A Soldier for God

Ihad been warned (for lack of a better term) by the university's chief admissions officer to expect a greater presence of "special needs" students in my classes that fall term. No explanation was given for such an increase in this type student. And indeed that one morning section of freshman composition contained three such individuals: a genial girl in a motorized wheelchair, a young man with a hearing impairment, and Jacob Lee, whose disability had been termed, ambiguously, in the descriptive sheet sent to me, as of a "learning nature." I thought immediately of autism. I had known no one with that condition but had read enough about it to recognize certain signs. That first class, for instance, I noticed Jacob's rocking back and forth in his seat, just briefly, before stopping, and his staring off into a faraway corner of the room, a smile flitting for a moment over his long, pale face. The smile left, and one of his long white fingers found its way to his mouth, as though to check any lingering evidence of the smile, then moved farther up to his nose. That's when I looked away. No official diagnosis of autism had been made according to the university's assistant dean for academic affairs.

Still Jacob must have lived in some sort of dream world. He seemed to be paying attention during class, but let me be done with one point and about to move on to another, and 30 seconds later this low growl would come from him and he would give one or two good rocks in his seat before halting at a downward dip to say, "Now you're saying... now you're telling us... .well, what you're saying is" and then proceed to repeat what had just come from my mouth, almost verbatim, but as though it were an original insight on his part. The rest of the class would check with one another with narrowed eyes and stealthy smiles. I wanted to check with them also and smile too and share with them the question they seemed to be passing around to each other almost telepathically: "Is this guy for real?"

He was from Spartanburg County and did not drive a car (his nerves were the reason). His mother brought him down to Compton each day so that he could attend classes; she drove a Winnebago that appeared to be an alumnus from the original class of Winnebagos way back from whence they first spawned. I learned much else about him from another student who knew a friend of his sister's. He was 21, an astonishing fact, given his near-pre-adolescent visage (only the half-hearted moustache gave him away). He'd been quite a loner in high school, a fact not as astonishing to hear. Once, in his senior year, he had urinated upon himself and refused to leave his seat to go clean up, until the teacher sought the assistance of a school vice principal. An ugly row resulted. The aforementioned mother was diffident, almost to the point of nonexistence. The father was a blue-collar drifter from job to job who complemented the mother's diffidence with indifference. Consequently Jacob sought his moral cues at a small fundamentalist Baptist church in Spartanburg presided over by a minister straight out of the Billy Sunday mode who had instructed Jacob, among other things, to steer clear of the company of both women and blacks, as, in this Christian gentleman's estimation, either could lead him to temptation. This same minister had left no doubt in Jacob's mind that he was an abject creature, eaten up with sinfulness, and that he would have to strive to atone until he drew his very last breath.

This puritanical influence made its way into Jacob's schoolwork. In fact the very first essay he wrote for me, a general self-assessment and statement of educational goals, ended with a single, stark line: "I aim to be a soldier for God." It also no doubt accounted for his nearly perfect, almost ridiculous honesty. For instance, if I passed him on campus and asked him how he was, he would reply with the standard "Fine." Then, later (it could be five minutes or five hours), he would seek me out, in the library or in my office, and confront me thusly:

"Um ... Mr. McMillan ... um ... now do you remember earlier today when you asked me how I was and I said I was fine? Do you remember that?"

"Yes, Jacob. It was only a little while ago that I asked you."

"Hmmmmm. Well ..." He halted, clicked his tongue a couple of times, lowered his head to show the long stalk of his pale, unblemished, translucent neck, spun around, dug his right sneaker into the carpet, then finally addressed me again. "Well, I lied to you."

"You did, Jacob?"

"Yes. I'm not fine."

After a pause, I said, "I'm sorry to hear that. If there's something you'd like to talk about, I'd be glad to listen."

Still averting his eyes, he wrinkled his mouth and said, "Ummmmm ... no thank you" and turned and left.

There were times when I came upon him, in the student lounge, for instance, or perhaps outside in the hall, rocking, his eyes closed, his knees firmly clasped and his hands in front of him if he were sitting; if he were standing he would just stare at the ceiling as though waiting for one of the tiles to come loose and drop upon him. He was praying. If I came upon him in the act he might stop and bolt to the bathroom to finish or to an empty classroom, or he might continue the invocation regardless of who saw him. Other times I came upon him merely sitting and staring off with a pained expression on his long, pale face. He might exhale loudly, a sigh that said more than any essay he wrote for me that term. He was thinking, no doubt, of the lifelong struggle described by his minister to be a good warrior for his Lord, and he realized, as we all do, that it was a battle he was doomed to lose. He was hurting. It was my instinct to stop and ask about his hurt and to try to assuage it in some way as I did with almost all my students. But I didn't, simply because I didn't want him to lie to me and then seek me out hours later to apologize for it. That seemed to me an incredible waste of time and energy.

I sought out the advice of colleagues who were also teaching him. They reported the same sort of aloofness. I thought the best tack was deference — not to push or to baby him, for he would surely resist that and retreat even further into himself, so that all that could be seen were those enormous glasses, as with the Cheshire cat and his ubiquitous grin. To encourage him in subtle ways would be best: I felt sorry for him frankly but was careful to remember that even young people of a certain defective temperament had access to cunning too and could take advantage just as well as the "straight" ones. So I directed questions to him in class and gave him all the time to hem and haw his way through an answer. I did not link, either physically or telepathically, with the not-so-subtle derision of his classmates. Outside class I was careful not to ask him "How are you today?" but to pose more specific questions of a nonpersonal nature, dealing with academics instead. That he answered at all, with a little less halting than usual, made me believe (or fooled me, to get right to the point) that I was gaining ground with him, winning his trust ...

... A trust that I quickly lost.

Two things happened, the first during midterm examinations. As a "special needs" student, Jacob was entitled to time and a half to take his test. The test ran the usual class duration of an hour and 15 minutes. That meant Jacob had an extra half-hour to finish his exam. When that extra 30 minutes had elapsed and I asked Jacob, who was the last student there, for his essay, he looked up at me with his long pale face emotionless, and said, "The paper says I have three hours."

"No, Jacob. It says you have an extra half-hour. I need your essay now."

He continued to write, oblivious. I sat at my desk, rambling through other students' exams, growing miffed, thinking the thoughts that would have confirmed Jacob's pastor's no-doubt low opinion of college professors.

"Jacob?"

"I'm almost done."

"I need the test now."

"Time and a half."

I stood and walked to his desk and smoothly extricated the lined sheet of notebook paper from him.

"I hate you," he said, still looking down, presumably at the ghost of his now missing exam.

I turned from him and said, "That's fine, Jacob. I imagine you're not the only one of my students who feels that way," when what I really wanted to say was "Oh go in your closet and pray, soldier of God." I gathered his essay together with his classmates', slipped them into a manila envelope, and left him alone in the classroom.

The second incident occurred nearer the end of the term, when the freshman composition class were to turn in their short research papers on the meanings of modern popular cinema. Jacob, who had not turned in a paper, remained behind after the other students had left.

"I don't watch movies."

"You still owe me a paper."

"I don't watch them, so I can't write about them."

"What do you do?"

He didn't answer.

"You still owe me a paper. You are to have that paper to me, typed and double-spaced, no later than 7 this evening. Otherwise you will fail the assignment and the course."

Later that day, in my office, I received a phone call from him. "Check your e-mail." I found an attachment — a title page: "The Sin of Procrastination." Not even the topic. He called back shortly and asked if I'd received it. "That's a title page, Jacob. Not an essay." A half-hour later another e-mail from him appeared with another attachment — barely a half page of inchoate rumination on wasting time. A phone call followed quickly. "Ninety-two words!" Jacob hollered manically into the earpiece. "Ninety-two!" "Keep going," I said calmly and hung up. But there were no more e-mails or phone calls, and at 7 o'clock I entered a grade of "F" beside Jacob Lee's name and washed my hands of him for good.

Knowing he had flunked, Jacob showed up at my office a few days later. He never entered the office itself but remained in the outside suite, within view, and performed his normal pacing, rocking and stammering. "Now, Mr. McMillan ... now what you don't know ... what you don't understand ... there are things ... now ... that you don't know ... Hmmmmmm." I was first inclined to go to him and strike him as I would an ill-performing clock or other piece of machinery to get it functioning again. That, however, would not look good come promotion time, so I decided on a peroration on discipline, duty, etc., virtues lauded in The Good Book, but as I opened my mouth to set forth, the door of the suite crashed open.

"Jacob!" someone bellowed like a bear. I stood and went to the door and found a middle-aged man there in a dirty T-shirt and blue jeans. He was bald save for a fringe of white hair at the rim of his skull and a heavy moustache. At first I thought of the fabled reverend, the guardian of Jacob's spiritual life, but quickly realized otherwise. Surely a man of God would have greater sartorial self-awareness. The man nodded at me and pointed at his son. "He giving you trouble?" Then he looked exclusively at the boy. "Jacob, we waiting down yonder, son! Ain't you done yet? You think we got all day to wait on you?" As the man excoriated his son, I stared at him, the father, and left the specific dilemma unfolding right outside my office for a more general consideration of Mr. Lee, whom I had not met and did not know. Yet I did know him. He was a bully, one of the long line of that certain type of man and boy — cruel, humorless, hairy-knuckled, perpetually scowling, intellectually vacuous, sometimes hard-muscled and lean, sometimes corpulent — who had given obstacles to people like me: nonathletic, nonassuming, book-loving, introverted. They did us physical harm, of course, but worse: They turned what we loved and endeavored to do into general weakness and waste. We wilted under their muscles, their bulk, their sharp-toothed grimaces, their wild-eyed, loveless stares. It was an age-old tableau — strong boy towering over weak boy in the schoolyard, with the eyes of the curious and inert looking on. They had bloodied me, yes, but I had wiped away the blood, stood up, walked on, carried on, till I was here, where I could give to young people what I had loved best and what Mr. Lee's kind had tried to take from me. Here the scene played out again, the old pattern, right in front of me, the father chastising the boy with a harshness out of proportion to the offense, the son absorbing it with tilted head. I didn't suddenly love Jacob Lee for enduring his father's tirade. I still, probably, did not even like him. But I knew him now, really knew him. We shared a kind of blood and were as much related as the son and father, in our own way.

I stepped out of my office, as though to referee, to put a stop to the one-sided verbal melee.

"Mr. Lee," I called into the maelstrom. The father stopped to watch me. With those blank, loveless eyes — the eyes of a brute. "It's all right, sir, really. Jacob's not taking up my time."

The blanks suddenly filled with disbelief. After a moment the man said, "Well, he's taking up mine. I don't keep the hours of no college professor." And he laughed his hollow, harsh laugh that described so eloquently his hatred of anything he did not understand. I looked at his son.

"Of course, Jacob. You may turn in your paper tomorrow. Take your time, son. Take all the time you need."