My name is Jan Thomas, and I am a History 12 teacher in public school.
Life as a teacher when you look like me is filled with low grade annoyance. I stand about five seven, with long red hair, blue eyes behind dark rimmed glasses. It is the 48GG-40-46 curves that make teaching a mixed-race school in the city a trial.
Teenage boys long on hormones, short on self control, and a staff that was largely made of males who were unable to understand that when I said married it did not mean we have to be discrete, it meant not interested. There are some students that make it all worthwhile, Henry was one of them. One of the ones you will remember forever, a kid who with a little bit of help might one day change the world.
I had jumped at the chance to mentor him in the Directed Studies independent learning course, and now his application for the project was in, and I was shocked.
Spartacus II: Gladiator revolution through political prostitution as racial political activism
"Premise: The slave revolt of the gladiators under Spartacus against the late Roman Republic ended with a slave crucified on every mile post along the Appian way because the Gladiators accepted the slave owners premise that violence was the only legitimate form of struggle for political dominance. The Gladiators of Rome were the star athletes of their age, and the women of the highest classes paid handsomely for the chance to be possessed even once by one.
Had Spartacus embraced the power of sexuality and not violence, his revolution against the slave owning money class of Rome would have been fought with Patrician daughters selling their bodies as prostitutes in front of those same milestones for their Gladiator lovers; to force the redistribution of wealth through the surrender of the bodies of their daughters, rather than through pitting the might of the gladiators against the most formidable military power in the world."
It is not often that I find myself shocked and horrified by the ideas in a student's paper, but Henry Martin was an unusual boy. A large quiet boy, a defensive lineman on our high school football team, he had an intensity to his focus that was a little frightening. His academic record was above average, but strange in the sense that it was just slightly above average in most areas, but where he showed an interest in something, his focus and follow-through made his performance the stuff that teachers talked about among themselves.
When Henry chose to excel, he excelled. His passion made him a natural choice for Directed Studies, and when I was offered the chance to be his teacher for the Directed Study this year, I was more than happy to accept.
His proposal was one that I was interested to see. One of the topics offered for Directed Studies this year was "Practical steps toward social justice and harmony in America". Normally this topic drew a whole lot of MLK/Gandhi/Dalai Lama dreamers with a lot of passion, but no real ideas beyond "if we all got along", and I was interested to see where Henry would go with it.
Now I was horrified. I cannot see letting one of my students spend a semester exploring prostitution as a cure to class and racial tensions in contemporary America.
I emailed Henry to come see me after second block for a counselling session about his Directed Studies. The office for Directed Studies was one of the small tutoring rooms, little more than a small meeting room with a desk, table, two chairs, and a couch in the back corner for quiet time if someone required it.
It was an intimate location for those times when you required privacy to let students feel freer to express themselves without the major social cues that screamed "public speaking, freak out now".
It allowed us to have more frank discussions on many matters across the power differential between student and teacher by establishing a between space, where we could collaborate as peers, rather than direct from above as instructors. I would need that for this discussion.
I did not want to kill the creativity, and the honest passion that drove Henry, he just needed to understand that prostitution was never an answer, the exploitation of women was never right.
If things got heated, and he became upset, he still had the remainder of third block and all of lunch to collect himself before the last two blocks of the day. I would try to be gentle.
Henry entered the room, his text books looking like paperbacks in those huge black hands of his, a warm smile on his face softening the lines of a face that was frequently either locked tight to show nothing at all, or focused like a laser on a target.
"Come in Henry, why don't you sit here on the couch with me so we can discuss your proposal and talk over a couple of concerns I had as your Directed Studies guide," I greeted him warmly.
My voice had a very real warmth and welcome in it, because somehow Henry always brought that out in me, making it an actual pleasure to teach him.
He casually closed and locked the door, I should have interrupted and told him to leave it open, as regulations required during one on one student/teacher conferences, but considering that I wanted to set a collaborative, not confrontational tone for the meeting, I decided to let it slide.
His smile lit his face, as he slid onto the couch in an untidy sprawl that took up two thirds of the couch, and left him pressed leg to leg with me, I guess because I forgot just how large he really was.
I saw the slow lazy smile he fixed on me, and realized he knew exactly what this was about, and had come not simply prepared, but eager to discuss his project with me.
"So, Miss T (my classes nickname for me, short for Miss Thomas, even though I am Mrs Thomas), are you excited as I am to explore how prostitution not revolution is the answer to this second Gladiator's revolt?" He cut right to it, and casually, he asked me.
I began my prepared speech about the objectification of women, and how wrong it was, but I was stopped cold when Henry rose to his full height, overtopping my 5'7" by nearly a foot, and being almost twice as wide.
With a look of anger, he pulled his loose fitting jersey over his head, and stood clad only in loose shorts, socks and shoes. He reached down and pulled me to my feet as one hand casually captured both of mine. Turning that look of intensity on me, he froze me in my tracks like a rabbit before a hawk.
"Objectification? The black man is objectified more than any other. Look at me, look at my body. I am a gladiator in the pits every damned day for the white Patricians pleasure. Look at the bruises, but you have to look closely, because the bruises are easier to hide under black skin. Trace the lines of the breaks on my ribs, see the scar tissue on my forearm where my arm bone broke through the skin two seasons ago," His rebuttal was angry, harsh.
He stood like a snorting bull in the center of the room, dominating it. Still but potent as an angry god, I found myself tracing the lines of his scars with my soft white hands, noting the long list of damages already incurred on his magnificent, but battered body.
He continued now, not in anger but in a terrible hopeless pain, "We sacrifice ourselves by the thousands to provide the top hundreds to play for leagues which bring in tens of billions. For every black man who makes it big, three hundred ended up crippled for life in lesser arenas long before the big stage. Most of those who make it, will eke out a living for a few years, and then be tossed aside like garbage when they break, or wear out. A few of the greats will make it big, and inspire thousands more to sacrifice again, so the patricians in their mansions can make their billions on the bodies of modern black gladiators!"
He paused and looked me in the eye, speaking with a passionate wounded pride, "We battle each other every week, while the children of the slave owners can trade us like commodities, sell us to each other like their ancestors bought and sold my own. That is what they think of us, property. Objects. Animals, good for only one thing, making the masters money!" he said with a snarl.
He shifted and winced, a look of pain crossing his face. He spoke now low and throbbing with passion.
"We know the cost. We play hurt, knowing we could be crippled for life, because there are scouts in the crowd, and for the chance to get out of here, for the slim chance to make it out, we will risk crippling ourselves our dying. Leave our blood on the grass, not the sand. Feel my knee Miss T, you feel what I put my body through to provide pleasure for the sons of the slave owners, and then you listen to me, perhaps then you will understand," wordlessly he pushed down on my shoulders, and I knelt at his feet.
My trembling hands traced up the strong corded black muscles of his leg until I got to his knee. It was swollen, visibly thicker right knee than left, but the shock was the heat. It was hot to the touch, inflamed, clearly damaged. The skin above and below was indented, from wearing a knee brace. HE HAD PLAYED when he shouldn't even be walking! He must be in agony.
I looked up at him, my wide blue eyes tearing up as I looked into the blazing hot anger in his; a modern gladiator, a slave who knows himself to be a slave, one who is forced to sell himself as a gladiator just for the chance to get out. A slave forced to accept his body as the only commodity he has to purchase even the slimmest chance of getting out and having a life.
I began to cry, and wordlessly I kissed his knee softly.