17. Both a curse and a blessing was this second sight. Jonathan’s mother didn’t always possess the gift of prophecy, but for a period of ten years, it seemed that almost all of her predictions came true. In early 1912, however, Emmaline’s second sight began to fail her and her back-porch prognostications started to miss their mark by wide margins. For example, she predicted that the Titanic would be drydocked after forty years of dutiful service to the White Star Line and then be turned into a home for old sailors, and that anarchist Emma Goldman would become a Republican senator from New Jersey. Later she predicted that Al Jolson would lose his voice and become a whispering Southern Baptist. Addicus Andrew Blashette, interview with author, 5 October, 1999.
18. “Graduation comes none too soon! Hip Hip Hoorah! Tah Rah Rah Boom Dee-A! [sic]” Jonathan’s Diary, 25 May 1905.
19. “I am leaving to spend my summer as a counselor at a fishing camp.” Jonathan Blashette to Mildred Boyers, 29 May, 1905, Private Family Correspondence Collection of Maise Boyers Gabridge. Mildred was, incidentally, in Atlantic City looking for her mother who, according to Gabridge, had learned of her husband’s extramarital dalliances and went to either “drag the man by the short-hairs all the way home” or “feed that sorry excuse for a husband and father to the fishes.”
20. “This was my welcome to the Fritz Fighting Camp.” The word “fighting” was a misprint. Jonathan spent his graduation summer paying — along with other members of the camp’s staff — for this glaring promotional brochure typographical error. Given the misleading advertising, few arrived at the Minnesota camp expecting to fish and those who made the attempt usually, in the words of the camp’s beleaguered administrator Trent Littlefeather, “had no sooner dropped their lines in the cool, placid lake water than their boatmate hauls off and knocks the dog crap out of them when they’re not looking.” It was the summer Jonathan learned fisticuffs, a little about lures, and the importance of accuracy in promotional circulars. Jonathan’s Diary, 3 June1905.
21. It was the second tornado to hit Wilkinson County in as many months. According to Blashette’s step-granddaughter Vicka Lovett (interview), Jonathan was in the barn as the twister lifted the roof off the farmhouse. Emmaline was in the kitchen and Addicus was out in the field. Jonathan’s diary disputes this. He places himself in the field, his father in the barn and his mother visiting with Pastor Stoddard’s myopic wife Margaret at the parsonage. By Addicus’s account (letter from Addicus to Lindy Blashette), Emmaline was in the barn, he was in the kitchen and Jonathan was off fishing with his friend Raymond Beams. Raymond (letter to his birth father soliciting funds) said that he was in the kitchen with Margaret Stoddard looking for Emmaline’s canning lids. Pastor Stoddard was in the Blashette barn looking for Margaret’s eyeglasses. Addicus and Emmaline were at Claiborne’s General Groceries and Sundry Dry Goods Store. Pastor Stoddard (church newsletter) said that everyone was seated at the Blashette kitchen table playing Uncle Wiggly. Margaret Stoddard (Bible Methodist Church Missionary Circle Circular) remembers that when the tornado touched down, Raymond Beams was in a barn located somewhere in the tri-county area helping her husband look for her eyeglasses. County historian Ida Sheridan (interview) insists that Pastor Stoddard was at Claiborne’s store buying an Uncle Wiggly game and a comical monocle fob. Everyone else was at the Pettiville ice cream social discussing crop rotation and bungled Montgomery Ward mail orders.
6 HALLS OF IVY, CORRIDORS OF PROMISE
1. The first day at Devanter went smoothly. Devanter College and Seminary was founded in 1866 by three Confederate veterans who implemented an early Dixie version of the G.I. bill, offering free tuition, room and board to any veteran of Jefferson Davis’s army whose application for its eclectic program was accepted. The school was financed by a wealthy British eccentric, Lord Hallowell who owned vast acreage in England’s Lake District and whose large family fortune (acquired over a century of trade with southern planters) also financed full-scholarships at an art school in Leeds for students willing to paint only portraits of his estranged wife Tildy whose oft-reproduced image clutters the walls of that city’s “Museum of Tildy” to this day. Alwin Chambers, The Little Brown College in the Wildwood (Pittsburgh: Academe Press, 1992), 222-25.
Devanter offered courses in the sciences, business management, and the “Biblical arts.” Since Jonathan’s interests included both of the latter two disciplines, the small Tennessee college seemed the ideal choice.
2. Jonathan was assigned to Orville House. Ibid., 225-26, 301, 321-23. Lord Hallowell’s endowment carried several stipulations. First and foremost, Devanter College would be multi-racial, a place of study and fellowship for men of all races. Over the years, the college’s charter had been altered to allow only half-white mulattos, then quadroons, and finally octoroons. It was because Jonathan was admitted to the school one week late that he was placed in Orville House (regarded by most as the “dormitory of last resort”), which bunked the college’s twenty-two octoroons and its only Chinese student, Wing Lu, who, though there to study the recently developed quantum theory of German physicist Max Planck, found himself spending most of his non-classroom hours running the college laundry and grousing heavily over his lot.
A second stipulation: That students were to be of strong moral character. Smoking and drinking were strictly prohibited, although the young men were permitted a glass of watered sherry from time to time at the home of President and Mrs. Greaney when “some of the boys would be invited over for social and intellectual intercourse with the faculty.” Most importantly, the men were to visit nearby Chucking with “only the most extreme caution.” A wild and wooly railroad town, Chucking had twice as many saloons as churches. Any student found to be frequenting saloon, brothel, or dental parlor (where, it was understood, nitrous oxide parties sometimes degenerated into giggly orgies of lust and “just plain undignified tomfoolery”) would risk expulsion.
Ironically, it was here in Chucking that Jonathan met one of the enduring loves of his life, a pocked syphilitic former prostitute named Great Jane.
3. “She is the earth, the moon and the stars.” Though never allowing Jonathan to consummate their relationship, there is no doubt that Great Jane did permit him to hand her his heart. Nor is there any doubt that she felt the same. Such a love many have found inexplicable. Lucianne Flom in her study of love, romance and venereal disease, A Canker of the Heart (New York: Koppelman Publishers, 1990), offers the following stab: that Jonathan, being somewhat the social misfit himself, given his disability, identified with others who viewed the world through a slightly skewed lens, and it is entirely plausible that such empathy might in a special circumstance extend itself to romantic attachment. I believe that Jonathan’s feelings for Great Jane went much deeper than simple romantic attachment. To call the two soul mates would not be a far-reaching assessment.