Chesapeake (144 page)

‘Why not?’

‘I think I’d better go north … for a few days.’

‘To Scanderville?’ This was a daring question to which the minister did not expect a reply, but he did want to discuss the matter with Hiram if that was indeed his destination. The ex-marine said nothing, turned on his heel in military fashion and strode off.

But Reverend Jackson would not permit him to leave in this fashion. Running after him, he overtook him at the edge of the campus and said forcefully, ‘Hiram, you’re in an emotional state. The things Eden Cater reported. Don’t rush off to Scanderville to find a lot of stupid conclusions.’

‘Who’s stupid?’ Hiram demanded.

‘Your sister Luta Mae. She is on the wrong—’

‘Don’t you say nothin’ about Luta Mae.’ The polished speech he had acquired in the Marine Corps vanished and he reverted to the double negatives of his childhood.

‘Luta Mae is engaged in a private war that will end only in disaster. Don’t become involved.’

‘Luta Mae, she the same as Eden.’

‘For the love of God, no! Don’t be deceived by glib similarities.’

But Hiram stormed off, went to the edge of Baltimore and started hitchhiking north into Pennsylvania, and as one white traveler after another passed him by, the angrier he became. Finally a black salesman carried him as far as Harrisburg, where a white trucker, a brusque, heavy man in his fifties, invited him into his cab for the run to Scanderville.

‘You got a friend in the prison there?’ the trucker asked.

‘My sister.’

‘What she do?’

‘Civil disobedience. Federal case.’

‘Placards and stuff like that?’

‘Yep.’

‘I don’t blame her. If I was black … How long she in for?’

‘Two years. That is, two-to-six. She told the judge to go to hell. In open court.’

‘She one of those with the big hairdos?’

‘She goes the whole route.’

When they pulled up at a diner in Sunbury, the trucker said, ‘Have supper on me,’ and as they ate he said, ‘You know, son, people like your sister … them god-awful hairdos … those loud-mouths … They make enemies they don’t need to make.’

‘Why did you pick me up?’ Hiram asked. ‘And offer to buy me supper? You got a guilty feeling, maybe?’

‘I got a son in Vietnam. I got great respect for soldiers and I could see you’d been in service … the way you stood.’

‘I was in the Marines.’

‘I ain’t surprised. And you came out willing to fight the world?’

‘More or less.’

‘Son, don’t fight with me. Tell your sister to lay off, too. It ain’t necessary, and it won’t win you a goddamned thing. Play it cool and you’ll get everything you want.’

The driver went out of his way to drop Hiram at the prison, then flashed the thumbs-up sign and cried, ‘I’m on your side, buddy.’ And for a moment, as Hiram watched the truck move down the highway, its red and green lights flashing in the darkness like beacons hailing a different day, he entertained a brief hope that the rough-and-ready accommodation proposed by the trucker might be possible, and he spent that night fashioning procedures which might lead to a juster America.

But in the morning, in the waiting room of the jail, he was electrified when he saw Luta Mae come slouching toward him, her sturdy body covered by prison garb, her insolence intended to infuriate her guards, and he surrendered any thought of conciliation. It was social warfare, and Luta Mae was in the vanguard.

She was implacable. From behind the wire mesh that separated them she growled, ‘Hiram, it got to be all burned down.’

‘You mean the old ways?’

‘I mean everything. It all got to change.’ She now preferred to use black speech, and she exaggerated its illiteracies.

He started to tell her about Eden Cater’s book on slaves escaping north, but she interrupted. ‘Why you tellin’ me ’bout her?’

And he explained that he saw his sister as the inheritor of the fearless old slave woman. Luta Mae, with her flaming hairdo and her uncompromising manner was the Eden Cater of this generation, and as he watched the guard lead her back to her cell, her challenge echoed in his mind: ‘It got to be all burned down.’

It was in the spring of 1965 that J. Ruthven Turlock had his final inspiration about the development at Patamoke Gardens. ‘I was driving home from selling a lot to a doctor from Binghamton when it occurred
to me that most of our buyers were elderly people … coming here to retire … comfort-filled final years. It was then I hit on the perfect name. Sunset Acres.’

Of course, when Ruthven implemented his design, the old Turlock cabin occupied by his brother Amos had to go—‘It’s an eyesore. You’ve made a bundle off the marsh, Amos, you can afford something decent.’

So this ancient center of incest, illiteracy, prejudice, lawbreaking, coon hunting and good living was burned off so that in its place could be wheeled a spanking new mobile home built in Sheboygan. Ruthven paid for the white picket fence that quarantined it from the more pretentious homes of Sunset Acres, but it was Amos who purchased the cement statuary that adorned the small lawn: Santa Claus with eight reindeer nicely disposed across the grass, a purple flamingo, a polar bear on his hind legs and a brown doe with two adorable gray fawns. When Chris Pflaum saw his uncle’s concrete menagerie he had to compare it with the real birds and animals that once graced the site.

Chris was having his problems with the former marsh. At the community college he attended, his instructor in American Lit 107 was a bright young man from Brandeis University with a commitment to the best in American writing, and the concise manner in which he disposed of old myths that cluttered his pupils’ minds impressed young Chris:

When Chris read the book, some years back, he had suspected that Miss Mitchell’s depiction of blacks had been criminally unfair and her portrayal of whites sentimental and highly prejudiced; he was pleased to find his instructor confirming his youthful doubts. But in his next lecture the young man from Brandeis tore into all American poetry prior to Lowell—Robert Lowell, he explained—and his special scorn was reserved for Sidney Lanier:

This time Chris was disposed to argue. ‘I thought
The Marshes of Glynn
was rather good … the part about the bigness and the sky.’

The young scholar looked compassionately at Pflaum and said, ‘I’m delighted to know that you studied Lanier. Not many bother, these days.
How old were you at the time? Yes, about thirteen? Well, Pflaum, “Little Miss Muffit” is ideally suited to the four-year-old and Felicia Hemans is just right for the nine-year-old. Sidney Lanier is the poet par excellence for the thirteen-year-old mentality, but now we’re all growing up, aren’t we?’

He then proceeded to demonstrate everything that was wrong with this long, painfully obvious old poem: its forced rhymes, its rhythms broken to order, the preposterous variations in line length and, above all, its religious sentimentality.

‘Aren’t some of the images good?’ Chris asked.

‘Yes, but they’re terribly belabored. Take the marsh-hen building her nest in the greatness of God. Line after line, repetition after repetition. A real poet would have disposed of that goddamn bird in four well-chosen words.’

Chris would not let go. ‘But wasn’t Lanier way ahead of his time in dealing with an ecological problem?’

Now the young man from Brandeis could show some excitement. ‘Indeed he was, Pflaum, and that’s the only merit of this old war-horse. If Lanier had said simply, “Marshes are worth preserving,” he’d have said it all.’

But it wouldn’t have had the ring, Chris thought, and I’d never have remembered it the way I remember the real lines.

When he returned home he went to the public library and found that during the past four months thirty-one residents of a town that didn’t read much had checked out
Gone With the Wind
and when he asked about it, the librarian said, ‘We have to keep three copies. Local women like to make believe their ancestors lived on plantations.’ And when he went out to Sunset Acres and stood where the Turlock marsh had once stretched, he could hear the rhythms of Lanier’s poem, those words which had given his life its direction.

As he stood there, pondering these contradictions, he watched a pair of cardinals coming back to what had once been their home. They flew erratically, here and there, looking for vanished succulence, and Chris thought: Taking them both into consideration, they must be the handsomest pair of birds in any country. Sometimes I think the male is the most beautiful, that flaming scarlet. But at other times it’s the female. Those muted colors, so perfect in combination. I wish I could put in words what I feel about those birds.

And then a tardy wedge of geese flew north, and as he watched their flight his world fell into place: I want to go to Canada … to see where the geese breed. If you live on the Choptank, you know only half the bird … October to March. Who wants to know half of anything? To the disappearing birds he cried aloud, ‘I’m going to see the other half in Canada.’

The idea of this trip had been germinating for some time, in fact, ever
since his English instructor had said in class, ‘You may not know it, but your region has produced one masterpiece of American writing. Thomas Applegarth’s
To the Ice Age.
I suggest you read it if you want to comprehend where you live.’ The little book had been a revelation, and from it Chris deduced that every burgeoning mind ought to make some pilgrimage. His would be to the nesting place of the geese.

But his eyes kept coming back to the vanished marsh and his mind to the vanished poem, and he thought: So he takes away Lanier and gives me Applegarth. Fair trade, perhaps.

After Hiram Cater left his sister in Scanderville Prison he spent two years drifting through the major cities of the North, seeking viable solutions to the problem of blacks in American life, and in sharp discussions with young men and women from Harvard and the University of Chicago he could offer specific illustrations which summarized black experience much better than their philosophizing:

In certain parts of the North conditions were slightly more promising, but in general, throughout the nation he found the cruel inequities of Frog’s Neck endlessly repeated, and he spent most of his hours trying to construct some sensible explanation of why the United States seemed so determined to ignore and waste the human potential of so large a portion of its population. His experience in the Marines convinced him that he was positively as capable as any white man of comparable background, yet society was determined to prevent him from demonstrating his skills.

He listened attentively to the endless debates regarding basic policy—‘Shall we become spineless subservients like Booker T. Washington or leaders of the street rebellion?’—and he did not know where he stood. He could not erase his memory of the truckdriver who had argued that gradualism was the sensible path, nor could he forget Luta Mae’s strident call to battle. The debates were fruitless, but he did make up his mind on one major aspect of black life, and for a public discussion on Boston television he prepared these notes:

His remarks were applauded, and after the cameras were turned off, the white moderator said, ‘Cater, you ought to get a college degree,’ but when he looked casually into the possibilities, he feared the barriers were too complex, and in frustration he came near to adopting Luta Mae’s battle cry: ‘It got to be all burned down.’ But he had been so well received by white radicals, and by the white television people, that he clung to the hope that society could be modified peacefully. With such perplexities he returned to Patamoke, a handsome, well-disciplined marine, twenty-eight years old and as capable as any young man the Choptank had recently produced.