The Last of the Savages (25 page)

“Is he
definitely
in London with Cheryl?” I was riveted by the magnitude of the scandal; despite my feelings for some of the principals in this drama, it was a delicious spectacle.

“He’s declared his intention to be married by the archbishop of Canterbury once the divorce goes through,” Will said, temporarily raising him from the dead.

“Maybe he loves her,” I said—the same observation I’d made to Cordell about Will’s marriage.

“And maybe Nixon is really a compassionate and caring human being.”

The following day I received a letter from the Harvard Law School. Hyperventilating all the way up the stairs, I carried it to my room and set it down on the desk, while I myself sat on the bed, looking across the room at the envelope which seemed all too light and insubstantial to bear the life-transforming news I so fervently hoped for. Finally I carried the letter into the bathroom; standing in front of the sink, I ripped open the envelope and learned that I’d been accepted.

Will never made it up for the May Day protest, but thousands of others did. The bombings in Cambodia and the subsequent killing of four students at Kent State threw high-test gasoline on the fire of the rebellion. What pissed me off, personally, was the announcement of grading modifications; because of the disruptions and the strike, undergraduates were to be given the option for each course of dropping, completing
over the summer or taking a grade of “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” for work done so far. Even though I was en route to Harvard Law, I’d been busting ass all semester, and this seemed to cheapen my achievement.

That Saturday night I was walking back from Sterling, exultant at having at last finished a draft of my thesis. The clear spring night was fragrant with the smell of the freshly mowed grass. Strolling up High Street, I was overtaken by a dozen students running past me, shouting as they ran and scattered throughout the Old Campus. Hearing a thud on the lawn beside Saybrook, I saw the teargas canister just as the first fumes reached my nostrils. Half blinded, nose and mouth burning, I stumbled away from the expanding cloud of gas, clutching my briefcase to my chest. Someone took my arm and dragged me into Durfee, dumping me in a bathroom where I coughed and vomited in the shower, cursing the revolution, the counterrevolution and all the combatants.

My thesis makes for somewhat specialized reading, particularly the first twenty-two thousand words, in which I examine and eventually discount the idea of an organized slave conspiracy at Bear Track. In the penultimate section I advance a psychological solution for the historical problem. I see now that I projected Will and his father onto the figures of their ancestors, though I’m not sure that this bias necessarily invalidates the thesis.

His nearest white playmates being miles away, I wrote, John Savage passed much of his childhood with the black people of the plantation. John and the slave Clarence spent their days in the fields and on the rivers—I compared them to Huck Finn and the slave Jim—away from the social strictures of the big house to the point that Clarence became a kind of surrogate father for John. Even a man as thoroughly imbued with the idea of the inferiority of the Negro race as Elihu Savage must have felt jealous of the relationship between Clarence and John.

Shortly before the outbreak of the War between the States, when John Savage was going on fifteen years old, Elihu Savage sold Clarence’s
wife off to another plantation, a fairly drastic action even for the time and place. This event would surely have traumatized Clarence; he could not have been kindly disposed toward John’s family, or to white people in general, and John could not have failed to notice this chill, which he would have blamed on his father. At about the same time Elihu tells him, to quote Binnie’s diary, “it is time … to put away childish things and cultivate the society of his own people.”

Within days or at most weeks of this break, war was declared, making Elihu Savage and other Delta planters, who were outnumbered nearly ten to one by their slaves, more nervous than ever for their safety vis-à-vis the newly restless Negro population. When John Savage blurted out word of a slave conspiracy, Elihu and his white neighbors must have been all too ready to believe, particularly since the alleged ringleader was a man with fresh cause to hate.

“Is it shameful of me to mistrust my brother’s motives,” asks Binnie Pilcher Savage in her diary. It’s unfortunate that she was the only one, so far as we know, to raise this question; John Savage is an adolescent who is angry at both his real father and his surrogate father. Both have let him down, though he knows that the blame ultimately rests with the former. When his father criticizes his table manners his accumulated resentment and anger find expression—I proposed—in an Oedipal thought, instantly repressed and transformed. At that moment he wishes his father dead, and he attributes the wish to Clarence, who has reason to hate his father. Perhaps he is at that moment also angry enough at Clarence to place him in jeopardy, or perhaps he does not consider the implications of his statement for Clarence. Perhaps he once heard Clarence mutter some dark imprecation or overheard Clarence discussing the war and the prospect of emancipation. But when he is questioned about this wild accusation it seems likely that he panics and begins to embroider his lie in self-defense, to tell a story which answers the great archetypal narrative of southern life: “The slaves are going to rise up and murder us in our beds.”

All the repressed and inchoate guilt of an unjust society found outlet in this single fear—they will do to us as we have done to them. Elihu Savage and his neighbors have been waiting all their lives for this moment,
dreaming about it, like a tribe that lives in the shadow of a smoking volcano. Elihu was a small child living in South Carolina when Nat Turner and his followers hacked up white women and children with axes and bayonets. And thereafter he never slept as deep and righteous a sleep as the man who is not surrounded in the dark by two hundred souls in bondage.

Once John Savage had transmogrified his Oedipal struggle into the collective myth of his people, events moved rapidly. We can only imagine his surprise at how thoroughly he was believed, his torment at the inexorable chain of consequences—the long dark nights of the rest of his days stalked by the ghosts of nine innocent black men …

I went on at numbing length, but that is the gist of my thesis, which was very well received by Professor Kaufman, my thesis adviser, who was impressed enough to submit it to the
Yale Review.
And that’s where the trouble began. On the editorial board of the
Review
was a history professor, whom I will call Jenkins. One of the more radical members of the faculty, Jenkins had played an inflammatory role in the Panther proceedings, and he now turned his flamethrower on me.

Professor Kaufman called me into his office a few weeks before graduation to inform me that not only would the
Review
not be publishing my thesis but also that his recommendation that I graduate with honors in history had been challenged. Jenkins had written a letter to the chairman of the department in which he attacked me for marginalizing the role of the slaves. A bearded gentleman of the Samuel Eliot Morison school, Kaufman was deeply embarrassed as he fussed behind the paper towers on his desk.

“Let me just say, Patrick, I am surprised and appalled by this unfortunate development, and I of course intend to defend you and your scholarship all the way to Brewster’s office.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, then opened the folded linen as if to read the contents. “But I’m afraid that for the moment the question of your graduating with honors is being put before the next full meeting of the department.”

Jenkins’s central complaint, as contained in the letter Kaufman read to me, was this:
Once again, a white scholar has placed white men at the
center of the narrative.
(I should mention in passing that Jenkins was no less white than myself.) An actual conspiracy involving Clarence and his fellows, Jenkins argued, was a far more plausible—and, of course, heroic—conclusion, based on the evidence.

Kaufman cleared his throat. “I am concerned that at the very least, the matter won’t be resolved in time for graduation.”

And he was right. I graduated summa cum laude, and I still have my Phi Beta Kappa key in my cuff link box, but the controversy over my thesis dragged on well into my first year at Harvard, when I finally received an apologetic letter from Kaufman. As a budding lawyer I thought about pressing my case. But illegal immigrants tend not to resort to courts of law to redress their grievances, and I still felt like an alien in the world I wished to occupy.

Like his polar opposite Cordell Savage, Jenkins was a man of righteous conviction, but I am a man of the middle, which is why I suppose I failed to follow up on this. While I am proud of my alma mater, my own small rebellion dating from that time consists of dropping each annual fund-raising solicitation into the wastebasket, a practice I have followed to this day. Maybe it was an early grounding in the concept of original sin which makes me susceptible to doubt as to my own convictions. Or maybe it is a sense of my own fraudulence that prevents me from asserting myself even when I believe I may be right. In fact, I had interpreted the evidence of the diaries according to my extratextual knowledge of Will’s family, just as surely as Jenkins had decoded the same data on the basis of his political convictions. I take comfort in the belief that, in the end, history may be better served by those of us who are able to see through our own convictions than by the passionate believers.

Somehow the whole incident filled me with shame. What I’d expected to be the jewel in my undergraduate crown had, in effect, served only to tarnish it. On the other hand, I had done in three years in New Haven what usually required four; I had, along with my Yale diploma, acquired a first-class ticket to the world I so fervently desired. And I had, or so I imagined, polished the veneer which concealed from that world the base materials of my nature, and the darkest enigma of my being.

A
midst the bleached tribe at the Harvard Club with their larval winter faces, Taleesha cut a striking figure as she strode in to meet me, her height exaggerated by a dark halo of hair and tight pink hip huggers that flared out to meet a pair of red platform shoes. A few months short of receiving my degree, I was in New York interviewing with law firms. She was assistant to a vice president at one of the big record companies. Still a recent immigrant to the North, Taleesha found it amusing—or perhaps she defensively pretended to be amused—to integrate such a WASPs’ nest. I hadn’t seen her in three years.

“The job’s great,” she said, after we’d observed the pleasantries and ordered iced tea from a uniformed black waiter. He and Taleesha exchanged a fleeting look that seemed to me like a secret signal, and then suddenly she was back with me. “I’ve had a promotion and two raises in less than a year and I’m learning the business. Everybody at the company’s fascinated that I quit singing. But I never really had that hunger. I’d rather be backstage, thanks.”

“Like Will,” I said, experimentally, dropping the taboo name. Though they were living apart—Will was still in Memphis—the terms of their separation were still not clear to me, and Will had been characteristically obscure on this subject.

She laughed mirthlessly. “No, not like Will. I don’t need to pull everybody’s strings. Will wants to set the world free, but strictly on his own terms. He can’t make up his mind whether he wants to be a preacher or a politician or a rock star.” Eyes bright with vexation, she seemed on the verge of an angry outburst. I watched as she paused to let the emotion subside. “Anyway, nobody’s like Will,” she said, in a subdued tone. “Even here I can’t …” She let me complete the thought. “Everybody at my company worships him, thinks he’s some kind of outlaw genius.”

I waited, glancing up at the stuffed head of a wildebeest.

She sucked in a deep breath, preparing for a sprint. “It just got to be too much. All of it—Will’s family, my family, the entourage, the South. His father leaving—that was the beginning of the end. Will started spending all his time trying to take care of his mother, but maybe that’s my fault. I don’t have much of a pattern for being a good wife. Then my brother getting killed in Vietnam. At first they told us he was missing and finally they sent him home in a box.” Her face grew taut. “The goddamned box was stinking by the time it got to us. There we were crying and sweating in the church on an August day and trying to hold our breath with my brother stinking in his coffin.”

She paused and smiled at the busboy as he filled our water glasses. “I don’t know,” she said once he’d gone. “Maybe we’re still stuck somewhere back there in history, somewhere between here and the Emancipation Proclamation.”

“I thought Will lived in the moment,” I said, playing dumb.

“He tries. That boy sure
does
wear it out. God, it was exhausting. Wake up in the afternoon and step over the bodies. Specially after we bought that old house outside town—it was like a transient hotel for musicians and dope fiends. I mean I could almost handle the drugs and the craziness, the groupies and the hangers-on, even the disappearances. But honey, Memphis was wearing us down. You don’t even know. Down there, white folks are still pissed off about sharing their precious lunch counters, let alone their blue-eyed sons. There’d be these remarks, you know, just loud enough so you could hear them, people spitting on the ground. Will would get in fights, if somebody says something he’ll be right in their face, but it just plain wore me out.” She glanced around the room. “Not that it’s a fucking bed of roses up here in Yankeeland.”

Indeed, it was difficult to make a case for great racial tolerance in the North; my Irish-Catholic brethren in South Boston would soon be setting fire to school buses and beating up Negroes with an ardor that would surely thrill and inspire the rednecks of Mississippi.

“So,” she said impatiently, “have you seen the great man?”