Sappho's Overhead Projector
Table of Contents
Titlepage
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About Bywater
For these six particularly beloved bookworms:
Deb, Dix, Dorothy, Cindy B., Nev, and Susan
Introduction
Sappho’s Guest Lecture
and the Overhead, Herself
Hannah left the meeting in the Dean’s eighth-floor suite determined not to cry. No, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Her face stonily composed, she walked to her office and began to yank pushpins out of the walls, sending her framed art posters crashing onto the worn industrial carpet.
No tenure for Dr. Stern. Her position was going to be terminated.
The entire history program had, apparently, been targeted for “strategic downsizing.” Just two tenured professors (both male) would remain, folded into a hallway behind the study-abroad unit. Women’s history would be eliminated as a major— “It has been a bold experiment here,” the Dean had purred. And Hannah’s former office? Her beloved townhouse building was going to be turned into a new subway stop.
Goodbye, and good luck. Hope you find work somewhere else, dear.
• • •
At six p.m., worn out from a lonely day of packing up her office, Hannah sank back into the bathtub, adding Lux until a foam of argan-scented bubbles covered her breasts. But no fragrant oil could soothe her skin; no alcohol in the house came close to numbing her panic. She’d have to go over to Sappho’s Bar and Grill later on— let Isabel, who was now her lover as well as the bar owner and bartending mystic, make her a potion. Food, though, seemed to whet her appetite for rage and revenge. Chipotle chocolates in particular. She nibbled one now, smashing another with wet fingers and smearing it into a bronze-hued women’s symbol on the tile wall. Then she shut her eyes and visualized, again, the line of subway representatives who had swarmed so importantly through her office the other day. Plucking blueprints from crisp folios, they had measured her office shelves and walls for imminent destruction even as she sat there tapping final grades into her computer with all the concentration she could summon. Erasure. Erasure of her time there, twenty years of grading in that space. Even her office phone was to be disconnected. How would her former students contact her? Her scholarly colleagues, her archival pals? Would that beloved familiar extension number ring and ring, fated to become a passive subterranean echo? Where did missed connections go, in the end— a parking lot in hell, an eternally flowing stream of canceled conversations?
She watched her bathtub water, like her teaching career, going down the drain.
• • •
The next day, as Hannah grimly piled her art and syllabi into old watermelon crates and boxed up textbooks she’d taught for years, she worried that she might leave something valuable behind by accident. Could a class outline get stuck on a nail, in a crack in the wall, or slide under the old tacked rug? And if so, when the snug egg of her old existence cracked under phallic drill bits of subway renovation, would the underground workers far below find evidence of her teaching life, trickling down like cave moisture? Jutting out of the underground walls like jagged gems of feminism in a diamond mine? Would fragments of her old class notes be discovered, years or centuries later, lost bits and pieces preserved and entombed like those amber-trapped insect bodies in the Jurassic Park movie, holding within them the DNA of women’s studies as it was once taught? Would her lesson plans be discovered one day like the Dead Sea Scrolls, like Sappho’s poetry, like cave art on a Neolithic wall, as the Venus of Willendorf statue herself had been found? Only this time it would be not archaeologists but subway workmen in scratched hardhats, marching through a dirty tunnel space with pickaxes under their arms like the Seven Dwarves?
And then the lightbulb came on full beam above her head.
What if all that Neolithic art, those goddess statues, the evidence of women’s sacred feminine past that male explorers found in caves, was just the teaching material left behind by some even more ancient women’s studies professor? Someone whose office . . . UP THERE . . . was shut down, taken apart before her work was complete? Like me?
What if the art slides Hannah used in her class lectures on women’s heritage were actually images of goddess figurine toys that had slipped off the desk of some earlier, earliest grand lecturer, an overhead professor as uprooted and bereft as Hannah felt now, but uprooted from where? From UP THERE?
All right. Who was the giant professor up above, the lesson planner in the heavens, the great Overhead women’s history department chair who had lost her place and who now floated in space? How could Hannah . . . and maybe Isabel, too . . . find her, and restore that lost department in the sky, and even join it as a lecturer again?
Would she have to be . . . dead?
• • •
On Tuesday, having surrendered her university ID and office keys, Hannah walked disconsolately into Lecture Hall B-12 for a final nostalgic visit. Here, she had made the past visible, selecting what she believed students must know about women’s differing histories. She gave a loving pat to the wobbly overhead projector, now shoved into a corner, its long electric cord wrapped like a protective dragon’s tail around an aging, soon-obsolete body. This had been her old standby when DVD films failed to load, just images laid over a light box, projected against the two big screens. Sappho, Queen Liliuokalani, Bessie Jackson. How it made them real, huge, larger than life, undeniable!
She was alone. She was on her way to nowhere, fired at middle age. This lecture hall had been her kingdom, or queendom, or playing field. Dr. Hannah Stern in the house; start note-taking! She closed her eyes, recalling that exhilarating moment at the start of fall term, when every student flipped a notebook open and began taking notes. Then it had changed from paper pads to laptops, but still, the pipeline had been assured: Take note. Listen up. Carefully. This is what you need to know, the wisdom handed down. The passing of the torch, the water in the pipeline, women’s mysteries. And will you catch that spark? And will you wade into those waters? Some took it seriously and became torchbearers in feminism, and others were simply hoping for an easy A and challenged their B+. Well, who would come in and stop her if she taught one last lecture now?
In her pocket was a brochure for the Mediterranean goddess cruise she’d planned to take . . . before losing her job and needing a whole new budget. No Olivia cruise this summer. No fun ever again. But she could dream for free. She slid the brochure onto the surface of the projector. She’d project images of happy lesbians, partying on a ship’s deck, as her last stand. Her bon voyage.
But before she could bend to turn on the overhead projector, both of the dual wall screens lit up. The projector whirred to life. Sappho’s face rose up on the huge light panels, watchful, fierce, benevolent.
Hannah jumped back, stupefied: But I didn’t plug anything in yet. In fact, I couldn’t have turned it on. My passcode was just canceled. I no longer have my university ID!
Then the lecture hall filled up with every student she had ever taught, two or three to a seat, holding in their laps spiral notebooks, sketchpads, computers, day planners. Every pen and finger was raised to start note-taking.
“Walk right in,” boomed Sappho’s voice, undulating from the overhead projector. “And sit tight, now. All of you. Listen to me, sisters. We’re going for a ride.”
• • •
Sappho’s guest lecture might have lasted a year, or longer. Hannah couldn’t tell. She and all her former students were under the spell of the lyre, and swept up in the great recital of ancient women’s knowledge that had never been written down. Always, it had been passed along orally, until a few, like Sappho, dared to write down poems of women’s love, only to have such words burned. Now the overhead projector of Hannah’s old lecture hall showed the course of goddess history, the span of earthly time from a woman-centered belief system and life cycle to the coming warfare of patriarchy. Here were the goddesses of mercy and compassion ranging from ancient Babylon to China, from Iceland to Guatemala; the great Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, the Dianic and Mycenaean cultures, vestal virgins dancing in the sisterhood of guarding women’s temples. Diana. Gaia. Aphrodite. The Nordic goddess Freyja, Ragana of Latvia, Spider Woman of the Navajo, Lakshmi and Durga and Kali, Pele and Oya and Anansi and Hine and Kunapipi.
Then the class saw all the women whose folk rituals were abruptly declared witchcraft, their torture and martyrdom assured. Now terrified women turned on their own, naming old friends as witches and blasphemers; here were the queens like Spain’s Isabella who found power in piety, ordering the Inquisition to burn other women alive. Other queens were once girls, married young to ambitious older men, locked away in towers; other girls were raped by wandering men and came to beg for mercy from these queens, their illegitimate pregnancies a mark of village shame. For Mary Hamilton’s borne a babe. Songs passed warnings to women, between women, and many a song and lullaby held hints of the old Goddess. But men had the law on their side. Always.
Then Sappho seemed to find a place of pause, intoning, “Class dismissed.” The students of Hannah’s long classroom career rose and bowed, saluting both Hannah and Sappho with their spiral notepads and sheathed laptops raised in tribute, and they vanished, leaving chalk dust. Sappho stepped forward from the flat two-dimensional plane of the projection screen, shook her gown once, and freed two enormous wings from shoulder blades that seemed to stretch forever, gathering Hannah in. The screen went blank. The room went dark. Beneath Sappho’s wings, which enclosed and lifted her protectively, Hannah felt herself rising, until the chalk dust and splintered podium of her old classroom were below her.
Below her, beneath her. “That job was indeed beneath you,” boomed Sappho, soaring toward some unimaginable upward rest stop, her gown never once flapping as the atmosphere heated and froze, pulsed with mist and baked with desert winds, ingathering time and space. “You’re ready to do more. And we have work for you.”
They rose above the familiar and unfamiliar, passing town water towers and radio broadcasting towers, the distant blinking signals Hannah had looked to from her window on so many nights, first while writing her dissertation and later during the long breakup with her lover before Isabel. Up past the towers, past tall buildings designating cities she had known, lived in, visited. Over the surf of oceans Hannah had known, and then above the shapes of hugely spouting whales. Then up above the footpaths of mountains Hannah once hiked on family vacations, over their snow-jagged crests and dry volcanic calderas, to the rims of other earthly peaks and constructions: Alps and pyramids, Himalayas and Mayan temples. Of a sudden they were hailed, midair, by a very old and steadily buzzing aeroplane. Hannah gasped as she recognized Amelia Earhart, who nodded and waved at her with one leather-gloved hand. “It’s her! So, she’s—”
“Orbiting,” Sappho called over the world’s broadest shoulder. “Orbiting and watching over us. Like so many misunderstood women, she just didn’t want to be tied down.”
They zoomed into darkness, around a bulky space station, and beyond. “UP!” shouted Sappho, and dense whirling clouds parted, finally revealing a floating slice of recognizable working women’s space. It was Hannah’s office. But not Hannah at that desk. A far grander figure, professorial mortarboard tilted on a massive head from which white hair flowed like water, rose to greet them, and Sappho deposited Hannah in the scarred red chair beside the desk— the chair Hannah once used for her own students during office hours. It still held the anxious sweat of every undergraduate who had ever come in to argue about a grade, to beg for an extension on an overdue paper, or, more thrillingly, to seize academia’s greatest dare and declare a major in women’s history. Hannah felt the chair alive beneath her legs, pulsing into her back. “We’ve got your back, Dr. Stern,” whispered the thousands of students she had taught. (Even those, Hannah marveled, whom she’d disappointed by explaining that, no, they wouldn’t be earning an A; learn to live with the B+.) But why was she here? Why had she been summoned to office hours with, with . . .
• • •
For this was She. The great Professor-in-the-Sky, the Overhead, the Overhead Projector herself. The grand displaced department chair who orbited, like Amelia, in search of ways to restore women’s history from its shattered vessels to its source. This was She, the Matriarch, the Goddess, who had lost her job to patriarchy, to God the Father. In that far more important and longer-unresolved tension than Hannah’s own academic turnover, this was the wise one who had been told a better system was in place, a new telling of origins, a better explanation of Creation. And for how long had She floated, out of office, her calendar of rituals forbidden, her followers declared insane, heretical, banned and burned and pilloried and outcast? With rage, She drummed long fingers on Her desk, swept papers and clay figurines off its top where down to earth they fell, long buried, marveled at when found. And all her powers locked in that Projector, which sometimes hummed to life and turned on without warning, projecting truth and justice, downward-beaming. For the many feminists who had returned to Her, how harsh that office hours were near impossible to get. And classes canceled, but for times like these, when portals opened for the lost— like Hannah.
“Call me Ova,” said She, anticipating Hannah’s question. “It’s short for Overhead, as you see. And Sappho is just one of my angels in waiting, as is Amelia, who finally found the flight she wanted, orbiting earth in protection of women, in service to me.” She poured a jewel-like coffee brew from what had once been Hannah’s old Thermos bottle, serving them both in Hannah’s souvenir music festival mugs. Sappho, standing guard in her worn sandals, said “No thanks” in lilting Greek: Oxi efcharisto.
And the interview began. For, of course, this was what it was, the next and ultimate job interview for Hannah, with the goddess CEO, the Dean of Deans, the Big Document. Hannah dared one burning sip of Ova’s coffee; instantly, she could hear the rhetoric of feminism pounding in her ears.
So you lost your job due to budget cuts. Because women’s history isn’t valued, yes. But, dear one: that is a very old story; they pushed me out from My job, too; and surely you can see you are not the first to be unjustly fired. Most women never gain the opportunities you’ve had. Let’s look.
The overhead projector whirred again, showing Hannah other scenes from history, anguished women’s faces, shortened lives.
Here are the ones before you who lost their teaching jobs for being gay, in every university that feared a lesbian’s power— refusing her right to be there.
Here are the ones never hired at all, before women’s history was a subject taught in schools, whose knowledge was denied, belittled, lost.
She saw sociologist Pauline Bart, shamed and scolded by a skeptical male colleague who declared there wasn’t enough material to teach one course on women’s history; she saw Bart and feminist friends return in the night to tack up a list of one thousand women’s names to that professor’s door.
Here are the ones who never earned a graduate degree because they were not white, all doctoral programs closed to them in segregation’s time.
Here are the ones who had an education through college, but never heard a word about women’s history, only the ideas and accomplishments of men.
Here are the ones who never had an education, denied them due to gender, race, religion, disability or clas
s— the girls burning to learn who learned in secret.
Here are the ones who made women’s history but who were thrust out of their new empowered roles when history changed: the Rosie the Riveter workers; the guardians of museums during war or those who hid treasures from invaders, but received no credit later; the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League; those who broke records of production and athleticism, written out of textbooks, names unknown.
Here are the ones at the gates of higher education, qualified beyond the males admitted, forced into a quota system, not allowed to study “manly” subjects.
Here are the ones destroyed at birth because they were born girls.
Here are the ones allowed to live, but starved and stunted, married off at ten.
Here are the ones who worked as slaves when the law said one could not teach a slave to read.
Here are the ones beaten by their husbands for teaching slaves to read.
Here are the ones who taught themselves to read but never owned a book.
Here are the ones who walked ten miles to borrow books only to be told by so-called educated women, “This is a white library, honey— you can’t come in.”
Here are the ones who lost their jobs because they offered books and space to children who were not white.
Here are the ones who lost their jobs because they put books about being gay into the hands of gay kids.
Here are the ones who lost their jobs because they wrote those books.
Here are the one who lost their jobs because they sold those books.
Here are the ones who lost their jobs because they taught that those books existed.
Here are the ones whose contributions are being erased as history moves “online.”
With each recitation, Hannah saw the eons during which women were denied their place in education, faces blinking as the great Overhead projected their stories, their histories. And as She pronounced each slight against the women across time, the Overhead swept an object off Her desk, figurines of women’s history falling downward, coming to rest, Hannah understood, in caves and crevices on Earth, later to be discovered and misunderstood by men. What stayed with Hannah was that image of the little girl who had walked so many miles in her best clothes, her Sunday shoes pinching already blistered heels, awaiting the reward of just one book, only to be told that the free public library books were in fact only for white children. There could be no going back in time to fix that record, to alter segregation and Jim Crow. There was, though, the writing that came from it, memoirs that told the story of suppression and survival. Those books held truths Hannah had assigned her own students to read. But now she had no students to mentor in that way.