The Fall of Rome: A Novel

The Fall of Rome: A Novel

Latin instructor Jerome Washington is a man out of place. The lone African-American teacher at the Chelsea School, an elite all-boys boarding school in Connecticut, he has spent nearly two decades trying not to appear too "racial." So he is unnerved when Rashid Bryson, a promising black inner-city student who is new to the school, seeks Washington as a potential ally against Chelsea's citadel of white privilege. Preferring not to align himself with Bryson, Washington rejects the boy's friendship. Surprised and dismayed by Washington's response, Bryson turns instead to Jana Hansen, a middle-aged white divorcée who is also new to the school -- and who has her own reasons for becoming involved in the lives of both Bryson and Washington. Southgate makes her debut as a writer to watch in this compelling, provocative tale of how race and class ensnare Hansen, Washington, and Bryson as they journey toward an inevitable and ultimately tragic confrontation. "White people were everywhere, hair flopping in their eyes, that faint wet-dog smell." A controlled fury propels this novel about a token black teacher at an élite New England boarding school. Jerome Washington is a classics scholar who, armed with a Harvard education and an accent purged of his Georgia-sharecropper roots, has spent his life trying to defeat racism through sheer decorum. But his hermetic existence is threatened by the arrival of a black student from a Brooklyn ghetto and a white female teacher who fancies herself a champion of the underprivileged. The author shows her hand too early; still, she remains true to the enigma of her hero, and her rendering of his voice—pensive, rueful, and entirely devoid of self-pity—is convincing. Although we know that his downfall is inevitable, it moves us just the same. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Southgate has given us a genuinely tragic figure...a man brought down by his own tragic flaw, and thus a man who has much to teach us that far transcends race. Liza Featherstone Newsday Beautifully executed....[ The Fall of Rome ] deserves to be widely read. The New Yorker [Southgate] remains true to the enigma of her hero, and her rendering of his voice -- pensive, rueful, and entirely devoid of self-pity -- is convincing. Michael Pakenham Baltimore Sun A tour de force of what might be called post-Movement race realities in the United States. Martha Southgate is a graduate of Smith College, with an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was books editor at Essence and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, and Rosie, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is at work on her next novel. You can visit her Web site at www.marthasouthgate.com Chapter One: The Roman Way The Chelsea School is in the middle of a field so lush and vivid as to make the eyes water and shine with its light. There's grass everywhere, acres and acres of it, green and falling away, rolling. Up on the hill, a grand red barn sits, incongruous, bright, the biggest in three counties. Black cows dot the hillside. Sometimes you can see boys in orange down jackets walking among them, slapping the rumps of the cows to get them to shift and calling to each other in raucous, sarcastic voices. But the barn serves no real purpose here. It was built by the school's founder in the belief that manual labor in the open air would make stalwart men out of callow boys. The boys can take a class called Animal Husbandry, playing at being the farmers they will never be. The small amount of milk that the cows produce is donated to a nearby bottler and sold in greenish glass bottles for more than three times its value. I have served this school since 1974. For most of that time, I have been the only Negro on the faculty. (A note: I am fully aware that Negro is no longer the fashionable term. It is, however, the term I prefer to use.) I have always been, and remain, the only Negro in the Classics Department. Given the waning interest in the classics manifested by today's young men, the fathers of the school have seen fit to render me the only classics teacher. It could be worse, I suppose. When I first arrived here, there was some serious talk of eliminating the entire department in the name of "relevance." Only an impassioned plea by the then-department head and some grumbling from our more conservative alumni preserved the few classes that are left. Fortunately, I have enough students to fill them, but there is not much demand for my knowledge of Greco-Roman culture outside of those classes. The vigorous and lengthy discussions that I imagine used to take place regarding matters of the classical mind are all in the past now. When I was hired, John Hays, who was headmaster at the time, said that I was exactly the person they were looking f