Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “Sexual problems? I …”

  “You didn’t know we had any? That illustrates my point. You haven’t noticed I hardly ever come?”

  “I … well …” He hadn’t realized girls came.

  “You haven’t noticed that lots of times I go into the bathroom and masturbate after we make love?”

  “I always thought you were … you know, cleaning yourself up.”

  They sat in silence.

  “God, this is awful, Maria. I’ve been having a wonderful time, and thinking you were too …”

  “Well, it’s had its charms, Raymond. But unassisted orgasm hasn’t been among them.” “Why didn’t you say something?” “I guess I thought it was my own problem.” “What’s changed your mind?”

  “Yes, well. That’s why I wasn’t listening to you on the tribulations of a Southern upbringing. I was trying to figure out how to tell you this.”

  “What?”

  “That I spent all afternoon in bed with Carson, that guy in Newland.”

  Raymond felt as though he’d been punched in the solar plexus. Carson was a cheery Negro from Birmingham who’d dropped out of Howard to drive people to work during the Montgomery bus boycott. Raymond and Maria had met him one night at a meeting. He was wearing a Howard sweatshirt. He told about being born in the back seat of a car on the way to the hospital, so his father had named him Carson. Raymond was being swept with waves of rage, humiliation, pain, and all kinds of emotions so new that he didn’t have names for them.

  After a couple of minutes, Maria said, “But it’s no big deal, Raymond. When you and I want to make love, we will. And we’ll figure out ways to cope with our problems.”

  He looked at her with amazement. “Aren’t you in love with this guy?”

  She laughed. “Who’s talking love? I’m talking lust.”

  She kissed him and left. He lay through the night assaulted by unfamiliar emotions. She was screwing a Negro, she wanted to screw him as well. Disease: Carson would give her VD, which he would pick up. She didn’t want to live happily ever after with him? It hadn’t occurred to him it wouldn’t go on forever. Things always had in Newland. This was the woman with whom he’d pledged himself to struggle to build a more decent world. Carson was a better lover. It was true what they said about Negro men. Of course if Raymond had been lying around some sleepy Southern town with loose Negro girls, instead of struggling to get away and slave for the Negro cause, he’d know how to make love too. Was Carson’s cock bigger? How long could he last? How long did you have to last to make a girl come?

  He watched the string of stereotypes marching through his numb brain.

  He would challenge Carson to a duel. The winner would have Maria’s devotion forevermore. He would string the bastard up and slice off his goddam balls. How dare he touch a white woman? His woman. More than one man at a time? He’d never heard of such a thing. For a man, maybe. But not for women. Not for decent women. He’d string her up. Sex before marriage was bad enough even if you loved the guy and planned to marry him. But sex for fun? Sex to quell lust? It was revolting. Maria was revolting. A jig in a college sweatshirt was like a monkey in a tuxedo. Who did Maria think she was anyhow? He was the man, he had the cock, he decided what went on when. She was just a stinking sink hole of a cunt. He pounded his fists rhythmically on the roof. Orgasms for women! These aggressive demanding Yankee bitches! She should spread her legs and be grateful for what she got! He was how he was, and she could take it or leave it! (Stunned, he began to realize that she’d probably leave it.)

  By morning, as he descended from the roof with crazed bloodshot eyes, he understood that you didn’t stop being a Southerner just by saying “you” instead of “yall.” He stopped eating, lay awake on the roof all night, excused himself from canvassing. The project doctor was coming by regularly to hand out Valium, which Raymond popped in great quantities. Though he was almost too far gone to notice, the violence the group was carefully hiding from the outside world they were turning in on each other. Almost every day now some kind of altercation erupted—between those who’d been jailed versus those who hadn’t, Yankees versus Southerners, whites versus blacks, men versus women, middle class versus working class, college-educated versus non-college-educated, religious versus atheist.

  Raymond began wandering around the countryside with his camera, taking pictures of the farmers, their families and crops. One afternoon he walked past the Randalls’, en route to a woods to photograph wild azaleas. The damp green fields were steaming under the hot spring sun. Mrs. Randall was sitting in an armchair on her front porch snapping string beans while her two children tumbled in the dirt in the yard. Raymond raised a hand, and she replied with a shy, “Hidy, how yall today?”

  “Just fine, thank you, ma’am. Pretty day?”

  “Yes sir. Sure is.”

  Raymond watched the children, remembering his days with The Five. “You mind if I take some pictures of your children?”

  “Shoot, no. But what you want pictures of them rascals for?”

  “Just for fun. Yall mind?”

  The children put their hands to their mouths and giggled.

  Raymond shot, with long waits between pictures, during which he studied their faces and tried to understand their games. He contrasted this to the way he’d made the documentary—splicing together every horrifying sequence he could get his hands on. He bludgeoned the viewer into accepting FORWARD’S interpretation. But was it reality? If he instead set up a camera trained for forty years on the Randalls’ front porch, recording people occasionally walking in and out or standing and chatting, was that reality? Year after year, cotton bolls forming, swelling, popping, getting picked. This boredom I get so impatient with, Raymond mused, is that actually reality? Do I then go and stir up drama where it wouldn’t otherwise exist just to escape reality, which is boredom?

  The next time he brought some candy, which the children stuffed in their mouths as though afraid it would vanish. Another day he brought Mrs. Randall some macaroni he’d liberated from the project supply. She hesitantly invited him for supper, and during the meal he asked if they’d mind if he did a picture book on their children.

  They looked dumbfounded, and Mr. Randall asked, “Who’d want a book like that cepting their mama and me?”

  “People up North might want to know how yall live down here.”

  Mr. Randall thought it over. “Why?”

  “Folks everywhere are curious.”

  “Yeah, ain’t it the truth? Well, yeah, I reckon it’d be all right”

  Raymond photographed their house, their sheds and fields; Mr. and Mrs. Randall sitting on their porch in their Sunday clothes—a board-stiff gleaming white shirt and black suit for him, a clinging white rayon dress for her, and a hat with a veil. Mr. Randall had ten acres of cotton, a tobacco allotment, and ten acres of green beans. Raymond photographed him among his crops and played long involved games with the children.

  One night Maria invited him to the roof. They sat down, and she took his hand. A shudder of revulsion ran up his arm. He retrieved his hand. “I didn’t know you’d be so upset, Raymond.”

  “Who’s upset?”

  “Well, look at you. Your clothes are hanging on you like a scarecrow’s. You’ve got black circles under your eyes. When you aren’t lying up here brooding, you’re stumbling around the countryside like a zombie.”

  “It just never occurred to me it wouldn’t last forever, Maria.”

  She laughed. “It never occurred to me it would last more than a few weeks. I was delighted when it went on for several months. In my life people have always come and gone, so to speak. You don’t let yourself get too caught up in it or you get hurt. I didn’t realize you were playing by different rules. I’m really sorry. But I didn’t mean to say it was all over. I like you a lot, Raymond. I’d still like to spend time with you. And make love with you if we feel like it.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle that, Maria. I want you all to myself.”r />
  “You can have me all to yourself, Raymond. But not all the time. That’s how I am.”

  “And this is how I am.”

  “So who’s going to change?”

  “Neither probably.”

  “Probably not.”

  Raymond, Justin, Maria, and Annabelle were lying on a dam that formed a pond. The afternoon sun was scorching. They had caught some bluegill and cooked them over a fire. Justin, his shirt off, was playing his guitar, and they were singing Dylan and Baez songs. Annabelle was kneeling behind Justin kneading his shoulders. Raymond, buoyed up by Valium, was feeling better than he had in days. Maria and he had begun having pleasant chats on the roof again, though he felt toward her body as he would toward a coiled copperhead. If she touched his forearm for emphasis while she talked, he twitched and moved away. And the vision of Carson’s black hips rising and falling over her writhing body almost made him vomit. Carson had come to the Wilbur project once, and Raymond had had to race for the woods to keep from hurling himself at the bastard and gouging his thumbs into his windpipe.

  Justin was being very friendly, had invited him along on this picnic, and had praised his fishing and firebuilding skills. Apparently, Raymond thought with resentment, I’m down and out enough now not to threaten him.

  A cross had been burned on a hill overlooking the next town two nights earlier. But Raymond had learned by now to live with fear. He doubted that anyone could hurt him as much as Maria had. These Yankees abhorred physical violence so much, clucked their tongues about vicious rednecks, then unleashed such psychological violence on each other that a beating would have been preferable.

  He noted that he was thinking of his comrades now as “Yankees.”

  In the middle of “We Shall Overcome,” three crewcuts appeared over the edge of the dam. They stopped singing and watched three sunburnt faces appear, followed by three Tshirted chests, and six chinoed legs. One man held a tire iron, another a length of chain. The four hopped to their feet.

  “This here’s private property.”

  “We were just sitting here,” Justin said in his belligerent New York accent “We weren’t doing anything.”

  “What was that there moaning coming out of yer mouth if you wasn’t doing nothing?” The man looked at the other two and grinned.

  “Well, yes, we were singing, true. But there’s no law against singing, is there?”

  Christ, Raymond saw that Justin was intent on getting them killed. Martyrs to the cause. For the first time he noticed Justin’s hair curling over his collar. Neither of them had shaved today. They looked like bums.

  “Naw, they ain’t no law against singing. Unless you happen to be singing on private property. But you Reds don’t hold with the notion of private property, do you?”

  “We’re not Communists,” Raymond assured him.

  “You with that there nigger-loving bunch from up North?”

  “Uh, the voter registration project. Yes.”

  “Well, let’s hear can you play ‘Dixie’ on that thang.”

  “I don’t know ‘Dixie,’” Justin said defiantly.

  “I’ll whistle it, and you see can you pick it up.” The man whistled.

  “Nope, I can’t,” said Justin, jutting his chin out

  “Try,” the man said, menacingly raising his chain.

  Justin eyed the chain and the tire iron, then fumbled with a few chords.

  “Yall sing,” said the man.

  The other three sang “Dixie” in quavering voices.

  “That’s not real good. See can you sing it louder.”

  Justin threw down the guitar, dived into the pond and began to swim. The man brought his chain down and smashed the guitar, picked it up and broke its neck over his thigh and tossed the pieces into the pond.

  “Run!” Raymond yelled to the girls as he threw a flying block at all three men, bringing one down. Christ, what am I doing? he asked himself.

  He rolled into a ball and covered his head. His not fighting back seemed to enrage them, rather than reform them. The fervor of the blows increased, and they started snarling “fairy creep” and “Commie faggot.” The chain slashed. The tire iron rose and fell. Fists and shoes connected with bone and flesh. He caught glimpses of khakis and Tshirts, flat tops and red faces. And he was flooded with sensations of—gratitude.

  “Go back where you came from, you motherfucking nigger-loving Yankee do-gooder. Why don’t you mind your own goddam bidness?”

  Raymond sat in the sun on the roof, reading about himself in the Chattanooga and Newland papers. He was covered with dark bruises. His nose and several ribs had been broken, and he had stitches in his scalp. He was a hero. Justin offered to shake wrists with him. Maria invited him to the roof for a blow job, which he declined. All he could think about was the gratitude he’d felt toward those guys. It baffled and appalled him. He stared at his high school graduation picture on the front page of the paper, his eyes shifting to the date under the logo—May 2, 1964.

  He looked out across the fields, carpeted by bright yellow dandelions. 1964. A hundred years ago these fields had been filled with marching soldiers and booming artillery.

  At this time of year in Tatro Cove he and Jed and their cousins used to climb the hills filling paper sacks with dandelion blossoms, which their grandpa would make into wine. In his cellar dandelion wine from previous years would start fermenting again, as though somehow aware that the fields were abloom. A few corks would blow, spewing wine around the cellar.

  Those boys had beaten him shitless thinking he was a Yankee. But he was actually one of them—a redneck, cracker, peckerwood, clay eater, poor white, white trash, hillbilly, ridge-runner, rebel, stumpjumper. All labels pinned on Southern working people by the Yankees. He’d grown up surrounded by boys like those who’d beaten him up. Any of the three could have been Jed. He knew all about their stubborn pride, their trigger-quick anger, their resentment of outside criticism and coercion, their loathing of men who didn’t display these characteristics. He understood what had provoked them into attacking him. They were descendants of the fierce over-mountain men who’d routed the British at King’s Mountain. And so, by God, was he.

  He climbed down from the roof and walked over to the Randalls’, trying to decide what to do now that it was clear to him that his participation in the project was a bad joke. He watched the children playing house and snapped an occasional picture. Looking up, he saw Mr. Randall striding across the yard to say in a low trembling voice, “What you always hanging around here for, son?”

  Raymond looked at him with surprise. “I …”

  “Gwan. Get out of here. We don’t want you round no more, hear?”

  “But I …”

  “Can’t you hear me, son? I said gwan.”

  Raymond backed toward the road. As he turned to walk away, Mr. Randall caught up with him and handed him a crumpled piece of paper. The childish scrawl read “THIS CAN HAPPEN TO RED-LOVING NIGGERS TO.”

  “What can?”

  “Killed our cat. Hung her up from a tree in the woods and set her on fire.” His face crumpled, then quickly resumed its facade.

  “Who did?”

  “Whoever writ that note. Probably the same gentlemens who beat you all black and blue like that. So don’t come out here no more. Please.”

  “I won’t.” He backed away, sweeping the surrounding woods and fields with his eyes. “I… shit, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too, son. Watch out now, hear?”

  This was a result of the project, Raymond concluded. How he wasn’t sure, but he meant to figure it out.

  The project people concurred with his decision to return early to New York. Back there he spent hours studying the pictures he’d taken of sharecroppers. White or Negro, their houses, their crops, their clothes, their children’s games and toys were identical. He put together a book juxtaposing photos of the Randalls and of white tenant families in identical poses in front of similar houses, and a publisher accepted it.<
br />
  The others were soon back from Tennessee, and FORWARD meetings resumed. Raymond felt confused to be a hero as a result of an undertaking he now repudiated. Because Justin was being sarcastic to him, Raymond saw that he now had sufficient clout to influence the course of FORWARD—if only he understood in what direction to exert that influence. Unfortunately, he lacked Justin’s brains and education.

  Justin for the time being had them focusing on fund raising. Carson came up to see Maria, and FORWARD had a cocktail party at Justin’s parents’ penthouse on Central Park West. The large living room was packed with businessmen and college professors, writers and dancers, Louis XIV antiques and Aubusson carpets. Raymond, talking with a woman in a pale green silk suit, became riveted by her brooch—a silver turtle studded with diamonds.

  As caviar and toast points were passed and Chivas Regal flowed, Carson in his Howard sweatshirt described his participation in the Montgomery bus boycott, and his experiences in the field registering voters. Raymond told his tired old story about growing up in a racist society and coming to see the light. Justin described the incident next to the pond and somehow emerged sounding like the hero. Maria glanced at Raymond and suppressed a grin. Raymond didn’t grin back: She had her arm through Carson’s.

  Justin’s father called the maid, whom he introduced as Mrs. Walters, in from the kitchen. She wore a wool dress instead of a uniform. The idea was that she was a friend who just happened to stop by to fix hors d’oeuvres. Mr. Lawson seated her on the couch and brought her some Scotch. A fat man in a pinstriped suit said as he sat down beside her, “Mrs. Walters, I want you to call me Luther.” Justin began playing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” on his new guitar.

  As people in the room began pulling out checkbooks, things clicked into place for Raymond. He looked at Carson and himself, performing like dancing bears for these Yankees in their jewels and Gucci shoes. In an instant, like a chemical solution crystallizing, he stopped seeing people as Negro or white—and instead saw them as rich or not. The Wilbur canning factory, the Newland mill, the Clayton mines—these Yankees with their pens poised over checkbooks probably owned them! These checks were a minute portion of their profits. As long as Negroes and whites in the South were kept busy hating each other because of skin color, they’d never recognize their shared exploitation. The violence those guys had unleashed on him by the pond—it was nothing compared to the quiet day-by-day draining away of the human and material resources of an entire area.