by Pat Conroy
Mike said, “She hated Republicans with her body and soul. She told me something during the McGovern campaign I’ve never forgotten. Shyla said, ‘They used to call Southerners who hated black people racists. Now they call them Republicans.’ ”
“The Republicans haven’t done a good job getting our message out to the black electorate,” Capers agreed. “But we’re working on it.”
“If you get a single black vote, it means democracy ain’t working,” I said.
“Coming from you I take that as a compliment,” Capers said.
The judge hammered his gavel and ordered, “That’ll be enough from you, Jack. Settle down.”
Capers began clapping, but the applause was mocking, increasing the tension: “A genius for exaggeration. A gift of Jack’s as large as his overgrown body. He thinks his heart’s as large as all outdoors. The pathetic fallacy of all American liberals. In theory, they love the black, the downtrodden, the crippled, and the poor, yet you never find any of these people at their dinner table.”
The gavel again and the judge said, “Let’s continue. You boys’re like scorpions in a bottle.”
General Elliott sat off to stage left, removed from everyone, his face a mask of disapproval. If he was listening he gave no sign of it. He stared directly at his son, who returned the stare without judgment. Jordan, the priest, was every bit as erect and gaunt, as righteous and as handsome as the general. Only one great difference was manifest between them: the darkness that Jordan brought to the theater was soft and lauds-polished, the general’s darkness looked stolen from a firing range.
“Capers and I’ll take up this part of the story,” Mike said, “from the time when all of us boys grew our hair longer.”
“I let my hair grow down to my shoulder blades,” Capers remembered.
Ledare said, “Long hair’s one thing but none of us lost a friend in the war. No matter what else happened none of our friends died in Vietnam.”
“Some of mine did,” General Elliott said loudly, his voice a sudden force onstage.
“But not Jordan. Not your son. Jordan’s right in front of you,” Celestine said. “He’s here tonight facing you at last.”
The general replied, “Jordan’s deader than any soldier who fought and died honorably in Vietnam, Celestine. He’s invisible to me. His cowardice blinds me to his reality. There’s a fog between us so thick, so impassable. A river of blood stands between us. The blood of men I ordered into battle. Every time I try to see my son, their blood gets in my eyes. Their names blind me when I try to catch sight of Jordan. All the names on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial come toward me. Hundreds of thousands of letters, the names of all the dead boys who did their duty, who did right by America—their names march toward me in endless regiments when I try to catch sight of our cowardly son. Our Jordan.”
There was silence, a breathtaking silence, and then I stood up and screamed at General Elliott, “With assholes like you leading us, I’m amazed one American boy ever came back in one piece from Vietnam. How can one, broken-down rigid old fart know everything in the world? Answer me that, General. That’s your son there. It’s not a flag, or an M-1, or a guidon, or a hand grenade, or a parade ground, or a foxhole—yet you’ve shown more love and devotion to all these things than you’ve ever shown to your son. You knocked Jordan around his whole childhood and everyone here knows it. You knocked Celestine around too, but only a couple of us know that. Oh, Brave General of the Republic, who sits in judgment of his son tonight … you’re not half the man your son is and you never were. You’re a child-beater and a wife-beater, a lightweight thinker, a first-class bully, and the only reason you’re not a full-fledged Nazi is you can’t speak German and we’ve got this Constitution that keeps shitbirds like you in check.”
The gavel. “Shut up, Jack. And sit down. You’re already too emotional and we have hardly started.”
“No, Judge,” Mike said. “We’re well into our drama.”
“I want to answer Jack,” the general said, rising to his feet and pointing his finger menacingly.
“Yours is the first generation that disgraced America. When this country called out to its sons, the lily-livered draft dodgers and mama’s boys of your era wore girls’ panties to their physicals, faked asthma attacks, poured sugar into their urine samples, went on diets to get below the weight limit, gorged themselves to exceed it, got girls pregnant to avoid the draft, joined the National Guard in droves to avoid combat. We needed men of iron in Vietnam and we had to choose them from a nation of pantywaists. We had to select warriors from a defiled pool of pretty boys who were more comfortable on a therapist’s couch than walking point in the jungle. Our nation rots from the inside out. It’s a republic without gonads, one that’s grown fat, effeminate, and bloated with all the gross excesses of a society gone to seed. It sickens me. You sicken me, Jack.”
“Well said, General,” Capers said in the silence that followed.
Celestine Elliott stood up and said, “Talk to us about loyalty, dear. You raised Jordan to believe that loyalty was the most sterling quality in a soldier.”
“I’ve not changed my mind,” the general said, not looking at his estranged wife. “But Jack would know nothing of the kind of loyalty I was talking about.”
“He could teach you some things about loyalty you’ve never dreamt of,” she said. “Jack never once turned his back on our son. He’s been absolutely loyal to the only child we ever brought forth on this earth. He’s never wavered. He’s never backed off. He’s never asked for anything in return nor received a single thing in payment.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“What’ve you gotten from all this, Jack?” Celestine asked.
“Jordan’s loved me. He’s been an irreplaceable friend. He’s made me less lonely in the world,” I answered.
During this exchange, Jordan continued to keep his eyes fixed on his father. His expression hardly changed at all; it carried all the serenity of monastic life in its gaze.
Mike then took over the main story line of the narrative. All of us, he said, had been witnesses to the change in Shyla Fox once she met Radical Bob Merrill, who had transferred to Carolina from Columbia University during the summer of 1969. Bob had been with the radicals who had taken over Columbia’s administration building and issued a series of demands so stringent that the New York police were called in to break the siege during a brutal, predawn raid that did great harm to Columbia’s illustrious progressive reputation. Radical Bob himself had been asleep in Harlem when the raid took place because he was learning to make incendiary bombs from a black Muslim on probation, for use in disabling police units sent to interfere with political demonstrations. He came South to start a branch of the Students for a Democratic Society at the University of South Carolina. His first recruit on campus was Shyla Fox. Before he left the university, he had built the SDS chapter to a membership of just over fifty. He shaped them to his own will and educated them politically. So gifted was Radical Bob at organizing the somnolent students of the university that he received a special citation from national headquarters. But this was later, after Kent State, and the storm that had broken the lives of all of us gathered at the Dock Street Theater.
“I had never seen anybody like Radical Bob,” Mike said. “He had long black hair like an Indian, spoke three languages, could quote entire pages of Walt Whitman, Karl Marx—nothing fazed him or bothered him. He wasn’t a good public speaker, but what a judge of character, of leadership. He knew the South distrusted outsiders, so he set about the business of seducing Southerners to do his bidding. He stayed in the background, invisible, pulling the strings. He began our political education. No doubt about that. Except for Shyla, I don’t think any of us had given two thoughts about the war. We were ripe for the picking. I’d been waiting my whole life for someone like Radical Bob. Cool. He wrote the script for cool. He made ideas come alive. All of us bought into his game plan. Except Jordan.”
Radical Bob
, dressed impeccably in a Brooks Brothers suit, his hair styled and his nails manicured, said, “Jordan was completely immune to the charms of revolutionary thought. He was far too emotional to be trusted in a political movement. His only danger to me was the allegiance he inspired in his friends. In their innocence, Shyla and Mike revered him. But I saw an alien. I discouraged Shyla and Mike from their friendship with Jordan. I did the same with Jack.”
“But I was your real victory, Bob,” Capers said. “I was your pièce de résistance.”
“Ah yes,” Bob said, smiling at Capers. “I set my sights on you in my first month on campus. Shyla and to a lesser extent Mike were great catches, but let’s face it, they were Jewish and still could be discounted by the Southern dimwits I was trying to reach. I used my own Jewishness to hook them, but with you, I had to come up with a longer-range plan. So I drew up a strategy. When I found out about the Waterford connection among you, I suggested that Shyla start bringing all of you together at Yesterday’s—a friendly gathering over a beer where we could eventually lead the conversation toward serious things. Toward the war. Toward a response to that war. And, of course, in the back of my mind, toward civil disobedience.”
“The phrase of yours I remember best,” Capers said, “was this one: ‘If there’s to be blood in the rice paddies of Vietnam, there must also be an equivalent amount of blood shed in the streets of South Carolina.’ I learned a lot from you, Bob.”
“You and Shyla were my best students. You could move a crowd like no one I ever saw, Capers.”
“Vietnam made us all passionate, one way or the other,” Capers said.
“The art of kissing did funny things to Judas too,” I said, not bothering to look up at Capers. “Hit the hammer, Dad. Before these two love birds slide off the stage in their own slime.”
Both Bob and Capers laughed, but the laughter was born of nervousness, and the tension in the theater tightened like a spring. Father Jude coughed. Celestine excused herself and made her way to the ladies’ room. Ledare leaned forward in her seat. The gavel came down again and Mike continued the story that was bringing all of us into the sulfurous, exhausted past.
It was Mike who spoke but I felt myself remembering everything as I conjured up those gatherings in Yesterday’s. From the start the Waterford crowd was central to the life of the university because, as a group, we were uncommonly active in student life. Ledare was swept up in cheerleading, sororities, and beauty pageants, carrying on the Southern traditions. She ran in place while the rest of us exhausted ourselves screaming epithets at each other, arguing late at night, trying to change everything by the force of our ideas. We liked being smart and we liked being loud, and Radical Bob picked up the tab for all the beer we drank at Yesterday’s. Ledare broke up with Capers shortly after he met Radical Bob. A month later, Capers dropped out of his fraternity, Kappa Alpha, after delivering an antiwar speech to his KA brothers.
By the end of 1969, Capers Middleton, scion of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in South Carolina history, descendant of three signers of the Declaration of Independence, had become the acknowledged leader of the SDS and the radical student movement at South Carolina. In the background stood Bob Merrill, offering instruction, advice, and political direction. Second in command was Shyla, who now shared both Capers’ bed and his commitment to stop the war in Southeast Asia and bring every American soldier home. To my own regret Capers and Shyla were inseparable figures on campus during those heady, unbridled days. In the mornings they drank espresso at the UFO coffeehouse on Gervais Street trying to talk young soldiers at Fort Jackson into declaring their opposition to the war. They traveled together all over the country attending demonstrations and conferences involving leaders in the peace movement. Shyla became famous for her beauty and eloquence, Capers for his courage in facing police lines and his ability to combine passion and practicality in the speeches he delivered every day to groups that ranged in number from five to a thousand. His oratory had a purring, hallucinatory quality that could spellbind a crowd within minutes.
“Shyla was the true revolutionary,” Radical Bob said. “I knew as soon as I discovered her that she was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. I saw her cry when one of the other girls described the night her pet cat died ten years before. Shyla didn’t know either the cat or the girl, but she had empathy for all God’s creatures. It made her exciting and it made her naive. But you could take Shyla to the bank. She was the real thing. I think she was in love with Jack even then, but Jack wasn’t political and he wouldn’t change. Capers won her love by tossing off his past life and manning the barricades with her. Shyla felt that Capers was her own creation. Of course, I felt the exact same way about her.
“Shyla believed the Vietnam War was evil … but her vision was complicated by her parents’ story. Her Jewishness was the key to all her antiwar activity. To her, the Vietnamese were Jews. The Americans were the invading army, so they became the Nazis in her mind. Every time I argued with Shyla about the war, she took me on a field trip to Auschwitz. Talk about the siege of Khe Sanh with the Marines and suddenly she had me riding in a cattle car across the Polish countryside. I learned that I was a different kind of Jew than Shyla. My mother and father had this extraordinary gratitude about America. I looked at the world through my parents’ eyes. She looked at the world and her vision was obscured by her father’s tattoo. I think she had a need to protest the war because no one said a word when her parents and their families were taken by the Nazis. Every picture of a dead Vietnamese reminded her of ditches piled with Jews. Her protest, her radicalism, everything was an extension of her family life. But Shyla’s feelings were the realest thing about her. It was life and death with her.”
“What was it for my son?” General Elliott asked. “I accept your description of Shyla’s protest. Her sincerity I never doubted. Shyla was pure of spirit. By changing a few words of your description, you could’ve been describing the perfect infantryman. But tell me about Jordan. As far as I knew, he was as apolitical as Jack. Yet both of them got caught up in this foolishness. I never understood it.”
“Shyla wouldn’t rest until she enlisted Jordan and Jack in SDS,” Capers explained. “They’d laugh and tease her about her newfound radicalism. For a while they called her ‘Jane Fonda.’ But she got them to the rallies and the speeches. They were smart guys and if they hadn’t been playing baseball I think they’d have gotten involved earlier.”
“We were carried away by events,” I said. “Things occurred beyond our control.”
“You take it from here, Jack,” Mike said, and I nodded and took the witness chair.
Chapter Thirty-six
I began my part of the telling slowly, but I tried to get my facts right. It would be a while before I was brought in to the main action, but I was certainly a witness to the startling changes among my friends. Once Shyla and Capers discovered the antiwar movement they were lost to us. Though they went to class only sporadically, they still maintained good grades. At twenty-one, Capers Middleton and Shyla Fox were the two most famous college students in the state who were not athletes. They were regulars on the evening news, and were widely quoted and photographed in the papers. Their first arrest took place when they protested a visit of Du Pont to the campus to recruit graduates for the corporation, which manufactured napalm. Their second arrest took place a week later when they tried to block an exit to the amphitheater when President Nixon was speaking in Charlotte. During this time, it seemed as if Capers and Shyla had passed into some twilight world of fanaticism. There were no questions about the war they could not answer. The two of them brimmed with the righteousness of their cause, and each week the antiwar movement grew stronger on campus because of their zeal and their remarkable skills of confrontation, organization, and debate.
But for most of us college was still the center of our lives.
Often after his classes, Jordan would walk over to the yearbook offices to meet me and sometimes Mike. I wrote almost a
ll the copy for three straight yearbooks and Mike took more photographs than anyone who had ever worked for the Garnet and Black. In one photograph, Mike had caught the essence of the annual Miss Venus contest, where coeds from the sororities dressed in tight blouses, short shorts, and high heels, and paraded across a stage wearing paper bags over their heads. It was a traditional way to judge the Carolina woman who possessed the most desirable body; the jury was a leering batch of fraternity boys famous for their testosterone level. Mike’s photograph captured the bagged, anonymous heads of this girls’ lineup, their strained, pigeonlike bosoms stuck out and shoved toward the camera’s lens, for the pleasure of one grotesque, ogling face of a fraternity boy, appreciating breasts that seemed to stretch out into infinity. I captioned it “The Teat Offensive.” When President Thomas Jones invited us to explain the play on words Mike and I both insisted it was a printer’s error. Slowly, Mike succumbed to the call of Radical Bob, but he still loved the yearbook; from the start we saw it as our opportunity to record history with our own signatures and slants on every page. For us, the Garnet and Black was part epistle, part Rosetta Stone, Hallmark card, Socratic dialogue, and census report. It was a bright accumulation of life assembled from the formlessness of ten thousand lives thrown together in a great bouillabaisse and simmered for four years.
But when Capers and Shyla chalked up their sixth arrest of the year in December of 1969, I said good-bye to all that. Mike and Jordan and I went down to bail them out. By this time we were pros at bailing out our friends, since Capers’ and Shyla’s parents had washed their hands of any responsibility for their offsprings’ legal entanglements. The Foxes shared the immigrant’s dread of offending the authorities, while Capers’ parents cut him off because he was destroying the reputation of a family name long celebrated in South Carolina history texts. Without parental support, the two of them often found themselves casualties of rough policework and were handcuffed and dragged by the hair into waiting paddy wagons. They learned that the police were blue-collar workers who had come out of marginal suburbs. They could easily hate the sight of long-haired, spoiled college kids who did not mind using the American flag to start up fires along the boulevards. A nightstick had put Capers in the hospital in November; Shyla received a punch with a closed fist by a highway patrolman later that month.