“I’m about to come through here like Sherman through Atlanta,” Timm hollered, striding across the front of the conference room on a sunny spring day.
Timm was newly hired—the first African American vice president at the small New England college where I worked.
With perfect posture, he was trim and immaculately decked out in a peach-colored linen shirt and beige linen slacks. My mother would have said he was as polished as a new pin. This, his first meeting with our department, was the only time I would see him not wearing a tie. Our department consisted of seventeen marketing communications professionals—writers, editors, proofreaders, graphic and web designers, and public relations professionals. All except two of the group were women. All except Timm and I were white.
I was one of five directors who now reported to Timm. During my eight years, I had yearned to see a black executive at the college, but I had my doubts about Timm from the first. What would play out was a struggle between my rights and self-esteem on the one hand, and my duty to another black person on the other.
“In my heart,” he slapped his chest with splayed fingers, “I will always be a military captain.”
I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d shouted, “Listen up, you scumbags!”
Timm wasn’t exactly short, but I wondered if he’d be less belligerent if he were just a little bit taller. Without a hint of wrinkles, he looked thirty-five. He later told us he was forty-nine.
His clean-shaven face shining with what appeared to be outrage, he hissed, “I will not tolerate gossiping or errors of any kind on my watch. If I catch you at either of these, you will be fired.”
I couldn’t account for the hostility that underscored Timm’s words. With the exception of Gabe, the webmaster, our department was entirely women, at a college comprised predominantly of women students. Would Timm have warned the group against gossiping if he were talking to a room full of men?
I put my elbows on the table, my fists beneath my chin. At over-fifty years old I had been working for for-profit and nonprofit organizations for decades, and here I was being scolded by a boss I barely knew. We staff members raised our brows and looked hard at one another across the conference table. A floor-to-ceiling window served as one of the room’s long walls. Promising pink and purple pansies squatted along the walkway outside.
Though shocked by Timm’s tantrum, I left the meeting having decided to hold off forming a firm opinion about him and privately wondering if I would have felt so ashamed, so somehow implicated, if a white boss had made such a spectacle of himself. Maybe Timm would adjust his behavior to suit the organization’s genteel culture. Several of the junior staff headed straight to human resources to ask, some tearfully, if their jobs were in jeopardy.
The next day, Timm called the staff together to offer a mea culpa.
“Let me assure you,” he declared. “No one will be terminated.”
Two weeks later, he fired Sadie, a capable senior director.
Maybe I should have begun looking for a new job. But I didn’t start talking to my contacts about open positions. I worked in the marketing communications suite, in a building constructed in the late 1890s when elevated ceilings represented the towering thinking and scholarship that took place in academia, far above the babble in the streets below. I was so attached to every aspect of the beautiful edifice that I once turned down a job offer from another college largely because I couldn’t bear to trade this one-hundred-year-old elegance for a 1960s concrete structure with cinder block walls.
I just watched and waited.
▴ ▴ ▴
In Timm’s job interview, he had deflected questions about his specific achievements. Instead, his manicured fingers fiddling with a tiny gold pen, he boasted about his personal possessions, especially his Porsche, and railed against the discrimination he’d experienced in his previous job in a Southern state.
“I’d come into the office on Monday,” he told the search committee, “and hear my coworkers talking about cookouts and golf games they had enjoyed together over the weekend. But being black and gay meant my partner and I were never invited!”
He had been hired over my colleagues’ and my objections. “He never answered our questions about his accomplishments, or even about what he did all day,” we protested. All Timm had told us directors about his background was that he had spent most of his career as an officer in the military before going to work for a gargantuan online service provider, his exact role there never quite clear.
In little hallway encounters we confessed we weren’t at all sure the president had looked deeply into his qualifications. Privately, I suspected she might have wanted to introduce some racial diversity to the Executive Committee of vice presidents and deans. But in all the time Timm worked at the college, my white colleagues and I never discussed his race.
Timm’s evasions about his accomplishments and his terminating Sadie weren’t all that troubled me about him.
From the very first, he had snubbed me.
Along each side of our suite’s hallway were the staff’s private offices. On Timm’s first visit to the suite, wearing a white dress shirt and perfectly fitting navy blazer, he walked up and down the hallway, stopping in every one of my white coworkers’ offices. But he walked past my open door, his face averted.
Then, within a week of starting the job, he stormed into the office of another director in our department, slammed the door so hard the sound reverberated through our entire suite, and began yelling at her. “Deborah, I told you . . .”
As the senior person present outside the ruckus, it seemed my responsibility to do something. I raced toward the door of our suite, passing en route three junior employees, their wide eyes following me as they huddled beside the copier. I grabbed the arm of the motherly but influential registrar, and pulled her back to my office, Timm’s tirade still in progress behind the door across from us.
The registrar and I punctuated our paralysis with questions: Should we get the president? Security? Finally, we agreed I’d check on Deborah after Timm left her office.
A native of the South, Deborah drawled, “I gave him as good as I got.”
However, her normally smooth pageboy looked wild and windblown, and the registrar and I had only heard Timm’s raised voice.
I was not only annoyed but flummoxed at finding myself in such uncharted, unwelcome territory—enlisting the aid of one white woman to help me protect Deborah, another white woman, from a black man. Black people don’t routinely perceive white people as a group in need of our protection. Over the centuries in America, right up to today, an innocent black man could be condemned as a result of a white woman claiming he had attacked her. Where I grew up in New York, and certainly in Florida, where my siblings and I visited our grandparents, black boys were warned to be careful of their interactions with white girls. Apparently Timm’s temper was hobbled by no such admonishment.
Little did I suspect that in a few months, I would need the white women at my job—if not to protect me—to lend me their support against Timm.
Upset as much as mystified by Timm’s attack on Deborah, that night I told my husband, who is white, “His former white coworkers didn’t invite him to join their activities because they couldn’t stand him!”
▴ ▴ ▴
Before working at the college, I didn’t enjoy work, an attitude that was entirely hereditary. My older sister, younger brother, and I were forbidden to work or to even learn to type before graduating from high school. Our mother believed if we held jobs, we might come to savor the taste of financial independence and neglect our studies.
My parents worked, but had no work ethic. People with their skin color—my father’s brown, my mother’s tan—were kept out of most jobs that paid a decent wage or offered the chance to advance. Having been born into the entrepreneurial and landowning Southern black middle class in the early part of the twentieth century, they were educated. As adults, the numerous menial positions as maids and janitors available wouldn’t suit them, so they settled instead into two of the black versions of white-collar jobs—teacher, government worker, or store clerk.
When my siblings and I were young, our mother worked part-time in two of New York’s largest department stores only during the holiday season. By the time I was in my mid-teens, my father drank so much he could no longer hold his post office position. Consequently, he worked at a stream of jobs as a cook and cobbler’s apprentice, but those couldn’t support our family of five. So my mother took on a full-time position with the state government, in which she resented her job, her bosses, and her coworkers. She came home every night threatening to quit the next day.
Even with broader opportunities than my parents, my climb up the career ladder hadn’t been easy. When I was in my twenties I was told outright, “We don’t hire people of your race.” When I stepped in as acting manager for a retail outlet of an art gallery chain, a vice president from the home office came to look me over.
“We don’t usually have blacks heading our stores,” she said bluntly.
“Well,” I laughed, “I have no intention of training someone else for a job I’ve been doing for three months.” I kept the new position.
Several well-paying jobs followed, but none of them fit until I landed at the college, where I started off managing advertising on a part-time basis. After a year, I was taken on fulltime and regularly promoted until I reached my current position as a marketing communications director with broad responsibilities and an annual budget in the high hundreds of thousands. I had earned my graduate degree at the college, so I was invested in keeping its reputation strong in the competitive academic marketplace. I loved the college and my position within it. (Before Timm was hired, on arriving home each evening, I used to sing, “I love my college, my job, and my boss!”)
When Timm was hired I had told myself, “So be it,” and fervently hoped I would continue to feel productive and at home in my job—and that the college’s first black vice president would succeed.
It took less than a month for the directors who reported to Timm to figure out he didn’t do any work. As far as we could see, he spent his time surfing the Web. From his desk at the far end of his office, he’d call out to an employee who stuck her head through the door hoping to discuss work. “Come look at this.” He’d point to his computer screen so we could see the clothes and electronics he was considering buying.
Seated in each other’s offices, Lilly, my closest friend among our department’s directors, and I lamented our need to temporize in uncomfortable confrontations with deans and department heads as a result of Timm’s shortcomings, which he covered behind a wall of bluster and swagger.
“Where are the budget projections (reports, evaluations, status reports) I was supposed to get from Timm?” a dean would ask.
“He’s probably working on them.”
“Did you give Timm the revised radio script?” a vice president might want to know.
“Yes.”
“Did he review it?”
“I’m not sure.”
I tried to arm Timm (as I would any new boss) with background materials—schedules, agendas, memos—before he attended an important meeting.
“Do you need anything else?”
He tapped a pile of papers on his desk. “Nah. I don’t read any of the stuff you give me.”
Dazed, I walked down to Lilly’s office, adjacent to mine, and stood in her doorway. She looked up from her desk and laughed.
“Timm just told me he didn’t look at the materials I gave him for the Executive Committee meeting!” I sank into a chair. “That he doesn’t read anything I give him.”
“He doesn’t read anything I give him either, not even the production budgets for the invitations to convocation,” Lilly exploded. “How the hell is he holding his end up in those meetings?”
Several members of our department commented on Timm’s unwise habit of making other executives cool their heels outside his office before appointments. My colleagues began whispering that he was unbalanced when he started loudly denouncing those executives in meetings with us. However, they—and I—kept our observations to ourselves: the president had hired him over our opposition and told us to expect his management style to be different from that of our previous boss. She had made it clear we were to rally around him.
We’d heard via the grapevine that she and some of the executives considered the marketing communications staff—creative types—too freewheeling. Yet they grudgingly acknowledged the positive results of our inventive contributions to all areas of the organization, such as student recruitment and retention, alumni relations, and fundraising.
▴ ▴ ▴
When I was a child, black people openly cheered the accomplishments of black baseball players, and those in science, politics, law, and the arts, especially those who were first to enter their fields as professionals. “We appreciate our own,” black adults said. I learned to take pride in, and share in, the triumphs of these individuals, no matter their specific enterprises. The call to support black people was so deeply embedded in me, I fretted over whether or not to warn Timm about his behavior. But as his tenure passed from spring to summer and into the dwindling light of fall, I kept silent.
Should I alert him that wasting time bragging about his belongings during staff meetings—the price he paid (twenty-five thousand dollars) to have his teeth repaired and replaced; his weekly visits to a salon to have his close-cropped hair cut, his nails done, and probably regular facials that would explain his skin, as bright as burnished bronze; how owning his Porsche made him feel like a man to be reckoned with—should I tell him those declarations were unprofessional and that they were fomenting organization-wide ridicule as department members passed on stories of his vanity?
Should I mention that his vociferously inveighing against the institution’s “girly” culture and those he considered his enemies within it were giving rise to widespread concern?
Should I caution him to keep such an admission to himself after he proclaimed in a directors’ meeting, “I fired Sadie because I didn’t like her!”
I was certain his response would be some form of, “I don’t need you to tell me anything!”
Although I didn’t feel exactly responsible for Timm, I struggled not to care about the image he was projecting.
But what did I owe him anyway?
The department’s previous vice president had appointed me chair of the communications committee that consisted of my director colleagues and members of departments that used our marketing services. In September Timm attended his first meeting of this group.
“Lynette will no longer be chairing this committee,” he announced to the startled committee members.
The registrar looked angry. Members of the group objected.
“What?”
“Why?”
Timm turned to Deborah. “I want you to be the chair.”
Then it was Timm’s turn to be shocked. “Are you crazy?” she asked him. “I got too much work already!”
The meeting folded. Grumbling, people stumbled past chairs and one another on their way out of the room. Timm’s expression was dazed, his face the shade of tarnished brass.
Afterward I approached his office door, my eyes narrowed in anger. “Timm, I’d like to speak to you a minute.”
“Sure. Come in. Hey, I like your outfit.”
I was wearing a cranberry-and-tan tweed jacket in a tiny herringbone pattern that narrowed neatly at my waist. My fondness for fashion, though not my budget, was equal to his. I was boutique. He was bespoke.
I frowned at his wall of framed photographs of himself with presidents, cabinet members, and celebrities. “If you make a decision about something that affects me, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me privately.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not asking you why you removed me from the communications committee chair role and offered it to Deborah. But I do want to know why you didn’t give me a heads-up in advance. You must realize it was demeaning to me and upsetting to the committee. I mean, I’ve never before seen a group just get up and leave a meeting like that.”
“Yeah, I didn’t handle that too well.” Unruffled, he strolled toward his desk and added, “I’ll be chairing that committee, but don’t worry, you’ll be responsible for the work, so that will restore any reputation I might have damaged.”
Thanks to his inability to follow through on anything, the committee never met again.
▴ ▴ ▴
While Timm held one-on-one conferences with my white colleagues (although they described these meetings as pointless), he canceled what I suppose would have been equally pointless meetings with me. Once, he stood me up to go shopping for another Porsche. The afternoon he did meet with me, I looked up from some student recruitment copy I was editing to see him enter my office, his mouth stretched into a caricature of a yawn. He took a seat opposite me, leaned back, and raised his feet, in custom-made suede shoes, onto my desk within inches of my face. Raising my eyebrows and staring into his eyes, I slowly slid my chair to the side.
He removed his feet.
▴ ▴ ▴
Timm called a meeting of our entire department to be held in one of the college’s largest conference rooms. My seat faced the door, so I saw him approach the room, flanked by two staff members. His head was slightly tilted to one shoulder; under his arm he carried a flat black leather case. I remembered that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used to approach the lectern at press conferences in that exact style. As Timm had quoted Rumsfeld to us a couple of times, I was pretty sure he modeled his style on the secretary’s.
Standing before a blackboard at the front of the room, Timm stated that in order to increase the department’s budget, he had to “put some skin on the table, make a trade,” that is, lay someone off. (The relationship between skin and slave trading apparently eluded him.) Afterward, several of my white colleagues gathered around me and asked, “Was he talking about you?”
I shrugged.
“Why is he always picking on you?” They had heard him remark a number of times that it was a black woman who had gotten him fired from his last job. It was clear they felt as awkward as I did.
Although I didn’t think it would be at all easy for Timm to fire me, I wanted to let him know how I felt about the words he’d used.
“That remark you made in the meeting didn’t feel good,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be so sensitive. That’s a common expression in the military.”
“This isn’t the military and, in any case, it’s crude and offensive.” I strode out of his office, stifling the urge to sweep his elaborately arrayed miniature military figures off his mahogany credenza.
I was used to Caucasians asserting African Americans were being too sensitive if we objected to a negative racial term or action. It might be a joke that was dependent on stereotypical black dialect or, without permission, reaching out a hand to feel our hair. But never had I been accused of that from a person of color.
▴ ▴ ▴
On a sunny September afternoon, members of our department gathered during a more casual off-site meeting led by a middle-aged woman Timm introduced as his buddy. Making a circuit among the staff spread around the room, Timm announced the projects each director would be heading. My brows drew together to cover hot embarrassment when my name wasn’t mentioned. I asked, “What will I be leading?”
Sotto voce, he replied, “I’ll talk to you about it later.”
What work could he have for me that was so confidential he couldn’t mention it in the presence of the rest of the department? I snatched my leather jacket off the back of a sofa and marched out of the room before the meeting ended.
When Timm didn’t come to see me over the next couple of days, I walked into his office. To reach his desk, I crossed a carpeted distance the size of a helicopter pad. He’d snagged the biggest executive office, probably a result of claiming his previous office had been as large as an aircraft carrier.
“Why didn’t you assign me a new project? In fact, Timm, why do you consistently marginalize me?”
“Keep this between us,” he said in a near whisper. “The truth is, I’m planning to eliminate your job. But don’t worry, I’m going to find another place for you in this organization. I’ve checked you out with several executives here and they have nothing but compliments about your work and your overall demeanor.”
“Have you ever ‘checked out’ my peers?” I asked, fuming.
“No. No, I haven’t.” He sounded at a loss.
I figured it was me, rather than my job, he wanted to get rid of.
Was he concerned that if he struck up a rapport with me, white people would perceive him as isolating himself from them? Or think I had engineered his appointment to his position at the college? At a firm where I worked years earlier, my white manager routinely asked if I knew every African American who applied for a job at the company.
I left Timm’s office for my therapy appointment, threading my way through a hundred noisy young women students in jeans and pajama bottoms, and headed out to the parking lot.
“Distance yourself from this guy as his tenure plays out,” my therapist said in regard to my dilemma. Then he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Just stand by and wait for him to implode.”
I was still a bit uncertain about my future in the department so, to be on the safe side, I spoke to an attorney, a friend of a friend.
“He wants you to keep it a secret that he’s trying to eliminate your job? Just let him try. You’re a woman, over fifty, and black. With positive evaluations and a strong reputation? Take yourself down to human resources and tell them this bozo is trying to push you out of your position.”
Despite the advice of the attorney, I still found myself unable to complain to human resources, or to Timm’s boss, the president. How could I alone, the only black staff member, report our black boss? How could the only black director in the department accuse the only black vice president in the entire institution of racial discrimination? I believed it would have been as difficult for my white colleagues to report Timm’s incompetence. Wouldn’t they worry they’d be perceived as racist?
In any case, I believed most of my white coworkers at the college no longer had much motivation to report Timm. On the whole he treated them well. Hell, without telling me beforehand, he’d given my open staff position to Deborah, whom he’d screamed at behind the closed door early in his tenure.
Tentativeness hovered over our department like a slow-moving blimp. The staff was waiting, but for what we couldn’t have said. We only knew, or sensed, this state couldn’t go on indefinitely. Many of us, including me, had worked fifty-plus hours a week; now we were almost completely idle. Our previously hard-driving department was in limbo.
▴ ▴ ▴
Autumn was full of bright days that year, and on one of them, about four months after Timm assumed the vice president position, Lilly and I took our lunches to one of the tables outside the cafeteria where we knew we wouldn’t be seen by Timm, who never seemed to eat, as if his twenty-five-thousand-dollar teeth were as ill fitting in his mouth as he was in the college.
“We’ve got to do something about him,” we groaned. Though neither of us admitted it aloud, we weren’t referring to having Timm disciplined—who could make him competent under his carapace of beautiful clothes? Who could make him sane, for that matter? No, we wanted him driven from the college.
Before going back inside, Lilly gave a crafty smile. “I might have an idea. Give me a little time to think it through.”
As the days became cooler, my husband and I took more than our usual walks in nature to diffuse my distress. One afternoon, while we trod carefully over sharp rocks and protruding roots in a forest, I mentioned my dilemma for the umpteenth time.
“You don’t need to put up with that clown’s crap,” he said. But he didn’t suggest I ream Timm out, report him, or quit my job. My emotions were so tangled, I wanted someone to give me clear instructions to end my wearying indecision.
What drove me to flail about in knotted sheets at night that fall was the question of my self-respect and morale against my loyalty to another black person. Had I, who had been praised and rewarded for my forthrightness, morphed into a wimp, unable to speak up on my own behalf? I’d succumbed to such convoluted self-questioning I even feared black people on campus would condemn me if I turned Timm in.
Outside the office, at weekend lunches with friends, my feet wrapped around the legs of wobbly wrought-iron chairs, I crumpled forward over bistro tables to lament Timm’s failure to produce work and the obstacles he constructed at the expense of his staff’s ability to produce. Timm and I somehow were biased against each other because of our shared race; I felt tethered to him because of this single similarity. If a white boss treated me the way Timm did, I’d have set the corridor carpet afire in my haste to get to human resources.
My wavering wasn’t helped by the fact that, in general, Timm was polite and reserved; he only seemed unable to keep himself in hand during meetings, and of course in his early diatribe in Deborah’s office. When I encountered him in the numerous campus byways, in his sober suits, his manner was like that of a benevolent funeral director. He greeted me graciously, asked how I was doing and if things were going okay with me, as if there was no animosity between us.
He also occasionally displayed flashes of vulnerability and kindness. He teared up when our department presented him with a gift certificate to his favorite restaurant and a birthday cake, its white frosting inscribed with our organization’s navy blue logo. I admired him, too, when I overheard him on the phone telling a family member that, yes, he would buy a bike for a niece for Christmas. “And I’ll get a helmet too.”
By early October, no longer hoping my particular situation would improve, I began a half-hearted search for a position outside the organization and actually received a job offer for a director of communications position at one of Boston’s famed museums. Considering the institution too stodgy, I declined the offer.
On an early November day, a lowering sky muting my view of windows across a courtyard, I was sitting at my desk eating an afternoon snack when my phone rang.
“Whatcha doin’?” Lilly asked.
I laughed. Her question sounded like a variation on a prurient anonymous caller’s “What are you wearing?”
“I’m trying out a new brand of yogurt.” I held up the container. “Dannon’s Activia,” I said, looking at the green wrapping on the carton. “Peach. What are you doing?”
Lilly took her time before answering. “I just lodged a formal complaint against Timm with Susan.” Susan was the vice president of human resources, a small woman in her early fifties with strawberry-blond hair.
“What?” I gaped at the yogurt container in my hand, as if it had answers. “What did you tell her?”
“That he’s destroying our department’s credibility. And that we’re doing nothing for the students!”
I could picture Lilly twiddling her neatly cut black curls near one ear.
I assume Lilly’s charges included Timm’s negative remarks about the organization and its executives, and his preventing staff from completing work for other departments.
“She needs others to come forward,” Lilly continued. “To confirm what I’ve said.”
Was this really happening? Timm had seemed so well protected, so fortified by the president I could only wonder that any executive would entertain criticisms of him. Then I remembered how he’d kept them waiting outside his office for appointments. I also figured they had noticed what I was sure were his forceful and uninformed pronouncements in Executive Committee meetings.
Lilly asked me to talk to Susan and help her recruit others to do the same.
I sighed. This was a moment I had both desired and dreaded, the moment I’d need to formally speak out against Timm and put my grievances in writing. My stomach clenched. Unable to finish my yogurt, I dropped it in the trash.
Later that month, Lilly strolled into my office.
“You going to the meeting?” Though our department wasn’t producing much work, we still had meetings with other departments. I guess they held out hope we’d fulfill their project requests. We were careful to listen, but to promise nothing.
Together Lilly and I walked over to a newly built steel-and-glass campus building. After the six of us in attendance served ourselves snacks, Melissa, the dean, said, “You know we’re opening a satellite campus out near the University of Massachusetts for some of our graduate programs? Does anyone know the region? Do you know how we can promote our courses out there?”
I nodded. “I have some ideas. My sister teaches at Amherst College, so I’ve visited the area often over the years. It’s got an enormous, active student population that takes its school newspapers seriously. A good place to insert ads, interviews, and editorials.”
Timm, who was new to Massachusetts and often said dismissively, “I don’t know anything about this place,” piped up. “No, no, Lynette, that’s not what Melissa is asking about.”
But Melissa, casually statuesque, brushed back her hair and replied pointedly, “You’re wrong, Timm. That’s exactly what I’m asking for.”
For the rest of the meeting, Timm quoted the points I had made, and smilingly patted my arm in a proprietary way. My colleagues snickered.
As we left the conference room, Lilly said, “The man’s demented.”
“I know. But I’m still reluctant to denounce him.” I didn’t go into my reasons. But I saw my situation in a clearer light: Timm didn’t regularly contradict other directors in public.
I was finally fed up.
One reason I hadn’t reported Timm was my conviction that the idea of a black person discriminating against another black person would be totally foreign to a white administration. Until recently, it had been foreign to me. A week before, however, I had googled black-on-black discrimination and found that intra-race bias was formally acknowledged. If necessary, I could bolster my accusations against Timm with research findings.
The next day, I told Lilly, “I’ll talk to Susan. And help you prod our colleagues to go see her too.” I should have been the engine in this scheme, but I was ready to hop on Lilly’s train. I might remain alone in the pain of racial disloyalty to Timm, but I wouldn’t be alone in trying to oust him. Also, I believed it would be more difficult for my white colleagues to oust him if I, the black staff member he mistreated, didn’t speak out. He was a blight on our department; if I ignored that, I would have been complicit in his mismanagement.
▴ ▴ ▴
Lilly and I were galvanized into action. We visited our colleagues to urge them to come forward with their perspectives on Timm. Having little work to do left us time to spend with our allies in cloistered corners, our whispered conversations taking place beneath the soaring college ceilings. Timm had tried to outlaw gossiping, but our gossiping was crucial intelligence gathering and sharing.
In my first meeting with Susan, I was careful not to seem vindictive, as I knew minorities are all too easily accused of antisocial attitudes. Seated across a table from her, I went over the various concerns I had about Timm—his failure to lead our department or produce any work himself and unnecessarily farming out our work to consultants.
The fingers of one hand holding clean white sheets of paper in place, Susan took rapid notes, occasionally asking for clarification, such as, “Was anyone else present?”
“It’s sad to report him, as he’s the president’s chief of staff,” I told her.
“He said that? He’s not.” Susan tone was emphatic.
“On a number of occasions when I was present, Timm told the staff a black woman had gotten him fired from his last job. That only a white woman had stood by him.”
Her pen suspended in her hand, Susan raised her pale brows and looked beyond me into the distance, seeming for a moment to forget my accusations of racial discrimination. “He said he was fired from his last job?” Evidently Timm had lied on his application. That alone might be grounds for termination.
“Well, there’s something else,” I added. “I don’t believe he’s committed to the college’s mission. When I told him a portion of my budget needed to be spent on developing a scholarship brochure, he said, ‘Fuck the students!’ Two interns heard him.”
Susan’s lips became taut.
▴ ▴ ▴
At 4:15 the following afternoon, Timm stuck his head in my doorway.
“Meeting at 4:30—my office. Tell the other directors.” His tone was mild, but the words felt ominous; he never called us together on the spur of the moment.
Early December darkness had descended outside the windows when we directors trooped like Stepford wives into Timm’s office. We didn’t bring our coffees or Cokes, as we usually did. We each gripped only a pen and a blank sheet of paper. The lamp on his desk at the far end of the room provided the only illumination. Encircled in the half-light, we squeezed ourselves around Timm’s small round table near the door, trying our best to leave a space for him.
He approached us briskly from the other end of the room. Waving his hands at the writing and note-taking implements we’d placed on the table, he said, “You won’t need any of that. I don’t want you writing this down.”
We gaped at him more or less stupidly.
Refusing a seat, Timm stood over us. All I could see of him was his crisp white shirt with widely spaced blue stripes. “I want you to know, some folks are out to get me,” he said evenly.
None of us moved, expressed disbelief, or asked what he was talking about.
“I expect all of you to have my back.”
We sat rigid while Timm spoke, his voice eerie in the dark room.
Lilly and I, eyes wide, locked gazes across the table.
The day before, I had seen Alex, a dean, leave Susan’s office holding a thin folder under his arm that looked suspiciously like a prop. He and Timm had bonded over their respective Porsches. Alex’s expression had been grim, which I now knew meant Susan had told him about Timm’s possible fate. Clearly Alex had alerted Timm about the case, without telling Timm members of his own department were helping prepare the case against him—a detail Susan most certainly would have kept to herself.
When Timm dismissed us after less than two minutes, Lilly and I hastened to the women’s room, our eyes slowly adjusting to the harsh fluorescent lights.
“We’re fucked!” Lilly burst out.
We stared at each other, then bent over laughing almost hysterically, our emotional balance shot from weeks of tense conspiracy.
We had no illusions. The top decision-makers might not believe the charges against Timm or might consider his crimes simple issues of management style. Most of all, they might not want to admit they’d made a mistake in hiring him. Lilly and I might be fired, although looking over his shoulder from the kitchen sink where he was washing dishes that night, suds plopping from his hands onto the floor, my unflappable husband declared, “You won’t be.”
Susan submitted her thick report to the president and the Executive Committee in two black-covered loose-leaf books. When Timm read the staff’s statements, he asked the committee if he could apologize to our department. But Stacy, the senior vice president, agreed with Lilly and me that it was too late. In fact, Susan told Timm he wasn’t to speak with any of us who had signed our names to complaints against him.
He was let go sometime around Martin Luther King’s birthday, on a clear, frigid day, seven months after his first meeting with our department the previous spring.
On his last day, afraid of an uncomfortable encounter with painful mutual accusations, I pulled my coat around my knees and crouched behind a ragged row of yew bushes outside the main college building to avoid running into him.
Pushing branches away from my face, I watched Timm, in a tailored charcoal overcoat, make his way from the college to his Porsche for the last time. He hadn’t managed to get rid of me. I had helped get rid of him—despite the messages I’d received in my childhood to support other black people. I’d let down my ancestors, but I’d saved myself. I was relieved. And heartbroken. Time, even after a decade, has done nothing to alleviate those feelings.
The author notes: Using an initial capital in “black” while relegating “white” to an initial lowercase letter seems to represent a sort of “reparation” for black people. However, to me, it simply reverses and reinforces the profound inequality that plagues this country. A central characteristic of American society is an inbred conviction that one race is superior to the other. Our goal should be equality, not domination. Using initial caps for both “black” and “white” seems to underscore equality, but I find that usage distracting when I read.