By TINA IYER
Features Editor
 

I arrived early, and was busy trying to find a credit card that I hadn't maxed out to pay for a bottle of wine when Nero walked through the door. We ordered our food, I directed him to the table I had chosen, and he browsed through the wine racks as I paid for my own purchases. "Audie," Nero called out to Austin's proprietor from the back room, "Where do you keep those Spanish wines?"

Nero and Conrad shouted across the store, Conrad pointing out the wine and describing a fine wine that drank the night before while Nero listening and browsed.

We sat down after our food had arrived. Nero had a bowl of gazpacho and some slices of rye bread on his plate, but he opened his bottle of Stewart's Classic Key Lime first. He drank, made a face, and laughed his signature great booming laugh. "This is sooo sweet!"

I asked him if it was like bug juice, the diluted Kool-Aid drink often served at camp. "I wouldn't know about camp," Nero said. I blushed; already it was obvious that Nero and I had vastly different backgrounds.

Nero grew up in Alabama, living with his grandparents for the first five years of his life, and when his grandmother died, he returned to his parents. His childhood was spent in a suburb of New Orleans.

Or as the Louisiana native Nero pronounces it, "Nah Ahlins."

Do you hate it when people pronounce it "New Orleens?" I asked.

Nero shrugged, "I don't hate it. I just know they're not from there."

Given that Nero's childhood was very different from most Bates students', I was interested to see what Nero thought of the average Batesie's life experience.

"The big issue, the difference, is that I grew up in an explicitly enforced segregated community," Nero said. Not enforced merely by economics, he clarified, but by law. "Most students now don't know what that's like."

"I didn't go to camp, I learned to swim as an adult; my high school didn't have a pool or a gym," Nero said.

Furthermore, the culture of the South is different from that of New England, where most Bates students are from. "By the time I was eighteen, I don't know how many funerals I'd been to," Nero commented, explaining that these funerals had nothing to do with high crime rates; funerals were just an event that the entire community participated in. He also mentioned his surprise that so many of his students have never seen a dead body.

The conversation steered back to segregation. Nero rattled off the history of his schooling, "I went to a segregated elementary school, a segrated junior high, an all- white high school, and an all-black college."

Stop. An all-white high school?

Nero laughed and said, " I was the first black to enter and graduate from the school. That was hell."

This enrollment at the school was purely accidental. Nero was supposed to go to the St. Augustine School, a black Catholic high school, but he inadvertently missed the deadline for the application.

His mother, broken up and crying, conveniently wept in the presence of someone who offered to get her son into the all-white high school.

Although the school was not technically only for white students, it was in a white Catholic community, in a white suburb. "Their mascot was a Confederate Soldier," Nero explained.

At this point, Conrad politely interrupted us to explain more about Spanish wines to Nero. Nero promised to return later for a possible purchase.

"Racism is insitutionalized in the South in a way that would be unimaginable in the North. Still," said Nero.

While there were a few other black students at school with Nero, few remained to graduate. But Nero said he was an "integration warrior," committed to the future of an integrated society. "You have to understand the ethos of integration, how important it was," he said.

For those integrationists, practicing integration for oneself felt like practicing it for all black people. Nero realizes now that such is not the case.

Harassed on a daily basis and once even told that his skin was the color of feces, Nero kept these incidents from his parents. "There were many things that I didn't tell my parents. If I had told them, they would have been too worried," he said.

Nero also hid his homesexuality from his parents. "With my parents? Good Methodist people?" Nero shook his head and smiled, "I couldn't have told them."

This silence was also part of the integration warrior mentality of keeping silent. Nero explained, "You had to demonstrate that you were above their ignorance."

His high school teachers were, by and large, not supportive. There was only one who truly affected Nero, encouraging him to read and love Shakespeare.

Nero had friends at school, people to eat with and talk to in the halls, but they did not cross the race tracks for him. His "real" friends were from his black church.

After high school, Nero proceeded to Xavier University in New Orleans. Initially, Nero was an anomaly at this all-black school. "I was the weird guy from the suburbs who went to school with all those white people and talked like them. I said things like `golly,'" Nero said.

Although a theater major, his first semester he was not cast in any shows because he "didn't talk right." A second semester performance in Chekhov's "The Marriage Proposal" boosted Nero's popularity.

Nero earned a Ph.D in communications, but it is teaching rhetoric and African-American studies that is his passion. Rhetoric, commonly misunderstood as sophistry or insincere oratory, is "at its broadest, the study of human communication," Nero explained. In his classes Nero focuses on oratory, film, some literature, theater and song.

The rhetoric department is an interdisciplinary one, and thus Nero and Robert Branham, professor of rhetoric, are the only

professors in the department per se. Nonetheless, Nero is a very visible figure on campus.

He is both supportive of students and vocal with his own views.

"I enjoy student life. I try to respect students, although sometimes it's hard," he said. "I believe in what students have to say, in students having rights."

It is students, after all, who were responsible for the institution of African-American studies in the academy. Nero told me, "Student protest and activism play an important role in the change and transformation of the academy."

As an African-American, Nero still finds living in Lewiston strange. Even after six years, he is still stared at when he's out on the streets. Nero compared this to his experience in South Africa.

"I loved being in South Africa. It's an amazing feeling to walk out of your door and see all black people. In South Africa, there are labels, of course, but there are flattering categories for black people, and that is so affirming."

Nero finds that this affirmation is only available only in places where blacks are the numerical majority.

Besides his paid position as professor, Nero moonlights as a safe sex proponent. I questioned him about the famed jar of condoms that sit on the desk in his office. Filled with different brands and types of condoms, Nero places the contraceptives on his desk with the hope that when he's out of the office, students will help themselves.

Nero shook his head, "I need to get fresh ones. They're a year old now. I need to check the expiration dates on them."

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