Back at school again, I hunkered down in the stacks, shuttling up and down High Street between Branford College and Sterling Library, the carillons of Harkness Tower providing the only music in my life. For economy’s sake, I had decided shortly before entering to complete Yale in three years, which required an academic load of six courses each semester. All of Yale’s secret societies somehow failed to tap me for membership, and in response I threw myself into academic life with a vengeance. For a variety of reasons, I declared history my major. My excursions into the South had reawakened a childhood interest in the Civil War. Then, too, I felt I’d been born too late, imagining myself not as a serf, but as a kind of Jeffersonian gentleman with a book in one hand and a riding crop in the other. But even I was beginning to suspect that the old order to which I wanted to pledge allegiance was crumbling. When I spoke to Will I advocated my choice of majors in contemporary terms: the study of the past, I told him, would illuminate the present struggle. And not least, I hoped it would help me get into Harvard Law.
I didn’t see Will for six months after his house burned to the ground. Ravaged and reticent, he’d come back to the ashes after a fierce, week-long bender in the Delta, crawling the juke joints. He would call me often enough that fall—seldom before midnight—that I think of him as nearly present that year, living in the hall phone booth with its locker-room/ashtray smell, its carved initials and graffiti: WHEN BETTER WOMEN ARE MADE YALE MEN WILL MAKE THEM, and late in the following year—WHEN BETTER MEN ARE MADE, YALE WOMEN WILL HAVE EQUALS. After the fire, he and Taleesha had moved into a suite at the Peabody Hotel. I wrote him letters, carbons of which I haphazardly saved along with English and history papers, like this representatively embarrassing note:
Dear Will:
It’s the tail end of one of those Sunday afternoons which was supposed to have hosted all kinds of achievements—paper writing, letter writing, extracurricular reading, room cleaning and general lubrication of the wheels and cogs of day-to-day life. But I went to a fairly boring party and got blasted last night so the mind somewhat fuddled, the synapses encrusted with carbon.
Speaking of extracurricular reading, I just finished a book you would thoroughly approve of, if indeed you have not given up on the written word, though this is the very book about your brave new world—Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death. A remarkable book, ideas-wise and aesthetically. Argues for a new non-hierarchical society and “polymorphous perversity” that will free us from the so called reality principle. Right up your (back) alley.
Loved that line from Furry Lewis. Got to use it in a paper. Great to hear the biz is going so well—I keep hearing T’s latest on the radio and I don’t even listen to the radio. Your brand of R and B is more popular here in Ivy land than yours truly would have imagined. You and James Brown and Norman O. Brown are avatars of the same Weltanschauung and you seem to be slipping it over on the rest of us. Hark, I hear the Philistines knocking at the gate. But meantime, the reality principle still obtains and I’ve got to go grind. After I sing a few bars of the Whiffenpoof song, of course. Love to your better three quarters, meaning Taleesha.
What seems interesting to me about this now is the way I was straining to find the bridge between Will’s world and my own. Or perhaps I was cooler than I remember; I haven’t thought of Norman O. Brown in years, but the fact that I read him then would seem to indicate that I was less of a nerd than I remember. In retrospect, maybe I’ve made the oppositions more stark, given where we both ended up. Besides this I notice the uneasy tension between self-mockery and showing off; clearly I was very pleased to deploy the word Weltanschauung, with its Panzer division of vowels—in fact the whole sentence seems to exist for the purpose of using it.
Will was present also that year in the form of his great-greatgrandfather John Savage, who as a boy featured prominently in the diaries of Binnie Pilcher Savage and whom I could only envision in Will’s precise image. The diaries rambled innocuously enough except for their news of the distant war, until this entry from the spring of 1861:
April 27th Great excitement here. Father has convened the gentlemen hereabouts for a Home Company to investigate the planned insurrection of the negroes. So far it is only the testimony of young John which points to such a conspiracy, but in the present wartime atmosphere suspicion reigns and his report is taken most seriously. At table last evening Father chastised him for his sullenness and table manners John then burst forth declaring he would be glad when the negroes rose up and killed him, that is Father, with an axe as they were planning to do. When questioned by Father about this extraordinary prediction he claimed to have heard Clarence and another negro from the Yancy place hatching that very scheme not three days before.
Within weeks of this event, according to the diaries, Clarence and seven other slaves at Bear Track and two adjoining plantations were hanged. The subject of slave rebellions was an increasingly fashionable one toward the end of the sixties, and it occurred to me that this remarkable slice of history which had fallen into my hands would make a fine subject for a thesis. I began to spend most of my time in the stacks, poring through slave narratives and old WPA interviews with former slaves. Will promised he would try to find more material, though the Savage archives, I suspected, were closed to him for the indefinite future.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, almost two months into my search, I found what I was looking for on a Library of Congress microfilm—a short interview with a slave named Prince Johnson who had grown up at Bear Track plantation, the first independent confirmation of Binnie Savage’s story of the alleged slave insurrection:
113—Autobiography of an Exslave
Prince Johnson—Isaqueena County 1937
Ma’am, I’s named Prince Johnson on account of I was named after Prince Albert, [sic] the famous royalty. They say I was born in Charleston and moved to Bear Track when I was a bitty thing. Closes’ I can figgers I’s nearly one hundred year old. I b’longed to Marse Elihu Savage, he was de riches’ and highes’ quality gent’man in de county. He had de blues’ eyes you ever seed. Same as young Marse John. Ever’body knowed him all round the country and nobody wanted to cross him. He had some kind of temper, Marse did. But mostly he was good to us. We ate good grub and the slave quarters was tolerable snug.
Marse he married Miss Julia who was a Trenholm. She lose one baby girl. De two young ladies was de prettiest young ladies in dem parts, wid big brown eyes and black hair. Den came young Marse John. He was de secon’ boy, de firs’ he up and die from de fever. And same wid de firs’ born girl. Most all of us niggers and white folks back den, we got de fever ever’ spring.
Miss Eliza was a wild one. She married young Mr. Alcorn over to Coahoma County. But she was a han’ful, no mistake. Dey all was. Dem Savages, dey was quality, but dey was de wildes’, cussinges’, fightenes’, hardes’ drinkin’, fastes’-ridin’, outspendinest folks you ever seed.
They was nearly two hundred head ob folk living in de slave quarters. Us heard about ol’ Hones’ Abe de rail splitter but we didn’t pay much mind, ’cept some ob de younger boys dey get to talkin’ ’bout ’mancipation when dere weren’t no white folk aroun’. I never hear bout no rebellion, but dere was a boy named Clarence, big fella used to do de’ huntin and fishin’. He use to take young John out to de woods like he was his own son and den one day dey question us all and dey say Clarence he plottin’ a rebellion to kill de Marse and rabish de white womens. Well, I ain’t heard no such talk but Clarence he was mighty het up when they done sold his woman off to a place down Vicksburg way. And dat weren’t like Marse Savage to do a t’ing like dat at all. No sah. A young nigger name of Abraham testify against him but he was a worthless no count nigger and wouldn’t no black peoples b’lieve a word he say. Dey say hit went hard for Clarence when dey found two guns and a hatchet ’neath his cabin, but I says, hit were his job, huntin’ for game for de table. But I don’t say hit to anyone but keep my own counsel, like always. And d’at’s why I’s here today. Not lik
e some of dem young bucks, like Clarence. Dey hung him and seben, eight others.
After de ’mancipation most of de niggers dey run off but me I stayed on. Hit were my home.
One snowy night shortly before Christmas break I returned to my room to find Will waiting with pinwheel eyes and a black velvet cape, sitting in a lotus position on my bed, the stereo blasting some funky new record of his. Unfolding his legs and rising slowly from the bed, he clapped his hands on my shoulders and attempted to look into my eyes, his actual focal point somewhere outside the walls behind me.
“Looking very Yale,” he said.
“You look … medieval,” I said.
He seemed to like this idea. Any sane person would have felt absurd floating across the Yale campus dressed as Will was, but you could sense immediately that he didn’t. And in his company you became a little self-conscious about your own appearance, your conformity, even on this, your own turf. I would have blamed this on my own insecurity, but Aaron, whom we ran into in the Branford courtyard, commented on it the next day after Will was gone. “Guy’s from another planet,” Aaron remarked, “but he makes you feel like he’s the one that belongs.”
Of course, to Will the campus must have seemed half real at most, the right-angled brick melting softly, the gray stone dressed up in brilliant chemical hues—his mind being literally elsewhere. Or so I imagined. I didn’t know what he was on. He was whacked out and yet he was coherent and self-contained.
I wanted to show him Yale or, rather, show him me at Yale. But he’d already seen it once with his father, well before Will had chosen a very different brand of higher education, and he was invariably condescending about the whole thing. “Kind of a big museum to Apollonian culture,” he said. “Sarcophagus of the status quo.”
I, for one, was hoping this relic would last long enough to award me a diploma. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not sure which of us picked the winning side. At the time, Will definitely had the edge. Yale is still Yale, but I suspect that the world my daughters are inheriting has been shaped more by Will’s followers than by Old Blues like his father. Or me. After his visit I sent Will a letter quoting a tract that I suggested could serve as a fine description of the Age of Aquarius, declaimed at a convention of southern states by one Leonidas Spratt of South Carolina in 1860:
I have perfect confidence that … when the peerage of England shall have yielded to the masses—when democracy at the North shall hold its carnival … when women shall have taken the places and habiliments of men, and men shall have taken the places and habiliments of women—when Free Love unions … shall pervade the land—when the sexes shall consort without the constraints of marriage, and when youths and maidens, drunk at noonday, and half naked, shall reel about the marketplaces—the South will stand, secure and erect as she stands now.
At Rudy’s, an off-campus dive, Will kept leaning farther and farther forward across the table until his chin was almost in my beer, the scar beneath his left eye seeming to pulse under my nose. He assured me a revolution was at hand and worried that I might end up on the wrong side.
“I’ll just tell them I know you.”
“Better not,” he said. “People around me have a tendency to get hurt.”
“Look, I’m sorry about Elbridge,” I said. “But you know it wasn’t your fault.”
Will reared back in his chair as if I’d slapped him. He swallowed half a mug of beer and shook his head.
“Thank you for that absolution, Father Keane. But his blood is still on my hands.”
“He could have borrowed anybody’s car,” I pointed out.
“But he borrowed mine,” Will said. “And I let him.” He leaned even farther forward and hissed, “And they were after me.”
“Who was after you?”
“L.B. was in my car. Everybody knew that car. They were tailing him.” He paused one of his long pauses, staring off into the ether. “Out there on the highway they thought they could take me down and say whatever they wanted later.”
“Will, he was high,” I said. “He was speeding and the cops gave chase.”
“Were you there?” Will demanded.
“Were you?”
“You’ve got to free your senses from the official version of events,” he said. “Sacco and Vanzetti, Sam Cooke, Medgar Evars, John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King—there’s always a cover story. Resisting arrest … lone gunman … drugs.” He looked around, reconnoitering, and whispered, “They always try to make it look unconnected.”
“Was there an autopsy or a coroner’s report?”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Will rolled his eyes. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” he quoted, retrieving a chestnut from senior-year Latin class. “It’s the motherfucking foxes guarding the henhouse. Hell, L.B. was the guy who first clued me in. He lent me the books, showed me how to look behind the veil.” He fell silent, and for a moment I was afraid he might cry.
“Maybe you should move out of Memphis.”
Will sighed and settled back in his chair. “Maybe so.” Will’s lips disappeared as he sucked them inward. “L.B. was always telling me to get out of town. I don’t know why he couldn’t take his own advice.” After a long pause, he said. “It’s in the blood. You can’t run from a curse.”
This emboldened me to ask, “Did you ever read that diary you gave me?”
“I might have looked at it.” He smiled cryptically, then reached down into his shirt and extracted a hoary, carved stone which hung from a thong around his neck. “Remember this? The uzat, mystical eye.”
I nodded, having seen it in his father’s collection on my first visit to Memphis.
“Protects against ghosts, snakebites and envious words.”
“You ought to give one to Taleesha,” I said. “She’s the one who needs protection.”
He smiled as if at a dim child. “You see her as the noble victim,” he said. “But, let me tell you—she’s way better than that. She could eat you for breakfast. Hell, she could eat me for breakfast. Fact, she nearly did.”
He suddenly pulled off his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his vivid shirt; on the inside of his bicep was an ugly bruise that looked exactly like the imprint of a set of teeth.
He grinned as if he were immensely proud of this trophy.
“Taleesha did that,” I asked.
“Don’t worry about Tally. She’s gonna be fine.”
He was right: Will himself was the one to worry about. When he still had a brother he was free to be the errant son. Now that he was the last of the Savages, he had to struggle even harder against his heredity, and I could see that it was wearing on him.
“Who are these people?” he demanded, looking around us. To my horror he suddenly stood up on his chair and shouted, “Hey, Yalies, you think you’re so fucking smart—who here knows where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog?”
I thought for sure we were in for a fight, but the comparative hush which this exclamation evoked was suddenly broken by a rebel yell. A big jock at a nearby table stood up on his own chair. “Moorhead,” he shouted. “Any good ole boy knows the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog at Moorhead, Mississippi.”
The Mississippian lumbered over to our table with his pitcher and soon we found ourselves carousing with several members of the football team. Incredibly, Will seemed delighted with this company and they with him. I was amazed not only that Will got along with these guys better than I could, but also that he knew how to talk about football, while our new friends proved to be extremely well versed in soul and blues. They were, in fact, big fans of Lester Holmes. After an eternity of bonding, I tried to extract Will; I had classes in the morning.
He said he’d be back in my room within the hour. I did not see him again for several weeks, although the football player from Mississippi always had a hearty greeting for me after that whenever I saw him on campus.
XIV
For Christmas that year my parents gave me a ’63 Corvair that my uncle had ta
ken in trade on his lot. In this Ralph Nader—condemned chariot—bidding farewell to my folks, little Jimmy, Aunt Colleen and Nana Keane—I set out a few days later for Jackson, Mississippi. My plan was to visit Will in Memphis and then follow the river south through the Delta to Jackson, there to scour the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for further clues about the alleged slave uprising at Bear Track.
Three hours short of Memphis I pulled off the interstate and made my way to Franklin, Tennessee, site of one of the bloodiest battles of what was still known in these parts as “the war.” The man who would have been my great-great uncle died there. In the years since, the postcard-perfect Victorian town had spread over much of the battlefield, and I stopped at a gas station to ask directions. The attendant asked, “You one of them reenactors?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Reenactors. Those folks dress up in uniforms, do the battle. There was a big one here a few years back—must have been five thousand of ’em, blue and gray, camped out in the field there, drinking and carrying on. Next day they acted out the battle, realistic as hell, carrying the colors, marching up against each other firing their muskets, falling over like fainting goats. It was a hell of a thing to see.”
After I disclaimed any such affiliation, he directed me to Carnton, an antebellum mansion where four Confederate generals had been laid out on the porch, and where thousands of lesser rank lay buried. As we do in such places, I tried to conjure up from the serene landscape some mystical sense of connection to the hallowed bloody past, but I couldn’t feel anything except a vague reverence until, on my way out of town, I encountered a young soldier in the olive-drab uniform of the U.S. Army standing beside his car at the pump next to mine. Inside the Pontiac a fat girl in a white dress was dabbing her eyes with a dirty handkerchief. He was about my age, nineteen or twenty, crewcut and skinny, with a thin face that seemed to be all pimples and bones. Young as he was, his face had a wizened quality; it was easy to imagine him in a daguerreotype, leaning on his musket, a member of the doomed Army of Tennessee.