The Office

Adelaide Westbrook had not planned to stay in the building past five o’clock, but by the time the light changed in the hallway window from afternoon to evening she was still sitting on the floor of the third-floor office with her back against the wall and her sociology textbook open on her knees and six other students around her, and no one was leaving because leaving was the thing they had agreed not to do.

It was October 1971. She was twenty-two, a senior, three semesters past when she should have graduated because she had dropped a semester in 1969 to work and another in 1970 because her mother was sick, and now she was back and finishing and also sitting on the floor of an office that did not belong to her, in a building that did not belong to her, on a campus that had admitted her and educated her and also never quite made room for her.

The office belonged to the Associated Students of the University of Nevada. ASUN, the student government. It was a small room on the third floor of the Jot Travis Student Union, a desk and two chairs and a filing cabinet and a telephone, and for the past four days it had been occupied by the Black Student Union, twenty-three members rotating in shifts of six or seven, because the university had been promising them space for three years and the promises had not turned into walls or a door or a key.

Adelaide’s father Walter had told her a story once about the first day he worked at the New China Club in 1952. He had shown up at the kitchen door and Bill Fong had put him on the line and that was it, no ceremony, no speech, just work. But before that day, Walter had applied at six other casinos and been told no at every one. Not because he could not cook. Because he was Black and the kitchens were white and the rule was the rule until someone broke it. Fong broke it. Walter walked in.

Adelaide thought about that now, in this office on the third floor, because the parallel was not exact but it was there. The university had not said no. The university had said yes, of course, we support you, we value diversity, we will find you space. And then it had said it again the next semester, and the next, and the space had not materialized, and the BSU had met in borrowed rooms and empty classrooms and once in a parking lot when the classroom they had reserved was locked and no one could find the key, and Adelaide had watched this happen and watched it happen again and finally she and Stan Davis and the others had decided that the way you got a room was the same way Walter got a kitchen: you walked in.

They had walked in Monday morning. Stan had the key to the ASUN office because he had been on the student senate the previous year and no one had asked for the key back. They had walked in and sat down and Stan had called the president’s office and said, we are here, and we would like to discuss the space we were promised, and we are not leaving until there is something to discuss.

The first day had been tense. Campus police came and stood in the doorway and asked if there was a problem and Stan said no, there was no problem, they were students using a student facility. The police left. The dean came on the second day and said this was not the way to handle things and Stan said they had tried other ways for three years. The dean left. A reporter from the Sagebrush came on the third day and wrote a story. The story ran on the front page with the headline BLACK STUDENTS OCCUPY ASUN OFFICE and the word “occupy” made it sound like a war, which it was not. It was seven people sitting on a floor reading textbooks and waiting.

Adelaide had been here since Tuesday. She went home to shower and change and came back. She ate sandwiches that friends brought from the cafeteria. She studied for her sociology midterm, which was Thursday, which was tomorrow, which she would take because she was not dropping another class, not this time, not when she was this close to done.

The number of Black students at the university had more than doubled in the sixties. Federal money, new recruitment programs, athletic scholarships that brought young men from Oakland and Los Angeles and Las Vegas to this small campus in the desert. But double a small number was still a small number, and the campus was still a place where Adelaide could walk from the library to the science building and not see another Black face, where her professors still sometimes looked surprised when she raised her hand, where the sororities on Greek Row had never pledged a Black woman and no one talked about why.

She had not come here to make history. She had come here because her mother Lavinia had said go, had said your grandmother Eliza never had the chance and your father never had the chance and you have it and you will take it. Adelaide had taken it. She had enrolled in 1967, a freshman from Black Springs, six miles north of downtown, the girl who had grown up hauling water jugs until she was nine years old, the girl whose parents had organized a civic improvement corporation to get a pipe laid to their own house, and she was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity and quiet about the rest. She had been quiet for three years. She was not quiet now.

Stan came back from the hallway with news. The dean had called. There was an offer. Not the ASUN office, which had always been temporary, but a room in the basement of the Jot Travis building. A dedicated space. The Black Student Union would have a key, a phone line, a budget allocation from ASUN beginning spring semester. It was not everything. It was not the freestanding center they had asked for, not the staffed resource office, not the permanent claim on the campus map. But it was a room, and it was theirs, and it was more than they had been given in three years of asking politely.

“Do we take it?” Stan said.

Adelaide looked at the six faces in the room. She knew them all. She knew their majors and their hometowns and who was working two jobs and who was one bad grade from losing a scholarship. She knew what it cost each of them to be here, on this floor, in this occupation that was not quite a protest and not quite a demand and not quite a conversation but was all three at once.

“We take it,” she said. “And we keep asking for the rest.”

They left the office at seven. Adelaide walked across campus in the dark, past the library and the quad and the old brick buildings and the newer concrete ones, past the planetarium with its gold-lit dome visible against the night sky to the north, past the parking lot where she had left her car four days ago. She drove north on Virginia Street, past downtown, past the casino lights, past the neighborhoods thinning out, and turned onto the dirt road that led to Black Springs, six miles from campus, a world away.

Her mother was in the kitchen when she came in. Lavinia looked up from the table, where she was writing a letter, because Lavinia was always writing a letter, to the county or the water authority or the school board, always writing the next request, the next statement of what was owed.

“Well?” Lavinia said.

“We got a room,” Adelaide said.

Lavinia nodded once, as if this were no more and no less than what she had expected. “Good,” she said. “Now sit down and eat something.”

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