The Lost Continent (16 page)

A lot of Williamsburg isn’t as old as they like you to think it is. The town was the capital of colonial Virginia for eighty years, from 1699 to 1780. But when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg fell into decline. In the 1920s John D. Rockefeller developed a passion for the place and began pouring money into its restoration – $90 million so far. The problem now is that you never quite know what’s genuine and what’s fanciful. Take the Governor’s Palace. It looks to be very old – and, as I say, no-one discourages you from believing that it is – but in fact it was only built in 1933. The original building burned down in 1781 and by 1930 had been gone for so long that nobody knew what it had looked like. It was only because somebody found a drawing of it in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that they were able to make a reasonable stab at reproducing it. But it isn’t old and it may not even be all that accurate.

Everywhere you turn you are confronted, exasperatingly, with bogus touches. At the Bruton Parish Church, the
gravestones were clearly faked, or at least the engravings had been reground. Rockefeller or someone else in authority had obviously been disappointed to discover that after a couple of centuries in the open air gravestones become illegible, so now the inscriptions are as fresh and deep-grooved as if they had been cut only last week, which they may well have been. You find yourself constantly wondering whether you are looking at genuine history or some Disneyesque embellishment. Was there really a Severinus Dufray and would he have had a sign outside his house saying ‘Genteel Tailoring’? Possibly. Would Dr McKenzie have a note in florid lettering outside his dispensary announcing: ‘Dr McKenzie begs Leave to inform the Public he has just received a large Quantity of fine Goods, viz: Tea, Coffee, fine Soap, Tobacco, etc., to be SOLD here at his shop’? Who can say?

Thomas Jefferson, a man of some obvious sensitivity, disliked Williamsburg and thought it ugly. (This is something else they don’t tell you.) He called the college and hospital ‘rude, mishappen piles’ and the Governor’s Palace ‘not handsome’. He can’t have been describing the same place because the Williamsburg of today is relentlessly attractive. And for that reason I liked it.

I drove on to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home for most of his life. Washington deserves his fame. What he did in running the Colonial Army was risky and audacious, not to say skilful. People tend to forget that the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years and that Washington often didn’t get a whole lot of support. Out of a populace of 5.5 million, Washington sometimes had as few as 5,000 soldiers in his army – one soldier for every
1,100 people. When you see what a tranquil and handsome place Mt Vernon is, and what an easy and agreeable life he led there, you wonder why he bothered. But that’s the appealing thing about Washington, he is such an enigma. We don’t even know for sure what he looked like. Almost all the portraits of him were done by, or copied from the works of, Charles Willson Peale. Peale painted sixty portraits of Washington, but unfortunately he wasn’t very hot at faces. In fact, according to Samuel Eliot Morison, Peale’s pictures of Washington, Lafayette and John Paul Jones all look to be more or less the same person.

Mount Vernon was everything Williamsburg should have been and was not – genuine, interesting, instructive. For well over a century it has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and what a lucky thing it is we have them. Amazingly, when the house was put up for sale in 1853, neither the federal government nor the state of Virginia was prepared to buy it for the nation. So a group of dedicated women hastily formed the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, raised the money to buy the house and 200 acres of grounds and then set about restoring it to precisely as it was in Washington’s day, right down to the correct pigments of paint and patterns of wallpaper. Thank God John D. Rockefeller didn’t get hold of it. Today the Association continues to run it with a dedication and skill that should be models to preservation groups everywhere, but alas are not. Fourteen rooms are open to the public and in each a volunteer provides an interesting and well-informed commentary – and is sufficiently clued-up to answer almost any question – on how the room was used and decorated. The house was very
much Washington’s creation. He was involved in the daintiest questions of décor, even when he was away on military campaigns. It was strangely pleasing to imagine him at Valley Forge, with his troops dropping dead of cold and hunger, agonizing over the purchase of lace ruffs and tea cosies. What a great guy. What a hero.

I SPENT THE
night on the outskirts of Alexandria and in the morning drove into Washington. I remembered Washington from my childhood as hot and dirty and full of the din of jackhammers. It had that special kind of grimy summer heat you used to get in big cities in America before air-conditioning came along. People spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it – wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans. Even at night there was no relief. It was tolerable enough outside where you might catch a puff of breeze, but indoors the heat never dissipated. It just sat, thick and stifling. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner bag. I can remember lying awake in a hotel in downtown Washington listening to the sounds of an August night wash in through the open window: sirens, car horns, the thrum of neon from the hotel sign, the swish of traffic, people laughing, people yelling, people being shot.

We once saw a guy who had been shot, one sultry August night when we were out for a late snack after watching the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 4–3 at Griffith Stadium. He was a black man and he was lying among a crowd of legs in what appeared to me at the time to be a pool of oil, but which was of course the blood that was draining out of the hole in his
head. My parents hustled us past and told us not to look, but we did, of course. Things like that didn’t happen in Des Moines, so we gaped extensively. I had only ever seen murders on TV on programmes like
Gunsmoke
and
Dragnet
. I thought it was something they did just to keep the story moving. It had never occurred to me that shooting someone was an option available in the real world. It seemed such a strange thing to do, to stop someone’s life just because you found him in some way disagreeable. I imagined my fourth grade teacher, Miss Bietlebaum, who had hair on her upper lip and evil in her heart, lying on the floor beside her desk, stilled forever, while I stood over her with a smoking gun in my hand. It was an interesting concept. It made you think.

At the diner where we went for our snack, there was yet another curious thing that made me think. White people like us would come in and take seats at the counter, but black people would place an order and then stand against the wall. When their food was ready, it would be handed to them in a paper bag and they would take it home or out to their car. My father explained to us that Negroes weren’t allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It wasn’t against the law exactly, but they didn’t do it because Washington was enough of a Southern city that they just didn’t dare. That seemed strange too and it made me even more reflective.

Afterwards, lying awake in the hot hotel room, listening to the restless city, I tried to understand the adult world and could not. I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container. But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered
that if you didn’t measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall.

My dad regarded me over the top of a book and said he didn’t think so. I asked him what would happen if a Negro tried to sit at a luncheon counter, even though he wasn’t supposed to. What would they do to him? My dad said he didn’t know and told me I should go to sleep and not worry about such things. I lay down and thought about it for a while and supposed that they would shoot him in the head. Then I rolled over and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t, partly because it was so hot and I was confused and partly because earlier in the evening my brother had told me that he was going to come to my bed when I was asleep and wipe boogers on my face because I hadn’t given him a bite of my frosted malt at the ball game, and I was frankly unsettled by this prospect, even though he seemed to be sleeping soundly now.

The world has changed a lot since those days, of course. Now if you lie awake in a hotel room at night, you don’t hear the city any more. All you hear is the white sound of your air-conditioner. You could be in a jet over the Pacific or in a bathysphere beneath the sea for all you hear. Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly-laundered shirt. People don’t wipe their necks much any more or drink sweating glasses of lemonade, or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda-fountains, because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or
from your office to the luncheon counter down the block. Nowadays, black people sit at luncheon counters, so it’s not as easy to get a seat, but it’s more fair. And no-one goes to Washington Senators games any more because the Washington Senators no longer exist. In 1972 the owner moved the team to Texas because he could make more money there. Alas. But perhaps the most important change, at least as far as I am concerned, is that my brother no longer threatens to wipe boogers on me when I annoy him.

Washington feels like a small city. Its metropolitan population is three million, which makes it the seventh largest in America. And if you add Baltimore, right next door, it rises to over five million. But the city itself is quite small, with a population of just 637,000, less than Indianapolis or San Antonio. You feel as if you are in some agreeable provincial city, but then you turn a corner and come up against the headquarters of the FBI or the World Bank or the IMF and you realize what an immensely important place it is. The most startling of all these surprises is the White House. There you are, shuffling along downtown, looking in department store windows, browsing at cravats and négligées, and you turn a corner and there it is – the White House – right in the middle of the downtown. So handy for shopping, I thought. It’s smaller than you expect. Everybody says that.

Across the street there is a permanent settlement of disaffected people and crazies, living in cardboard boxes, protesting at the Central Intelligence Agency controlling their thoughts from outer space. (Well, wouldn’t you?) There was also a guy panhandling for quarters. Can you believe that? Right there in our nation’s capital, right
where Nancy Reagan could see him from her bedroom window.

Washington’s most fetching feature is the Mall, a broad, grassy strip of parkland which stretches for a mile or so from the Capitol building at the eastern end to the Lincoln Memorial at the western side, overlooking the Potomac. The dominant landmark is the Washington Monument. Slender and white, shaped like a pencil, it rises 555 feet above the park. It is one of the simplest and yet handsomest structures I know, and all the more impressive when you consider that its massive stones had to be brought from the Nile delta on wooden rollers by Sumerian slaves. I’m sorry, I’m thinking of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Anyway, it is a real feat of engineering and very pleasing to look at. I had hoped to go up it, but there was a long line of people, mostly restive schoolchildren, snaked around the base and some distance into the park, all waiting to squeeze into an elevator about the size of a telephone booth, so I headed east in the direction of Capitol Hill, which isn’t really much of a hill at all.

Scattered around the Mall’s eastern end are the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution – the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, and so on. The Smithsonian – which, incidentally, was donated to America by an Englishman who had never been there – used to be all in one building, but they keep splitting off sections of it and putting them in new buildings all over town. Now there are fourteen Smithsonian museums. The biggest ones are arrayed around the Mall, the others are mostly scattered around the city. Partly they had to do this because they get so much stuff every year – about a million items. In 1986, just to give
you some idea, the Smithsonian’s acquisitions included 10,000 moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a MiG-25 jet fighter. All of this used to be kept in a wonderful old Gothic brick building on the Mall called the Castle, but now the Castle is just used for administration and to show an introductory film.

I strolled down towards the Castle now. The park was full of joggers. I found this a little worrying. I kept thinking, ‘Shouldn’t they be running the country, or at least destabilizing some Central American government?’ I mean to say, don’t you usually have something more important to do at 10.30 on a Wednesday morning than pull on a pair of Reeboks and go sprinting around for forty-five minutes?

At the Castle I found the entrance area blocked with wooden trestles and lengths of rope. American and Japanese security men in dark suits were standing around. They all looked as if they spent a lot of time jogging. Some of them had headphones on and were talking into radios. Others had dogs on long leashes or mirrors on poles and were checking out cars parked along Jefferson Drive in front of the building. I went up to one of the American security men and asked him who was coming, but he said he wasn’t allowed to tell me. I thought this was bizarre. Here I was in a country where, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I could find out how many suppositories Ronald Reagan’s doctor had prescribed for him in 1986,
^fn1
but I couldn’t be told which foreign dignitary would shortly be making a public appearance on the steps of a national institution. The lady next to me said, ‘It’s Nakasone. President of Japan.’