The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (26 page)

Throughout the conflict, I saw Wahiba only once. I went with Sayyid to Family Court, where both parties made statements to an official. Sayyid wore particularly filthy clothes, because the lawyer had told him that appearing poor would improve his odds by exactly 15 percent. Wahiba arrived with her lawyer, her mother, her sister-in-law, and her three small children in tow; she wore a black niqab and her hands were gloved. Sayyid and I were asked to go into the next room while she made her statement. The night before, she had sent a text:
I'm going to go under oath and destroy you
.

I had always liked talking with Sayyid, because of his eye for detail in Zamalek, but I noticed that he rarely said anything specific about his wife. She was crazy, he often told me, and her mind was a lock—a phrase that describes ignorance and stubbornness. But sometimes I wondered if she was almost as mysterious to him as she was to me. In his description, the woman was completely blank, as faceless as a figure in a shroud. And all the skill that Sayyid showed in Zamalek—his insight and flexibility, his ability to interact and negotiate with so many different people—seemed to evaporate when he was dealing with his wife. She was, quite simply, terrifying. And from the male perspective this seemed true of Egyptian women in general, whether they were starting fights, or chasing
dakar
, or intimidating Azhar judges.

I never knew why Wahiba became so angry. Sayyid blamed money, which seemed unlikely. A couple of his neighbors told me the real problem was that Sayyid spent too much time in Zamalek, cultivating his relationships, while Wahiba was stuck with three small kids in the
ashwa'iyat
. But it was impossible to know for certain, just as it was impossible to know why she suddenly dropped her cases. After all the lawyers and statements and all the threatening messages, at the last moment Wahiba backed out. She decided not to file for divorce, and she quit her factory job, and Sayyid went home to Ard al-Liwa as if nothing had happened.

Last year, after Morsi was forcibly removed from office and the military returned to power, a friend of mine remarked that it felt like a revolution “in the circular sense of the word.” She explained, “You go back to where you started.” The longer I lived in Egypt, the more I sensed the presence of some undefined and undirected frustration that motivated everything from politics to home life. It wasn't limited to a certain class: I was struck by how middle- and upper-class friends also had family fights that were just as intense as Sayyid's. And like him, they almost inevitably returned to whatever was familiar. It felt like a statement, not a demand—people couldn't say what they wanted, but they could say that something felt wrong.

Still, they survived. The circle kept turning. The garbage vanished from the fire escape every morning. At night, Sayyid periodically stopped by my apartment to drink beer and chat. After he was gone, Leslie sometimes asked, “Is it really possible that they're together again?” But he looked so much healthier and happier than he had during the winter. And he was back to taking tramadol on Thursday nights, which had to mean something.

RACHAEL MADDUX

FROM
Oxford American

I
N THE BEGINNING
, God created the heavens and the earth, or maybe he didn't, but either way vast ribbons of peat came to rest under what became the foothills of Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau, and in time the peat became coal, and later the railroads arrived, along with mines and coke ovens, and near one lazy arc of the Tennessee River workers built homes to return to after their long days of burrowing and burning, and the homes became a town, and the town was called Dayton.

It was here in July 1925 that John T. Scopes was tried and convicted of teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school. And it's here, nearly every July since 1987, that he has been retried and reconvicted as part of the Scopes Trial Play & Festival. Every year the same verdict is read (guilty of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which made it illegal for state-funded instructors “to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals”) and the same fine is levied ($100) by a man playing a judge sitting behind the same bench in the same second-floor courtroom at the Rhea County courthouse where the case was first heard nine decades ago.

For much of the outside world—even just 40 miles downriver, in Chattanooga, where I grew up—Dayton has long functioned as both punch line and punching bag, especially in recent years. In 2004, the Rhea County commission briefly approved a measure banning gay people from living in the area. In 2006, a local woman named June Griffin stole a Mexican flag from a downtown grocery store because she felt the proprietors didn't speak sufficient English. Griffin had earned some notoriety the year before when she appeared in a
Daily Show
segment filmed in town. “What's your take on the Scopes trial?” comedian Ed Helms asked her. “Evolution is a total fabrication and a lie,” she said. When she announced her candidacy for Tennessee governor, the
Nashville Scene
wrote, “Griffin is creepy, racist and terrifyingly xenophobic. Fittingly, she's a resident of Dayton, Tenn. (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame).”

Dayton is one of thousands of small American towns besot by hyper-conservative goofery, but the residue of the Scopes trial seems to trap and magnify it, even all these years later. Over those two weeks in July 1925, journalists swarmed in from across the country, their baser tendencies prevailing on a new, massive scale—it wasn't the first “trial of the century,” but it was the first broadcast live over the radio. Preachers and monkey-souvenir vendors peddled their wares on streets clogged with looky-loos. The defendant lent his name to the production, but the counsel starred: famously agnostic Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow led the defense, with populist statesman turned fundamentalist vanguard William Jennings Bryan a figurehead of the prosecution. Chief among the gawking scribes was H. L. Mencken, whose dispatches for the
Baltimore Sun
and
The Nation
bemoaned Dayton's “forlorn mob” of “rustics” and “gaping primates.” Dayton was a “ninth-rate country town,” he sneered, a “dung pile” destined to be “a joke town at best, and infamous at worst.”

And then came
Inherit the Wind
, on stage in 1955 and on screen in 1960, in which Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee interpolated the trial's narrative in service of an anti-McCarthyism parable, à la Arthur Miller's
The Crucible
. The story was presented as fiction but accumulated an honorary factualness, becoming a proxy of the history it dramatized. Its images of the small-minded South were indelible: as a female alto warbles “(Give Me That) Old Time Religion,” men in dark suits march to a high school where they find a young teacher, Bertram Cates, lecturing on Darwinism. Cates is dragged from the classroom and jailed. One night, locals mob outside his cell window, carrying torches and itching to lynch him. A bottle thrown at the barred window showers Cates with broken glass.

But the real story of the trial, like Dayton itself, began with the mines: they were dwindling, the town was suffering, and a group of local boosters—including drugstore owner and school board president F. E. Robinson and school superintendent Walter White—were looking for a pick-me-up. Meanwhile, the fledgling ACLU was offering pro bono legal representation for any teacher accused of breaking Tennessee's recently passed Butler Act. Soon as the boosters got a whiff, they pounced. The trial was bound to be a big to-do somewhere, so why not Dayton? A willing defendant was found in John T. Scopes, a teacher and football coach at Rhea County Central High School. “I wasn't sure if I had taught evolution,” Scopes wrote in his 1967 memoir. “Robinson and the others apparently weren't concerned with this technicality. I had expressed willingness to stand trial. That was enough.”

Scopes was served with a warrant but never incarcerated. At the end of his eight-day trial, Bryan and the prosecution had won. But in a way, so had the defense—among other maneuvers, Darrow had angled all along for a guilty verdict, planning to appeal the ruling to the Tennessee Supreme Court. (He did; they upheld the ruling, but dismissed Scopes's fine on a technicality.) Both sides left town nursing a certain sense of bruised victory. The only clear loser was Dayton.

The twenty-fifth Scopes Trial Play & Festival commenced on a Friday afternoon in mid-July of last year, the sky an unsettling October blue. Dayton had recently made regional headlines after an anti-gun-control billboard featuring a photograph of Adolf Hitler appeared on the outskirts of town, but I saw it nowhere along the stretch of Highway 27 I took up from Chattanooga, just a daisy chain of old houses and new gas stations, bait shops, gun stores, a sign for Old Hicks Road. I was ushered into town by a gauntlet of churches, the largest boasting a strobing LCD marquee and fluttering car-lot bunting.

As I approached downtown, I braced myself for the crowds. The Butler Act was repealed in 1967, but teaching human origins in Tennessee classrooms remains a touchy subject; in 2012, the state passed legislation protecting instructors who taught “alternatives” to accepted scientific theories such as evolution (and, increasingly, climate change). So a festival celebrating organized religion's government-assisted triumph over science seemed like a sure draw. But at first the John Deeres gathered on the courthouse's side lawn for the festival's tractor show were the only indication I had arrived on the right day.

Around the front of the building—three stories and a clock tower, red brick—I found a smattering of vendors lining the sidewalk. Behind one table spread with chunky beaded jewelry, a poster declared
GOD KNEW YOUR NAME BEFORE YOU WERE BORN
. To one side of the courthouse steps, a vinyl banner said
READ YOUR BIBLE
. The chalkboard menu of Heavenly Dogs (“Our hotdogs are heavenly”) advertised a Scopes Trial Special, two beef franks and a bag of chips for five bucks. On the lawn was an imposing bronze statue of William Jennings Bryan, who popularized the anti-evolution movement that inspired the Butler Act, was conscripted to the prosecution as more of a mascot than a legal mind, and died while napping in Dayton five days after the trial. Bryan College, the fundamentalist Christian school founded here in his memory, originated the festival in the late 1980s, but dropped sponsorship in 2000 to focus on projects illuminating the glorious whole of its namesake's life rather than his fraught final weeks. In 2013, a flier told me, sponsors included the local civic group Main Street Dayton, the Rhea County Historical and Genealogical Society, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the local Holiday Inn Express, the blandness of which was somehow reassuring.

There were two plays on the festival docket, both staged in the original second-floor courtroom, and I bought tickets from a woman wearing earrings made from Barrel of Monkeys pieces. Friday's matinee, a one-act imagined conversation between Bryan and Darrow staged by a Wisconsin performance troupe, billed itself as historically accurate but showed its hand when its Bryan began pontificating on intelligent design theory, a strain of creationism not codified until the 1980s. I took it as a vote of no confidence that there appeared to be more people watching the rickety bluegrass band outside, where the temperature was sweltering even in the maple-tree shade. But later that night, the courtroom was filled for the festival's main event, the premiere of a new commission called
Front Page News
. With the shaky charm of community theater—poor enunciation buffered by enthusiasm—the play opened and closed with the town boosters mulling over their plot at Robinson's drugstore, the courtroom drama comprising its sticky middle. Between scenes, reporters in boater hats jostled to the front of the newel-post bar. One arched his eyebrow as he quoted
Baltimore Sun
reporter Frank Kent: “A lot has been written since the trial began about what the outside world thinks of Dayton. Nothing has been written about what Dayton thinks of the outside world. It would be interesting to know.”

Afterward, the director, Dayton native Morgan Robbins, told me she isn't religious, “can't see any way other than evolution,” and almost turned down the gig. But the script, commissioned from Johnson City, Tennessee, playwright Deborah DeGeorge Harbin, won her over. Assembling a largely male cast in a town of 7,200 turned out to be a gnarlier prospect. Only five actors showed up to Robbins's audition, but one was George Miller, portly with a booming drawl—her Bryan, she knew. Still, he needed direction, especially when it came to the trial's climax, when Darrow examines Bryan as an expert witness on the Bible: Did that whale really swallow Jonah? Where did Cain get his wife? How long ago was the Great Flood, exactly?

“I was trying to get him to sweat a little bit when he took the stand,” Robbins said. “I was like, ‘Can you get a little more nervous? Your religion is being questioned—can you have that in your body, that you're uncomfortable with this?' And he was like, ‘I don't think Bryan would have been uncomfortable with this. Bryan's a hero. Do you realize how many people are pro-Bryan? I don't want to be met outside with pitchforks when I'm done.'”

But on opening night, Miller straddled the line between piety and bluster, his face morphing between flustered folds and satisfied grins. Across the aisle, festival veteran Rick Dye, the self-proclaimed “sole agnostic of the group,” played Darrow with a wry, crackling energy. Scopes sat in the middle, silent, looking alternately bored and overwhelmed—an unlikely dream role for Bryan theater major Dakota McClellan. “I wanted to play him if I ever got the chance, because he stood up for what he believed in, and that's how I am,” he told me later. “I'm on the other side, but as actors we have to get out of our comfort zones, do something different.”