There is Nothing Outside of Potionmaking Discourse: Day 18, and 32,052 Words

One more day of EsNoWriMo down! I had been planning what I wrote today for a while now, and I'm happy that things are finally moving forward here. Jeanette has a lot going on today-- I hope you enjoy!

Jeanette Talismann had spent her entire life in possession of an excessive awareness that she was a product of intermarriage. She was well aware of her family’s story, even though it was something that was seldom discussed. When her Mystic mother, Rebecca Stormplotz had informed her parents while she was a student at Spellberg that she was dating Tobias Talismann, a scholarship student from the Wizard caste, they had assumed that it was just an act of teenage rebellion. They told her they disapproved, but tried not to put too fine a point on it so as to not reward her attention-seeking behaviour. She had been raised to value and appreciate her station in life, they told themselves, and would get tired of slumming it with someone who was so obviously from an inferior family.

When she had told them that she was going to marry Tobias, they did everything in their power to prevent the union. They refused to attend the wedding; they threatened to disinherit her; then they threatened to never speak to her again. The day that they had to make good on all of those threats was a sad one for them, but they assured themselves that some things are best life behind, and ungrateful, low-status daughters were just one of those things.

They told themselves that, of course, but it always sounded so hollow when they said it aloud. Feelings of guilt were for lesser wizards, they thought, and they had their family genealogies going back centuries to show precisely how far they were from being lesser wizards. They shoved their guilt down within themselves as far as it would go. And then a little further. When that wasn’t enough, they quietly started paying their granddaughter Jeanette’s tuition at Spellman with hopes that she might find someone foolish enough to marry her and restore her rightful status as a wizard in possession of a good fortune. If she looked anything like her mother, they said to each other, she’d have a fighting chance of doing just that.

Jeanette, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing. She did not know her grandparents well, but she knew that her grandfather was the type of person who would self-identify as a “wizard of colour” because white is a colour and privileged people were oppressed now. Why would she want to be one of them? How could she ever find it palatable that someone would love her despite who she was, rather than because of it?

She most certainly did not go to Spellberg to get her “MRS” degree, as they call it. No, she made sure that she was near the top of her class every year. As a Wizard she knew that any failure on her part would be representative of the group that she was a part of. And, of course, any success was just hers and would never translate into anyone re-thinking their biases. She had never actually been at the top of her class, though, because there was no way that any professor at Spellberg was going to have a Wizard as the top student! This, as you can expect, did not incline her any further towards marrying into the castes that had always told her that she could look like them and brew potions like them, but not be them.

When she became a professor at Spellberg herself some years later, she made sure that she was on the admissions committee. Every year, the proportion of Wizard students increased. She never thought that it was enough, but she was working from inside this terrible system to dismantle it.

After a while, though, people stopped seeming to notice that she was a wizard. She seemed to blend in with all of the pretentious, toffee-nosed professors that had treated her so poorly when she was a student herself. If she didn’t bring up her caste, and of course she often did not, people didn’t know.

She was awakened from her slumber when Spellberg had taken that trip to the Academy of Wizardly Arts, the prestigious school that had never admitted a single Wizard in its 589 years of existence. As she looked around the great hall and saw the looks on her own students’ faces who would not have been admitted there, something changed. She had a novel idea. No, it wasn’t writing a novel. It was something that would actually help people.

She met with the Headmaster and told him that they should not be taking any more trips to segregated schools. Her and Eliza pushed for quotas within the admissions committee, which was not well received or accepted by their peers. She decided that she would incorporate discussions of wizard segregation into her lessons on potions and elixirs. The students should know where their potions ingredients were sourced from--or who, to put it more pointedly-- facts that were always so outside the frame in broader potionmaking discourse.

Headmaster Merlinfield did not like this one bit. Some parents—many of whom self-identified as wizards of colour because they were descendants of Irish Merlins and Mystics—were especially aggrieved that a professor was injecting politics into somewhere that politics just didn’t belong. He told her, in no uncertain terms, that she should stop with this nonsense or find somewhere else to teach. Jeanette told him instead that it was his moral duty to make the position of Spellberg School of Magic Headmaster one that would be open to anyone, regardless of caste.

Jeanette Talismann had grown up with considerable awareness that she was different from the people around her. She knew, more than ever, that it was true. She had been working in a school that was perpetuating caste segregation, and very few people seemed to find this to be a matter of concern.
When she was told by Headmaster Merlinfield that she would not be a professor of potions and elixirs at the Spellberg School of Magic in the new year, she felt as if she was fulfilling some kind of destiny. The destiny of someone who had been so close—too close—to a status that just was not hers. It was almost a relief, really, to be done with the charade. To be done with the pomp and circumstance and the self-importance. To dispense with colleagues who thought that she was good at what she did “for a Wizard,” and nothing more or less.

It did not surprise her, then, that when she told the man that she loved more than anyone else that she had been dismissed, he grew distant. Then he just ran into her in the hall one day, asked if they could talk, and told her that he was going to be going back to Wizarding Parliament in a few weeks and that he was happy to have met her and looked forward to keeping her as a friend.

Who knew that so much destiny could be fulfilled, in such a short amount of time?

“What did he say?” Eliza pressed her friend, as she stared blankly out the window. They were sitting on the couch in her living quarters, which she had decorated with fluffy purple pillows and glowstone dust candles.

“Not a lot,” Jeanette replied. “We hadn’t talked very much about what would happen when his term here ended. I thought that things were going really well, and I believed that he felt the same way. I guess he didn’t.”

“From what I saw, Jeanette, he very much felt the same way. Probably even more,” Nora said, squeezing her hand.

“They’re just all the same,” Jeanette cried bitterly. “He remembered who he is, and who I am, and the spell was just broken.”

“I don’t think he’s like that,” Eliza said, realizing as the words left her mouth that she didn’t know that he wasn’t like that at all. Perhaps his image of her—as the smart teacher who needed saving from her low status—was fully shattered. Or maybe he liked the caste system as it was and didn’t want to change it, and thought that aligning himself with someone who did would be bad for his political career. Maybe William Wandstein had encouraged him to leave her behind, and he was too weak of a man to do what he wanted instead.

“It’s better this way, anyway. Maybe we are just too different.”

Jeanette told herself that, time and time again, but it always sounded so hollow when she said it aloud. She shoved her heartbreak down within herself as far as it would go. And then a little further.