Emails from Hell, part six.

The sixth in a series of email dispatches I have received from our correspondent in Hell.

{beginning of email}

            As Joe, Andrew, and I came back from lunch, we saw the spirit of a young woman sitting on a rock, looking very despondent. I started to ask my companions why she was sad, but Andrew said, “You’d best go talk to her yourself.” They left me alone.

            I walked up to the young woman and introduced myself. She looked up and gave me a little smile, then resumed her somber, pensive stare at nothing. I could tell that while she was alive she was attractive in a petite, small-faced sort of way. Maybe it was her big eyes, but I had the impression that she did a lot of thinking and reflecting back before she was in hell, too.

            “So,” I said, “I’m new here, so you pretty much know what I’m going to ask you.”

            “I was a history teacher,” she said.

            “That doesn’t exactly answer my question. Why should a history teacher be in Hell?”

            “I was a history teacher in Oklahoma,” she said. “Does that help?”

            “Not really,” I said.

            “I taught AP history,” she added.

            “As in, advanced placement?”

            “Yeah. High school kids could take AP courses and get college credit. It helped to reduce college expenses and also it helped them get into the better schools. I didn’t get paid very much. Teachers in Oklahoma barely get paid enough to survive on.”

            “But, it sounds like you were doing a valuable service to your students,” I said. “I still don’t understand. How could the conservatives—the ones who get to determine who goes to hell or not—possibly object to that?”

            “It was the content of the course,” she said. “That’s why they outlawed it.”

            “When did they do that?”

            “January of 2016. I stopped teaching it when it was outlawed, but I was still guilty of having taught it.”

            “You put some stuff into your course that the conservatives didn’t approve of?”

            “Actually, it is a nationally standardized course. I only taught what the course required. Oh, and I didn’t get paid much.”

            “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “The conservatives in Oklahoma sent you to hell for teaching a nationally-standardized history course. So, what was in this course that they could have objected to so strongly?”

            “They said that high school history teachers should just teach good things about what white Americans have done, and none of the bad things. So, during the course, I taught that Europeans introduced diseases such as smallpox that killed up to 90 percent of the Native Americans. I taught about the genocide—I didn’t use that term at the time; I do now, because it doesn’t make any difference anymore—of Native Americans at the hands and bullets of the white Europeans and, later, white Americans. And I taught about slavery. And I didn’t get paid much. Did I say that already?”

            “But, those things all happened, didn’t they? Slavery and all?”

            “And more, but I could barely scratch the surface of the evils that white oppressors inflicted upon non-whites.”

            “Well, if you were to not teach those things, what exactly were you supposed to teach?”

            “Watch your head,” she said.

            “That’s impossible. Nobody can watch his or her head. Your eyes are inside of your head, and you can’t see your own head…Ouch!” A large object hit me on the head that I was not watching. It knocked me to the ground. Of course, being a spirit, I could not die. I looked at the object. It was a large, leather-bound book. I heard loud laughter from above me, coming from Heaven. I looked up and saw the spirit of a fat white man pointing at me and laughing more.

            Then I looked at the book. It was engraved, Oklahoma Version of American History. I went over to pick it up. I opened it randomly in the middle. It was a pop-up book. Up popped a cardboard cartoon version of a Pilgrim man with musket and white collar and black hat. There was also a cardboard cartoon of an Indian, with feathers, begging him for mercy. I read the accompanying text. “The Pilgrimes brought Christianity to the Injuns, and if they had only humbly accepted it, this glorious gift from the Conqueror God, then it would not have been necessatory to kill them.”

            I opened to another page. Up popped the cardboard simulacrum of an Indian with sores covering his skin. The text read, “God sent smallpox and other diseases as punishings against the Injuns for not accepting His Holy Word.”

            Another page showed a well-dressed, clean black slave smiling as he picked cotton. “Most slaves had a lot better life on the plantation than they did back in Aferca.” Right then, from inside the spine, a Confederate flag on a penile pole popped up just as straight as you please.

            Another page showed Native Americans being herded into forts by white soldiers.

            “This must be the Cherokee Trail of Tears,” I said.

            “Every tribe, all five hundred of them, had their own Trails of Tears,” said the teacher.

            The text said, “While in forts and later on reservations, the Injuns lived on welfare handouts from the white government. The government gave them flour, salt, oil, and baking soda. They should have been thankful that we encouraged them to invent frybread.”

            On another page, a big penile oil derrick popped up. The woman gagged just a little when she saw it. “That was my least favorite part,” she said.

            The text read, “The Injuns in Oklahoma had land with oil under it that they could not use, so the white Americans had to take it away from them.”

            I was getting tired of this. As if she read my mind, the woman asked, “Are you getting tired of this?”

            “This is what they wanted you to teach?”

            The voice from Heaven laughed loudly again.

            I hurried to the end. The last page said, “All true history comes from the Holy Bible. Throughout the six thousand years of human existence, white people have been God’s people, starting with Adam and Eve…” Who were, of course, standing right there, in the altogether but tastefully hidden by leaves and fruits and snakes and mushrooms and beavers.

            I slammed the book shut. At that moment, I noticed a little filament connecting the book to Heaven. The filament yanked the book right back up to the fat man, who threw it back down. This time it handed on the woman and squished her. She was a pile of guts, but slowly she reformed into a woman—even her spirit-clothes were clean again—and the book flew back up to heaven. The man threw it down again, and pulled it back up.

            “You should get out of here,” I said.

            “And go where?” she asked.

            “Advanced placement classes help students get into good colleges, and help them afford college, any college. Oklahoma legislators were willing to close that door of opportunity for their own students?” I was puzzled.

            “They considered it a small price to pay for proving to everyone that they were God’s chosen people on Earth,” she said. “They underfunded education, refused to raise the minimum wage, refused to allow unions, gave the oil companies anything they wanted—they basically insured that Oklahoma would be a source of cheap labor and raw materials for the rest of the nation and the rest of the world.”

            This time the book hit me. After I reformed, I answered her question. “Join us. John, Andrew, Joe, Mickey, and the others. We’ll form a little discussion group and go around looking at things. And if the book lands on the rest of us, I think we would gladly put up with it for the pleasure of your company.”

            “That is the nicest thing anybody ever said to me…”

            I told her my name. She was Philomena. I think she had been black back when she was on Earth, but she had blanched so much from depression that it was hard to tell.

            “One last question,” I said. “Doesn’t that man up there ever get tired of throwing the Book at you?”

            “No,” Philomena said. “These are the people who seriously think you can be happy by sitting around the glassy sea and chanting praises to the Lamb with the Seven Horns nonstop forever.”

            We rejoined the others and I introduced her, to the great pleasure of my friends.

{end of email}