Comfortably ensconced in her accustomed alcove on an upper floor in the library, Nellie pored over a copy of Ulysses, a non-circulating annotated edition from the reference section, when she was startled to see a figure hovering over her.

“Hello,” said an unkempt young man with dreadlocks.

The intruder, she realized, was the guy her roommate complained to her about, and she scowled and looked back down at her book. She’d seen him on campus a number times and always gave him a wide berth because of Julie’s stories about him. She wondered how he got into the stacks.

“Reading something good?” He nudged the book with his hand to see the title.

“I’m trying to.” She pointedly opened the book again and buried her face in it. She didn’t want to be rude, but she had work to do, and realized that subtlety would be wasted on the fellow. The guy was obnoxious, but probably thought he was just being friendly.

“That’s a pretty challenging read, isn’t it? What do you think of it?”

Nellie closed the book, keeping her place with her finger, and swiveled around, planting her feet on the floor, to face him. “Can I help you?”

Instead of taking her utterance amiss, he stroked his chin as if musing on a profound question. “Yes, maybe you can.” He then attempted to sit down in the space where her legs had been.

“Listen, I have work to do, but if you want to talk to me, I can meet you at The Nook in an hour.”

“An hour? You can’t talk now?”

“No!” She was firm. “In one hour. The Nook. Got it?”

“Okay. If that’s what you want.”

“What I want?” she thought and rolled her eyes as she settled herself back in her niche. No wonder Julie found this guy annoying. Then she got back to her book and immersed herself in the life of Leopold Bloom. She had only an hour and there was a lot of reading to do.

Exiting the library an hour later, her head was still filled with the language of Joyce and the progress of Leopold through that long day. It wasn’t until she stepped into the coffee shop and saw the boy who had intruded on her space, sitting alone at a table with a soft drink in front of him, that she focused her mind on the matter at hand. She’d spent the past hour reading about a Jew in Dublin, was about to spend the next hour talking to a Jew draped in dreadlocks, would then return to the room she shared with Julie, a Jew who didn’t want anyone to know she was Jewish, and finally work on her research paper on the literary legacy of Shylock, Shakespeare’s immortal Jew. It was strange. Her life had unexpectedly become populated with Jews, where none had been before. She threw her backpack down on the chair opposite him and walked over to the counter. A couple of minutes later, she returned to the table with a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin.

“Okay, here I am.”

“You came.”

“Didn’t I say I would?”

“Yeah, but people don’t always do what they say they’re going to.” His surprise at seeing her attested to his having had experiences of that sort.

“Well, I do. I’m Nellie. Who are you?”

“My name’s Asher. Asher Fleischman. I guess you’re not like most people, then.”

“Not like most people around here, anyhow,” she said, rotating her hands in front of her to make her point. A quick look around the room had confirmed there was no other person of color in the vicinity.

“Oh, you mean in that way? There aren’t many Negroes on campus, are there?”

“African Americans.” Nellie wasn’t sure why she corrected him. She was accustomed to people who lacked sensitivity in the matter of race.

“I’m sorry.” He hit his head with the palm of his hand. “It’s weird that I said that. I normally say Black and have been trying to get used to saying African American, like Jesse Jackson is urging. ‘Negro’ is what I grew up hearing and I guess it slipped out. Please correct me if I mess up again.”

His politeness surprised her, after his complete lack of self-awareness in the library. She was surprised he even knew about Jessie Jackson’s campaign to use African-American instead of Black, an effort, she felt unlikely to succeed.

“Anyhow, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“The phrase African American?” Nellie couldn’t imagine why he wanted to talk to her in the first place, and it wasn’t getting any clearer.

“No, about being part of a minority population, being an African American in a predominantly White college, looking different from the people around you. How does that feel?”

Nellie sat back in her chair, surprised at his question. It was the last thing she expected. White people usually tiptoed around the topic race with her. Before she could say anything, Asher continued. “You see, I’m like you in a way. I also belong to a minority.”

“Okay.” It had been a few weeks since her long talk with Julie about race, religion and identity, and since then they hadn’t spoken much about those subjects again, finding lots of other things to talk about relating to their daily lives. She didn’t mind discussing the topic with the odd boy across the table from her, slurping his soft drink through a straw. The perspective of a Jew who, unlike her roommate, embraced his faith and heritage, interested her. Maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all. Nellie wanted to know more about the spiritual side of Judaism, and Asher might be able to fill her in. She supposed he was very devout, since he wore that little cap all the time. “You must be very religious,” she said.

“Religious?” He screwed up his face and looked deeply offended. “I’m an atheist.”

“Then why in the world do you wear that yarmoke, or whatever it’s called? Are you going bald?”

“Yarmulke.” He was surprised that she knew the word, even if she garbled it a bit. He recalled how his friend Nate made the same joke about going bald. “I wear it so that people will know I’m Jewish.”

“Why do you want people to know you’re Jewish if you don’t follow the religion?”

“Because that’s who I am. Judaism isn’t just a religion, it’s an ethnic identity. If your skin color was very light, don’t you think you might wear an Afro just to let people know who you are?”

“I don’t know.” It was a good question. She hadn’t considered it before. “As you can see, I never had to think about that, so I can’t say for sure. By the way, how come you wear dreadlocks?” She wondered if he had any African American blood in him.

“That started back when they designated February as Black History Month. I mean African American. Anyhow, I decided to wear my hair in dreads then.”

“Why? You’re not Black.” Hearing what came out of her mouth, she laughed at herself. “I mean African American. Listen, you can use the word Black. It was just the word Negro I took exception to. Shakespeare said, ‘What’s in a name?’ But names and words can carry a lot of baggage. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the word Negro, but it hearkens back to the days of slavery and Jim Crow, which we’re trying to put behind us. But I still don’t get why you decided to put your hair in dreads.”

“To show solidarity with African American students. My school was mostly White, and I wanted to show my support for Black students.”

“But that was a while ago. What happened? Couldn’t you untie them?”

Asher snickered. “I got razzed a lot by my friends and I kept them, out of spite. Then I just got used to them. They became part of me. I’d feel like someone else without them.”

Nellie shook her head. “Do you wear a dress on National Women’s Day?”

“Nah, girls all wear jeans now.” He said it with a straight face, not missing a beat.

Nellie guffawed. This guy was hilarious. He said it without the faintest trace of a smile. He was making a joke, right? She didn’t know what to make of this boy so eager to adopt the symbols of other people.

“So you wear dreads to support African Americans and a yarmulke to support religious Jews?”

“Hell, no, the yarmulke isn’t to support anyone. I wear it to show I’m a Jew. People already know I’m Jewish. When Gentiles look at me, they see my long nose and my kinky hair, and they don’t see a person like themselves. They see a Jew. With the yarmulke, I make clear I’m not hiding my Jewishness. It’s right up front, in their faces.”

“I see.” Nellie understood. She knew Black brothers and sisters with similar attitudes. If they were going to be treated like second-class citizens because of the color of their skin, they’d stuff their Blackness down the throats of any White person they encountered, playing up stereotypes rather than trying to dispel them. She thought that some of the menace in rap music was an outgrowth of that attitude. Asher’s strategy for dealing with his Jewishness was the complete opposite of Julie’s. She hid her ethnic identity, and he proclaimed it. Nellie admired Asher for standing up for who he was, but she recognized a downside as well. There’s a thin line between self-esteem and pride, between contentment about who you are and disdain for others. The way he just spoke about Gentiles smacked of the same kind of stereotyping and condescension he accused them of.

Nellie asked what kinds of prejudice he’d experienced as a Jew, and he told her about what happened at Traven University and how he came to be enrolled at Mt. Belle. He was sure his professor’s animosity towards him stemmed from antisemitism. He was still thinking of taking legal action against him, and had been up in the library stacks researching the matter. Although he liked Mt. Belle and had no desire to return to Traven, he felt a moral obligation to call out antisemitism where he found it, and not allow it to stand. That, at least, cleared up one mystery for Nellie. Students engaged in research projects were allowed into the stacks, and he must have convinced library personnel that his research met the criteria. Nellie couldn’t tell from his story if the professor was antisemitic or just didn’t like Asher. After all, Julie didn’t like him, and neither did she after their encounter in the library. Of course, for all she knew, the prof was a raging Nazi.

In discussions about bigotry, Nellie decided there were two distinct factors to consider: perception and intent. She thought of the time she was standing in line at a movie theater and was jostled by someone behind her. She turned around and the white guy standing there with his date apologized. At the same time, her cousin, who was with her, turned around, put his fist in front of the guy’s face and offered to loosen a few of his teeth. Nellie had no way of knowing if the shove was intentional or accidental, and was inclined to assume the latter given that there was no evidence of the former, and an apology was proffered. Her cousin, however, a year older than her and an angry young man, considered any slight an act of racism. He’d say, “All Whities be racist.”

She argued with him about it. “If that’s the case, the word racist means nothing. It’s like saying all Whites are Whites. If the word racist had any meaning, it was to distinguish between those Whites who think and act a certain way from those who don’t.”

“They ain’t no difference ‘tween ‘em,” her cousin insisted. “That’s why they all racist.”

Nellie knew there was no convincing him otherwise and left it at that. She liked her cousin. He was a sweet and generous boy as long as White people weren’t involved. She understood what he was saying. Racism was, often enough, at the root of things even if the individual involved wasn’t intentionally racist, because racism was baked into the system. Her neighbor’s son back home was a case in point. He shoplifted from the local supermarket all the time and raised hell if a White clerk looked at him wrong, crying racism. Nellie knew the feeling of someone watching her every move when she entered a store, although she’d never shoplifted a thing in her life. The neighbor’s boy said he might as well steal if people always treated him like he was stealing, and besides, if the whole system wasn’t unfair he wouldn’t have to steal in the first place because he would have had more opportunity, a better education, a good job, and plenty of money. You couldn’t escape racism; it was all around. If you were mistreated, it was damned hard to know if it was an accident or because someone didn’t like you personally or just because you were Black.

When Nellie heard Asher’s tale of bigotry and antisemitism, her position was neutral. She knew Asher could be a pill, and that a person could dislike him for a variety of reasons. It was also true that there was no dearth of bigots, even on university campuses. She was becoming fond of Asher and wanted to tell him that her own negative first impression of him had nothing to do with his being Jewish. If she could nudge him toward greater self-awareness and make him see that what he perceived as the hostility of Gentiles could be due to his behavior rather than his ethnicity, he might be happier for it. She asked, “Do you distinguish between yourself as a person and yourself as a Jew?”

“What do you mean?” He couldn’t comprehend what she was saying. “I am a Jew. That is who I am. I can’t separate myself from that. You can’t separate yourself from the color of your skin, can you?”

In fact, she could, and realized that it might be an unusual and not altogether desirable quality in the eyes of many Whites and Blacks who considered color a person’s most defining trait. Conversation with Asher was like a game of ping-pong in which the ball keeps coming back to your side of the net, regardless of how good your last shot was. Every time she asked him a question, she ended up having to answer it.

She deliberated before responding. “Of course you’re right. My race is an unalterable part of who I am, and that’s true for all people of color, for all people, period. For that reason, I have a strong bond with other African Americans. But I also have a bond with people of my generation as opposed to those who are older or younger, a bond with other females, a bond with others who attend college, a bond with people who like the same music I do. I understand that there are people who see me only as an African American, but that’s not the way I see myself. Maybe if those people knew me better, they would see me as a real human being, and maybe that’s precisely what they want to avoid doing. That’s a limitation of theirs. Some call such people racists. I don’t really like using that term because then I’d be looking at them in the same one-dimensional way that they view me. It’s not worth my time to try to get through to people like that to change their minds. I have other things I want to do with my life. Instead of hating people who appear to hate me because of the color of my skin, I try to think of them as people who don’t know me.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so generous towards people who think of you as less than human and would gladly annihilate you from the face of the earth.”

“I don’t see it as generosity. I haven’t met lots of people who’ve actively tried to harm me. Plenty of people are rude, but some folks seem to need others to feel superior to. In my experience, people from the same racial or ethnic group can treat each other as badly as people outside the group treat them. I have been treated better by some Whites than by some Blacks, and I would guess that you have sometimes been treated better by Gentiles than by Jews.”

The time had gone by quickly because Nellie was engrossed in the conversation, but looking at the clock on the wall, she rose from her chair. “Listen, I have to go, but I enjoyed our talk. Maybe we can continue it another time.”

As she started on her way, Asher called after her.

“By the way, your roommate is Jewish, isn’t she?”

The question stopped Nellie in her tracks.

“How do you know I have a roommate?”

“Oh, I see you together all the time. It’s Julie Gold, right? I’m in Dawson, the dorm across from you.”

“What do I know about her religion?” She’d promised Julie to keep her secret and was seething inside. She turned quickly and walked away. What kind of creep was he? Is that why he wanted to talk to her? Had he been stalking her to ask her about Julie? It seemed like such an honest conversation, and he turned it to crap. She felt used by him. Julie was right about him, after all.

Asher rose and left a few minutes later, impressed with Nellie’s openness and happy with the conversation, but confused by the angry look on her face as she left.

Note: This story is a modified excerpt from my novel The Best of Times.