The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

“You can be, but you ain’t never.”

  He lunged for her left nipple with his teeth, snapping them shut a fraction of an inch away. “See? I coulda bit your tit off and I didn’t. Ain’t that sweet?”

  “If that’s sweet, honey, then we’re all in bad trouble.” She cradled his handsome head in her arms as though he were a big baby and tousled his light brown flat-top until he fell asleep.

  Chapter Three

  The Minstrel Show

  The gym was packed for the Civic Club’s annual minstrel show. Many of the prominent business and professional men in town sat in chairs in tiered rows on a stage. They wore orange satin tuxedos with exaggerated lapels, battered top hats, and white gloves. Their faces were blackened, and they held tambourines.

  Dr. Pridemore, the town orthodontist, was doing a soft shoe routine to the tune “When Nighttime Comes to Ole Nigger Town.” A banker and an insurance salesman were behind him, ineptly parodying. Every time he turned around, they’d be resting on their canes, looking off into the distance and whistling through thickened red lips. The audience was screaming with laughter.

  Emily was sitting in the bleachers beside her friend June. Raymond crouched below the stage snapping pictures. Jed and Sally sat a couple of rows below Emily. Jed was trying to slide his hand up Sally’s thigh. Sally slapped the hand and said something petulant. Neither took their eyes from the stage. Mr. and Mrs. Prince, Mr. Prince Sr., with his bushy white hair and eyebrows, and Mrs. Tatro Sr. sat in folding chairs on the gym floor. Raymond and Jed’s mother, on the far side of the room, was tugging at her skirt trying to cover her slip. Her husband, his long legs crossed at the knees and his chin resting on his fist, was chuckling.

  A minstrel named Rastus, who owned a lumber yard in real life, was asking the interlocutor, whose face wasn’t blackened, if he’d heard about his cousin LeRoy.

  “No, I don’t believe I have, Rastus,” said the interlocutor. “Tell me about your cousin LeRoy.”

  “Law, Cap’n, dat man de dumbest thing you ever did see!”

  “You say your cousin LeRoy is dumb, Rastus? That’s a pretty serious accusation. Why do you say your cousin LeRoy is dumb?”

  “Boss, dat man so dumb he went and robbed him a clothing store.”

  The interlocutor looked blank. “Well, I don’t know that robbing a store is a very good idea, Rastus, but I still don’t see why that makes your cousin LeRoy the dumbest thing that ever lived.”

  “My cousin LeRoy, he so dumb, Cap’n, dat when he rob dis clothing store, he put on de new clothes and leave his old ones in de store!”

  The audience howled, and the minstrels high-stepped around the stage, shaking tambourines and wiping tears or laughter from their blackened faces.

  Mr. Prince Jr. was feeling guilty for not being up on that stage. The Civic Club used to invite him to join every few years. Sometimes he’d try by attending their luncheons in the club room at the Howard Johnson Motel while they planned the Junior Miss Pageant, or this minstrel show. But for some reason, he felt awkward, and so did they. The other men were self-conscious in his presence, and meetings never got off the ground. It seemed as though the biggest help he could give them was to stay away. Even though he’d lived in Newland his whole life, he couldn’t do the accent required for this show. And apart from earning money for the Civic Club, he didn’t actually understand the appeal of ridiculing Negroes. He’d been raised by Negro women, his mother, a Newland native, being at club meetings a lot. His parents had always treated those women kindly. It upset him to see them made fun of. But he’d learned as a boy to keep such upset to himself, because people around you didn’t necessarily share it. And if you wanted to get along with them, you couldn’t be accusatory and self-righteous. You were responsible only for your own attitudes and behavior, not for those of your neighbors as well. So you performed a variety of moral self-violation. Which explained how he was able to sit through this minstrel show every year, smiling at the right places. A few weeks before, at church, a young man from Baltimore who was trying out for old Mr. Shell’s job had delivered a sermon in which he urged the executives in the congregation to hire more Negroes and to exert their influence to integrate the schools. Several men stomped out, but Robert Prince stayed seated and was secretly delighted. Times were changing. A new order was coming. His only regret was that he himself was part of the debris that would have to be swept away to make room for it.

  Even in high school Robert had felt a gap between himself and his peers. He was the son of a Yankee, the son of their fathers’ boss. They were mostly sons of dirt farmers and coal miners down from the hills. They talked different and carried themselves different from Robert, who was a town-born North-South hybrid. They were silent, proud, elaborately polite, and treated him with respectful banter. But among themselves they drank and fought and courted. He longed to participate, but didn’t know how to make it happen—and the initiative in relations with them was always up to him. He’d been a loner, had hung around with the few other offspring of professional and managerial families who hadn’t been sent North to boarding schools. And toward the end of high school he began dating Melanie Tatro, now Mrs. Prince. Her father was a vice president at the mill under Robert’s own father, and they’d known each other forever. It was a match so obvious that, after it happened, everyone wondered why it hadn’t happened sooner.

  He had gone off to Princeton, where he first came in contact with novels about the British in India and Africa and began to get some perspective on why he felt so out of place in Newland, why his parents’ friends looked to the North for standards of sophistication and civilization. He also discovered that to the golden Yankee youth at Princeton he was just another dumb hillbilly, something he’d yearned to be back home. He studied hybridization in biology class and understood that he was doomed to this stance of never quite fitting in with members of either parent species. He might as well stop trying because it just wasn’t going to happen.

  The following year Melanie went to Randolph-Macon. They traveled to each other’s schools for dances and party weekends, and were married in Newland in a big ceremony at the Episcopal church right after her graduation. He’d begun at the mill the previous year and was being groomed to take over when his father decided to retire, which everyone was convinced would be never. It was like being the Prince of Wales to his father’s Queen Victoria.

  He glanced at his father, who sat next to him with liver spots all over his hands and face. What had confounded Robert’s Princeton theorizing was the knowledge that his father, who was from Philadelphia, was able to carry it all off. He’d never been a minstrel up on that stage, but he used to roll up his shirt-sleeves and stroll through the mill all the time, chatting with the workers. He knew most on a first-name basis, as well as their spouses and children, from many years of company barbecues. He could inquire about their latest surgery, their new houses, their softball league. In many cases, their fathers and mothers had also worked at the mill; their cousins and aunts and uncles worked there; their children would eventually work there. They would sometimes ask him, as a favor, to take on a brother or a daughter, and he would do his best. Ever since he’d been able to walk, Robert had been taken on these journeys through the mill by his father, as training.

  Heads were craning throughout the minstrel show audience to catch a glimpse of old Mr. Prince. The older people in the well-fed, well-dressed crowd that night felt they owed their current prosperity to his prudent stewardship of the mill. Old Mr. Prince felt so too. Robert knew there was no question of this in the old man’s mind: He’d taken a poor muddy little market town and put it on the industrial map, through his own personal foresight and hard work and optimism. At one time Robert had tried to discuss his problems running the mill with his father. The world economic climate was shifting. Just as contracts had been switched from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Newland, Tennessee, due to cheaper labor, so were they now being switched to Taiwan and the Philippines, where workers were paid thirty-
five cents an hour. Just as harness makers had been doomed by the arrival of the auto, so was cotton manufacture doomed by the arrival of synthetic fibers.

  “Poppycock!” his father shouted, bushy white eyebrows twitching. “Don’t hand me any of your Princeton bullshit, son! I want action, not excuses!” His father, who hadn’t been to college, delighted in ridiculing Princeton, even though he’d pushed Robert to go there, in a seizure of keeping up with the other professional families in town. So Robert was a class hybrid as well as a regional one. And the result of all this hybridization was uncertainty. He had difficulty ever giving himself wholly to any course of action. He agonized, and delayed decisions, hoping someone else would make them for him, hoping the necessity for making them would evaporate if he ignored them. He felt loyalty to no one group. And whenever he tried to exercise blind allegiance, he was wracked with guilt over all the alternatives he was dismissing.

  This unfortunate personality structure almost cost him his life during World War II. He was on a plane from England to Belgium when the instruments went screwy. They wandered around in a thick fog until the fuel was running out, and then had to crash land behind German lines. As captain he knew he was supposed to lead the crew back to no-man’s-land. In the dark, with bursts of shell fire on the horizon, he studied the maps and compasses and terrain for a long time, then set out toward a woods. At the woods he turned around and led them back in the direction of the wreckage. This went on until his sergeant grasped the fact that Robert didn’t have a clue what he was doing, and took over. It was all written off to shock from the crash, and battle fatigue. The crew joked with him about it for the rest of the war. He’d never let on to anyone that it hadn’t been shock or fatigue, but indecision and terror. He’d been in full control of his faculties, but hadn’t been able to make up his mind and had been overcome with anxiety. He’d smiled wryly as his father told about leading his platoon over the ridge in the Argonne Forest as showers of shells exploded all around them like a fireworks display.

  All his life he’d been thrust into leadership positions because he was his father’s son, or a Princeton graduate. But he didn’t like leading, or have a gift for it. He hated it—with his soldiers during the war, and now with his workers—when they came up to him with those cringing grins to ask what to do about their personal lives, or work problems, or anything. How the hell should he know? Some mornings he couldn’t even decide whether to wear green or brown socks. His father talked about “captaining his ship” and “commanding his troops,” and everybody loved it, most of all his father. But Robert, alas, knew that there were economic forces at work that nobody, not even his father, could control. He wondered if it was precisely because individual choices seemed to make so little difference that he had such a hard time making them.

  A minstrel named Abraham Lincoln Jones, the town’s leading pharmacist, jumped up. “Hey, boss,” he called to the interlocutor.

  “Yes, Abraham? What can I do for you?” Raymond held his camera in readiness and studied the men. They looked like the coal miners he’d photographed in Clayton, after they’d emerged from the mine, when the only white on their faces was that of their eyes and teeth. The men who mined coal and these minstrels who in real life wore coats and ties and worked in clean offices—how were they different? Was it just a question of chance—whether you were born on Tsali Street or in a Kentucky hollow? He inspected this new thought.

  “… you say your wife finally figured out how not to have babies, Abraham?”

  “Yassuh. Now she keeps her legs crossed instead of her fingers!”

  Shrieks of laughter. Tambourines shaking. Businessmen cakewalking across the stage. Raymond started snapping.

  From the corner of his eye, Jed could see Sally’s cleavage. He wanted his face buried there, a hand molding either breast, while Sally stroked his hair and murmured how much she loved him. That would happen as soon as this infernal show got over with. He glanced at his watch. Oh God, another half hour. He was getting an erection. He crossed his legs, trying to weight the damn thing down. Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve. Coach Clancy sometimes made jokes about the trouble older men had getting it up. Well, he had trouble keeping it down. It was embarrassing having the damn thing spring up like an eager puppy at the least excuse, or even without one. In junior high the boys had worn jockstraps to the dances to keep them down—diving board dicks, they used to call them. It made it tough to play it cool with girls. They always knew exactly where you were at. But them, with their secret little holes—you never had a clue what they were up to. So you were always barging ahead and horrifying them.

  “… so de Doc says to her, says, ‘Maybelle, has you ever been through de menopause?’ And Maybelle, she say, ‘Law, no, Doc, I ain’t even been through de Smokies yet!’” Laughter. Tambourines.

  Mrs. Prince tried to smile, but she disliked this show. Did jokes really have to be so crude to be funny? Everywhere she looked these days—crudity. She hung etched prisms in the living room windows so that when the sun poured in just right, the room filled with all the colors of the rainbow, and the mellow wood of the antiques gleamed. She played Bach fugues on her piano. Sometimes Emily played along on her flute, when Mrs. Prince could tear her away from her Sousa marches. In the summer she raised gardens full of flowers, and in the winter she filled the house with arrangements of dried weeds. The girls were scarcely aware of this. But she hoped that surrounding them with nice things could develop in them an instinctive feel for harmony and balance and proportion, though in doing so she knew she was preparing them for a world that was ceasing to exist. The radios and record players in the girls’ rooms were always blaring with the maudlin self-pity of country music, or the throbbing sexuality of rock and roll. How could Bach and dried weeds compete? It was like trying to wave back a hurricane with a feather duster. She sometimes felt, as she walked her Oriental carpets, like a refugee from a Chekhov play. She preferred to think of herself that way, as opposed to Robert’s description of themselves as flying reptiles nearing extinction. He always said that the real problem was that historical time differed so drastically from one’s own lifetime. That people wanted the two to coincide so as to feel that what they were doing had significance. But that historical time was so vast that you might very well be a member of a transitional generation without being able to see what had preceded you, or what would take your place.

  She often thought about this as she stood at her living room window with rainbows from the prisms dancing across her arms, looking down into the valley where the mill sat. She’d been a history major at Randolph-Macon and knew that the valley had been inhabited by wave after wave of prehistoric peoples—the Adenans, the Hopewells, the Copena, the Mississippians. They came out of the west from “The Place Where the Sun Falls into the Water,” they came from Mexico and Central America, they came from the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Then the Cherokees were driven into this valley from the Ohio River Valley by the Iroquois and the Delaware. They had to fight constantly to stay here—the Creeks to the south, the Tuscarora and Yamasee to the east, the Chickasaw and Shawnees to the west. Bands continuously dissolved, or split off from their tribes with ambitious leaders to form new tribes, like a crowded beehive throwing off a swarm. Then De Soto’s men marched through the valley and dug gold mining shafts into the hills. Then came the Europeans—the Scotch-Irish and German and Dutch down from Pennsylvania. Scotsmen from the Clearances crossed the mountains from the North Carolina coast. Englishmen arrived from the Virginia settlements, signing treaties guaranteeing the Cherokees their land for “as long as the green grass grows and the water flows.” Then they massacred them, using their skin for boots and reins.

  Some town father with a morbid sense of humor named the street outside the house Tsali Street. Tsali was a chief who refused to be marched to Oklahoma during the Removal. A soldier prodded Tsali’s wife with a bayonet, and Tsali killed him, fleeing to the North Carolina mountains. The troops promised to leave the
other cave dwellers alone if Tsali would turn himself in. He did, and was shot.

  Like the layers of a compost pile, each culture that had inhabited this valley rested on the decaying remains of previous ones. The ashes from their fires, the graves of their forebears littered the valley. Humanity had existed for 20,000 generations, the most recent consisting of her friends and family. And what culture would replace the Newlanders? She could speculate, but it irritated her that she would never know. She recalled her outrage at Randolph-Macon when she first saw in a textbook a chart illustrating that most species failed to adapt to new conditions and went to extinction.

  Having Robert around triggered bleak musings like this. He was like a live-in Hamlet. Getting to know him had been a shock. The men around her—her father and brothers and their friends—had been so flamboyant, forceful, and gallant that she’d just assumed that that was what men were like. Her father owned a large tobacco farm and raised horses, in addition to being vice president at the mill. He wore silk shirts and a diamond ring on his little finger. And when he rode, the horse’s hooves scarcely touched the ground, seemed to dance deftly in the air. He merely flicked his wrist and the horse reversed directions or changed gaits.

  Robert had been so unflamboyant that she was scarcely aware of his existence until he asked her out in high school. Even then, he had stooped badly. Their parents were great friends, his father being president at the mill. Her father admired his father’s blustery optimism. He used to say, “We need us a few Yankees around this town who know there’s still such a thing as progress. You take a Southerner: He’s positively wedded to the status quo because, however pathetic, it’s an advance on the War and Reconstruction.” Robert’s and her mothers were heads of rival garden clubs that engaged in friendly but fierce competition when members opened their gardens to the public in early summer. All four parents were thrilled with the match, and it seemed a shame to disappoint them, so she kept dating him. And gradually she learned to appreciate his anguished seriousness. There was nothing he could take for granted and enjoy. But if these qualities made him interesting to talk with, they sometimes made him frightful to live with. Some mornings she’d go into their bedroom to see why he was late to breakfast and find him staring bleakly into his sock drawer. “Wear the green ones, dear,” she’d say. “They’re nice with that tie.”