Let me give you an idea of a typical day.
 
Mornings
 
Rise early. The earlier the better because you want to put some miles behind you before the sun gets too high. Wash up. Eat breakfast. Sort your lunch for that day, usually sandwiches and fruit. On a lucky day, the cooks will have purchased tins of sardines with various sauces. Water. Do not forget to take water, though if you do, cemeteries often have spigots with potable water. Keep an eye out.

​Pack your day bag. Don’t forget your map, which you should have prepared the night before. Don’t be one of those pilgrims who waits until that morning to prepare the day’s map. Be sure to bring your rain gear, hat, and walking stick. Bring your journal if you’re journaling and remember your fully-charged cell phone, which you will need when you have to call the support team to tell them you’re lost.

“Never say you are lost,” the support team will tell you. “You are geographically embarrassed.” This is meant to make you feel better.

Attend Mass, which will be over by the departure time of 7am. Look around and see that there are only two or three of you besides the priest. Oh, well.

Pack your sleeping bag and other kit and leave these next to the entry of the lodging. On this particular morning, you are being driven to the starting point at the edge of a forest. Do not be late or your lateness will cause everyone else to get a late start.

The walk
 
Start out as a group. Look at your maps. You did remember to bring your map, didn’t you? Review any peculiarities of the route. Review the meeting point, sometimes called the RV or rendezvous point. Note the pick-up time. Have you packed enough water?

The group departs. Within minutes, the fast walkers have disappeared from view. You are a slow walker and you’ve learned not to be bothered by this. Set your own pace. Appreciate the sights and sounds of wherever you are. Be present. You are not in the middle of whatever soul-crushing job you perform to pay the rent. You are on a pilgrimage: a beautiful, difficult, sweaty, but ultimately spiritually regenerating pilgrimage. Relish it!

Enjoy the company of the other walkers who have agreed to walk with you, at least for a while. Have lunch whenever you get hungry, preferably on the banks of a river, or on the seashore, or in the shade of a parish churchyard.

Continue your walk and try to take in everything. Or take in nothing. Sometimes zoning out is just the ticket. Arrive on time at the RV point. Even though you’re the slowest walker, you are not the last one to arrive because someone didn’t bring their map and got lost. Board the van and enjoy a brief bit of air conditioning as you’re driven to the new lodging for that night.

What is a pilgrimage?

This was a question that occupied our thoughts on an almost daily basis during our walk from Val-des-Choues to Pluscarden. What is a pilgrimage? And, depending on the answer, are we really doing a pilgrimage or is this just some sort of pleasant, walking holiday?
The practice of pilgrimage has its roots in religion and spirituality. It usually involves a journey (sometimes a very long journey), often with the goal of visiting a religious shrine or other location of great spiritual power. 
 
Pilgrimage has existed in many cultures throughout history: Christians traveling to Jerusalem, Muslims making the haj to Mecca, Hindus on their way to Varanasi. Modern-day pilgrimage often emphasizes these historical roots. Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago today recreate a route that is at least 900 years old. Another aspect of pilgrimage, at least in the medieval Christian tradition, includes a kind of penance, the hardship of walking great distances acting as satisfaction for sins committed earlier.

Was the Pluscarden 1230 Pilgrimage a pilgrimage, in any of those senses? 

For starters, it was only loosely historical. The premise of the Pluscarden 1230 Pilgrimage was based on the idea that Val-des-Choues in Burgundy sent monks to Scotland to found Pluscarden. Were we accurately recreating their journey?

Well, no. 

First, we have no written record from the 13th-century monks who left Val-des-Choues for Scotland. Did they travel the whole way on foot? On horseback? By ship? Their sponsor, Scottish King Alexander II, could easily have provided any of these means of transportation.

But did he? 

We also have no idea which path they took, by land or by sea. We can guess that those long-ago monks probably went in as straight a line as possible: from Val-des-Choues to Calais to Dover, then from Dover to Morayshire, to the future site of Pluscarden.

The route of the Pluscarden 1230 Pilgrimage wasn’t so simple, at least not in terms of being the shortest, most direct path. For example, our “re-constructed” pilgrimage began by heading south, for no other reason than we wished to visit Val-des-Choues’s other daughter monasteries—Val-Saint-Benoît and Val-Croissant — along the way.

And in the UK, instead of going from Dover straight up the east coast to Pluscarden, we cut west from London across to Prinknash, the Benedictine monastery that gave a new foundation to modern-day Pluscarden. From there we headed northeast again to Edinburgh, then west again to Ardchattan, another daughter house of Val-des-Choues, near Oban. Next we headed north and east again, visiting Beauly, a third daughter of Val-des-Choues in Scotland, before finally arriving at Pluscarden. All of this zig-zagging would have made no sense to our medieval counterparts. But for the Pluscarden 1230 pilgrims, it meant the chance for deeper experiences: visiting the great cathedrals at Reims, Laon, and Westminster; connecting to other monastic communities; even enjoying spiritual experiences not connected to organized religion, like hiking through the Scottish Highlands, whose immense beauty makes a strong case for God’s existence.
​
Was Pluscarden 1230 a real a pilgrimage?

1.        Corona virus burst upon the scene,
2.        And doctors gave these simple tasks to men
3.        To flatten curves and reach a golden mean:
 
4.         First, wash your hands until they’re good & clean,
5.         Sing “Happy Birthday,” twice, then twice again.
6.        Corona virus burst upon the scene,
 
7.        So, give up shaking hands. Self-quarantine!
8.        Keep six feet from each enemy and friend,
9.         To flatten curves and reach the golden mean.
 
10.       Stack toilet paper high in your latrine,
11.       And binge your shows on Netflix from your den.
12.      Corona virus burst upon the scene,
 
13.       And it cares not who’s peasant, king, or queen.
14.      Don’t leave the house, not e’en for church. Amen!
15.      To flatten curves and reach the golden mean.
 
16.       “But isolation’s boring,” said the teen.  
17.      “I’d rather protest global warming!” Then
18.      Corona virus burst upon the scene,
19.      To flatten curves and reach Earth’s golden mean.

Given the events of the past year, most of my detractors would say "don't even try," while most of my fans would say "why step in front of that moving train?"

But the piece I'm working on requires a Black medievalist to lead the action. I've benefited greatly from an amazing site called Writing with Color, that gives great advice for avoiding some of the most obvious tropes and stereotypes. That said, I'm posting this excerpt, very early in the process, to see if it rings true. I invite readers from all backgrounds to comment  honestly (and I hope constructively) to tell me how it reads.

The piece opens with a grad student in a library study carrel. She's just figuring out that she is in the wrong carrel, and doesn't yet realize that she'll be sharing the space with another grad student.


Excerpt from The Medievalist (work in progress)

I knew some of the books from my days hanging out with the SCA and the Texas Renaissance Festival and some I’d read as an undergrad: Maggie Black’s The Medieval Cookbook, Emilie Amt’sWomen’s Lives in Medieval Europe, and Life in a Medieval Village, by Joseph and Frances Gies. There were a few books by Kantorowicz: Crips, Bloods, and Crusaders: Medieval Pre-cursors to Modern Gang Signs. Next to that, The King’s Too Bawdy: Urban Graffiti as Medieval Marginalia, the whole reason I’d come to Yale. Here was another by Kantorowicz that I didn’t know, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Weirdly similar title.

There followed a row of books on a similar theme. Lynn Ramey’s Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages, Cord Whitaker’s Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking, Matthew Vernon’s The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, and Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. One particularly handsome volume caught my eye, not the least because of its lengthy title: The Image of theBlack in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”, Part 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood,2nd Edition, edited byDavid Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Professor Gates was at Harvard and hosted that “Finding Your Roots” show on PBS. The cover of The Image of theBlack in Western Art had a beautiful cover showing a sculpture of a medieval knight. The knight wears a hooded hauberk of chain maille, over which he sports a surcoat that still shows the original colorful paint across the belt. Most surprising, to me at least, is the face that peers out of the hood. It has a broad nose and full lips and is painted black. I noticed a flyer taped to the wall next to me that has the same image of the black knight. It advertised a grad student “mini-conference” that apparently happened last year called “Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages.” As I read the flyer, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a face similar to the knight’s peeping into the window of the carrel.
 
I screamed!

The face outside the door backed away until I could see an entire body with tattooed arms and hands held in the air. One of the tattoos looked like the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral. The other arm also had a labyrinth, but in the Minoan style—the minotaur next to it was a dead giveaway. I was still shaken by his sudden appearance but, somehow, having these images to focus on helped me calm down. My inked-up peeper moved back further and leaned against the edge of a table. I opened the door slowly. He spoke first.

“You’re with Kantorowicz?” 

I nodded. 

“So am I,” he said. He pulled a chair out and sat down, closer to the carrel, but not too close. “This has happened before,” he continued. “In fact, when I first arrived and was given a key to this carrel, there was another grad student in it. It’s a faculty carrel, but the man doesn’t use it, so he portions its use like a benefice to his doctoral students. I’ve actually had the space to myself for the last two years, but I’m not surprised somebody new has shown up.”

“It is a faculty carrel,” I said, picturing “Use of carrels,” item 5, vividly before my eyes. “Isn’t that illegal or against the rules or something?”

“Oh, it certainly is. But Kantorowicz winks at the librarians and they look the other way.” 
I looked down at his right arm.

“Chartres?” I said. 

“Yes.” He smiled and stretched out his hand to introduce himself.

“Quigley,” he said. “Dante Quigley.”

“Isaacson,” I said, taking his hand, at first shyly, then more confidently as I remembered dad teaching me to shake hands “like a professional.” I looked Quigley in the eye and shook his hand with a firm grip.

“So how does this work with the two of us both ‘assigned’ to the same carrel?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If you want to use the space, I can make room for you on the bottom shelf. We can figure out a schedule, if you think you’ll be here a lot.”

I nodded, then looked back at the shelving and all the books I’d been examining before my humiliating scare.

“These are your books?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you’re a medievalist, too?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re …” I stopped myself before I said it. It was a ridiculous, horrible, stupid thing to think and I almost said it out loud. Yet there were those ellipses, hanging in the air like cartoon cannon balls that would soon drop on my head. I searched for a different word to fill in the blank. “You’re …”

“American?” he said. “Yes, I know. Exactly. So many people think that only Brits or Europeans can have any insight into medieval history. The same way they think that only Blacks can study Black history, or only Jews can study the Holocaust.”
“Yes,” I said, grateful, but quietly embarrassed. 

 ***

White people. 

White people are so … 

—interesting? 

—annoying? 

—crazy? 

Condescending, ignorant, arrogant, fragile, capricious, privileged, controlling, fascinating, adorable, fearful, uninformed, ill-informed, misinformed, hateful, dangerous. 

Yes. I could’ve knocked on the door and stood back, offering a gentler, less threatening first encounter. But she was in my space, or at least I’ve thought of it as my space since what’s-his-name left. I submit that any normal person who walked up and saw a light inside their carrel where there shouldn’t be a light would justifiably peek in the window to see what the fuck was going on. And suddenly I’m Henry Louis Gates trying to explain to the Cambridge cops that I’m breaking into my own house because I’ve locked myself out.

Screams! She screams?!

And I back up, offering my best Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. Hands up—Don’t shoot! Because mama trained me from the moment of my birth to code-switch into the least aggressive posture my melanized body could muster, lest I put my life at risk, though from the moment of my birth it was already too late.

Was it just that I caught her off guard? Or was it my black face catching her off guard? Hard to say, in and of itself. But her follow-up reveals all. 

“You’re a medievalist? But you’re black!”

No. She said, “You’re a medievalist, too.” She’s just starting with Kantorowicz. His newest little rabbit. 

Okay, little rabbit. You just got here and you don’t know a thing about POC in the Middle Ages. Hell, outside of Kantorowicz, most of the older generation don’t know anything either. Cut her some slack, Quigley. She’s probably never been exposed to anything but the all-white “real Middle Ages.” Probably started her medieval fandom as a festie or a rennie, driving every summer weekend to some “Ye Olde Ahistorical Faire,” wearing a laced bodice and playing the part of the wench. 

On the other hand, she did recognize the Chartres labyrinth in my ink. She must have some knowledge beyond bad Robin Hood movies. Does she know anything beyond the image? That the Chartres labyrinth signifies a penitential journey to Jerusalem, the return to God? Does she know the difference between the Chartres labyrinth and the Minoan labyrinth? The former, a continuous path on which you cannot get lost, but can only travel deeper into the self. The latter, a path intended to disorient, to deceive, to contain the minotaur—shameful halfling aberration, product of an illicit union—until Theseus can kill it. One labyrinth to contain the “darkness” in men’s souls, the other to set the soul free. 

Was she getting all of that, any of that, from looking at my ink? Or did she remain on the surface, marveling perhaps at “how vivid and vibrant the colors seem against my tawny skin”?

A tawny-skinned minotaur am I, born of a white father and a black mother, brought together in true love in the age of Third Wave Feminism—thanks, Anita Hill. Dad, a historian at Princeton, advocating a theory of “inclusive diversity as a core value of Western Civilization, in contrast to Plato’s dualism.” That’s how he talked at the dinner table and he expected me to keep up. He was way ahead of his time and the bright star of his career might have continued to rise if he hadn’t gotten side-tracked by conspiracy theories of secret societies. Ironic, for me at least, was his obsession over a group called the “Round Table,” allegedly founded by Cecil Rhodes for economic and political control of the whole world--orbis non sufficitand all that. And mama, a leading voice among the Black feminists of the 90s, matching dad’s inclusive diversity theory with her own theory of intersectionality: the notion that women’s oppression occurs on many levels at once, not just gender, but also race, class, etc. Her own star rose steadily if not quickly. She might have achieved greatness had dad not ended up in the looney bin. Conspiracy theories will do that to you. Mama’s career, hijacked by a severe case of single motherhood.

That’s me then: an ABD Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth of Yale’s graduate program in history; a PhD candidate with father issues, working with an adviser who has father issues of his own. 

“Why the Middle Ages?” dad asked practically every time I visited him at Greystone Park. Mama was less blunt, but I could tell that she, like him, hoped that I’d do something more relevant, something that’d have an impact on the world. Both of them are long dead but their disappointment still follows me, which I suppose is less aggravating than the expectations that precede me. The expectation that a Black man must come from an impoverished background or from uneducated parents. The expectation that a Black man in grad school must be studying law or medicine or business because that’s how he can really help “his people.” The expectation that a Black man can’t be a medievalist.

Well, fuck you, little rabbit. You’ve brought your own expectations to this first encounter and I saved you from the embarrassment of a racist utterance. That one’s on the house. But we’re done. I’ll share this space with you ‘cause that’s how it goes, but I won’t be the magical Negro or sassy Black best friend in your grad school romcom action adventure movie. You’re on your own there. I’m here to subvert the dominant paradigm, to fight stereotypes with my scholarship and with every ounce of my being, not to play a game invented by White people. 

And if a Black medievalist disrupts your worldview, what of it?
 
"On the ninth day there came riding towards them a knight on a goodly steed, and well-armed withal. He was all black: his head was black as pitch, black as burnt brands, his body, and his hands were all black, saving only his teeth. His shield and his armour were even those of a Moor, and black as a raven. But in all that men would praise in a knight was he fair, after his kind. Though he were black, what of it?"
 
As Sir Morien shows us, there were Black folks in the Middle Ages, and not just a few. 

​What of it?

Dear blog readers, 
 
Yesterday, President Paul Pribbenow sent the official notice announcing my retirement from Augsburg University. Before he did so, I sent this note to select colleagues, and now to you.
 
"My decision to retire from Augsburg was not made lightly, but it was made freely and by me alone. I look forward to focusing on my writing and research and see many exciting and fun opportunities ahead. I taught at Augsburg for almost two decades. Many of my fondest memories and deepest friendships formed there. I’ll miss all of you, but only in the sense of not seeing you with regularity on campus. I hope to see you elsewhere, and often."
 
Big changes. Time to update this writer's platform. Thanks for your patience while we undergo some construction.

Next blog entry: what will I do now?

I lived in Kreuzberg, a poorer neighborhood of West Berlin that was a haven to artists. Kreuzberg was also full of Turkish Gastarbeiter, guest workers who had helped rebuild Germany after World War II but then “outstayed their welcome” by having children who became citizens under Germany’s birthright citizenship laws. This conflict was as old as the metics of ancient Athens and as fresh as the “dreamers” and DACA students of the 21st-century United States. Many more lessons on racism in those days, but I resisted it rather than passively letting it seep into my brain.

I had a German girlfriend and we regularly visited her parents on their farm in the village of Kisdorf in the Schleswig-Holstein region of West Germany. On one visit, in 1978, the nine-and-a-half-hour, American mini-series Holocaust aired on the WDR network over the course of four evenings. Panel discussion with historians and other experts followed each evening’s episodes. My girlfriend’s siblings and their partners and I all wanted to watch. Her parents, who had both lived through the war, had very different responses. O—, the mother, ran from the room, almost crying, insisting that these constant reminders of the Holocaust were unfair. After all, she had not been involved and didn’t she know some Jewish people and hadn’t she been perfectly nice to them while they were still around. B—, the father, said that he would watch with us. Hmm. B— was an uneducated farmer and one of the kindest people you could ever meet, but in his youth he had bought into the Nazi propaganda, enlisted in the Wehrmacht, and only escaped death on the Russian Front—according to family legend—by missing his troop transport train and, not knowing what else to do, walking back to the farm. B—’s viewing of Holocaust was somewhat comical. The program aired late at night, and after 9pm, the 68-year-old dosed in and out. He seemed to waken whenever anyone in the show said something about “the greatness of Germany,” then resumed his snoring whenever the Jews were being boarded onto trains for the death camps.

In “Fear of the Past? Notes on the Reaction to Holocaust,” the historian Julius H. Schoeps described similar responses in households across Germany. WDR had set up phone banks to take viewers’ calls during the broadcast. Some callers expressed latent anti-Semitism, making claims that the program had been financed by Jews, or was broadcast as a way to disparage the German people. A few callers were more overt, denying the Holocaust or claiming that the Jews were to blame for it. But as the mini-series progressed, as Germans of the post-war generation kept watching, most of the calls expressed sadness, consternation, shame, and guilt. “How could it have come to that?” viewers asked again and again. According to Schoeps:

"After four evenings … after roughly 10,000 incoming telephone calls … something was set in motion … More than just a few became aware for the first time that they had repressed the murder of the Jews that was committed in the name of the German people and had previously avoided dealing with the past. Did the Hollywood film “Holocaust” signal a turning point in these attitudes? Only the future will tell."

In 2000, the German television station ZDF produced a documentary called Holokaust, amid a fresh surge in anti-Semitic and racist hate crimes.

Subtle racist indoctrination was everywhere. Not just television and the movies. It was also being transmitted in school.

Colonial Hills Elementary, fourth grade class of Mrs. D—. Before interactive educational computer programs, pedagogy ran on flash cards. Mrs. D— had flash cards for everything. One set had silhouettes of all the states in the Union. Another had all the countries in the world. See the shape, guess the right country, and get a shot of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain. Capital cities and major crops and industries were listed on the back of these cards for extra points. I was a master of any and all flash cards. Without realizing it, I was also a slave to the rewards (approval, love) that their correct answers promised. Mmmm, dopamine.

In the pre-Powerpoint era, flashcards also served as presentational tools. One day, Mrs. D— was presenting cards that showed “families of the world.” There was a photo of a Japanese family in which everyone wore a kimono. A family from an unspecified country in Africa wore dashiki. A generic Arab family had the men in burnous with the women in hijab. Everything was going well until she got to a card depicting a white family. The father in the family wore a grey suit with straight lines. The mother wore a pleated skirt with petticoats. The daughter dressed like the mother, but the son wore dungarees and a striped shirt that let you know he was made of “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” As she flipped through the flash cards, Mrs. D— provided minimal commentary.

“This is a Japanese family,” she said.

Flip.

“This is an African family.”

Flip.

“This is an Arab family.”

Flip.

“And this is a normal family.” You could almost hear the brakes in her mind screeching to a halt. “Oh, no,” she corrected herself. “I mean, this is an American family.”

There is something beautiful about the way my fourth-grade teacher caught herself in her own normative bias, recognized the problem, and attempted to redirect the attention of her young charges. All of the families were “normal,” she must have realized, and she didn’t want to give her students the idea that American families are more normal than others. What was the point of having “families of the world” flash cards if not to teach intercultural understanding and diversity? Of course, I don’t recall Mrs. D— using those phrases. The fact that she caught and corrected herself is likely the only reason that I remember this episode, but the memory is so vivid that I can smell the mimeographed worksheets and waxy crayons in the room; I can feel the cool linoleum floor where we sat on cushions watching the “families of the world” flash by. I’m sure I must have been wearing dungarees and a striped shirt as I watched. My family had been “normal” for a split second, then we became American.

This ridiculous set of flash cards is so rife with racism that it’s almost impossible to figure out what to unpack first. The depiction of families in “native costumes” is a good beginning. Were we meant to believe that everyone in Japan only wore kimonos? The costumes were bright and exotic and grabbed our attention, but where was the harm in showing Japanese businessmen wearing grey suits with straight lines as they rode the high-speed rail to work? Or the school uniforms that Japanese children wore? Or what the children wore when they weren’t at school? This wasn’t feudal Japan in the age of the samurai for God’s sake! This was 1967, when many Japanese people shared the Western fashion choices of Americans. That idea is problematic, too, but at least it represented contemporary culture. And an “African family”? Not a family from Benin or Zimbabwe or Tunisia? Did the creators of “families of the world” flash cards believe that nine-year-olds were so unsophisticated that they couldn’t grasp different people from different countries? Benin is a country that is shaped like Vermont. Zimbabwe is shaped like Ohio. Tunisia is shaped like New Jersey. And Africa, which is a continent and not a country, is shaped like … well, Africa! I learned to distinguish all of this from the flash cards produced by the same company that made “families of the world.” If I could differentiate all of those countries and states, why didn’t they trust me with more nuanced depictions of people!?

The most infuriating piece was that Americans were depicted as white and upper middle class. The family on that flash card came right out of central casting for every TV sitcom of the 1950s. I didn’t know anything about Japan or Africa, but even I knew that there were all kinds of ways that an American family might look. The racist subtext of these flash cards seeped into my brain. But, thanks to my teacher’s slip-up, I also started to carry the tiniest nugget of discomfort about what the school was feeding me. I began to “question the dominant paradigm,” as I would later say in grad school. I was on my way to ... something.

In the early 1980s, near the end of my career as a clown, I returned to the States. Through a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts, I found myself teaching mime and circus skills to high school and middle school students in Huntsville, Texas. I had been teaching theater and clowning workshops during the off season in Europe and discovered that I liked it and was good at it. At 25, I felt like I was transitioning away from performing and thought that teaching might be a new path for me.

Huntsville is one of the stranger places I have lived. The permanent residents of Huntsville number just under 40,000, but this does not include the roughly 20,000 students who attend Sam Houston State University or the 13,000 inmates housed in prisons around Huntsville, which is also the headquarters for the Texas Department of Corrections. The town has a large African American population, but it still shows the remnants of segregation and Jim Crow. For example, the phone book in 1984 listed the Baptist Church and the Baptist Church (colored) at two separate locations. I attended pep rallies at the high school and was astonished to see all of the black students seated on one side of the gym and all the white students on the other. Because the town could only afford one high school, there was integration in the classrooms, but not at the pep rallies or in the cafeteria, where students were free to choose where they sat and with whom.

I worked with students in grades 7 through 12 in their theatre courses, but I also did whatever I could to participate in the greater life of the schools. One day a journalism teacher asked me to help with an assignment. Her students had written down the names of famous people they wanted to interview. She gave me a folder with the students’ submissions and asked me to pick one of the names and portray that person as part of a practice interview. Most of the names were exactly what you might expect: singers like Boy George, Michael Jackson, and Elton John; actors like Molly Ringwald, Eddie Murphy, and Sean Penn. I didn’t want to portray a woman or a black person or a gay person, not because of any sense of identity politics, but because I thought that would just lead to silliness. The next to last piece of paper had one name on it: not Cher or Sting, but Jesus. Oh, yes, I thought.

“We’ll need to be careful,” the journalism teacher said. “But an interview with Jesus will certainly force students to be more creative with their questions.”

I had fairly long hair and a beard at the time. I borrowed a long linen robe from the costume shop, a relic from some past Christmas pageant. Bare-foot, with a piece of rope tied around my waste, I began the exercise with a disclaimer.

“Listen up,” I said. “As part of this interviewing exercise, I’m going to be portraying Jesus. This is not meant to be disrespectful in any way. I am not an expert on Jesus, and my knowledge is very basic. The point of this exercise is to give you experience interviewing someone that you don’t often hear being interviewed. It is not intended to make fun of or be disrespectful to anybody’s religion.”

Okay. I’d said something like “not meant to be disrespectful” twice. That should be good enough.
“What can you tell us about your early life?” the first student asked. Perfect. I was able to tell the whole nativity story without any problems.

“How did you pick your apostles?” another student inquired. I was less certain on this one, but I did at least remember the “fishers of men” story.

“If God is all powerful,” one student began, but I cut him off, answering his question before he could even finish it.

“Can he create a rock so big that he himself can’t lift it?”

The student’s eyes mimicked a character in a Tex Avery cartoon. What the—? How did I know what he was going to ask? I thought I saw him wondering whether I might indeed have god-like powers. I eased his suspicions.

“I’ve listened to that George Carlin album, too,” I said, referring to the “Heavy Mysteries” track from his 1972 album, Class Clown. There was laughter from the other students. The interviewer looked a bit sheepish that I’d caught him out, then smiled when he realized that he’d found another lover of George Carlin in east Texas. The “rock so big” question is actually part of a bigger theological issue called the omnipotence paradox. I didn’t learn this until I started studying the medieval church in graduate school, but when I did it increased my respect for the intellectual aspects of Carlin’s humor. The next question was not so easy to tackle.

“Was Jesus black?” An African-American student posed this question, and it seemed clear that they’d heard something, perhaps in their church, that they expected me to confirm.

Over the centuries, Christ has been depicted as a Greek philosopher, a warrior, a conqueror, a sufferer, an innocent baby, a precocious teen, a shepherd, a magician carrying a wand, long-haired, short-haired, bearded, and beardless. He has been shown with ethnic features ranging from Ethiopian to Chinese. Even Muslims, who know Jesus as the prophet Issa, have offered up descriptions of Christ as a “reddish man of medium height with lanky hair and with many freckles on his face, as if he had just come from a bath.” The Nazis claimed Jesus had Nordic, Aryan features, while Malcolm X famously proclaimed that, “Christ wasn’t white. Christ was a black man. The poor, brainwashed Negro has been made to believe Christ was white to maneuver him into worshiping white men.” The forensic anthropologist Richard Neave “reconstructed” Christ’s face based on a first-century skull from Galilee and writings and art from the time. The image is not meant to depict Jesus, but to show what a contemporary man of the time might have looked like “given the scientific information we’ve got.” The facial features are broader than European depictions, and with an olive complexion—darker, but more Mediterranean than African.

I wouldn’t know any of that until I was deep into my graduate studies years later, but I had heard that “light-skinned Jesus” was probably the invention of white folks, and that black skinned folks probably had their own version of what Jesus looked like.

“He could have been black,” I said. “But I really don’t know.”

Holy mother of God! I thought. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d wanted to avoid with this exercise and then, there I was, in the tall grass. There must have been three or four more questions, but none of them lingered in the air like that one. Did I really just say that Jesus could have been black? In Huntsville, Texas, where the white Baptists worship in a separate church from the black Baptists and the percentage of executed black inmates is 3.25 times greater than that of whites? The principal of Huntsville High School called me into his office the next day. I don’t care how old you are, when you get called to the principal’s office, that feeling you experience in your gut returns as powerfully as when you had it in second grade.

“Uh, Phil … a couple of parents have called and complained about something that happened in the journalism class …”

Luckily, the principal liked what I was doing in his school and just asked me to be more careful next time. But that wasn’t what provocateurs do, I thought to myself. I could have dressed as a high school stoner and portrayed Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and everything would have been fine. Maybe funny. But probably boring, because, to my mind, it didn’t push the envelope far enough.

It is all of a piece. It’s all connected to my life as a clown provocateur, which I now realize has also and always been the life of a teacher. I trace my provocateur lineage back through several generations: from Commedia’s Arlecchino and Shakespeare’s fool to Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx to Monty Python and Dario Fo. When the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to the Italian playwright Dario Fo, they praised him as a writer “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” Yes, that sounds about right. But I also trace my lineage through teachers like Socrates and Peter Abelard, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. I aspire to the bravery of these teachers, but have rarely, if ever, lived up to it.