The students scribbled that into their notes. Not Braden though. Braden sat there unmoved by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s words regarding motherhood.

“Braden, take out your earbuds,” Victoria said in a sharp voice.

The young man sat up and heaved a sigh before pulling the earbuds away from his head. He wrapped them around his neck and continued to stare into space.

“Stowe’s sudden shift to second person, to address her audience is a literary device called apostrophe,” she said as she made her way back to the whiteboard. She wrote the word in large block letters and put an asterisk beside it. “The guilt a reader should feel should be counted as pathos. Stowe employs it regularly while Douglass lets the facts, or logos, do most of the heavy lifting.”

When she turned around, she was met with a raised hand from the front row. A young man beside Braden asked, “So Douglass was relying on logos rather than pathos?”

“He did both,” she corrected. “But he used his writing style in such a way that made the events more like a catalogue of atrocities. He took great effort to list each overseer on his plantation, but all of the descriptions are still vivid enough for the reader to feel something.”

Satisfied with her answer, the young man wrote the information in his notebook.

“I’m going to cut it short today,” Victoria announced, which began the immediate shuffle of papers and books. “Because I want to use the next class to cover the Negro spirituals. We’re going to listen to a few before breaking into smaller groups to analyze the lyrics.”

As students packed up and filed out of the classroom, Victoria spied Braden trying to be among the first to leave. Which was pretty easy since he hadn’t unloaded his belongings or taken off his outerwear.

“Braden, why don’t you hang back,” she called after him.

The young man stopped short and lifted his face to the ceiling for another loud sigh. He made an about-face and returned to the front of the classroom. She waited for the class to empty before gearing herself up for another lecture.

“You were forty-five minutes late to a fifty-five-minute lecture,” she started. “Do I have to remind you that participation is part of your grade?”

He shrugged. “So I was late.” His slouch and lack of eye contact made her grit her teeth. It wasn’t bad enough that he was late, but his apathy was insulting. Had he been one of her father’s enlisted privates, Braden would have been quarterdecked faster than he could give another shrug.

“But it’s a daily occurrence,” Victoria said in a voice edged with iron. “I don’t know what makes it so difficult to get to my class, but you need to get it together and hop to it. Because the next time you arrive late, I will ask you to leave and mark you absent. Enough absences, and I’ll have to dock your grade by a full letter. I only use five letters and you’re already down to four.”