Walking with Brindle a mile or so to the university campus though I had no classes that morning. At the sandstone building intending to visit the departments of economics, political science, statistics but encountering, in the first department, a mailbox belonging to JONES, TYRELL M.

As it turned out, Tyrell Jones wasn’t a student here. Not even a graduate student. In fact, Tyrell Jones was an assistant professor, a faculty member at Mohawk.

How stunned I was at this revelation. How stricken with embarrassment, shame! While I’d been taking university courses for years, dropping out, transferring, beginning again, wayward and uncertain as a rudderless oarless boat on a fast-moving stream, squandering my youth, Tyrell Jones had kept a steady course. He’d earned a Ph.D., or so I assumed. He’d joined the faculty of a respectable state university branch and was teaching a subject of which I knew virtually nothing—economics.

I was proud of him. I was happy for him. Almost I felt that I might burst into tears.

I had not seen Tyrell Jones since graduation at Port Oriskany High. Like me, he’d been awarded a four-year tuition scholarship to one of the state universities. Like me, he’d received other prizes at commencement among them a math prize.

I recalled that, after Mr. Sandman’s abrupt departure, a substitute math teacher was hired to finish the semester. Despite his high grades in math Tyrell had not been selected by Mr. Sandman for membership in the Math Club but the substitute teacher, Ms. Frankl, made up for this injustice by selecting him; in our senior year Tyrell was elected president by the eight or ten members (including me). How wonderful it was, I thought. Tyrell Jones had not (evidently) been harmed by the racist Sandman. Perhaps, unlike me, Tyrell had been able to forget him.

“What a darling little dog,” the departmental secretary cried, smiling at Brindle, as everyone did who encountered the feisty little bulldog. And lifting her eyes to me. “What breed is he?”

I told her, as I told everyone who asked. Numerous people each day, strangers who smiled happily at the little dog, as at me, with a warmth they would not have thought to exude to me, otherwise.

In such ways, sudden friends are made. Sudden alliances, linked by a naive and sentimental affection for a miniature bulldog with disconcertingly wide-set bulging eyes, who had come to adore this public role, and to beg me, tugging at his leash, for ever more attention.

The newly befriended departmental secretary struck up a conversation with me. Told me, when I asked after Professor Jones, that he was “new since last year” at Mohawk and “a very nice—quiet—person.” She paused as if she had more to say and then thought better of it.

“Is Professor Jones the first black professor in economics?”—innocently I asked.