Love and Fury (17 page)

They mean the people I grew up with, who lived in “the wards,” in the lower street numbers, near the river and the slaughterhouse and the breweries, in neighborhoods with few detached houses and dogs that were not for petting but protection. They mean my cousin Joanne, “gone to live with the coloreds.” They mean all those who have not ascended the class ladder, who either failed or never tried in the first place, perhaps for very good reasons the students would not understand.

They mean, it has turned out again and again, these students of mine, they mean the people they are leaving behind, distanced by ridicule, the people who raised them.

White trash is a term related historically to the establishment of race as a political designation and justification for atrocity. In his two-volume work,
The Invention of the White Race,
historian Theodore Allen traces the origins of the American class/race dynamic to 1676 Chesapeake, in the Virginia Colony that Allen calls “our society's first living cell,” the site of what came to be known as Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising that threatened to overthrow an agricultural system in which 5 percent of the planters owned the land and therefore the labor of all who lived on it, no matter what continent they had come from. Allen says that the significance of that uprising is that “a century and a half before Nat Turner led his rebellion, and William Lloyd Garrison began the
Liberator
, the armed laboring class, black and white side by side, fought for the abolition of slavery.”

In the decades that followed, laws were enacted that meted out certain small privileges to those from Europe to ensure their loyalty. So-called “miscegenation” was criminalized, as were nearly all easy relations between European, African, and native groups of the laboring class. These laws came to govern the entire plantation system on which the nation was built. Once these laws became established, the traffic in Africans became easier to justify. What's more, they served as the template for the legal framework of apartheid in South Africa and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws concerning “racial purity.”

I am only recounting what I have learned, what is easily available to all who want to know, in order to make my point here: the air, the atmosphere of a conversation about my grandson, about his parents, his future, is tainted still, poisoned by the particulate of history, of the crime of trading in human flesh, human labor, human lives.

I asked a friend of mine once how I, a white man, ought best to deal with this history now, in my own life. An African American poet and professor, one who has given a great deal of thought to all this, he replied, “Try not to be an asshole.”

But white trash or not, what class am I? And how has that played out in the lives of my children?

“I think it was my hair,” Veronica says. We've been looking at a folder of D's preschool homework, sitting at the kitchen table; I had asked her why she never hung around with the white kids growing up. “It probably sounds really stupid but I think it was my hair. Everybody just assumed I was mixed. They didn't see me as a white girl with this kinky hair. And Alyssa was my best friend.” Alyssa's parents are African American and Japanese American.

“So you felt more comfortable with friends of color?”

“Well, it wasn't like I fit in with the white kids! I wasn't coming back from school vacations in Aruba or the south of France.”

“Yeah, but they probably never got to go to Allentown.” I made a face at her.

Must I say how sad this conversation made me? How close to despair it brings me to think that we are all required to live in this continuing absurdist tragedy where race and class intersect?

And what about this ache that I keep pushing away, this need to know if my daughter, in always choosing black boyfriends, is rejecting me? I am ashamed of this concern. I understand how elementally racist it is, and I resist it and feel angry at myself for my inability to escape my upbringing. The ghost of my Uncle Francis? Did he feel rejected by my cousin Joanne? Spurned and defied without the benefit I've had of all that's changed since then, without the education I've received, without the habit—a luxury, really—of weighing and wondering at the way things are?

We have not come very far.

In more than twenty-five years of AA meetings, I have never heard a better description of the alcoholic's predicament than I heard from my son, Robert, in his first shaky weeks of abstinence, trying not only not to drink but to understand how he had gotten so lost in the first place.

“I'd start drinking with my friends and after a couple of drinks I could see how loose and easy everyone was. Everyone but me. So I had another, and then another. But I could never get there where everybody else seemed to be. I'd keep trying, but I always ended up passed out someplace. I'd wake up and wonder: what the fuck?”

It was my own experience when I was his age. My companions always seemed to be “lit”; their pleasure in one another, or the music, or the activity, was enhanced by a few drinks. I couldn't seem to get the light to go on, but I could see it flickering: if only I would try a little harder, have just one more.

But before long, it was precisely that unconsciousness I was seeking. By the time Robert was born, I was a solitary drinker. I had a satchel of papers to grade every night, and I would hole up in my study, in my father's old recliner, a rocks glass and a bottle next to me on the table, inching my way to oblivion as I corrected my high school students' grammar and usage and penciled occasionally legible comments in the margins. In the summers, and on school vacations, I was “working on my novel” in that same black hand-me-down chair.

I used to drive past a liquor store on the way home from the school where I was teaching. I would have finished the bottle of bourbon the night before—or worse, I would have fallen asleep with only an inch or two left in the bottom of the bottle, and I'd be behind the wheel, talking to myself. If I hit the red light at that corner, I would glare at the neon signs in the windows, jaw set, breathing hard through flared nostrils. You're not going to get me this time! I would tell myself that if I made it past the store without pulling into the parking lot, then I wasn't an alcoholic. After all, I was going home to a house where there was no alcohol. An alcoholic wouldn't do that! An alcoholic would be sure to have a bottle at the ready, maybe even a backup. A great relief washed over me as the light changed and I passed the store and soon after turned onto the highway. Then, maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, I'd pull into the parking lot of the liquor store in my own neighborhood and buy a quart of Jack Daniel's, with no memory, none at all, of the fearsome battle I had just fought with myself only moments before.

It goes without saying that Kathi and I were unhappy. She was unhappy with me, and I was unhappy with her unhappiness with me, so I raged at her. I was creating a distance between us, then accusing her of withdrawing. I was afraid: of intimacy, of responsibility, of the truth. I was afraid I would have to stop drinking.

One day, when Robert was about to turn four, we were at a dinner party given by a friend. After dinner the three adult couples were sitting in the living room around a glass coffee table filled with desserts when Robert came reeling into the room, knocking against the walls, with a plastic cup in his hand, pretending to be drunk. He staggered over to me, presented me the cup, and in his clear, high, three-year-old's voice said, “Here, Daddy! This is for you! It's whiskey!” I took the cup from him, threw back my head, and laughed. What a clever kid!

Everyone else, silent, was looking at the floor. Three months later, I walked into my first AA meeting.

Soon after we moved to Massachusetts, I met a guy I'll call Charlie, a psychologist, the father of two sons who seemed to adore him. As a young father myself, I saw him as a guide. Charlie knew where to rent boats to go out on the flats after flounder. He knew when the bluefish were running and what they were biting and the best spots to surf-cast. “See that rocky point there? The blues drive the baitfish toward that shelf, and they have no choice but to turn toward shore, so the blues only need to swim in an inverted V to corral them. Then it's a bloodbath. They're pack hunters, like wolves.”

I was more of a freshwater guy myself, not having seen the ocean until I was eighteen. One day we were heading to the North Shore to fish and, being a new father, I was having a hard time with my dad—with him, with my memory of him, and with my idea of him. I was determined to be what I thought of as a better father—not more loving, my father's affection was never in doubt, but more discerning about the influences my son would contend with, more critical of the masculine culture that I felt had crippled me in ways I was only beginning to understand. I thought that if my father would only be more forthcoming, talk about his boyhood, his time as a paratrooper in World War II, his marriage to my mother, I might get to know him as a man, not just Dad, or now, Poppop. I might come to appreciate his complexity and find a way to love him as complexly. Charlie seemed to enjoy being a father, and besides, he was a psychologist, so I thought I'd talk with him.

“Your father doesn't want you to know him.”

“I don't understand.”

“What's not to understand? He doesn't want you to get to know him.”

“I mean know who he really is.”

“He doesn't
want
you to know who he really is! Come on, that's obvious!”

“You think he's hiding something?”

“He's hiding who he is.”

“Why?”

“Why not? Look, you are grown up, gone away, married, you have a kid. The guy doesn't owe you anything. He raised you. That's enough. Be grateful and leave the poor bastard alone.”

“I'd just like to get to know him better.”

“Tough shit.”

That conversation shook me. I don't remember much else about that fishing trip. I spent the whole afternoon and evening trying to accept what Charlie had said. It wasn't until a dozen years later, however, that I understood. One day, Charlie's wife got a call from an irate husband. Turns out Charlie'd been a tomcat the whole marriage. It was, of course, shattering for his wife and worse, if that's possible, for his two sons, both young men now.

“The guy doesn't owe you anything. He raised you. That's enough.”

Going through my father's things, I come upon a folder marked “army stuff” that contains a photo he sent home to his parents, and a number of flimsy and yellowing documents.

SAVE THIS FORM.
IT WILL NOT BE REPLACED IF LOST.

These words are from my father's “Separation Qualification Record,” dated January 31, 1946, from which I learn that my father spent three months in basic training, two months training as a “Rifleman 745,” four months as an “Automatic Rifleman 746,” a month in paratrooper training (“Student Parachute 629”), and finally sixteen months as a “Rifleman 7745.” Under “Summary of Military Occupations,” it says:

TITLE—DESCRIPTION—RELATED CIVILIAN OCCUPATION

RIFLEMAN 7745—Jumped from airplane by parachute. Loaded, aimed and fired a rifle to destroy enemy personnel and to assist in capturing and holding enemy positions. Placed fire upon designated targets or distributed fire upon positions as situation demanded. Trained in use of hand weapons including rifle, automatic rifle, rocked [
sic
] launcher, rifle grenade launcher, bayonet, trench knife and hand grenades. Advantage of camouflage, cover and concealment, intrenching, recognition and following arm and hand signals, recognition of enemy personnel, vehicles and aircraft. Familiar with hand to hand fighting techniques.

That's it, the text fills the box. No room, I suppose, for “Related Civilian Occupation.” It makes me sad. And angry on my father's behalf: what could he have possibly taken, this young man, into civilian life from such a curriculum? When he was drafted, my father was an engineering student at the Virginia Military Institute. I suspect that he was there in the hope that he would be perceived, at least potentially, as an engineer, as too valuable to the war effort to become cannon fodder, trying to demonstrate he had some brains. After the war, my father never returned to school. I don't know why.