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By Root 12530 0

funereal journey across the Virginia lowlands, and, I think, finally and most genuinely by some fresh vision of the South that (despite the influence of Faulkner which he detected and to which I readily admitted) was uniquely and, as he said, “electrifyingly” my own. And I was secretly delighted by the knowledge that subtly, through the alchemy of my art, I seemed gradually to be converting Nathan’s prejudice against the South into something resembling acceptance or understanding. I found that he no longer directed at me his jibes about harelips and ringworm and lynchings and rednecks. My work had begun to affect him strongly, and because I so admired and respected him I was infinitely touched by his response.

“That party scene at the country club is terrific,” he said to me as we sat in my room early one Saturday afternoon. “Just that little scrap of dialogue between the mother and the colored maid—I don’t know, it just seems to me right on target. That sense of summer in the South, I don’t know how you do it.”

I preened inwardly, murmuring my thanks and swallowed part of a can of beer. “It’s coming along fairly well,” I said, conscious of my strained modesty. “I’m glad you like it, really glad.”

“Maybe I should go down South,” he said, “see what it’s like. This stuff of yours whets my appetite. You could be the guide. How would that suit you, old buddy? A trip through the old Confederacy.”

I found myself positively leaping at the idea. “God, yes!” I said. “That would be just tremendous! We could start in Washington and head on down. I have an old school pal in Fredericksburg who’s a great Civil War buff. We could stay with him and visit all the northern Virginia battlefields. Manassas, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania—the whole works. Then we’d get a car and go down to Richmond, see Petersburg, head toward my father’s farm down in Southampton County. Pretty soon they’ll be harvesting peanuts...”

I could tell that Nathan had warmed immediately to this proposal, or endorsement, nodding vigorously while in my own wound-up zeal I continued to embellish the outlines of the travelogue. I saw the trip as educative, serious, comprehensive—but fun. After Virginia: the coastal region of North Carolina where my dear old daddy grew up, then Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, and a slow journey through the heart of Dixieland, the sweet bowels of the South—Alabama, Mississippi—finally ending up in New Orleans, where the oysters were plump and juicy and two cents apiece, the gumbo was glorious and the crawfish grew on trees. “What a trip!” I crowed, cutting open another can of beer. “Southern cooking. Fried chicken. Hush puppies. Field peas with bacon. Grits. Collard greens. Country ham with redeye gravy. Nathan, you gourmet, you’ll go crazy with happiness!”

I was wonderfully high from the beer. The day itself lay nearly prostrate with heat, but a light breeze was blowing from the park and through the fluttering which the breeze made against my windowshade I heard the sound of Beethoven from above. This, of course, was the handiwork of Sophie, home from her half-day’s work on Saturday, who always turned on her phonograph full blast while she took a shower. I realized even as I spun out my Southland fantasy that I was laying it on thick, sounding every bit like the professional Southerner whose attitudes I abhorred nearly as much as those of the snotty New Yorker gripped by that reflexive liberalism and animosity toward the South which had given me such a pain in the ass, but it didn’t matter; I was exhilarated after a morning of especially fruitful work, and the spell of the South (whose sights and sounds I had so painfully set down, spilling quarts of my heart’s blood) was upon me like a minor ecstasy, or a major heartache. I had, of course, experienced this surge of bittersweet time-sorrow often before—most recently when in a seizure considerably less sincere my cornpone blandishments had so notably failed to work their sorcery on Leslie Lapidus—but today the mood seemed especially fragile, quivering, poignant, translucent;