Original Sins (33 page)

“Sounds like Alexander the Great.”

They walked into the living room with its mellow antiques and oriental carpets, flowers and bowls of fruit, paintings on the walls. Earl's mother was on the terrace instructing the gardener. In the bright sunlight Emily could see the makeup she'd applied skillfully. Her bouffant hairdo was perfect, hemline straight, stockings un-run, shoes polished, nails polished. Emily felt a tightening in her chest. She wheezed.

This time she fought it. There was nothing wrong with this scene. There was order here, beauty and peace. Careful perfection. The wheezing subsided. If this was what she had to do to have Earl whenever she wanted him, she'd do it.

On the morning news on television, uniformed men were flailing with night sticks at some people, white and Negro, who knelt in postures of prayer. Snarling police dogs were lunging at them. Blasts of water shot out from fire hoses. Earl switched off the set.

At the Wilderness Trail that night they watched a short about a Northwoods trapper who staked a tame female wolverine near a trap. She made mating sounds that lured a male. As he circled her with lustful intent, the iron teeth of the trap snapped shut on his leg. Eventually he gnawed his leg off to escape.

The following afternoon Emily discussed with Earl whether she should pledge Tri Delt or Chi O at State next year. And that evening she mailed off her acceptance to college in New York.

“… Three hundred and seventy-five million years ago, in lakes and swamps, creatures developed which we call crossopterygians. They were like fish, but with bony fins and air sacs. The regular fishes probably thought they were freaks. But eventually some crossopterygians left their ponds. Maybe they were chased out by the other fish. Maybe the food supply gave out. Maybe the swamp dried up. Maybe they were just curious. Nobody will ever know. But for some reason a few dragged themselves on their fins across dry land, gasping air into their sacs. They didn't know until then what dry land
was
, much less whether it would suit them. Some probably flung themselves as fast as possible into new swamps. Maybe they were terrified. Maybe they were excited. Maybe they were just responding numbly to instinct. The fish in the swamps died out, while the descendants of the crossopterygians took over the earth for several million years …”

A graduate farted loudly. Students tittered.

“… So as we leave behind these friendly faces and familiar halls to go out into the world, we can fight change every step of the way. Or we can pledge ourselves to accept and assist the inevitable. The choice is ours. Thank you very much.”

The band broke into “Pomp and Circumstance” for the twenty-fourth time, as the audience applauded politely and the graduates cheered to be getting it over with so they could take off their hot robes.

Mr. Horde shook her hand and gave her her diploma. As she put her tassle on the other side of her mortar board, she surveyed the restless crush of classmates moving forward on the gym floor. In their identical robes they resembled black bass minnows in a fish hatchery. Most of the boys would soon be working in the factories and stores and warehouses. Most of the girls would marry them and keep their houses and raise their children. Some would go to State. A few would leave the region. “The choice is ours.” She smiled. Who among them was choosing? Certainly not herself. If she could have chosen, she'd have stayed here with the scenes of her childhood and the graves of her forebears. It sure didn't feel like choice.

Part Three

Chapter One
Emily

Emily passed through a wrought-iron gate, emerging in a huge paved courtyard surrounded by neoclassical buildings of grey stone. Up a flight of steps, in front of a building with an elaborate frieze of cavorting gods and goddesses, was a landing on which sat a stone statue of a Greek goddess who held tablets. At her feet were fold-up tables and chairs, around which milled students, most dressed in faded denim. The tables held petitions, pamphlets, donation boxes, stacks of tickets. Signs read: “
SUPPORT VOTER REGISTRATION IN THE SOUTH
” and “
SHARECROPPER BENEFIT TICKETS HERE
.” Voices exhorted and disputed. The words “redneck” and “cracker” jumped out at Emily like pop-up pictures in storybooks.

Emily's dorm was one of several massive brick buildings dwarfing a tiny courtyard. A high iron fence separated the courtyard from the crowded sidewalks of Broadway. She had met her roommate an hour earlier. Joan had smiled in a way that indicated a smile was not her most compatible expression: The corners of her mouth turned up at sharp right angles, but her eyes continued a process of cold assessment. Emily unpacked while Joan lay on her bed and read a newspaper and sighed and muttered, “Oy, the things that go on in this world. They should rot, these people.”

“Who should?”

“These crackers in Alabama. These schmendricks who blow up churches. Four little girls those cretins murdered.”

“I didn't hear about it.”

“What, they don't tell you what your neighbors are doing down there?”

“I'm from Tennessee.”

“Tennessee. Alabama. Mississippi. Georgia. What's the difference?”

Emily paused in her unpacking and studied Joan, perplexed. “But my neighbors don't blow up churches.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. We have other things to do.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Lots of things.”

“For instance, what were you and your neighbors doing last spring when I was getting chewed by a German shepherd in Birmingham?” She smiled her rectilinear smile.

“Uh, getting laid, I guess.”

Joan didn't hear her. “What were you doing last summer when Medgar was shot?”

“Who's Medgar?”

Joan looked up, amazed. She had crumpled her paper into a ball.

“Most Popular” Emily had never won at Newland High, but she'd gotten along all right. The Ingenues had eventually given her a bid. She went down to the Residence Office and inquired about the single room she'd requested on her application.

A young woman in sandals, whose thongs, patterned like cats' cradles, bound her calves to the knees, was asking another, “Did you hear about Edward?”

“No, what?”

“He's taking next semester off to go to Tennessee.”

“He
isn't?”

Sandals smiled faintly and nodded, shuffling her benefit tickets like a deck of cards.

“He's an example to us all.”

“I know.”

“Is he scared?”

“Oh, I'm sure he must be. Wouldn't you be? It's unbelievable what goes on down there. They're psychopaths, those people.”

Emily frowned and blinked. She'd ridden to New York on one of the trains she'd watched sweep through the valley all her life. The fields, washed in early evening sunlight, flashed past her roomette window. She propped her feet on the padded toilet seat. Yellowing pastures, peppered with grazing Angus; harvested cornfields, bristling with a five o'clock shadow of stubble. The train veered through foothills, then climbed toward the pass in the mountains. Emily saw way below a weathered wooden corn crib, in a field framed by oaks whose foliage showed a faint rusty hint of autumn. The sun, about to set, shed a soft golden glow. She knew what she was leaving. But what was she heading toward, she wondered.

As she wandered back toward Broadway, she saw Joan sitting on the protruding cornerstone of a building, holding the hand of a young Negro man. He kissed her lingeringly on the mouth. Emily walked on, her personality structure tottering.

Raymond appeared that evening in his hat and beard to take her to a small Chinese restaurant on Broadway. He ordered with proficiency. Emily picked suspiciously with a chopstick at bamboo shoots and water chestnuts. Weren't the Chinese supposed to be Communists or something?

Raymond talked nonstop about a documentary film on Negroes in the South he was working on for his group. He was taking a leave of absence from the print shop to go to Tennessee as a volunteer photographer on a voter registration project.

Emily poked at her peanuts and chicken in silence as he talked about upcoming rallies and benefits. Most of his face was hidden by his beard, but his eyes gleamed.

“Raymond, what is it everyone up here has against the South?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I forgot: You're just off the boat. It must be kind of overwhelming.”

“Well, it's just that I wasn't around when the Crusaders were going off to Constantinople.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“At one time I think you'd have found it funny.”

“At one time I was a bigot.”

“I see. Well, then, do I disgust you now? The way I seem to my ex-roommate?”

“You don't disgust me, Emily. But you've got a lot to learn.”

Emily speared an evasive slice of water chestnut with her chopstick.

“But there's no reason why you should. After all, your family has nowhere to go but down when the South topples.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That blasted hierarchical town we come from: a place for everyone, and everyone in his place. With Daddy Prince on his throne.”

“I always thought you liked my father.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“It doesn't?” She envied him his new air of certainty.

“No, it doesn't. We're talking ideology now, not personality.”

“I don't understand.”

“Look, if I hadn't left, I'd be working for your daddy right now. And I'd be at his mill the rest of my life.”

“But you could have worked your way up, like your father. Or you could have switched to the paper mill. You could have done whatever you wanted down there, Raymond.”

“But that's not the point. Why would I want what I wanted? Because I'd been raised to believe that was all I was good for. I'd be grateful for what Big Daddy paid me. And meanwhile, he'd be living it up on Tsali Street.”

“Living it up? His idea of a big time is supper at the Barbecue Pit. Raymond, what you're saying has no bearing on real people.”

“You can't see it because you're the crown princess. There's no percentage in your seeing it.”

“Raymond, it's me: Emily. Your old childhood buddy.”

“You're not cute, Emily.”

“I'm just trying to figure out how come you put up with me?”

“It ain't easy,” he drawled.

“By the way, what have you done with your accent? You sound like a Yankee.”

He shrugged. “You'll find it's not very fashionable to be a white Southerner up here right now.”

“I've noticed. I've never even thought of myself as a Southerner, and here I am, hated for being one. Southerner. What does that mean?”

“You'll find out fast, and lots you won't like.”

“Oh, thanks a lot, Raymond. When I think I could be going to State …”

“So go to State. Never leave the goddam place.”

“I've already left,” she pointed out.

Brakes screeched, horns blared, drivers cursed and gestured obscenely. Huge glass and steel buildings ringed the crowd, most dressed as though ready to call home the hogs. The young man in overalls addressing them had spent forty days in Parchman State Prison following a Freedom Ride. Although white and a Yankee, he for some reason was speaking like an Alabama sharecropper: “They's several hunnert of us gathered here this afternoon. We can be real proud since we competing with a football game.”

Derisive laughter.

“But we ain't got much else to be proud of, friends. Thousands of the brothers and sisters can't be with us today because they got them no long green to get here on. Never mind that. They got no money to
eat
on. They working as maids and yard ‘boys' for ten dollars a week, for families who got theirselves a hunnert thousand dollars a year. They working in fields from sunup to sundown for fifteen dollars a week. Not only ain't they got no money, they ain't even got the
right
, friends, to demonstrate about not having nothing. Old women is being tore into by po-lice dogs. Little girls in their own Sunday school room is being blown to bits. Negro students is being throwed in jail for ordering greasy old hamburgers at dumps they wouldn't get caught dead in otherwise. And thousands of Negro citizens can't do nothing to change this because they ain't allowed a vote. So it's up to us, brothers and sisters—all of us here this afternoon, and the thousands who couldn't be—to change all this.”

Emily didn't know what to make of it all. Jed would have jumped up there and punched the guy out, but Emily's responses were more confused. On one side of her was Joan; on the other, Corinne. They had taken her political education in hand. Intent on being polite when a guest in other people's countries, Emily was attending each benefit, rally, concert, and coffee house they suggested. They appeared to regard her with the same delight Victorian missionaries lavished on a naked savage whom they'd persuaded to wear a loincloth. They assured her that her moral inadequacies were not her own personal fault, but the result of an upbringing in an iniquitous social system. (One of the South's inadequacies, Emily had decided, was to instill in its children the ability to listen politely while people dumped on their homeland.)

Joan's parents owned a furniture store on 125th Street, which made her an expert on race relations. Several times a week she'd perch on Emily's bed and compare the South to a large Nazi concentration camp.

The first time Emily replied, “Yes, but it's not like that.”

Joan looked at her. “Listen, Emily, you don't know from nothing.”

“But Joan, I lived there eighteen years.”

Statistics, broken down by race, showered down like balloons at a convention rally—infant mortality rates, per capita income, expenditures on education, welfare payments, violent death rate. There was nothing Emily could say. Joan would never discuss if she could argue or lecture. You had to become sly, go to rallies like this one when you really wanted to be at the football game, appear to be convinced; then you could think as you liked in the privacy of your own brain. She liked Joan and Corinne. She just couldn't understand what they were so upset about all the time. And she felt a little bit guilty pretending to understand in order to have friends to drink coffee with after supper.