Leaving Bishop College. Sr. Celine Werner. Dr. Augustine Fernandez, Dr. Helen Benjamin

Sr. Celine, MM, who I served with in the Bishop College English Department, she from 1970,  "found herself in a position to overcome the just suspicions of faculty and students as to why a white woman, with her qualifications, would choose to be on the faculty of a struggling Black Christian College."  This is valuable for a statement about the suspicion that falls upon any one who intrudes into the racial miscontracts of the  U. S. and the world. It can be said of any missionary, any Caucasian or for that matter any nonmember intruding into a group. Sociologists got away with it for a time and scientists maybe do still. I have had multiple trials of this, two among black people, one among Latin American students in San Jose, Costa Rica. But moving to the Mainline of Philadelphia for the last year of high school from a multi-ethnic steel town surely counts, also travels among the Hopi and Navajo towns of Arizona is relevant. In all this, empathy and love cover a multitude of sins. The after effects of Bishop College have been cooperating in and maintaining a solo medical practice for thirty years in the downtown zip code of Phoenix, delivered to us by divine providence and prophecy.

Sr. Celine took her doctorate at the U of Santo Tomas, FOUNDED 1611! I took mine just down the road in Austin, but something of the same just suspicion could have affected me had I let it, twice, since I took teaching positions in Fayetteville in 1967 and Bishop in 1981-86. I just don't consider myself in any of those categories, and now I don't consider myself a part of any human society of dissipates or renegades.  I am a thinking being engaged as a wayfarer even as I am attacked by pit bulls as I walk before dawn. It gives poignancy to the beliefs of Mennonites I hold legitimately on my own and from family members of the past.  

 

All hoopla of making a name, garnering honors to be respected, deny the one truth we may not avoid, we are all one person as created human and none of the differences among us matter as much as our honoring and caring for one another no matter what station. If, after enough time, the veneer of society wears through and the simple courtesy of greeting one another as human beings dissipates I  resign. This was not the case in the years addressed when the layers of blessing were able to overcome the not invisible animus of much of the faculty whose questions Celine addressed. There must be a huge exception in this for Dr.  Helen Benjamin, one of the most excellent people I have known, whose magnanimous  character went on to have a brilliant career. She was the only notably open encounter I had with those in authority, aside from Dr. Vernon McDaniel, interim president of the college before Dr. Lassiter. I went to see him unannounced concerning an African student who had a psychic break and was being held at the state institution at Terrell. I visited with Cyril there, to encourage him, and he did make a full recovery. I wanted Dr. McDaniel to know of the situation and left impressed with his gravity and concern.

 

This is not to say necessarily that difficulties were racial, but whatever they were I lack the constitution to be bullied. Ultimately I avoid situations of conflict, once they become overbearing, so I had already booked my resignation at the end of that fifth year, after being granted tenure, partly because I was being made too visible and had fewer lower level classes, so knew fewer students, and presciently too, since the College would close the next year anyway, and with the shake up I would have been made the English department chair at that end. Anyway we were on our way to this medical practice in the desert. On the flip side the orange trees of the Sonora Desert beckoned and I felt if there was anywhere I would regret not living it was there where we ended up staffing clinics at the Grand Canyon for whole weekends and one solid month, as well as in Kearney.

 

It may be a lonely walk but we still get to meet wayfarers on the same road of Isaiah 35. The reservations among the students at the start of my Bishop tenure were dissolved in the third week of that first semester when I sang Psalm 8 in full voice a capella to a packed literature class of juniors and seniors. My relation to the body politic became a little transcendent. To the many Nigerian and Kenyan students the encounter with an American PhD was an extraordinary thing and they were full of respect. I knew and appreciated many Kikuyu students from Kenya and even more Ibo from Nigeria and retain an  affection for all those black students in appreciation of the honesty and depth of their culture. There were even more American students at both Fayetteville and Bishop who confided in me personal elements of their lives just because I was neutral and not of their backgrounds and cultures, both men and women These were moving and poignant expressions. I never did much in those circumstances beyond listening like a therapist, in trust. There was no student evaluation at Bishop like Fayetteville or Texas, so feedback was oral. At Fayetteville these were expressive. One student, made this point,

 
--Being a white man in a black school, he shows no sign of prejudice towards the black student.

It is true that he is a white man, but what negro man or woman could you go to and tell him your problems and ask for help? Not one! The negro man will give some smart remarks and try to get fresh, which the negro woman doesn't like you because you look better than she does--

 

I think it important to see the humor in that because she's kidding and not kidding too. I hesitate to give the evaluations of the teaching per se, they are embarrassing, like the one in the series at Texas I took to Dean Silber to get my TA job back after being fired for being "in linguistics," obviously a blind for something else, further illuminated here. "Thank you Andy! You gave us life!" Seriously, Arrowsmith would turn in his grave. 

It is always the rule to encounter in such situations the open hearted as much as it is an exception to encounter them in the opposite populations of suspicion, greed and self centeredness. Students were puzzled, --He is a teacher who will make the black student wonder about. He does not speak too highly of his own race, but seems to enjoy working with the blacks. Questions enter the student's mind which take a long time to answer. I am still puzzled about his concern for the blacks. The best that can be hoped for in this neutrality is, "that he shows no signs of prejudice." For how can you read the intent or mind of another anyway? 

 

Maybe I never said this much before because I was asked so many times at both schools whether I was going to write a book about the experiences of teaching there. This has been done countless times by voyeurs of academe to boast their laurels. I always said I was not going to do so and never did. It seems like profiteering. The payback has been the gratitude I feel in encountering such a wide spectrum of people, which continued what had begun in all the previous expatriations from Germantown to the Chartiers Valley, to the Mainline, Costa Rica, Iowa, North Carolina, Texas, the Hill Country and beyond. I have been blessed in these contacts. Consider that the first online appearance of Angel Standing in the Sun was on the cover of the initial issue of Awhile, of Nigeria, and that my first chapbook of poems The True Light That Lights, was issued by a publisher in Nigeria, Parousia Reads, who have made  it available anywhere in the world in a couple days from Amazon. Contrast this against the usual limited number of copies that chapbooks receive and with the difficulty of obtaining them, Often there are less than 50.

Sr. Celine, who had begun in Fushun, Manchuria, and served for six years from 1936, speaking Mandarin, got eight months of internment in the revolution. https://maryknollmissionarchives.org/?deceased-sisters=sister-celine-marie-werner-mm, She was at Bishop College, in her own words, to “help disadvantaged youth come to a realization of their own worth and power, by enabling them to develop their intellectual powers and skills, and by awakening them to a deeper, wider vision of life.”

My own set of assumptions, practiced for six years at UT- which got me fired there twice, more or less, were that everybody is a genius and may realize it at any time. It's true I had an ulterior motive to teach at Bishop since my wife was in medical school at Southwestern in Dallas, but I should be classed a diehard since I had done it before at the public affiliated black college of Fayetteville State in the 60s, home of Charles Chestnutt.

The polities of these difficult social relationships are important to maintain, which I did perfectly with one exception, according to my own lights, when I agreed to accompany three white teachers to the cafeteria once, which they did often, the Chilean, Adriana Cobo-Frenkel in biology, who organized an exhibition of her work and about two dozen of my paintings in the Zale library, Sr. Celine and one other, a Filipino. There was an international aspect to the faculty, which gave it some distinction. Of course I had also worked for the Latin America Mission in Costa Rica before this, but this was mere shadow compared to Celine's commitment, even if I could be suspected of altruistic intentions.

 Dr. Augustine Fernandez, Professor of Spanish at Bishop, who began at Bishop in 1964, has to be considered distinguished. She received her doctorate from the University of Havana and was part of the intellectual ferment in the years before the Cuban Revolution. Indeed, by her telling, she and her husband were on the last plane out of Havana after the revolution. If this sounds improbable you would have to know her passion. She faced down the guards at the door of the plane who had come to take her husband off. She had joined the college in 1964 which bio occurs in the Tiger Yearbook of 1969. Augustine continued to write and publish in literary magazines in the United States. Speaking of distinction Dr. Helen Benjamin, then at the start of her extraordinary career, was the chair of English when I arrived. Her grace in administration is of the highest praise.

At home among these sometime prisoners and emigres of four continents, I had in common with Celine, as her obit cites, an enthusiasm for Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Yeats and that is a great affinity. It was not my choice to apply for tenure at Bishop. Dr. Lassiter send a memo to all faculty early in his administration that mandated everyone was expected to apply, so I complied and was the only one granted, for which I suffered almost as much ire as when in his first faculty assembly he held up a copy of the Red Rose, the college lit mag I started and edited of all student work the year before and said he wanted more things like this. I had done something of the same collection of student writing at Fayetteville and published them anonymously in the school paper. While it is always better to avoid publicity, the yearbook staff were all students of mine as well as contributors to the Red Rose so they gave it a center page spread in the '83 Success, the last yearbook to appear. The third strike of exposure besides the Red Rose and tenure was when the department moved me from the basement office I had inhabited to Celine's glassed-in office on the second floor. The teaching assignments improved dramatically. Since I had just enough advanced work in phonetics I taught linguistics, along with creative writing, the mind of the maker, and colonial American lit, in addition to world lit. Visibility however was a detriment. In an example of visibility's retribution the infrastructure would not, just would not print the second Red Rose, even though John Dvorak executive assistant to the president, got a handful of proof copies to me, I did not realize that the way to get it printed was not through the system but by Baksheesh and homage to the college printer. Not like undergrad writing but of life and suffering, of people who have known what true life is and have loved it, it had the work of Darryl E. King, Farah I. Brown, Promise O. Gomba, Eniola Abosede, Elizabeth M. Bockarie, Katrina Harrison, Carlton Smith, Carla Crisanti, Noisey Shelton, Kenneth I. Ibe, Kendrick Denman, David Eldridge, Melvin Neal, and Michael Payne. 

 

Admittedly I did some good work in teaching and writing there. My lectures in lit were taped and put in the library the next day for consultation. I planted trees on campus! Taught creative writing. Still I can see how it might rankle that the only positive result of this mandated tenure application was white. Talk about a set up. Those who had tenure felt the same as before, disdainful of the naif, which is all I am underneath. In those years I informally published two full length works, one about the herbs and native plants of Texas, Native Texans, and one, written before our second child was born in my wife's third year of med school, A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David. There was more than one fictional effort besides The Roundness of Belly Heart's Bearing, a take on birth. But the tenure thing had to be influenced by publications, which just happened to come just at this time either by accident or fiat, especially when Piante Celeste appeared in Rome among the some of the most prestigious authors like Guy Davenport, and the Taliesin Poems, which the editor called me on the phone at the last minute to get permission for. 

 

All this time I was also writing pieces for the native plant newsletters like those at Greenhills in Dallas and for Carroll Abbott in Kerrville, founder of the native plant movement. I used to start writing at 2.30 a.m., then type it up before the family woke. The idea of tenure is a mistake anyway. All of us are passing through. Tenure produces the worst creative and intellectual habits. 

 

This was before word processor and the internet, which produced  hundreds of stories, poems and essays since 2005, and twice that  in blog, not to speak of manuscript. These together have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, which is not say they have had any impact either way for the subject or author, but that is by the way, the work reason, with multiple volumes of eighteenth century Pennsylvania history. My wife being brilliant and as off handed as possible about it-- a botanist, with an M.A. in literature from the University of Wales,  cleared the MCAT with the second highest score in the city, had a pick of any residency in the country, which was Good Samaritan in Phoenix because she could intern at the Grand Canyon and rural clinics in mining country, but we took a hard look at St Paul's in Dallas, if we elected to stay, and Albuquerque, Galveston, Houston and Austin, which were failing. We wanted to stay close to the land, she being a ranch girl, so we renovated and added on, sold our house ourselves, put a strange For Sale Sign above the kitchen door, and got double what we paid. 

 

Let it be said that all this from the beginning was provided for, the job at Bishop, the house bought cheap because it was a gang house, the buyer at the end who did PR for the Dallas Symphony and arranged his own finance. All provided. Good Sam provided a month at the Grand Canyon clinic for residents if they wished, weekend stints for moonlighting, as well as  in copper mining country. We did them all many times. I walked our two small children down the Bright Angel and Kaibab trails many times. Our daughter would hop along the rocks cawing convincingly like a crow. We saw a snow bow in the sky there when the sun shined through the flurries. Two mornings a week at least, for years, I packed myself and the two year old and the seven year old into the Four Peaks wilderness early in summer, to pastel sketch rock formations and hang out among the teddy bear and saguaro, bright, brilliant, clear. Eventually, all together, we worked our way through the Mazatals, on foot, sometimes with our first black chow-chow, a male gang dog who was an escape artist and three time escaped his captor in order to join us, dragging his chain, until we finally kept him safe. We camped the Mogollon rim country often and  all over the White Mountains many times, but stopped finally after the Wallow Fire of 2011. All of this was the result of that decision to leave teaching behind, one thing I was natively good at, not like writing. But the ceramics are good. I never taught again, not that efforts weren't made, but maybe you know what happened to the universities and personas non grata.

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

 

Being a social, intellectual, artistic outlier became limiting in publications after 2018 or so. To alleviate the back pressure of writing every day for all those years I implemented many pseudonyms, partly because editors could not understand the many different narrative and expressive postures. Is he a Christian? That's no good. He is a radical. A Christian atheist? Have an Anglo name? Not really. Is he white? Taking a leaf from the early aesthetic of elimae that wanted to publish the best and brightest, where I appeared serially for a long while, but in opposition to editors who feared to publish back to back or multiples, I thought the word and thought most important and not the name, so on more than one occasion, in print, five or more pieces of mine in a single issue. Not by name. Like an act of piracy.

The fall of the college was speeding on its way as Texas Monthly reported of its involvement in an offshoot scam of Robert Hicks (An Aggie's Revenge. See Gary Cartwright, Texas Monthly, August 1985). Hicks defrauded $217,500 from the impoverished college because of Dvorak's error, believable I guess because everything about Dallas is bigger than life. The author of that article, Cartwright, gives an unflattering picture of the college, but I never heard a word of this scandal. A credible good faith effort was made to save Bishop with the appointment of Dr. Wright Lassiter as president and Dr. Robert Dixon as dean, who were assured by the monied interests of Dallas they would be taken care of if the event failed. These kept their word. It's a little hard to believe now that I was in the thick of intrigues of all kinds, revelation of students about their lives in Chango cults, Santeria initiations, and the sometime brilliant poetic appearance of immense talents, one of whom appeared in the first Red Rose, and whose complete ms. of poems provoked from him a great brilliance, but was left behind in one or another of his compulsions. I left this ms. in the Zale Library in the care of the librarian, who took it seriously since I was a professor, and believe it possibly still exists subject to the retrieval and redemption under the Paul Quinn college administration of the Zale Library still there. This poet's whereabouts were generally tracked by his continuing records. Overpowering gifts like this impose their own destruction the way it is said of  Eprata's founder Beissel, "when they beheld the rays of heavenly wisdom that shone forth from him they fell in love with the heavenly beauty, but as soon as they came nearer to his person, the fire as of a smelting furnace seize upon them" (Chronicon, 19) Among these confidences in the basement office one Ibo student said he had been cursed by a witch at home who said he could only get a C. That's a good one, however it was before I knew anything about exorcism and I gave him a C. Another student, a Jordanian tried something I knew from UT when a father who wanted to change his daughter's grade said he was willing to expose my beliefs etc, otherwise to the department. This Jordanian said if I didn't give a higher grade he would file a complaint with Dean Daniels and he would have me reprimanded. Yes I knew this would work considering the circumstances. Other students among the writers, had my back though, esp. DK, much appreciated, and others. On my list is the republication of Red Rose II (1984) 1-35, online. I am substantially behind.

 I was trying to track down Celine's dissertation when I remembered Celine's comment on Psalm 23 in my Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David, (Bishop, 1985), that it was "authentic."

BISHOP COLLEGE R.I.P.? Cecil Sharp. D Mag, Aug 1987 gives a full polemical obit. 

Addendum. The purpose of this addendum is to recognize what a blessing Bishop College was for me at this time.

I WAS GIVEN TENURE, THE EMBARRASSMENT OF TENURE BECAUSE I WAS THE TYPE OF FACULTY THEY WANTED TO BUILD THE COLLEGE AROUND FOR THE FUTURE, should there be one, FIRST ENTHUSIASM FOR TEACHING, HONORABLE RELATIONS AND ENCOURAGEMENT OF  STUDENTS, AND ESP. INSPIRATION OF CREATIVITY IN EVERY ASPECT OF TEACHING AND LIFE. I WAS ALSO HARD WORKING IN MY OWN WAY, WRITING, AND INVOLVED IN COMMUNITY AFFAIRS, ESP. IN BOTANY, EVEN WITH A WIFE IN MED SCHOOL. What they did not account was that under these welcome attitudes was an inability to be bullied, and be controlled by attitudes of the past whether they were black or white attitudes. I rejected them all. I rejected white attitudes about blacks beginning at least the age of 10. I rejected commercials of motherhood and love, Valentines Day and and Mothers day, two kingpins of the greeting merchandise  industry as sentimental travesties by age 12 with long debates with my aunt who was the New York buyer for a department store. I rejected princess attitudes and blackmail of others to get your way. My experience of black life was less complete than the white, but in another way various and profound, for I saw much to like about the openness and joy. The best part of these experiences among the proletariat of Chartiers valley, the main line of Philadelphia, the rural folk of Fayetteville and the cosmopolitans of Dallas, with all the Nigerian, Cuban, Kenyan influences mixed in, not to omit the time in Central America, was just that in my mind they were all equal and each difference, each shade contained value to embrace. I held these attitudes on my own from birth. My life had been transformed in the image of God and eventually I learned, albeit after this, to even so walk. None of this suited me to prosper in the white academic world, so I never was actually able to land similar work again. One door closes another opens. I was to learn how to give my life for others, to teach, support, engage the social world solely as a husband and father, gardener, artist. Though I worked a lifetime at being a writer, my thoughts and perceptions were often too deep and complex to express obviously, so much of that work was not lyrical, but satiric, absurd, surreal, even if always passionate and ironic. 

 I come to these tasks honestly, being first preoccupied with the spiritual sense of the American colonies, their conflict with the natural and embodiment of it, the history of their adventures and bloodshed, their attempt on the unknown world of the sixteenth century. After this work was completed in a dissertation I came to examine the early settling of Philadelphia where I learned my family was among the first to occupy lands about 1717 in Montgomery Co, Skippack, Worcester, Oley. Having traversed many lengthy trails and records in the aggregation of these materials documented further by an aunt who curated these artifacts and records herself, I came as an executor into possession of the records of five generations of my wife’s families and their settlement of Texas from the 1850s,, the Clarks and Cosgroves of Bandera. These matters involve both independent arrivals in Texas as with Amasa Clark and more organized settling at the influence by the impresario Henri Castro in Hondo, instrumental in founding the colony that settled that region. These matters and attitudes that come to an outlier at birth can not be taken credit for. Appalled at the orphan children my own age behind the bars of the orphanage that rose up with stone walls as a prison I could not from the back porch of that row house on Segwick St. in the first five years of life without seeing, I come by birth to the attitudes of love and joy as a gift, positive and negative. By birth I say, hence they are a gift, not my own and no credit can be given or claimed, but I wear them and always and only have been given entrance into human society by these gifts of enthusiasm and readiness, but they were accompanied with a strong concern for the outcast and lowly, even if I was not one. I was the tenth generation of a Swiss family of the Palatinate made palatable by many examples of Mennonite piety and involvement shown in their personal histories, which I considered collected and published as noble, taking for granted from my own experience of the Truth that not to take a life, to live with the earth and not against it and to serve others is the greatest truth. However I knew nothing of this at birth, so these things were just in me. To explore the gift I have been given, material  practice of the truths in serving as horticulturist of the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden and conservation of hill country watersheds, serving as faculty on two traditional black American colleges, and always and foremost desiring to walk in peace even while engaging conflicts. Beyond that I renewed a quality of boldness to the Clark/Parson line when that last daughter sought a poet and sigma male to incorporate new blood of sons into that line. She didn't know she was doing that. She just did it!  Before I met the Lord that summer at 17 all manner of spiritual events approached me, even as child, or especially as a child I saw and felt but did not then name the spiritual horrors. So together and apart she and I took sojourns in Central America and Wales and among the highest intellects in their courts but always to our own purposes as we explored the wonders of the Edwards, West Texas, Big Bend informed by her grandfathers' and grandmothers' introductions to the land, the people, the aquifers, the herbs, just as I before I had explored the rhododendrons of Western Pennsylvania, the rivers, hills and caves as well as the cedar water pine barrens of New Jersey.

  Conflicts make you what you are, set boundaries. I talk to myself like this in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, going over again and again the perils, and mishaps to counter in a sense and understand those that fall and have fallen to my sons. To imagine I have been given sons, who I raised with a compassionate wife in the enthusiasms above, is amazing in the aftermath, what I call the afterlife, since I have influence on them no longer beyond an occasional conversation when they may-hap visit on me astonishing revelations of their lives and of each other, experiences and facts which I know myself but could not document with such completion as they give, which grieve me beyond telling, but there is nothing I can do. I had my chance and took every opportunity when I did, believe me, I did. I was all in as a father, friend, coach, brother, wayfarer, then they made their own choices, as I did too. It was a three way partnership altogether, now grown apart by the forces of age and travail that grieve all of us who come to end of our lives. “Oh where has all the bright company gone who is fitting for the diamond’s dance, who left, who left the studded cuff of night,” which I remember as a version of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillens, “They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling’ring here;” this indeed was responded to in Edith Sitwell's Where has all the bright company gone, which Babette Deutsch in Poetry in Our Time wrote, “like the medieval hangings that kept the cold away from secular kings and princes of the Church, the finest of [Dame Edith’s] poems have a luxurious beauty that serves to grace the bareness, to diminish the chill of this bare, cold age.”