by Aaron Thier
And I’m remembering the fall days of my youth. That first breath of cold, the leaves gathering against walls and fences, a foretaste of nostalgia that comes paired with a wild excitement. I remember it—the strength and pain of youth—and now, miraculously, I feel it again.
The Man in Me Might Be Almost Anyone
To blow off some steam, we thought we’d have a party. In an e-mail invitation, Lehman called it the “First Annual Autumn Antislavery Bash.”
By now I’d gotten used to these events, but I still marveled at the way excited college kids spoke to one another.
“I tried to start my thesis last night,” one student announced, “but it just came out gibberish.”
I heard another student saying to his friend, “You know Pete? I figured out Pete isn’t a Hasid. The side-locks are an affectation.”
At the beginning of the night, while Lehman was polishing off his third or fourth beer, I reminded him not to drink too much. He’d made me promise to remind him, because just that morning he’d been so hungover that he brushed his teeth with exfoliating facial cleanser. But now, only eight hours later, he shrugged the episode off.
“It’s a way of life,” he said, “like being a galley slave or an Alpine skier. There are highs and lows. Sometimes the routine is difficult to bear.”
Soon Lehman was sick again, and Burke dragged me into the bathroom to check on him. He was pale and wall-eyed, hugging the bowl of the toilet and gesturing madly with his fingers. There were four or five people watching him. Tripoli bathrooms are spacious, even if the fixtures are older than I am. Ours has three sinks, two showers, two toilets, and lots of room for spectators.
“Problem in a secular world,” Lehman was explaining, “is no point of reference. How far to go? Which books to consult? Where to find the correct solutions?”
All good questions, I thought, but I was a little frustrated that Lehman had put himself in this position for the second night in a row. I was turning to leave when he caught sight of me and called me over.
“Who are you really?” he whispered.
“I’m Bill Dean,” I whispered back, “mature freshman.”
“I only had one beer,” he said. “One glass of wine. One liter of scotch. Ask the demented foreigner Volokhonsky. He’ll give you the exact tally.”
He spoke with a hoarse clarity, exactly to the point. The trouble was that we didn’t know anyone named Volokhonsky.
“What should we do?” said Burke.
I suggested that we call the health center. He just cocked an eyebrow. Students who end up at the health center for alcohol-related problems are required to attend substance-abuse workshops afterward, so everyone thinks of it as a last resort. It seems that students would rather risk death than attend substance-abuse workshops. This is something we ought to address. We don’t want to be in a position where students are declining essential medical care simply in order to avoid a week’s worth of alcohol counseling. I myself have come to believe that mandatory workshops are largely ineffective in any case. I’m thinking of my friend and longtime colleague Richard Carlyle, who has been in and out of mandatory rehabilitation programs for years, and always to no effect.
“What’s the alternative?” I said. “Should we leave you to die, Lehman?”
“Of course.”
Burke frowned and shook his head. “That’s no good. This is a terrible place to die.”
Then Lehman began to weep, and I heard him whisper incredulously, “A gentleman and a scholar?”
I went to the window and looked out at the dark rainy street. Exasperating as all of this was, I realized that I felt wonderfully privileged to be a part of it. I peered down at the slate roofs, which were sparkling in the rain, and at the cars swishing by under the yellow streetlights, and at the piles of yellow leaves. My life seemed rich in a way it hadn’t in a long time.
Then I turned from the window and saw Megan, who had just come in from the hall. She had high cheekbones and madwoman’s eyes, and she was laughing with an animation that seemed to overcome her. The choice is the same whether you’re seventy or seventeen: You can knuckle under and let life pass you by, or you can put up a fight. I said to myself, Who cares if she loves John Kabaka? I’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a shot.
And it was then, just then, that the whole thing seemed to swing out of my control. The whole giddy semester, I mean. The project and the mission and the enterprise. I felt it. One moment and I was lost.
Later, Megan and I were drinking white wine and sitting by an open window in the common room. Lehman was asleep in a shower stall and the party was getting loud.
“Who are you really?” she said.
“I used to be the dean of students.”
“Well, sure. I knew that. I wanted to hear you say it. And you gave it up to come back to school?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re like me. You’re turning over a new leaf.” But then she shook her head. “Some new leaf!”
I could see that she was a little down, so I asked her if she needed someone to talk to. I tried to explain that my door was always open, although I wasn’t sure if I was speaking as her friend or as the dean.
“I’m not feeling so good, but it’ll pass. I try to stay positive and energetic.”
She took an enormous swallow of wine. She winced and frowned and shook her head.
“I feel like my face is sort of loose and baggy,” she said, “like meat hung on a corpse. Too much pudding. Look at me!”
I did look at her. She was lovely. And sitting there, sipping cold wine in that hot room while the first breath of winter rattled the window frame, I could hardly believe that any of this had happened.
“You look beautiful,” I said.
“Sometimes I feel like nobody really listens to me. Do you know my dad sometimes forgets the name of the college I go to? He calls it Tivoli. Once he called it Monopoly.”
She finished her wine and leaned back.
“It’s just that the twenty-first century is getting me down.”
“Is it?” I said. “I haven’t really gotten a feel for it yet.”
“Look at this country! Everyone’s a sicko. Something goes wrong and they send poor kids off to die in the desert. And nobody cares. And I hardly care.”
I’d heard other students articulate the same feelings, and I realized that I felt bad for these kids. The hopelessness! Was it their fault? A lack of spirit, maybe? I hadn’t been a radical or anything in my own youth, but I did participate in a few protests and I always felt like we were making a difference. We thought we were winning.
“I marched with Dr. King in Washington,” I said. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it, but it’s a different world now. Trust me. Things are better.”
Of course, I’d only gone to Washington in order to impress my wife, who wasn’t my wife yet. I’d just gotten back from Vietnam and I’d met her at a friend’s apartment in New York. I still couldn’t believe she was gone.
“But in Professor Kabaka’s class,” Megan was saying, “I did care! I cared about everything. I sort of came alive. And now he’s gone, and what am I supposed to do? I’ve been reading slave narratives for two months and I can’t see the world without seeing the ghosts. They’re up and moving around, like Professor Kabaka says. They don’t know what century they’re in.”
Two students came crashing by, both of them in pirate costumes, and one of them shouted across the room:
“Hey, Pete, you faux-Hasid freak, say something in Jewish!”
“Sh’ma, Yisroel . . .” Pete shouted back.
“Don’t say it as a mockery, you son of a bitch. My friend Jack knows your sister at UMass. You’re a Methodist!”
“I have a twin brother,” Megan said. “Chris. He’s gay and he keeps saying he’s going to come out to Mom and Dad, and part of me just wants to tell him, ‘Chris! Don’t ever tell them!’ Because Dad’s never going to accept it. And part of me knows that when Chris does tell him and Dad doe
s get angry, that’ll be it. My relationship with Dad will be over. I’ll never forgive him. I’ll have to grow up all at once in that moment because after that I won’t have even the half father I have now.”
I could think of nothing to say to this. And I was having trouble concentrating as well. I was having a very strange feeling, a kind of déjà vu.
Megan grabbed my hand. “You’re an adult! Tell me it’s going to be okay! Just say it and I’ll feel better.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said.
But now I realized what it was. There was something about Megan’s eyes, her cheekbones, her teeth. There was something about her energy. It was nothing I could put my finger on, and maybe it was my imagination, and maybe it was a trick of the dim light, but except for the difference in skin tone, this young woman looked just like my wife on that long-ago Monday when I met her for the first time. How else to say it? I could hardly breathe.
Letter from
Israel Framingham Tripoli
to
Zephaniah Fitch
November 10, 1788
Dear Sir,
Yesterday afternoon, as I stood frowning into the twilight of our descending winter and reflecting that it is near five months now before the sun shall supply us with anything like a hint of summer’s balmy warmth, I found myself longing for the heat and light of Saint Reynard. Is it not comical, Sir, when in my last letter I represented the island as a place of exile and condemnation? Yet such is the operation of the mnemonic faculty, that we forget what we wish to forget, & invent what we wish to remember.
I was standing at my window thinking of these things when, as chance would have it, there came a knock upon my door, & Mary, my housemaid, handed me a letter just arrived that moment from Mr. Sturge, who was my host when I was in the island. I wonder if I failed to give you some account of this fellow? He is in the habit of reading his children a sermon each afternoon before those little wretches are permitted to eat. They must sit perfectly composed in their flannel and wool as their father raves and gestures like a Bedlamite for whole hours at a time. These sermons are thorough-stitched nonsense such as never got vent through the keyhole of a street door, but Mr. Sturge thinks highly of them and frequently affects to weep from what I believe he supposes an ebullition of feeling. An ebullition of spirits is more likely. He is a man of low character, a shuttlecock of a fellow, apoplectic with rage one moment and the next a smiling, Supplicating Fool.
But I dodge my subject, Sir, which is this, viz. that not three weeks after I departed, some of the slaves upon Mr. Sturge’s Binghamshire plantation rose up and Murdered the clerk, a blameless & callow youth named Mr. Claibourne. The conspirators had armed themselves with cane knives and were it seems intending to flee to the island’s uncultivated interior, but their organization was poor and their intentions betrayed by one of their own number, a cowardly fellow named Virgil, whom I remember meeting and of whom I formed a disagreeable impression. This Virgil had hidden the silverware and sent to a neighboring plantation for aid, and thus the rebellion was swiftly crushed (and, I am sure you will rejoice to learn, the silverware preserved). There followed a species of trial, tho one can imagine its theatrical absurdity, and then the slaves, three young men and one woman, were broken alive upon the rack and decapitated, their heads displayed afterward at a crossroads near the plantation.
My emotions upon receiving this news were such as I could only confide to you, dear Friend, for while I do lament the effusion of so much blood, and while I feel that Mr. Claibourne cannot be said to have deserved his violent death, being a harmless fellow with a brain like wet tinder, yet I am not surprised, and I could almost wish for a bloodier outcome still, if only to bring this great injustice of slavery to a point of crisis. As long as the slaves are so wretched, and the planters so intractable, such events will be commonplace, and it is folly indeed to hope for peace when the best one can expect are periods of fearful respite.
I have, as you know, striven all my life to be unoffending in my course and unambitious in my views, and yet the bloody current of the times turns me radical. Intimations and apprehensions crowd upon me thick and threefold. It is a war, Sir, and the crisis upon Mr. Sturge’s plantation only a skirmish in that war, and the matter at stake is precisely that for which we ourselves so recently fought: freedom from tyranny. Indeed it may be that this matter of slavery is the greater cause, for until the world is cured of that vast and terrible pestilence, and the balance of nature restored, how can one speak with any confidence or sincerity those now immortal words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”? As long as our sable brethren toil beneath the lash, whether it be in our own Southern states or in the islands of the West Indies or indeed anywhere upon the globe, our Great Declaration is a lie.
I am troubled to-day, Sir, but I remain, with great fondness and humility, your servant and Friend,
Israel Framingham Tripoli
History of the Brands, History of the Americas
A Big Anna® Heritage Timeline
Prehistory: Delicious bananas evolve in South or Southeast Asia.
600 b.c.: Greeks build the slave-powered Diolkos wagonway, thought to be the world’s first railway.
500 b.c.–
1492 a.d.: Polynesians carry the banana as far east as Hawaii, while Arab traders are responsible for the fruit’s westward migration. Europeans first encounter the banana in West Africa, probably in the early 1400s.
1492: Columbus, miscalculating the circumference of the earth, which he believes is shaped like a pear, discovers America. Unfortunately, so do European epidemic diseases, which kill almost all of the New World’s indigenous peoples over the next hundred and fifty years. Big Anna® honors them (the people) and celebrates their heritage yearly during its Amerindian Festival™.
1516: Friar Tomás de Berlanga brings the banana from the Canary Islands to the “undiscovered country” of the Caribbean, after which it spreads through Latin America like the epidemic diseases already blazing a path.
1519: Hernán Cortés arrives at the court of Aztec king Moctezuma II, where he learns that the monarch consumes more than fifty cups of chocolate a day. Aztec chocolate isn’t the delicious treat that Europeans will come to know and love. It’s a spicy unsweetened beverage. Gross!
1520: Moctezuma II is killed.
1520–1600: The banana serves as a nutritious treat for early colonists and slave laborers alike.
1600s: Ditto.
1692: The city of Port Royal, Jamaica, is completely destroyed in an earthquake!
c. 1700: After trying to start a mutiny on the merchant ship Tatterdemalion, John Morehead Tripoli is marooned on the Caribbean island of St. Renard. He lives among the Carawak Indians for a full year before being rescued, and he’s the first European to taste the fruit of the Carawak Apple Tree, which will later prove to have important medical applications.
1769: After making some improvements to preexisting steam engines, James Watt becomes the man we think of as the inventor of the steam engine.
1776: Theodor Rubella declares independence from bland snack treats with his delicious biscuit thins, which he sells from the back of his stable in Philadelphia. Hard work! Because of a misunderstanding, he is later hanged as a traitor. Theodor Jr. takes over the business, and his father’s legacy lives on to this day in Rubella Crackers™, one of Big Anna®’s oldest and most beloved snack items.
1819: Keith M. Cheek, railroad mogul and uncle of Andrew Cheek, the great father of Big Anna®, is born in New York City on the same day as Herman Melville.
c. 1839: Adolphus K. Mortonton begins selling cheese from a cart in Manhattan.
1842: Jakov Fleischman takes over Mortonton Cheese Co. when Adolphus K. Mortonton is hanged as a traitor.
1846: The Rubella Cracker Company introduces Horse Liver Crisps, precursor of Big Anna®’s beloved Equestrian Classic® crackers.
1847: Englishman Joseph Fry manufactures what everybody now thinks of as the first c
hocolate bar. The truth is that chocolate bars already existed, although Fry may have been the first to introduce factory methods of production to the industry. Where do inventions really come from?
1871: Keith M. Cheek signs a contract with the government of Nicaragua to construct a railroad connecting the capital city of Managua, situated close to the country’s Pacific coast, with several Caribbean ports. In the first three years of the project, an estimated two thousand laborers, or about 60 percent of the total workforce, die from tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria. After laying only sixty miles of track through dense jungle, Cheek declares that the trans-Nicaraguan railroad can’t be built.
1875: Andrew Cheek, nephew of Keith M. Cheek, takes over the trans-Nicaraguan railroad project. He imports thousands of Afro-Caribbean laborers, who prove more resistant to tropical diseases than his uncle’s predominately Irish workforce, and sets up banana plantations to provide freight for the railroad and offset skyrocketing costs.
1880: The Nicaraguan government defaults on its payments to Andrew Cheek, who raises money from private investors and continues the project himself. In gratitude, the government offers Cheek an “eternal lease” on the operation of the railroad, as well as significant territorial concessions and tax exemptions.
1882: Mortonton Cheese Co. acquires the Rubella Cracker Company. The new company is christened Mortonton Foods.
1883: Facing bankruptcy, Andrew Cheek halts construction of the trans-Nicaraguan railroad to concentrate on improving the infrastructure of his banana plantations on the country’s Caribbean coast. Construction never resumes, although Cheek’s banana business, soon christened the Tropical Fruit and Rail Company, begins to expand rapidly and soon establishes plantations in many Central and South American countries.
c. 1885: In Columbus, Georgia, John Pemberton formulates a coca wine that he calls Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, an imitation of another coca wine called Vin Mariani, which had appeared in 1863. He sells the concoction as a patent medicine for the treatment of morphine addiction, irregularities of the stomach, and neurasthenia.
