Desks, chairs, and portable blackboards were stacked as barricades at the front and back entrances. We were more afraid of the jock fraternity next door than the police. By eight o’clock, when the first classes were to be held, over a hundred of us had filed into the building, filling the halls and foyer and front windows on every floor. I took up a post on the second floor. From the outside the building must have looked totally occupied. At least, that was the impression we wanted to give. I saw white students and a few blacks gathered outside; some paused and just walked away, bewildered. Some I knew from dance class, the dormitory, the theater. Many were simply confused, astounded perhaps that the building had been taken and that black students were now in charge. We were honoring a fallen hero, a symbol of something we had but didn’t quite have, and needed to have. Some radical white students gathered with picket signs, expressing their support. By noon more students had congregated outside than there were inside. Someone quickly arranged an impromptu rally. A few student writers read from their poetry. One of the organizers asked me to dance something “political,” but I declined, remembering his look of disdain when I first said I was studying to be a dancer, not a doctor or lawyer like the rest of them. From my window post in the empty classroom I looked out and did nothing more than watch.

What I saw scared me. It was my history professor, Robert James Woods, hurrying angrily along the front of Clarkson. He was determined to hold his class elsewhere. He stopped at the barricade, looked up at all the windows. I saw him, but he looked at me without any hint of recognition. And I always sat in the front row of his class. We must all have looked like mold on brick to him. He turned away disgusted. I remained at the window, stunned. Then I saw someone else. Thick, wavy brown hair, angular forehead and chin, horn-rimmed glasses, stubby fingers clutching a reporter’s steno pad. Eyes like reaching hands. When he looked straight at me, I felt pulled into his whole face. His stare made me feel weightless, light, angled toward him on wings suddenly fluttering from inside me and begging for air. I wanted then to get under his skin, travel at breakneck speed through his veins and right to his heart. But there I was, locked inside the building, barricaded away on the second floor. So I waved to him slowly, with all the fingers of one hand. He nodded and waved back. His hands were much larger than I thought.