If I couldn’t believe that my grandfather had sex with a black girl from my hometown, how can I expect twelve men and women to believe Dade Cunningham when he tells them that he didn’t rape a white girl? Why didn’t I believe Lucy that day when she told me?
A few yards from the overlook I come upon a bronze plaque bearing a likeness of John IF. Kennedy, who I learn dedicated the dam on October 3, 1963. It is sobering to realize that this man, who was such a hero of mine, had stood in this same spot, and was murdered only a little over a month later. By joining the Peace Corps and working in the rural areas of the northern coast of Colombia, where most people had a mixed racial background, I thought I had overcome my racial prejudices, but maybe I didn’t. Why did I join? For years I have told myself it was some form of youthful idealism, a manifestation of the hubris that came with being American during our golden age of seemingly unlimited power before Vietnam so rudely interrupted our global fantasies. I remember seeing an American propaganda film ostensibly about Kennedy’s South American foreign policy, the Alliance for Progress, that was shown before the regular feature in the outdoor theater in the town where I worked on the Magdalena River. Actually, the film had been a testament to Jack Kennedy. God, how the Colombians had loved him. Only the Pope inspired more adoration.
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” his words had implored my generation of college students, “but what you can do for your country.” I remember tears coming to my eyes as he thundered, over Spanish subtitles, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
Bear Creek was, in relative terms, as poor as Plato, Magdalena. If I was so hell-bent on saving the world, why didn’t I start at home in the thirteenth-poorest county in the United States? Perhaps the truth was that by joining the Peace Corps I was staging a mini-rebellion against the status quo. But if I had wanted to stand on my two feet and tell my mother and Bear Creek, Arkansas, to go to hell, why didn’t I have the guts to do so directly in stead of trying to organize in my hideously accented Spanish unbelievably poor communities to build out houses, schools, and health centers?
I stop to have lunch in a diner on the outskirts of Heber Springs and stare at the middle-aged waitress, a delight fully saucy confection of a woman with dyed blond hair and big breasts under a T-shirt that advertises her employer business: Leo’s Eats. Lewdly, I think of the message as a profoundly self-satisfied sexual communi cation. The feeling that I have been telling lies to myself for a long time is as inescapable as my own libido. I didn’t have the guts to stay in Bear Creek and say what I thought. I smile at the woman who, paid to please, or at least to bring the food out, grins as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
What did I think back then? Nothing remarkable for a twenty-one year old. That God was probably dead or at least sleeping and that east Arkansas was a pretty crappy place for treating blacks so badly. Yet, if I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to come back to Bear Creek with my mixed-blood wife from Colombia and preach this un original coming-of-age sermon to my mother and her friends, what else have I been kidding myself about? Obviously my psyche and I have some unfinished business.
As I contemplate myself as a newly married ex-Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve always realized that Sarah is much more direct and assertive than I am, even though I’m al most fifty. She was the one who insisted that we return to Bear Creek to confront my past. She is like her mother not only physically but emotionally. Rosa was the realist in our family of three: she confronted her own breast cancer and mortality and insisted that I face it. My good intentions, I’ve always thought until now, were enough. I sip at the glass of weak tea in front of me and watch my waitress banter with the regulars. Enough for what? To call what I do living, I suppose. The women in my life have been grittier than I have and consequently have often dominated me. Should that come as a shock? Oddly, it does. Thinking I should be in control, I have tried to bully them with guilt, the coward’s ultimate weapon.
Rosa, when I brought her to Arkansas, accepted my decision not to move back to Bear Creek as my unquestioned right to decide where we should live. Later, when I offered the explanation that I had not returned home out of consideration for how she would have been treated, she wouldn’t buy. it
“You didn’t want to go! I did. She was to madre, no?” Leaving her own mother, Rosa expected to find another one. Not able to screw up my courage, I pretended I couldn’t have found a job and moved us to the center of the state.
I pay the check and point the Blazer south toward Blackwell County, thinking I’d go out to eat more often if all the help flirted with me like the waitress at Leo’s just did. As I settle in behind a Dodge Caravan on the winding road, almost obsessively my thoughts return to my mother and Bear Creek. Guilt and sarcasm. She was a master of both. She was stronger, too.
“Are you trying to kill me, son?” she asked when I had said I wanted to come home to live with my new bride.
“First, you leave me and go to South America, then you marry a nigra, and now you want to bring her home to live next to me. Was I that terrible as a mother? With your father sick all the time, maybe I was.” Weak. That’s what I was. Buying into all that. I should have told her that, by God, this is my wife and you’ll accept her and love her. Instead, for a quarter of a century from a safe distance of a hundred miles, I told myself that mother did learn to love her, but we just didn’t have the opportunity to visit much. Bullshit!
I stop in Rose Bud to get gas and see on the wall in the service station a six-month-old notice of a parade and a barbecue sponsored by the Rose Bud volunteer fire department and ladies’ auxiliary. A parade of a single fire truck? Bear Creek was too small. We were better off not going home. After all these years, it is the reason I can’t abide. As I drive on, I wonder why has it taken so long to come to terms with my past? No wonder I am so afraid of a jury in this case.
“You can come see Woogie anytime you want to,” Marty tells Sarah as we say good-bye. We have been invited for dinner, and though the reason for our coming is a sad one, we have had a good visit. With some trepidation I told Marty about our visit to eastern Arkansas over Thanksgiving, but instead of lecturing me again, Marty listened for a change and said little in response. She is not interested in the past, her demeanor says. If I am nutty enough to put myself through that meat grinder, it’s my problem.
Woogie, knowing something is up, won’t leave Sarah long enough for us to slip out the door. Sarah wipes away her tears and gently nuzzles his battle-scarred ears.
“Be good, Woogie!” she whispers and kisses him on his graying muzzle.
Marty’s husband. Sweetness, holds out a dog biscuit in the shape of a bone.
“Come here, boy,” he coaxes.
“You’ll like it here” I like Sweetness better all the time. He can’t help hating Bill Clinton any more than I could help liking the looks of that waitress in Heber Springs this afternoon. If he loves my sister and likes dogs, he can’t be all bad. A sucker for food, Woogie trots over to Sweetness, who grabs his collar and gives him the biscuit to distract him.
I wave at my sister and brother-in-law, and nudge Sarah, and we go out into the cold night air.
“We’ll never see him again!” Sarah wails as we get into the Blazer.
“We never come out here.”
“We will, more and more,” I say, grinding the Blazer’s starter in the darkness.
“As Nazis go. Sweetness isn’t so terrible.”
“He was a good dog!” she pronounces, as if we had carried Woogie to his grave.
“A wonderful dog,” I concur, no longer feeling the need to play the strong, silent type. I will miss him more than Sarah will. I’m the one who will be alone.