“Conversion” – After Donald Roy, the pastor of the Lonesome Mountain American Christian Church, loses the church building to the bank and runs off with the congregation’s remaining money and the wife of one of its members, the Islamic Community of Western North Carolina takes over the building and converts it to a mosque.
On that Tuesday twenty years ago, I was a couple of weeks into my first year of teaching at East Tennessee State University. I had two ENGL 1010 (freshman composition) classes that morning, one at 9:45 and another at 11:15. I arrived on campus early and closed myself in my office to do last-minute prep.
The earlier class was a strange one in which hardly anybody ever talked–not to me (unless called upon), not even to each other. Although cell phones weren’t quite as ubiquitous as they are now, I’m guessing that at least a few of these students were aware of what was underway in New York and DC. Nobody said a word.
I finished that first class by 11:05 and returned to my office for a few minutes, where I sat with my door closed and readied myself for the next class.
As I walked out of the office and down the hall to meet my 11:15 folks, thankfully a lively bunch so different from the group just before, I remember noticing a strange quietness and hearing snatches of conversations that struck me as odd. I walked into that talkative 11:15 class, where the students were in an uproar about what had happened that morning.
In other words, both towers had been hit and had fallen before I knew anything about it.
My students were telling me what had happened when my department chair, Dr. Judy Slagle, knocked on the door and said ETSU was closing. I let the students go, drove to Southside Elementary and picked up Raleigh, who was in 4th grade, and drove to our rented house on Franklin Street. The rest of the day was spent glued to the television.
As I think about it now, I realize that the change in the world–White “Christian” America’s sudden awareness of its vulnerability–is what made my story “Conversion” possible. As the world voiced its outrage against the devastation New York and DC (and Pennsylvania) experienced that morning, I felt a hope that violence and terrorism might draw the world’s humans together regardless of race, religion, nationality, and so on, but that hope was a pretty bubble that lasted only a moment. What was momentarily a colorblind humanity united against terrorists of any color or stripe unfortunately dissolved into the USA’s lengthy “War on Terror,” a war of mostly White against Black and Brown people, which has been too much like waging war on the wind or on ghosts, ultimately adding legions of ghosts to those of 9/11.
To be honest, I would rather have not been able to write “Conversion.” But it is written. If interested, you can read it at Still: The Journal or in my book A Twilight Reel: Stories.
