Out in the woods, there was more gunfire. I thought about Maureen—how, after we moved back here to the farmhouse from Colorado, those random gunshot blasts during hunting season would make her flinch, set her on edge. Return her, over and over, to that place, that day….
“Wow,” Janis said. “Where were you just now?”
“What?” I looked away from her gaze. “Nowhere. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“You know what I find depressing?” she said. “That between Lizzy’s era and ours, nothing’s really changed.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ouija boards and horse-drawn carriages have kind of fallen out of fashion, haven’t they?”
“Really, Caelum. Think about it. We still enslave black people. We still put kids in uniform and send them far away from home to kill and be killed. Do you know what our military is paying in ‘blood money’ these days so that they can make their recruitment quotas? I heard it on NPR yesterday. Twenty thousand dollars! And who’s vulnerable to bribery like that? Well-heeled kids from the suburbs? No, poor kids. Inner city kids. Twenty thousand dollars so they can go over there and get themselves killed in Bush and Cheney’s bullshit war. It’s disgusting.”
“Okay, the deck’s still stacked. I’ll grant you that. But ‘enslaved’? That’s a stretch, isn’t it?”
“You know something, Caelum? You don’t live in New Orleans for five years without having your eyes opened. You don’t marry a black man without seeing the million little ways this country chips away at his dignity. And not just in the South either. Do you know how many times Moze has been pulled over and profiled since we came to Blue State Connecticut? Three times. Do you know how many banks he had to go to before one of them would give him a small business loan? Four. And do you know why the fourth one said yes? Because I was with him that time. Because that stupid loan officer addressed everything he had to say to me and treated Moze like he wasn’t even there.”
“All right, I’ll give you institutional racism. But that’s not—”
“Tell me something, Caelum. When you go to visit your wife, what’s prevalent at that prison—and every other prison in this country, for that matter? Light skin or dark?”
“Dark,” I conceded. “Eight or nine to one.”
“And who gets a longer sentence for the same conviction? That one white woman or the nine black women who can’t afford good lawyers?”
She shook her head in disgust. “Poor Lizzy. She must be rolling over in her grave. And Lydia, too.”
“Maybe so. But here’s a little friendly advice. When you walk in there to present your thesis proposal? I think you’d better check your guns at the door.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, don’t start talking about ‘blood money,’ and how blacks are still enslaved. Because if there’s a couple of conservative professors in that room and you start sounding like Al Sharpton, they might just take you on. And then things could get hostile.”
She said she hadn’t been in grad school for five years without knowing what people’s politics were, and how to talk the talk.
“Then you’ll do fine,” I said.
She stood, said she’d better go back upstairs. But instead of opening the door, she just stood there.
“What?” I said, knowing it was a risky question.
“I got pregnant once. Not too long after Moze and I moved in together. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it or not, and he was pretty definite that he didn’t want it. So I had an abortion. I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d leave me.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“That child would be in kindergarten by now. I was lying awake thinking about that last night. I’d be the mother of a five-year-old.”
“First things first,” I said. “Go down there and get your degree. Then you can come back here and figure things out, you and him.”
After she went inside, I stayed out there for a while. She’d forgotten her cigarettes, and I took one out of the pack and lit it. I don’t think I’d had a cigarette in a decade.
Boom! Boom! A deer had either escaped or been struck down….
I closed my eyes and saw the two of them out there on the side of the school building, armed to the teeth, taking aim at their own. Go! Go! This is awesome! This is what we always wanted to do!… Saw Rachel’s body in the grass near the top of the stairs. Saw her white casket, scrawled with messages of grief and love…. Rachel, Danny, all of them: they’d been their parents’ precious children, just as Edmond and Levi had been Lizzy’s. As Morgan Seaberry had been his mother’s pride and joy….
Nothing ever changes, Janis had said. It did, though. We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere. What had that chaos theorist on the plane called it? I couldn’t recall the word. Began with a b.
I checked my watch. My papers were graded, my lessons prepared, I was showered and dressed. I had another twenty minutes or so. I could either get to Oceanside a little early for a change—run off those handouts, answer some emails. Or else I could…
Putting aside her personal grief, Popper wrote to the Union Army’s superintendent of women nurses, Dorothea Dix, whom she had met fifteen years earlier at Seneca Falls. “I am nearly sixty years of age and have had no formal medical training, but my constitution is strong and I can learn as swiftly as any. Having lost sons to this war, I should like to come to the aid of other mothers’ sons.”
While Lizzy Popper awaited a response from Dix, she received, to her great relief, a letter from the missing Willie. Lizzy’s fear that her surviving son would become a casualty of war proved unwarranted. As his letter explained, Willie Popper had taken a far different path.
Earlier correspondence between Lizzy Popper and her brother, the troubled, one-eyed Roswell Hutchinson, sheds light on the Popper family dynamic, and on the ways in which Charles and Elizabeth Popper’s youngest child differed from his siblings. In an 1859 letter to the sister who had raised and later rescued him from his troubles in Richmond, Hutchinson criticized what he perceived as his sister and brother-in-law’s “immoderate mollycoddling” of Willie. The letter was a parting shot of sorts; after an extended stay with the Poppers, Hutchinson had been asked to leave because of drunkenness, “dicing,” and unemployment. Said the wounded and wounding Hutchinson:
Even a one-eyed shipwreck of a man such as I can see that Crown Prince William is worshipped by his fawning father and doting mother, and that he is ill served by these extreme attentions. Would that you had offered me one-tenth of the affection you bestow on this spoiled whelp, Lizzy, back in the day when you were young and I was younger, and the mother who would have loved me was mouldering in the ground. Perhaps if you had been more loving, I would not have taken as my consort the demon drink.
In a letter written but apparently never sent, Lizzy answered her brother’s charges with Quaker frankness: “If thee was ill raised by me, I say only that I did my best. I will not be held responsible for thy intemperance. Willie’s gift sets him apart, but he is neither better nor more prized than his brothers.”
By “Willie’s gift,” Lizzy Popper most likely referred to her son’s musical talent. Charles Popper had detected in his youngest son an aptitude for music and had taught him to play piano, banjo, and fiddle, and to sing much of the catalogue from the old Popper Family songbook. Willie shared his father’s love of performance, executing the abolitionist songs with passion and zeal, but later confessed to his mother that he gave little notice to the political messages the lyrics conveyed. During the second half of 1863, Willie Popper had been working unhappily as a longshoreman under the direction of his uncle, New Haven harbormaster Nathanael Weeks. Slight of build, Willie hated the work and was intimidated by the other dock workers—“coarse Irish,” he later wrote to his mother, “whose great sport is to mock me for my small frame and small hands, and the absence of whiskers on my chin.
” It was at the harbor, however, that Willie became seduced by what he called “the siren’s song”: placards and broadsides advertising the Broadway melodramas and minstrel shows a short ferry ride away. On a winter afternoon, Willie Popper snuck aboard one of those ferries, crossed Long Island Sound, and arrived in Manhattan. He never saw his mother again.
During the bleak years when the Union battled the Confederacy and mothers on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line wept for their slain sons, there were no fewer than twenty blackface minstrel shows playing in and around lower Broadway. Willie Popper auditioned and was hired as an “Ethiopian delineator” by one of the most successful of these entertainments, Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels at Waverly Calhoun’s Musee and Theatre, located at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. Promotional posters for this large-cast show promised that ticket-buyers would witness “The Darky As He Truly Is—At Work! At Rest! In Song and Dance!” But if authenticity was advertised, what Calhoun’s show delivered was the usual costumed extravaganza and comic stereotype.*
Willie Popper began with Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels as a blackface chorus member in the opening and closing production numbers, but his voice and stage presence quickly brought him to the attention of owner-producer Waverly Calhoun, who renamed him Fennimore Forrest, dressed him in drag, and made him a featured player.
By the mid-nineteenth century, women had broken the gender barrier in New York theater, among them actress-producer Laura Keane and soprano Jenny Lind, the popular “Swedish Nightingale.” Minstrel shows, however, continued to cast males in female roles, most likely for comic effect. As a longshoreman on the docks at New Haven, Willie Popper’s slender frame and beardless chin had been liabilities, but on the minstrel stage, they became assets.
Wearing gaudy dresses and ocher-colored makeup, Willie titillated and repulsed audiences during the walk around as Lucy Long, a seductive, sashaying “yaller gal” who made fools of her would-be “darky” lotharios, and whose “lips are so big, they can’t be kissed all at once.” In the show’s afterpiece, Willie segued from comedy to melodrama, playing a suffering young slave named Minnie May. Minnie May was a blatant imitation of Eliza, the heroic escaped slave mother in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ever-popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dressed in ragged skirts and cradling a black baby doll wrapped in bunting, “Fennimore Forrest,” as Minnie May, apparently galvanized New York theatergoers. According to an April 3, 1863, New York World account, “The talented Mr. Forrest, in the midst of the third-act plantation frolics, stops the show with a poignant anthem that brings tearful audiences to their feet and reminds us of the Union’s Holy Mission.” For his showstopper, Willie had converted his father’s abolitionist hymn “Swing Open, Freedom’s Door!” into a melodramatic tour de force.
In the letter Willie Popper sent to his mother, he enclosed a clipping of the World article and wrote that, despite lingering sorrow about the deaths of his brothers,
I am far happier now than I have ever been. You who worked so hard to liberate the slaves will hopefully appreciate that my life in New Haven was one of enslavement.
When I stepped aboard the ferry that took me to New York, it was my escape from bondage! Cast aside your mourning and your Quaker resistance to theatricals, Mother. Come and see my show!
No evidence exists that Lizzy complied, but her estranged husband, then ensconced at Manhattan’s DuMont Hotel, did attend a performance of Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels. Charlie Popper promptly disowned his surviving son. A subsequent letter from Willie to his mother is ambiguous as to the exact reason, or reasons, for the break with his father. Perhaps it was because Willie’s reworking of “Swing Open Freedom’s Door!” insulted Charles Popper, or because Willie’s taking of female parts embarrassed him, or because he disapproved of minstrel shows in general. The possibility also exists that Willie Popper may have been engaged in a sexual relationship with Waverly Calhoun, the show’s owner and producer, and that Charles Popper broke with his son for this reason. If Willie Popper was, in fact, having an affair with Calhoun, he hardly would have stated so in a letter to his politically liberal but socially conservative mother. The social mores of the time dictated that “the sin that dare not speak its name” was never referred to directly. But in Willie’s letter to his mother, he stated, “Waverly has become a friend to me—the dearest I have ever known.” The letter’s return address indicates that Willie was living at Calhoun’s Park Avenue apartment.
Whether or not Willie Popper and his producer were involved sexually, their relationship ended abruptly in January of 1864, when Waverly Calhoun’s Musee and Theatre was destroyed by fire. Calhoun had fallen asleep in his office while counting the evening’s box office receipts and had died, apparently of asphyxiation. A New York Sun account of the blaze and its aftermath describes the removal of Calhoun’s body from the destroyed building, “while his young star, Fennimore Forrest, looked on, distraught and in dishabille.” Willie Popper disappeared from New York shortly after and did not communicate with his mother again until ten years later, in 1874. By then, Charles Popper had died. He and Willie had not resolved their differences.
In March of 1863, Lizzy Popper received by telegram a succinct response from the Union’s nursing superintendent Dorothea Dix: “You will suffice. Come as soon as possible.”
I went back inside. Fed the cat, packed my briefcase for the teaching day ahead. On my way out, that word came to me: bifurcation. I checked my watch, looked over at the computer. The screen saver was on; I’d forgotten to close it down the night before. I sat. Googled chaos theory bifurcation.
And son of a bitch, what was the first listing that rose up from cyberspace? An article by my airplane buddy, Mickey Schmidt. I’d called him, slurring drunk, at midnight on Y2K as the tectonic plates of time were shifting from the twentieth century to the twenty-first. Sure you remember me, I’d insisted. You said you were writing a book about gambling. You asked me to hold your hand during takeoff because you were afraid to fly.
And did you? No, you didn’t. You couldn’t do that one small thing….
Why don’t you ever hug me back? she’d wanted to know—the mother who hadn’t really been my mother. The mother they’d passed off as mine….
“Emotional castrato,” Francesca had etched onto the face of my computer monitor the day she left me. Wife number two: she’d had the same complaint as wives number one and three. I saw Maureen, standing there in our Colorado living room, our signal, the lit candle, flickering between us. Come upstairs. Love me. Be close to me. But I’d withheld myself, as usual, and now withholding myself was one of the house rules: a quick embrace across the visiting room table, a peck on the cheek, no handholding. Guards and surveillance cameras were watching….
I clicked the mouse. Scrolled down. And there it was, in Mickey Schmidt’s own words: “Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates.”
I thought about all this on my drive over to Oceanside, where the lawn signs and bumper stickers I passed—“Let’s Support Our Troops,” “Sleep Well Tonight—Our Marine Has Your Back,” “There Were No WMDs—They LIED,” “Impeach Bush”—spoke of our deep division, our bifurcation since 9/11…. Whether it was “Bush and Cheney’s bullshit war” or “Mr. Lincoln’s fratricidal war” or the vengeful war against their own that Eric and Dylan had waged: war begat chaos and altered everything. I thought about Private First Class Kendricks in my Quest class: who had Kareem Kendricks been, I wondered, before he went over there to fight the insurgency and got his hand blown off?…Thought about how chaos had descended on the Columbine families. They’d sent their kids off to school that morning, lulled by the assumption that school was safe…. Thought about Cha
rlie and Lizzy—how the war had pretty much ended their marriage, how their children’s lives had bifurcated. Levi and Edmond had marched off to war to end slavery and had lost their lives to the cause. Their brother, my great-great-grandfather, had marched out onto a Broadway stage to reinforce all the ugly stereotypes and had been lauded and rewarded for it—at least until the night his benefactor went up in flames. But there was more to Willy’s story than that. There had to be. Because as Janis had put it, I was here, wasn’t I?
Perturbation, chaos, bifurcation: it was just as Mickey Schmidt had written: some explosion—as local as rifle fire, as worldwide as war—can set things reeling in a whole different direction, can cause a fork in the road. And one path may lead to disintegration, the other to a reordered world.
So maybe Janis had been right that day when we’d gone up to see the crumbling Memorial Arch that Lizzy and her granddaughter Lydia had seen unveiled and dedicated. Maybe my ancestors could teach me something….
And maybe I’d better put all of that aside for now, because my mission that day was to try and somehow convince seventeen skeptical community college students that the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur could inform their lives. Well, good luck with that one, Quirk. Wishing you all the best with Mission: Impossible….
chapter twenty-nine
Order Inciting disturbance CHAOS Order Restored
Recapping the felt pen I’d used to scrawl the myth’s equation, I turned from the whiteboard back to them. “So by the end of the story, Theseus has slain the Minotaur, sacrificed his kill to the gods, and escaped from the imprisoning maze. Athens has been restored to order, until the gods’ next intervention for good or ill. But let’s backtrack, okay? What would you identify as the ‘inciting disturbance’ of this story—the thing that called the Minotaur into existence in the first place?”