Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

Thanks to @xtyc for the free idea that inspired this post.

Bill came into the house dripping with sweat after his run.  Out of habit, he kicked his running shoes into the coat closet by the door and walked back to the bedroom where he flipped the switch on the clock radio.  He heard Bob Edwards’ voice but did not listen to the words as he went to take a shower.  Charlottesville was supposed to be cooler than Nashville, or at least that was what Bill hoped for.  He had chosen the University of Virginia over Ole Miss or Alabama because it’s law school had a better reputation.  Being in the Blue Ridge mountains didn’t hurt either.

He almost went to Ole Miss anyway, even though he had not intention of making class action law suits with Dickie Scruggs.  The magnolias in Oxford fit right in with his close cropped hair and tortoise rim glasses.  It’s not that Bill was all that conservative, but his whole image of what he wanted to be when he grew up was built around Gregory Peck’s depiction of Atticus Finch in “To Kill A Mockingbird.”  He rented the movie when he was a sophomore in high school on the night before there was to be a test on the book.  Bill had not, of course, actually read the book.  That image of an honorable man standing up for justice against all odds made a deep impression on him, and the next time he needed new lenses, he traded in his John Lennon glasses for Atticus Finch ones.

That summer, after he finished the books assigned to rising juniors, Bill happened across In Cold Blood. He was engaged, enraptured even, by Capote’s vivid account of the Clutter family’s brutal murder.  He finished it at Boy Scout camp.  When he got home, right before school was about to start, he saw in the paper that Truman Capote was dead.  Out on the road this morning, while Bill was running he thought about Capote’s other great work, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  Like To Kill A Mockingbird, he had only seen the movie.  But he turned over in his mind the ways that he was like Holly Golightly, making up a persona for the people around him so that they could not get at the more horrid truth of his real life.

And the truth was that Truman Capote was not the only author he had killed, although he was the first.  It would be another five years before Bill did it again, but just as he was trying to decide between law school and journalism school, he came across All The King’s Men. One might imagine that, being an English major at Vanderbilt, Bill should have come across Robert Penn Warren significantly sooner.  There remains, however, a great deal of ambiguity regarding the leader of the Southern Agrarians in Kirkland Hall.  It was perhaps serendipitous that Bill picked up the book in the days just before his last year of classes would begin.  Not wanting to resemble the cow of the first chapter who is powerless to do anything but observe, Bill chose Atticus Finch over Jack Burden and the LSAT over the GMAT.  When he finished the book two weeks into the semester, Bill heard that Robert Penn Warren was dead.

That spring, in an effort to coast to graduation, he took the survey of southern literature course that had been put off since freshman year.  Bill was not much on being exclusive to a genre, but he loved the class.  He especially loved Walker Percy, picking up The Last Gentleman on Spring Break after having read The Moviegoer for the course.  As Bill was about to cast off his line from the only city in which he had ever lived, he could identify with Will Barrett’s disorientation and fainting spells.  By graduation, Walker Percy was dead.

Bill did not bring any novels to Charlottesville.  He was tempted to read through a John Grisham novel just for spite, but it turned out that not even spite was up to the task.  Not that there was a lack of reading material in his classes.  Contracts and torts kept him busy enough, but they lacked the sort of moral compass setting that Bill had come to rely on from literature.  At a time when most of his classmates were headed towards lucrative careers in big DC law firms, Bill’s vision of life as a simple country lawyer — doing pro bono work for the poor and downtrodden — seemed at best foolish and at worst irresponsible for the President of the Law Review of a leading school of law.  In desperation, he had picked up a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird in the Daedalus Bookshop.

The book had been beside his bed for a few weeks.  He knew it was a stupid notion, that he killed writers just by reading their work, but it was also hard to shake.  Like many people, Bill was hoping that Harper Lee (and JD Salinger and Ralph Ellison) would have a change of heart and publish some new work.  He could not fathom how he would feel if he killed Harper Lee, especially if she was working on something.  So the book sat by the bed with his glasses on top.  This morning as he reached for them with a hand wet from the shower, he thought he heard Bob Edwards say something about Harper Lee.  Bill froze, sure that just the intention of reading the book had brought doom.  James Carville, the Presidential Campaign Manager for the Governor of Arkansas, responded to Edwards’ question that yes, he in fact had been profoundly influenced by To Kill A Mockingbird. Bill put on his tortoise shell frames and threw the book in the garbage.

Down in Louisiana, New Orleans gets all the attention.  Given the food, music, and — ahem — laizze faire attitude of the city, that’s completely understandable.  It’s easy to miss, however, that a beautiful country lies just outside the city.  Part of why we miss it is because the area is hard to reach.  Swampy, infested with alligators.  Or crocodiles.  What really is the difference?  Anyway, it’s a hard place to explore, made only somewhat easier by the bridge that goes across Lake Pontchatrain.  Some of the kids at Brigadude lived on the far side of the bridge from New Orleans.  Their parents figured alligators (or crocodiles) were better company than the French Quarter.

Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville must have had kids too, or else he was just sick of New Orleans when he came across the lake in 1829.  It was considerably harder for him, given that there was no bridge or really a whole lot of locomotion on the lake.  He was getting the hell out anyway.  Going up the country, Mandeville built an estate with a driveway lined by live oaks.  His plantation was surrounded by water on three sides, and he planned it to be as grand as the noble estates of France.  He called his new home Fontainebleau.  He called the town that sprung up nearby Mandeville, because that’s how he rolled.  So, once you go out into the woods and get all the marrow of life sucked out, what do you do next?  Maybe someone’s father pulled him aside at a pool party and whispered that one word, “sugar.”

Long before tariff protection made it super lucrative, Mandeville established a sugar plantation.  The major sugar production at that time was going down in the Caribbean.  The people who worked on those plantations recorded a pretty horrific life.  Mortality rates were significantly higher for slaves in the cane breaks than in the cotton fields.  I don’t know for sure, but I would be willing to bet that the slaves on Mandeville’s plantation were treated more like other slaves on the continent than like slaves in the islands.  Which may be a fine point of distinction given that they were all, well, slaves.  But if the spirit of a place counts for anything, the people who lived and worked here are now at peace.

It’s easy to see what a refugee from the city would find appealing about life at Fontainbleau.  Under the cool shade of the Cypress and Live Oak trees, a breeze blows up off of Lake Pontchartrain.  Although you can’t see it, New Orleans radiates its energy across the water.  There is mystery and romance, but not so much of either to disrupt the calm ebb and flow of life.  Just up the road in Covington, Walker Percy used to walk to the Post Office and back home in between writing paragraphs.  The place he and Mandeville made their homes was not forgotten by time.  Time never knew it in the first place.