Lessons from a Troubled Time

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my parents, and my mother made a comment that was something like, "I can't stand to watch the news these days, there's so much bad stuff." I've been feeling that way myself, with a sort of existential dread that I can't shake, that the future of this country is really dim. Probably the last time things were this dim was during the period leading up to and during the Civil War. That led me to wonder - how did people deal with things back then? I decided to read a book about the time period that I remembered from my teen years - Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt.

It's been a better match than I expected. The book opens in the days before the war began. The first couple of chapters show how, even in a close family like the Creightons, there were strong disagreements about politics. Two brothers who had always been close disagreed over whether what the South was doing was wrong, and eventually, that disagreement led to a fistfight and one brother (Bill) leaving home to join the Confederate Army. In today's terminology, Bill went "no contact" with the family; throughout the rest of the book, the family gets letters from their other sons as they go through battles, but not a single letter from Bill. How many families across the country these days get into heated discussions about politics, or just try to avoid the topic altogether? As the mother in the story says, "I know that all of us is troubled, and our feelin's air runnin' high; but fer awhile here at the table, let's steer away from hard talk."

Another thing I thought seemed relevant was how much uncertainty the family has to live with. Of course, they were living in a time period before 24-hour news and texting, so they would hear from a neighbor or a newspaper there had been a battle. Then they would have to wait maybe weeks before getting a letter from one of the sons to let them know he was still alive. Can you imagine how the worry must have worn on them as they waited those long weeks for a letter that might not come? Beyond the fate of their sons, the family was also concerned about the outcome of the war, and as you may remember from history classes, the first couple of years of the war were pretty dismal for the United States. Lincoln went through several generals trying to find one that could put together a winning strategy. I thought this line was a pretty profound statement: "Jethro read the news in dismay, and for the rest of the war there was always a fear within him that disappointment and disaster inevitably followed hope." I've felt that way, too.

The part of the story that really gave me something to think about, though, was the role of the Creightons' neighbors. Some of them were focused on the fact that Bill had gone to fight for the Confederates (conveniently forgetting that two other sons and a nephew who was like a son were fighting for the Union). These neighbors harassed the Creightons by talking against not just Bill, but also the father (Matt) for refusing to condemn his son as a traitor. The harassment went from talk to threats to an effort to run Jethro (the youngest son) off a bridge while he drove the wagon across, finally escalating to burning the family's barn and poisoning their well. The anxiety would have been unbearable; as the book says, "None of the Creightons slept well at night for a while, until exhaustion overcame their anxieties...The dark was a fearful thing..."

But not all the neighbors were violent and hateful. When Matt Creighton suffered a heart attack brought on by the stress of Jethro's near-miss at the bridge, several of their neighbors stepped up to help plow and plant his fields. The local newspaper editor chided the anonymous harassers in editorials, and when the barn is burned, people donated new equipment and hay to replace what was lost. The family probably wouldn't have been able to recover without the support of a community that was willing to remember that the Creightons were neighbors, despite the one son who made a choice they disagreed with.

As we live through these turbulent, uncertain times, there's some wisdom in a stoic line at the end of the novel. 

"The rains came or they were withheld, the heat ripened the grain or blasted it with a scorching flame, the ears of corn matured in golden beauty or they were infested by worms or blight. One accepted the good or the evil with humility, for life was a mystery, and questions were not for the lowly."

I definitely count myself among the lowly, so.....no more questions! (at least for this post....) 

A Literary Rubik's Cube

Remember the Rubik's Cube? On the surface, it looks pretty simple - a cube with a different color on each side, made up of 9 segments. But give that cube a twist or two in different directions, and suddenly the colors are all mixed and it's a head-scratcher of a task to solve the puzzle and get back to the original configuration.

I finished Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days yesterday, and while it's not a perfect metaphor, the Rubik's Cube is a decent way to describe my experience with the book. The "cube" that holds the story together is the legend of John Henry, the steel-driving railroad builder who "died with a hammer in his hand, O Lord." The book also has some "solid colors" that seem to be the main storylines - a small town in West Virginia is using the release of a commemorative John Henry stamp to kick off a new John Henry Days festival; a group of PR "junketeers" is in town to cover the event for various media outlets; one of the junketeers, J. Sutter, is the closest thing to a main character in the story. There are also several chapters that give John Henry's perspective leading up to the famous contest in which he beat a steam drill (then died with his hammer in his hand).

But Whitehead keeps twisting the cube and coming up with different combinations of colors that don't, on the surface, have anything to do with the main storylines. One chapter is about a little girl who discovers the sheet music for the John Henry song but is told by her mother not to play such trash when she could be practicing her "better" piano music. Another is about a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who is trying to recall the words of the song he heard a stranger sing, so he can put it down in writing and maybe have a hit that will support his family. There are two chapters about the wife of the motel owner in the smaller of the John Henry Days towns and her superstitious obsession with ghosts. And those are only a few of the side stories in the book.

Like the Rubik's Cube and its myriad of color combinations, this story structure can be a little frustrating until you stop fighting it. It's not really that hard to keep the thread of the main storyline, since Whitehead presents chronological events leading up to the ceremony. He does, however, keep a reader sort of unsettled by revealing in the second chapter that there is a shooting at the ceremony that kills two people. I spent the rest of the book being fearful that the characters I was coming to care about (J. Sutter and Pamela Street) were going to be the two. I guess I'm a little cynical about modern authors and how they like to set up readers and avoid traditional cliches, so killing off the nicest characters in the story seemed like the kind of thing a modern author would do. 

SPOILER ALERT!!! Whitehead didn't do it - at least I don't think he did. That's another similarity to the Rubik's Cube - sometimes you can never get back to the original six colors. After setting us up in the second chapter to know a shooting is going to happen, the actual shooting happens off-screen. The only way we know anything about what happened is through a conversation between two postal workers. And frustratingly, we never find out who the two specific people who were killed are, only that they were two journalists. The story ends with J. weighing an invitation to skip the ceremony and go back to New York City early with Pamela. The book ends without telling us what his final decision is. My first response after reading the final line was "WHAT? THAT'S IT?" - the literary equivalent of throwing the Rubik's Cube against the wall, ha ha.

For all its (minor) frustrations, I did enjoy the book. Once I got into the groove of the shifting stories, I liked the little vignettes of random characters interacting with the John Henry legend or song. And two of the chapters were incredibly poignant. MORE SPOILER ALERTS!!! Pamela has been struggling throughout the story with the impact of her father's obsession with John Henry, and she asks J. to come with her to bury her father's ashes in the hidden graveyard of the black workers who died building the railroad. It's a life-changing experience for her and for J., and it's very satisfying to see them moving toward a different path that is (hopefully) going to bring some meaning and richness to their lives. That's followed up immediately by a chapter in which Whitehead portrays Pamela's father as a lonely old man who has lost his family because of his obsession and who built what sounds like a pretty good museum to John Henry in his apartment - that no one comes to see. He spends his days waiting to share John Henry with people who just don't care. Sad.