his official role, which was as vague as it was evocative of countless wildly incontinent attacks on, ironically, First Amendment rights.
People sent their kids to college. As the kids’ studies progressed and they entered a larger world away from their families, these kids began to question all with which their families had indoctrinated them. Of course, the response of some parents and entities was to accuse the university of indoctrinating their children, when in fact it was advancing their studies and associations that had loosened them from the indoctrination they’d received steadily, tied to the very survival of their bodies, since before they had language.
Laura Wise allowed the word “innocence” to pass through her like the lightning bolt it was meant to be. She’d made a point of showing up for the reception; her chair had taken her aside and suggested that she start on good footing with Dr. Dundor, whose PhD was rumored to be about 60 pages long and issued by a Hungarian university during that country’s brain drain. She was known for her contributions to feminist theory. In other words, she was a marked woman. She also served on Saturdays as an escort at a women’s health clinic, helping clients cross the rubicon of protesters who held up signs of fetuses. Doubly marked woman. Already, the College Republicans, once an opposing force making for vigorous political campus debate, had been overtaken by the America First Party, which she referred to as the American Fist Party. She didn’t bring her wife to the reception, though many of the heterosexual male faculty had brought theirs. Maureen hated these things anyway. She was a welder who earned twice as much as Laura. Forearms like rebar. Triply marked.
There was no more claim to innocence for anyone under this growing authoritarian regime, she wanted to say. Dr. Dundor had brought up The 1619 Project to bait her, she supposed. She’d responded in as flat a tone as she could muster that it was incumbent on a healthy democracy to know its history, so as not to repeat it. Of course, he jumped in with the usual canard: The United States is not a democracy; it’s a democratic republic. His dubious degree was in Political Science. Who was Laura to disagree. The only thing she said was that, whatever the semantics, it was important to represent a nation’s history fully and accurately. That’s when he moved in with his innocence comment.
She knew from a friend who taught in Indiana that they could expect in-person observations as well as unannounced video surveillance of their classes here, now that the university, succumbing to its trustees and the retrograde state legislature, had brought in a First Amendment Referee. She knew she’d have plants in her class who would go off-topic to assert things like “There are only two genders” and “The Civil War was fought over economics not slavery.”
She was to teach her section of Women and Literature the next day. She had to go home and write the lesson plan, upload it by midnight to the Referee Repository, a cloud folder for the new micromanagement of ideas.
Fortunately, the only person she knew who would willingly approach Dr. Dundor, a clean-cut guy from the business school, came up to them, giving her a chance to excuse herself. “Early class tomorrow,” she said, rolling her eyes sweetly—innocently.
*******
“What is couverture?” she asked the class, reviewing Victorian background for their discussion of Jane Eyre.
The aroma of bacon from a breakfast sandwich was the dominant sensory perception in the room as the students slowly woke up. It was October, lovely outside, the leaves at peak gold and red, the grass still green, a few desperate bees still visiting flowers.
Miriam Waterman, in a battered denim jacket with the sleeves cut off, looked around then raised her hand. “It’s when a woman has the legal protection of a man.”
“A husband?” Laura prompted her.
“Well, yeah, but if you’re not married, it could be a father, a brother, a brother-in-law.”
“Okay,” said Laura. “So what makes Jane particularly vulnerable in this society? Remember, ‘couverture’ is a French word that translates to the English word ‘coverage.’”
“Like insurance coverage?” asked the guy Laura imagined was a plant. He was blond, wore a prominent crucifix pendant, and had more than once referred to marriage as “liberating” for women.
“Kind of like that, Kyle. When you have insurance, you’re protected from bad things happening to you. It’s a kind of safety net. So think how that translates to gender in Victorian culture.”
“A woman without a man to protect her can be poor. Or she can get hurt.” This came from Jamie Brown, a biracial student whose writing was stellar.
Laura was watching herself teach from a remove, because there was a chance the Panopto was recording her.
“So in this sense,” she said, “marriage can be empowering, can’t it?” Kyle blinked in shock. His teacher was embracing his go-to claim? He didn’t know what to say, but Miriam, equally shocked, rushed in. She made scare-quotes with her peace fingers and said, “Well, yes, it’s ‘empowering’ but not real power.”
“Why isn’t that real power? Doesn’t a wife have influence on her husband, children, and household? Isn’t the household a microcosm of society?” Students were looking around at each other. Kyle looked like he was experiencing contractions. “Why wouldn’t domestic power be enough for women?”
“Women of this era, you mean?” another student asked, after rubbing her eyes.
“Well, any era, really?” Laura responded. “It’s no small thing to manage a relationship, children, and a home, is it? Isn’t that the heart of everything?”
Whispering among the students began. “You’re joking, right?” Miriam said, this time without raising her hand.
“Am I?” Laura asked.
Jamie raised her voice. “I just have to say that my mom had to live with me at a shelter for six months to get away from my dad, who beat her. How is that empowering?”
“Does anyone want to address Jamie’s point? Thank you, Jamie, for trusting us with your life experience.”
Miriam pushed her desk away and began tipping back on the hind legs of her chair.
The possible plant, humbled by the teacher’s euphony with his views, raised his hand with an uncharacteristic solicitude.
“Kyle?”
“Um, yes. Jamie’s father violated the sacred trust of marriage by abusing his wife. Or her mother refused her role of a wife, which led to the violence. Saint Paul teaches us that—”
Miriam fired, “I’m Jewish. Saint Paul doesn’t speak for me.” Jamie cried out, “What gives you the right to blame my mother for the abuse she survived?”
Laura was losing her bearings here. She counted thirty seconds of uncomfortable silence, doing the mindful breathing she’d learned at yoga. During that micro-eon, furniture creaked, pages rustled. A thin young man hidden under the bill of his baseball cap had one leg crossed perpendicularly over the other, and the top foot was moving prentissimo. He generally said nothing until the last ten minutes of class, when he offered something perfunctory to secure his participation points.
Now she felt watched not only by the omniscient eye of Panopto but also by Jamie and Miriam, who expected her to address Kyle’s egregious words. They had known her to intervene at moments like this. Miriam’s green eyes beseeched Laura. Jamie’s hazel eyes shone with incipient tears of rage.
This is when Kyle confidently offered what he saw as an olive leaf. “The Jewish and Christian people share roots. Western civilization was built on that foundation.” No points for mixing metaphors, though it did result in Miriam hurling her copy of Jane Eyre against the chalkboard on the side wall, standing up, grabbing one strap of her heavily buttoned backpack with one hand, and leaving the room.
“Let’s take a few minutes to gather our thoughts on paper,” Laura said. “Please write about couverture and how Jane Eyre’s youth and young adulthood played out in relation to that social norm.”
Students took out their notebooks and began writing. Miriam’s book, its pages decorated with three colors of Post-It notes, lay on the floor in defeat. The rest of the class session consisted of silent writing. Silently, as well, Laura went around and whispered to each student that they should tear the sheet out and leave it on her desk on the way out. One girl used her full voice to ask whether she needed to put her name on it. Laura shook her head rather than saying No.
Kyle came up after class. He was only, he said, trying to dialogue. He couldn’t understand why Miriam and Jamie had freaked out. Laura smiled and wished him a good rest of the week, then she walked with him out into the hall and told him how he could have been more self- and other-aware. Off the record.
*******
I hate to bother you at home, but I’ve received a complaint from one of your students about your class this morning. Can you call me?
Laura had just come home from yoga class to find an email marked with an exclamation point in her inbox. From Ray Torres, the department chair. Huge sigh. She’d shower first before calling him. Maureen was grilling one of the late zucchinis from the garden. They had plans to continue their binge of Deadloch that evening. She knew it was Miriam Waterman. At the same time, she hardly knew what to say to Ray about the class session or what to do in class the following Tuesday. She was home until then, and nothing sounded better to her than being zoned out watching TV. She wanted to wash her hands of everything. She’d done what she could to resist the rise of America First. How many protests? Petitions? Voter registration drives? Phone banking hours? Even so, the highest court in the land was extremist. The electoral college had been gamed to guarantee minority rule with the help of lawlessness and voter suppression.
What was there to say to Ray? How much longer would Ray be on the faculty, let alone remain as chair, once they undid the past two decades’ diversity and inclusion initiatives? How much longer would Laura remain on the faculty?
She typed a response to his email. “Violently ill with a stomach virus. Can we talk about this when I get rid of this? Sorry.” She autopiloted through showering and dressing for the evening at home. It crossed her mind that she was an uncovered woman. Ray was the closest thing to couverture she had. The son of Mexican immigrants brought in to work the soybean fields of Ohio, he was a brilliant scholar and translator. He was innocent. Miriam Waterman, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors: innocent. Jamie: innocent. Kyle: made innocent by the blood of the lamb, Laura supposed with a groan. “The lamb” represented who in the current American context?
She had never claimed innocence. She knew she was implicated in the American story. Her ancestors came from Scotland, Germany, Ireland, England. So many discarded white bread crusts.
*******
On Saturday morning, she rose, and as usual, she and Maureen picked up their Starbucks mobile orders and headed to the East End, where the unmarked women’s clinic was. The usual range of picketers was there: from the wizened white man with the outsize rosary beads to the portly young brunette with her It’s Not a Choice, It’s a Child t-shirt. There were no black people in this crowd, though it was a black neighborhood. The air had a nice chill to it, where you could smell the edges of leaves and the woodfires that would consume them, even in the city.
“The usual suspects,” Maureen said. They both wore fluorescent vests so that any client approaching the clinic could find them. Maureen always carried pepper spray, but had never used it. Laura had only her phone and wallet in her jacket. She imagined herself as a tree in this situation, an unbending oak—but with no roots save her own conviction that, in a society that claimed all were created equal, women had the right to bodily autonomy. She faced down the picketers with her usual dead-eyed, unfocused stare, the way court police looked when they brought a prisoner into the courtroom. This sea of self-righteous meddlers ebbed and flowed. RICO laws be damned, the tide always moved closer to the building than they were legally allowed to, gathering around poor individuals who needed a range of services, from mammograms to pap smears to pregnancy terminations. The escorts stood like buoys facing them. Not long after 9 a.m. the tide clustered around two figures. Maureen said, “I’ll take this,” and Laura followed tentatively. The sea parted, and there was Miriam Waterman, shepherded by Maureen’s thick and powerful right arm.
“Don’t murder an innocent child!” a gray-haired woman brayed. “There’s help for you, you’re not alone,” another voice shrieked. Miriam spotted Laura, blurted out something with “fuck” as punctuation, and ducked under Maureen’s arm. Like a determined runningback, she rammed through the bobbing bodies, retreating from the clinic. On the other side of the crowd, there was the sound of a loud horn. Above the horizon of people, the red body of a Port Authority bus. Laura followed her student, fearing the worst. She was aware of planting a sharp elbow into body fat, maybe a breast, as she pushed through the human press.
“Get out of my way,” she said. “Someone may be hurt.” She heard a kid whose voice was changing say that more people were being hurt inside that building. On the other side, the bus was stopped, Miriam just in front of it, sitting on the curb, holding her ankle. The driver stood above her, milk chocolate brown skin in blue uniform. “Paramedics are on the way,” she said gently to Miriam.
“Did you—” Laura began.
“No, I stopped in time. But looks like this poor girl twisted up her leg on the curb here,” the driver said.
Miriam looked up at Laura, her face red with pain and rage. “I don’t know who I’m angrier at, these assholes or you. I was here to get the pill. Jesus Christ.”
The paramedics arrived. “I’m so sorry,” Laura said to Miriam, who waved off her words. Maureen was now beside them. “Is she okay?” she asked Laura in a low voice.
As they walked away to resume their positions between the ragtag righteous and the entrance to the clinic, Laura explained that Miriam was the student who’d walked out of class.
“So she really is pissed at you, huh? I thought she was going to break my arm getting away.”
“She should be,” Laura said, shaking her head.
*******
Laura was relieved to see Miriam in attendance at Tuesday’s class, albeit using crutches. Laura’d spoken to her via Zoom over the weekend, apologizing for not intervening more in the class discussion. Also in attendance, to her surprise, was Dr. Dundor. She’d decided to pick up from her question about whether marriage could be said to be empowering for women today in the ways it had been under couverture. “I read your in-class writing from last week, and was impressed with the level of insight. I’ve decided to share some of this writing to get us back to this discussion,” she told them, darkening the room and starting the PowerPoint.
The first slide read: “I don’t know why guys with old-fashioned views take a course like Women and Literature, but I know I took it so I could understand my place in history and in the world today. Also, although I am a Christian, I am uncomfortable with the ways it is being used today to oppress women. It seems like so-called Christianity is always up-to-date when it comes to any other issue besides women and sexuality. It’s as if some of these evangelicals still believe in couverture. That guy running for vice-president now? He’s basically saying that women who don’t reproduce should not be allowed to vote. And that marriage has to be between a woman and a man. Why are we letting people like this have the loudest voice in the room?”
Laura then asked people to weigh in on the excerpt by their peer. Kyle’s hand shot up at the same time that Miriam’s did. Laura let Miriam speak first.
“I was nearly hit by a bus on Saturday when I went to the clinic for birth control pills,” she said. “A mob of people were calling me a baby-killer. This is couverture on steroids. Surveillance of me and my body.”
Dundor winced. Kyle’s arm was still up.
“Kyle?”
“Life begins at conception. This is a fundamental truth.”
“No,” said Miriam. “It’s clearly not a fundamental truth, Kyle, or you could count a fetus as a deduction on your tax forms before it was born.”
Laura asked everyone to make a few notes on what they thought about the idea of a “fundamental truth.”
“A fundamental truth is anything that can’t be credibly called into doubt or disproven,” Laura said, her shoulders squaring. “We’re not in the business here of determining when life begins, and it is a question that is not at all settled among those whose business it is. Let’s be honest, when we state that something is a fundamental truth, we are not interested in dialogue. Kyle, your response to Miriam comes across as saying that you are not interested in dialogue, with her or anyone else, on the matter of reproductive freedom.”
“Can I ask something?” Lisa Marrone piped up, her black hair stacked over her olive-toned face, its loose ends giving a Medusa-esque effect. “I wrote the passage that’s up on the screen now. I want to ask Kyle why he took this class.”
Others chimed in, me too, me too.
“Kyle, do you want to answer this question?”
At this point, Dundor stood up, his scraping chair sounding Ahem. Kyle blinked rapidly about six times, then tackled the question like a forensics champ.
“I wanted to learn about women’s writing from the past. I knew women had been writing—but less seriously—than men throughout history, and I wanted to hear what they had to say. I expect someday to be married, so learning more about how women think and feel will help me in my relationship.”
Dundor was still standing. His voice ratcheted through the room. “When is the class going to discuss literature, Dr. Wise?”
Seeing him there, in all his judicious bearing, cut through all Laura’s hesitations. “Dr. Dundor, we are discussing literature. We are trying to understand why marriage could be empowering for someone like Jane Eyre and whether it is still so in the same way for contemporary women.” She remembered that the students didn’t know who this guy was. “While we’re on the topic of couverture, I’d like to introduce you to our class observer, Dr. Dundor, the recently appointed First Amendment Referee.”
“Yeah, I read about that on the internet. That’s some bullshit.” This was Hanna Dulane, a wide-faced black student with jade eyeglass frames. She spoke without looking up from her folded arms.
“It really is. Can he get you fired?” Jamie Brown asked. “My cousin told me her professor in Florida got fired because of officials spying on the class. I didn’t believe her, I thought it was just the usual Florida weirdness.” A few people laughed.
Laura sat against the cold radiator lining the side of the classroom beneath the windows to the lawn. Before Dundor could launch into a monologue about the first amendment and “intellectual diversity,” she shot out, “Yes. He can get me fired.”
“For what you say in class? How is that about the first amendment?” Miriam asked, pausing every third word to glare at Dundor.
“I don’t know,” Laura replied. She honestly didn’t. Or she did: she was being closely monitored for how she handled Kyle’s faith-based statements. She told them that, too. And apologized for not better addressing them during the last class.
She had never felt so exposed in a room full of people.
The whole concept of “religious reasoning”? An oxymoron. A squaring of a circle. Who had it better in the end—married Jane Eyre or exploited governess Jane Eyre? They would have you believe it was married Jane who had it better, for playing by the rules, biding her time, being stalked, tricked, and lied to by Rochester, who, of course, only had her best interests at heart—given the limitations of the society in which they lived. And Jane, Jane was able to preserve her innocence from beginning to end by dint of enduring all of this unnecessary hardship and pain, by saying “yes” to it all and wedding herself to it.
“Kyle, you said a few minutes ago that you took this course because you wanted to hear what women had to say, right?” Laura finally asked. Kyle nodded, then began to speak. She kept talking. “Then Kyle, wouldn’t you want to listen to them before asserting your beliefs?”
“I was going to say, before you cut me off, Dr. Wise, that I wanted to hear what these writers had to say, these women writers of the past.”
“But Kyle, most of the class is made up of potential women writers. Who also have something to say.”
Dr. Dundor was furiously writing things on his clipboard. When he looked up again, Laura was watching him. “Did you want me to repeat that? Did you get it all down, Dr. Dundor?
“So, to get back to the first excerpt. Do you believe the idea of couverture is still alive in contemporary society? Have those of you who identify as women been in situations like Jane Eyre where the absence of male legitimation or protection posed a problem?” This was not a question Kyle would be able to answer. What’s more, it was directed back to the text, as she’d followed her question with instructions that they leaf through and identify relevant moments in the novel that resonated with their own experience. By the end of the class, they had a working concept of “the ghost of couverture” and a list of current practices—such as a bride taking a groom’s name—that gestured toward it. For almost every item she went to write on the board, Kyle had his hand up. “Do you have something to add to the list, Kyle?” she asked whenever she didn’t just ignore him, and when he said he didn’t, she said she wanted to continue to build the list before discussing the items in-depth. Underneath all of this christofascist warrior machinery was probably a smart, kind young man. This was no longer her concern. She was glad she’d called to request a Panopto recording of the class session. She would be sure to download and save the recording in more than one place.
