XVI

Cordell Savage’s disappearance a few weeks later was the talk of Memphis and the Delta. He’d driven off to the Rotary luncheon one day and hadn’t been heard from since. Will phoned from his mother’s house, which was itself indicative of the gravity of the situation.

“Maybe he’s just off on a binge,” I said. “Surely you could relate to that.”

“Not the old man’s style.”

“Foul play?” I suggested, lawyerly.

“Smells rank, on somebody’s part.”

The missing person, I gathered, was himself one of the prime suspects in the matter of his own disappearance. Will said he’d let me know of any developments, and I asked if there was anything I could do.

“Keep in touch with Taleesha,” he said. “She likes you.”

I suppose he knew this would please me. After all, even fans need acknowledgment sometimes—an autographed picture, a kiss blown carelessly from the bright center stage.

The Savage clan was much on my mind that semester as I worked feverishly on my thesis. Cordell’s vanishing act emboldened me as a historical analyst; I didn’t think he would approve of my project, and this prospect made me nervous. Will claimed that his father was a Bones man, and I was enough in awe of this fact to imagine his reach extending to the campus; I could imagine him looking over my shoulder as I wrote, barking his disapproval. All I had told him, as I departed Bear Track for Jackson, was that I had developed a keen interest in southern history.

I had been none too comfortable pursuing my research at the Mississippi Archives, though no one seemed particularly hostile. A middle-aged librarian named Lizzie Tyre ostensibly assisted me, glaring at the card catalog through her pointy Cadillac-fin glasses, making me wait for documents while she talked with friends and relatives on the phone. I started by asking for letters and diaries of planters, which were well cataloged and preserved. To locate the interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the Works Progress Administration took much longer. When eventually some of this material surfaced, it came in the form of faded and crumbling carbons on yellow paper fastened together with rusting staples and paper clips. Amazingly, most of these had never been forwarded to the Library of Congress in Washington, and thus were not part of the collection I had seen on microfilm in New Haven. This was particularly the case with those interviews that cast plantation life in a harsh light. This evidence of censorship at the state level was itself an interesting discovery, one which was noted later by George Rawick in his classic American Slave.

I took time out from my thesis only to apply to law school and to campaign for the newly formed school senate. Not being a candidate for any of the secret societies, I’d run for election in an attempt to expand my orbit on campus and to bolster my undergraduate resume for my law school applications. Shortly after I was elected by classmates who did not necessarily covet the honor, various members of the Black Panther Party were charged with conspiracy in the murder of New Haven party member Alex Rackley the previous year. Initially, like most students, I didn’t assume that the trial concerned me in any manner. Yale was Yale, aloof from merely local events.

The first scheduled meeting of the senate was canceled for lack of a quorum, and for some reason the second was canceled as well. In the meantime I received acceptances from Virginia and Michigan Law Schools—but no word from Harvard. When we finally convened in April, more than a hundred spectators—half of them black—awaited us in the lecture hall. The agenda for the meeting included a number of resolutions formulating Yale’s response to the Panther trial, but the chairman of the steering committee, intimidated perhaps by the clamor from the back of the room, announced that he would entertain motions from the floor. This immediately proved to be a mistake. A shaven-headed black man demanded we vote for a university-wide strike in support of the Panthers.

“We don’t recognize your authority,” shouted a white man on the other side of the room who was draped in a red hammer-and-sickle flag. It was hard to believe he was a student—certainly I’d never seen him before.

“This body is irrelevant,” he proclaimed, “an artifact of the corrupt, discredited power structure. It should be disbanded immediately. Power to the people!”

At this point the floor exploded with shouts and jeers. Our chairman pounded his gavel and pronounced the mob out of order. But it was a little late for that. Everyone was shouting. Looking down from the raised platform, I saw a black woman in the second row looking directly back at me, screaming “Fuck you fuck you fuck you …” I was startled by the hatred in her face. So far I hadn’t even said anything. And the senate hadn’t opposed the strike; we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to consider it. Who were these people, I remember wondering. Had they been at Yale with me all this time?

Prevailing over the mayhem, a black man with an Afro every bit as impressive as his dashiki addressed his remarks to the podium. “You pathetic lackeys—go home to your white corporate masters. Go lick the boots of the masters of the military-industrial complex.” He held the commandeered microphone in one hand and thrashed the air with the other. Standing beside him I suddenly noticed Aaron Greeley.

Without thinking, I waved to my former roommate—and then instantly dropped my hand, realizing how inappropriate this gesture was under the circumstances. However, it apparently confused the speaker and created a strange hiatus in the proceedings. For just a moment, the noise subsided, no one knowing quite what to make of my inexplicable semaphore. Aaron stood there rigid beside the orator as if immobility would disguise him.

Looking directly at me, the man in the dashiki regained his composure: “You make me sick. All you privileged fucking honkies with your pathetic parliamentary bullshit. You wanna debate rules of order while the pigs are breaking their clubs on our heads. We’re done with bullshit. You got that? In the name of the people I hereby declare this meeting adjourned. The black student union will hold a press conference at ten tomorrow morning and introduce a little reality into this fucking university.”

He jumped down from the podium and walked out, trailing dozens of the spectators, including Aaron, in his wake. But the lecture hall still seemed on the verge of a riot. Somehow the chairman was able to shout out a proposal endorsing a strike, which most of us timidly voted for, if anyone cared. And then we ran for cover.

Shaken as I was after my close encounter with the revolution, I had naturally called Will. Taleesha answered at the Peabody and told me with no discernible goodwill that he was at his mother’s house. Cordell Savage had surfaced in London with Cheryl Dobbs, his dead son’s recent fiancée.

“Some Memphis people saw them at the American ambassador’s in London,” she said, “and the old bastard’s lawyer has contacted Mrs. Savage to ask for a divorce.”

This incredible news served to promote the tenuous reconciliation between Will and his mother; at the cost of a difficult and unloving husband, Mrs. Savage seemed to be regaining a son. This amnesty did not extend to her daughter-in-law, who had yet to meet Mrs. Savage or set foot in her house. “I understand,” Taleesha claimed, unconvincingly. “He’s all she has left.”

She’d spent Easter with her own family while Will stayed by his mother’s side. The good news was that he’d finagled a special compassionate exemption from military service on the grounds of his mother’s recent loss of Elbridge and fragile health—an exceptional dodge which probably, ironically, had much to do with Cordell’s residual political clout.

“So you got the Panthers on trial up there in New Haven,” she noted.

“I didn’t put anybody on trial. As far as I’m concerned they can all go free tonight.”

“Sorry. I was just making an observation is all.”

When I told her about the disrupted senate meeting, she sighed audibly. “There was actually a moment, right before I married Will, when I thought everything was getting better.”

I thought I knew what she meant. “Then King was shot.”

“Yeah, that and a lot of other stuff.”

I called Memphis several times over the next week, but Will was never at home and I didn’t want to call his mother’s house for fear she might answer. He finally called me to hear firsthand about events in New Haven, so intrigued by the prospect of anarchy and revolution, by the putative alliance of ruling-class students and black revolutionaries, that he was planning to fly up to add his body to the fray. “Didn’t I tell you the old ivy walls would come tumbling down?”

“And what are you going to put in their place,” I asked, “communal farms?”

“Poppy fields,” he proposed.

“Get real, Will.”

“You’re just afraid you might not get your precious Yale diploma.”

He was half right. The events of the week were leading me to believe Will’s interpretation of the momentum of recent history; the times were beginning to seem apocalyptic. The strike—supported by much of the faculty—was in effect, and that morning only three other students turned up for Professor Morgan’s class on the American Revolution. Since I’d mostly been hiding out in the stacks, my front-line information was scant, but I dutifully repeated all the rumors I’d heard at meals: that the Hell’s Angels were roaring into town en masse for May Day, that the three Weathermen who’d fled the exploding townhouse in Greenwich Village were already here; that gelignite had been stolen from the chem lab, although no one stopped to ask what gelignite was doing there in the first place.

“What news on your father,” I asked, thinking that if I ignored it, the revolution would go away.

“There’s nothing to say about my father. I don’t have a father anymore.”

“That’s exactly what he said about you two years ago.”

“You’re going to have to unlearn this habit of quoting deceased authority figures.”

“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.