In Memory of Hall Peebles H’63
My pledge brothers and I were, in many respects, undergoing a highly miniaturized version of Egyptian captivity
It was Halloween night 1979. The “immortal 27”—my 26 pledge brothers and I—were asleep in the freshman cold dorm of the Fiji house. The stillness was interrupted by creepy sounds off in the distance—doors creaking, mournful bells tolling, spine-tingling screams of torture victims. As the minutes passed, the volume progressively increased until no one was asleep any longer. Someone went to investigate. The upperclassmen had planted large stereo speakers just outside the door and were piping in their most blood-curdling soundtrack.
Then hell seemed to break loose—pots and pans banging, people shouting, general chaos. Before we knew it, the 27 of us were lined up down in the basement of the house, undergoing a marine drill sergeant–style rebuke for a variety of code infractions, both real and imagined. The house wasn’t clean, pledges had not aced a test of fraternity history, one of us did not know the names of all the brothers’ girlfriends, and someone else had failed to answer the phone by the third ring. In short, we were not measuring up—we were a disgrace to the house, the fraternity, and the College.
Such dressings–down were a regular feature of our first semester of college life, and they continued well into second. We were told that this was the price we had to pay for membership in such an august organization. Clicking the brothers into the dining room, standing up on chairs at lunch to recite various texts from the fraternity handbook, and remaining on campus after finals for “hell week” to make the house shine—again and again, they said, we would look back on these nuisances and assaults on our dignity as the happiest days of college life.
Besides, all the upperclassmen had endured the same rigors, and now it was our turn— “Now get back to your burdens!”
IT TOOK ME several decades to figure out what we were experiencing, but now I think I have it. That is thanks, in part, to what I learned in Professor Hall Peebles’ unforgettable class on the Old Testament. My pledge brothers and I were, in many respects, undergoing a highly miniaturized version of Egyptian captivity. Like the Israelites who, under Joseph, had once rescued the Egyptians from starvation, we had been demoted from honored houseguests to Pharaoh’s slaves. Pharaoh had forgotten all the nice things he said about us during recruitment, and now he regarded us as nothing more than exploitable laborers whose very existence had become noisome.
Scrubbing the baseboards, waxing and rewaxing the tile floors, and polishing the kitchen to a shine, we were chattel, laboring in obscurity to maintain Pharaoh’s edifices— and collecting our own straw to bake bricks to boot! What mattered to Pharaoh was not the Israelites, but what the Israelites could be made to produce. To him, in Aristotle’s phrase, we were nothing more than human tools. Moreover, we were numerous—nearly half the occupants of the house—and Pharaoh’s fear of an uprising made him loathe us all the more.
As pledges, we caught a whiff of slavery’s stink—subject to the arbitrary will of another, with no redress of grievances. We experienced the life of bureaucratic pawns, made to do things that made no sense and then forced to endure nonsensical penances when they were not done right.
The house was supposed to be our home away from home, but many of us felt like exiles, people who didn’t belong, with no prospect of liberation or redemption. When late one fall weekend we went on “walk out”— another obscure custom we were pressured to observe—our return precipitated only harsher punishments.
IN EGYPT, Pharaoh was god, and in the fraternity house, the brothers were demigods. Yet, as the Israelites eventually came to realize, Pharaoh was not divine. Neither, we discovered, were the brothers. They enjoyed a measure of control, but the more ruthlessly they attempted to assert it, the more sharply into view came their fear that they would be found out. The more distressed we grew, the more questioning we did, and the more we questioned, the more apparent it became that hazing’s whole edifice rested on sandy soil.
We pledges were unorganized, had no plan, and subscribed to no coherent creed. But we intuited that something was deeply amiss. We knew that it was wrong to treat other human beings—especially those you someday hoped to call “brother”—so callously. Sure, we made mistakes, and in many respects we failed more than once to measure up to reasonable expectations. But we were not scum of the earth, and the insistence on treating us as such only brought more sharply into view the logs in the brothers’ eyes.
EVENTUALLY, the Israelites groaned under Pharaoh’s burdens, and their cries were heard. In our case, they were heard neither by the administration of the College nor by the leadership of the fraternity, but by what burned in the heart of nearly every occupant of the fraternity house. We had at last seen through Pharaoh, his nakedness had been made visible, and the fires of fear he had worked all fall semester so hard to fan were finally sputtering out. It had been replaced by a new kind of fire, not entirely unlike the fire of a ceaselessly burning bush that never consumes itself.
A story of subjugation and servitude had been replaced by a new narrative, a new myth, one in which we were every bit as human—in senses both bad and good—as our captors. They could not rule over us because they were not above us—in fact, in some cases, their desperation to maintain control had only brought them low. We had been called to a new and different identity, the role of free men, of brothers, with all the privileges and duties thereunto appertaining. In short, the curtain had been lifted, and a new day—initiation day—had dawned.
Our discontent had opened our eyes and shown us a way out of bondage. Only one question remained: Would we, too, the very next fall, assume the mantle of oppressor?
GUNDERMAN is professor of radiology, pediatrics, medical education, philosophy, liberal arts, philanthropy, and medical humanities and health studies at Indiana University. He is a contributing writer to The Atlantic and a frequent contributor to WM. His newest book, We Come to Life with Those We Serve, is due out later this year from IU Press.