Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  We arrive in Knoxville and I have to wait an hour and then change buses to get one to Chattanooga. A woman sits in the bus station holding a large bed-pillow complete with pillowcase. A man comes up to her and says, ‘Came prepared with a pillow?’

  The bus is late and I soon find out why. The driver is incredibly slow and verbose. As we finally leave the station, he starts his routine: ‘Smoking is prohibited. If you don’t know what prohibited means, it means, don’t ask for it, don’t do it, don’t even want it. No boomboxes and no sex in the bathroom. If you get the desire, I’ll pull over at a motel, but I won’t wait.’ He then goes on to explain where we’re going, how, and at what speed. He’s like one of those airline pilots who just as you get to sleep insists on telling you his name, the kind of plane you’re on, how fast you’re going, at what height, ‘and if you look out the left of the plane, you may just be able to see Las Vegas …’ But this driver is worse. It seems like he’s never going to shut up. A woman across the aisle from me says, ‘What’s he goin’ on about? I can’t understand a word he says, it’s like he talks with his mouth shut or somepin.’

  In front of me, a one-legged man discusses the pros and cons of city life versus country life. ‘I just can’t believe people spend $200,000 on a house that’s so close to another one that you could spit on it, an’ it’s like everyone’s flinging around attitude an’ he’s gonna hit you before you hit him ’cause maybe you’ve got a hidden gun. I was in auto-repair—expect you to do work for nothing, don’t even want you to earn a living wage. And the cops have gotten pretty bad too—think they’re God or something. The only drawback to living in the country is you get less opportunity.’

  I refer to my book on the South which gives definitions of Southern types. A Southern Belle seems to be a kind of aristocrat who has a coming-out party. The cognoscenti don’t call her a belle, referring to her instead as ‘a real cute girl.’ Adult Belles are known as ‘ladies.’ ‘Women’ are workers and whores.

  A ‘Bubba’ is a Southern man who’s not too bright but not necessarily low class. A ‘Redneck’ drives a pickup truck. He’s rural, profoundly conservative, enjoys guns, Country and Western music, fighting, fishing, and camping. A ‘Good Ol’ Boy,’ though he may come from either end of the social scale, seems to be in better shape financially. He’s into guns (everyone is), fishing, football, and women, all of which provide grist for the many anecdotes he tells his buddies with whom he may have bought land for a hunting club. The ‘Good Ol’ Boy,’ unlike the other two categories, takes expensive foreign vacations.

  Late in the afternoon, after two days of more or less constant travel, I arrive in Chattanooga. It’s a pretty town with a gracious, civilised air. It has an opera and a symphony orchestra and private schools and there seem to be a lot of trees and wide streets. Site of one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War, it became, after the war, a place where veterans from both sides settled together amicably. To me it still seems amiable and relaxed, like a resort or a spa town.

  I check into the best hotel, the Reade House, another big downtown hotel that’s seen better days, but this is more typically Southern somehow, grander, less to do with industry and farming and more to do with pleasure and politics. There’s even a black shoeshine man in the lobby. He’s in his mid-twenties and he smiles at me every time I go by, so after a couple of passes I figure I’ll get my shoes shined and chat with him a while. I climb up onto a beautiful stand with brass footplates and he starts working on my shoes. He tells me this used to be his father’s spot.

  ‘Now he’s up the street. I also do the airport, but I come in here coupla times a week ’cause I’m also a bellman.’

  I ask him how long he’s been doing it.

  ‘Been doin’ it since I was twelve. Used to be a good business, but, man, it’s slowed down. Different people these days. Businessmen. I shoulda done somepin’ else, but there it is, I stuck a fork in it.’

  ‘“Stuck a fork in it”?’

  ‘It’s off the grill. Stick a fork in it. It’s done.’

  He gets back to work on the shoes. He’s brushed in the sweet-smelling polish and now reaches for a long piece of lambskin.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘now it’s time to take these shoes to ultra-space, where they ain’t never been before.’

  In the evening, I walk down wide, empty downtown streets to Sticky Fingers, a rib joint a few blocks from the hotel. I’m tired and contented. It’s still early but the restaurant has already slowed down. I sit outside on a terrace and munch away at some stringy but tender beef drenched in barbecue sauce. A couple of middle-aged women sit nearby, talking and drinking. A group of young people, good-looking, ill-matched but expectant, finish their dinner and stroll away. You see people enjoying themselves in New York, but there’s usually something frantic about it, squeezing in pleasure between important matters of ambition or survival. Here, this evening at least, pleasure seems to be an end in itself.

  I finish the food and then go into the empty bar to have a drink. The bar itself is an oblong with a barman in the middle. The place has more the atmosphere of a college-town bar than anything redneck. A pretty blonde girl comes in to meet a friend working in the restaurant. They order two shots of something and then stand around on the short end of the oblong, glancing at me now and then and adjusting themselves. The one who works here, a tall, slender girl with a long, flat face, casually lights her cigarette by bending back a match on a book of matches and striking it with her thumb. It’s a stylish, deliberate move. Having lit her cigarette, she tosses the matches onto the bar, but, to her surprise, the match keeps burning and now she has to make a decision: admit defeat and retrieve it, or wait for the whole thing to explode. She laughs and lets it burn. The barman stubs it amiably. The young, who I find interesting because they’re so uncluttered, find themselves uninteresting for the same reason. Their mannerisms and affectations, the lighting of the match, the way they dress, the belly-button rings, which I love, all these are there to take the place of scars earned in the process of life.

  The blonde girl moves a shoulder bag so the strap bisects her breasts diagonally, and glances at me again. She’s wearing a white shirt and she’s not yet twenty. After a while, they leave. I go in search of a ‘Duelling Piano Bar’ I’ve been told about where two blues pianists face off on opposite pianos, but I cannot find it so I return to the hotel and go to bed. In the morning I rent a car and set off for Dayton to do my bit for history.

  Through America Online I’ve made contact with a woman who runs a bed-and-breakfast in Dayton called the Magnolia House. Her name is Gloria and her AOL profile reads:

  Marital Status: not married, not good at it. Hobbies: horses, field trials, bird hunting, antiques, cooking, fun, skeet shooting, shopping, people, life. Personal Quote: most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, not knowing when the dawn will come, i open every door. i am a sweet thing. i do not like to be teased …

  On the phone, she had a smoky, flirtatious voice and one of those laughs that comes hacking out in sudden nervous bursts. Later, she e-mails me some pictures of herself. She’s blonde and appears to be in her late thirties. Some of the photographs show her with horses. Another group of four show her wearing a tight leather dress—and she looks good—but then there’s a picture of her standing on a bridge and she does not look quite so good.

  The second time I call, closer to my arrival, she tells me she’s selling up. Things haven’t worked out somehow and she’s leaving town. I’m to be the last guest at the Magnolia House.

  After about forty-five minutes driving along a highway littered with yet more warnings of Christ’s imminent return (it really is astonishing how obsessed they are by this) I arrive outside Dayton. The road around which the town grew has been atrophied by Highway 27, which, like a big artery, bypasses Dayton along the eastern edge. The cholesterol of modern life, Arby’s, McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, clusters around the new highway. I fork left off the highway
and take the old varicose vein into town.

  Dayton lies in eastern Tennessee alongside the Tennessee River. Before the whites arrived, Tennessee and the Carolinas were home to 40,000 Cherokee Indians. The Cherokee Nation consisted of about 200 red and white towns. The red towns were war towns, the white, peace towns. The chiefs of each town answered to a supreme chief of either war or peace who lived in the headquarters of the tribe. The white towns were sanctuaries, and the similarity of these to Hebrew ‘cities of refuge’ is why some people believe American Indians are descended from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

  I wonder what would happen if it turned out to be the other way around, that the Jews were in fact descended from American Indians? The true spiritual home of the Jews would then become Nashville instead of Jerusalem, and a Holocaust Museum would have to be erected there to commemorate another genocidal episode in their history, an episode which, during an epidemic of memorial building, is conveniently overlooked.

  According to the History of Rhea County, Tennessee, compiled by Bettye J. Broyles—a massive tome which can be purchased at the Chamber of Commerce in modern Dayton—the Cherokee and the settlers lived together peacefully in the early days of white incursion into the area, even marrying each other and raising children. As in all things, however, the Indians soon got the shitty end of the stick. In 1650, a smallpox epidemic cut the Cherokee Nation in half and soon land grants were being freely given—20,000 acres here, 40,000 there—although the land still legally belonged to the Indians. Later, the government itself would grab 7,000 square miles of territory in a single day.

  A complaint of the time, and an excellent excuse for genocide, was that Indians were difficult to ‘civilise.’ Whatever that means, it was not true of the Cherokee. Having come in contact with the white man’s alphabet, they created their own and, having done so, wrote several books about their culture. They adopted a written national constitution, built houses and paved roads. In 1828, the tribe even started its own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. When parts of the tribe were forced west, they tried to hold their nation together, in spirit if not in place, by writing back and forth. They were, in short, considerably more civilised than the rapacious Christians who pushed them further and further back into their mountainous lands in northwestern Georgia. One Profitable Nation Under a White God was what these God-fearing men were after, and if the Indians had to be cheated out of their lands or killed, so be it. God Bless Genocide! Pass the turkey!

  There had been rumours of gold in Cherokee country from the very start. John G. Burnett, a soldier who participated in the gold rush which followed and later wrote a memoir about it, says an Indian boy living on Ward Creek in Tennessee discovered a gold nugget in 1828 and sold it to a trader. The Cherokee were doomed.

  Through bribery, corruption, and violence, the last of the Cherokee’s land was taken. In 1835, the Treaty of New Echota was achieved by a five-million-dollar bribe to a portion of the tribe. The treaty demanded that the Cherokee now move west of the Mississippi. When some of the tribe refused to leave, the government decided to ‘remove’ them.

  Chief Junaluska, who had fought alongside President Andrew Jackson in a battle against the Cree, and indeed saved his life, was sent to Washington to plead with him. Junaluska explained that the majority of the tribe were not in favour of the treaty, which was internally unconstitutional. Jackson was cool to him and said there was nothing he could do. Davy Crockett and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, expressed their outrage at what was about to happen, but to no effect.

  In the summer of 1838, 7,000 U.S. troops arrived. They rounded up all but a few hundred Indians and put them in stockades. Many Indians died here either of disease or what is now known as bungungot. A Filipino word, bungungot describes a spiritual homesickness, a sorrow so profound it kills. It occurs among people who believe their land is imbued with spirits, including the spirits of their ancestors. To be torn from this land is to be torn from your soul.

  By the time the tribe had been captured and imprisoned, it was already November. Undeterred, the soldiers loaded the Cherokee into 645 wagons and set off for Oklahoma. They travelled through the winter and did not arrive in Oklahoma until March. Four thousand Cherokee died of exposure and disease and the route they took became known as ‘The Trail of Tears.’

  The ‘Trail of Tears’ passes right through Dayton. In the early 1880s an English company under the direction of Titus Salt Jr. came to town and formed the Dayton Coal and Iron Company. Dayton was almost unique in its natural resources and means of transportation. In the nearby hills were both coal and iron, as well as timber for props and clay for making bricks. Chickamauga Lake, which came right to the edge of town, was actually an offshoot of the huge Tennessee River only two miles away, and so, with the coming railroad, the city would have two ways to send its heavy goods to market.

  Within five years of the company’s formation, the population of the town shot up from 250 to 5,000. The price of real estate jumped by 300 per cent. By 1890, the population was over 6,000 and Dayton was a bona fide boom town. Soon there were several elegant hotels, and a year-round resort known as Dayton Springs.

  What no one in Dayton knew was that the parent company in Britain was in financial trouble from the start and that the boom was founded on debt and chaos. As far back as 1884, Titus Salt had been forced by lack of capital to sell much of his stock to James Watson and Co., Iron Merchants, of Scotland.

  In December 1895 an explosion in one of the mines killed twenty-nine miners, including two boys, one aged fourteen, the other aged fifteen. The company, now entirely controlled by Watson, reorganised again, seeking to protect itself from possible lawsuits from the families of the victims. They need not have worried. The naive Daytonians settled for between $125 to $400 per dead miner. In the next few years there were two more explosions, which killed another fifty miners. From the turn of the century, the company operated at a loss.

  In June 1913, Peter Donaldson, president of both the Watson company and Dayton Coal and Iron, drove down to the Thames in London, chained himself into his car, and took the plunge. As the car took the man, so the British company took the American company. Dayton Coal and Iron was declared bankrupt in 1915 and the boom was over.

  In 1924, with the population of Dayton shrunk from 6,000 to a mere 1,800, one last attempt was made to revive the mine. A company named the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company was formed and an engineer was employed to explore the mine’s potential.

  His name was George W. Rappleyea.

  George, described variously as a chemical engineer and a metallurgical engineer, was from New York. He had married a local woman, Ova, a nurse he met in a Chattanooga hospital after he hurt himself playing touch football. In 1925, he was thirty-one years old. He had a grey-streaked mop of black hair which seemed to shoot directly up from his scalp. A short man, he always dressed well, favouring snappy suits, bow ties, and a straw boater. Fast-talking and jumpy, his eyes were dark brown behind round horn-rim glasses. He was not good-looking, but clearly his intelligence and energy made him attractive. Always in motion, always busy, he danced and played tennis and drove his car too fast along the country roads as if he might miss something.

  In 1925, Prohibition was in full swing, along with heavy drinking, flappers, the Charleston, and art deco. The first issue of the New Yorker magazine was on sale. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy; and an obscure Adolf Hitler, volume one of Mein Kampf. And on May 4, before dinner, George read the ACLU announcement in the Chattanooga Times.

  George, who had fully accepted the idea of evolution while in college, was outraged by the law. He saw immediately—and this is where his genius came in—that this was a big issue and could become a big trial which, apart from being important and fascinating, might also attract investors to the ailing town. The whole state had read the ad somewhere or other. Only George saw what it could mean. The next morning, he drove through town to F. E. Robin
son’s drugstore. Although there was some industry in the town, a lumber company, two canning factories, a hosiery mill, and Morgan Furniture manufacturing, all but one of the hotels, the Aqua, had closed down and the place had an empty, defeated quality. Robinson’s drugstore, which had a soda fountain, was a thirty-second walk from the large three-storey courthouse, and was the social centre for the town’s business elite. Fred Robinson, known as either the ‘hustling druggist’ or ‘Doc,’ was also chairman of the school board. In typical Southern fashion, where politics and business so often commingle, his shelves were stocked with school books.

  George told him his idea. If the trial was staged here, it would attract publicity to the town and then perhaps investment. Perhaps the mine could be brought back to life. George was convinced that no matter where the trial happened, it was going to be a historic event. Why not Dayton?

  The Christians down in Dayton say the ‘hustling druggist’ was no more than that, that the entire appeal of the thing was in the hustle; but his family and people who knew him well say Fred Robinson was a genuine believer in evolution. He was, after all, chairman of the school board. George and he called in some other civic leaders and the idea gained momentum. The group phoned the principal of the high school, who was also the biology teacher, and asked him if he’d care to be arrested, but he refused the honour. He was a family man. Attention soon focused on football coach, and young bachelor, John T. Scopes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Last Guest at the Magnolia House

  Set in a half acre of unfenced garden dripping with rain, the Magnolia House is a big wooden ante-bellum Greek Revival house with a porch facing the street. There are two white rockers sitting on the porch, shaded by a vast magnolia tree which grows between the house and the sidewalk. Four tall and slender columns support an overhanging roof. A small balcony juts out above the front door. Before I’ve even rung the door I hear the clatter of boots and look up.