So it seems to me that any division in his identity has most to do with his exile from his past and his adoption of a new identity in a new place. I recognize the exile mentality. When you try to become a new person in a new place, you sense that one of the two identities must be a fraud. But which one? You or the twin who died at birth? Which one are you? Parvenu or subversive? Entering the official literary culture of the Northeast with doddering Ralph Waldo Emerson at the helm, Twain may have felt insecure, but he also staked his claim there as if it were the Comstock Lode. The division between mere humorist and man of letters was a chasm he had to straddle. That he had one foot in each culture was his great success. His genius was in bringing the literary world the brash idiom and humorous storytelling energy of the America of discovery, can-do, and rigged-up solutions. In The American Claimant we hear that song.
Twain was an original. He was a visionary who struggled against his era and crossed regional and class lines with a fresh style that made him stand out as an oddity, someone exotic. Henry James called him “quaint.” Twain joined the official culture and played by its rules to the extent that it allowed him a subversive power. It was with the creation of art that he balanced his past and present and mingled the complex contradictions of his vision into an original whole. He rigged up a singular persona, the gentleman in the angelic-white outfit, a disguise for his dark side.
Twain’s preoccupation with duality and role switches is characteristic of exile. The Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov, like Twain, was fascinated with the double theme. Nabokov reached for the English language to turn his Russian memories into the dappled sun-shade fabric of art. His true home was in the life of art, the refuge of the exile. Twain, a willing exile, used the language of his Hannibal past in the service of his new adopted class and culture. Like Twain, Nabokov was also fond of wordplay. Vladimir Nabokov worked the letters of his name around to get “Vivian Darkbloom.” I’ve discovered that Mark Twain yields up “A Twin Mark,” as well as “Twin Karma”—whatever we are to make of that. Perhaps it means that Colonel Sellers has dressed himself up in Mark Twain’s white rigging and beamed himself up to our century to become Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Chicken king, both tycoon and inventor, hawking his secret formula of seventeen herbs and spices.
Finally, and this is not entirely tangential, there’s the matter of cats. There are seventeen casual mentions of cats in The American Claimant, including the cat-sneeze “Oh, scat!” Twain once called himself an authorcat. (God purrs, he wrote in Letters from the Earth.) Twain had a cat’s wise and wary eye and skill at pretense. A claimant has to answer to a cat; in Puff’nhead Wilson he wrote, “A home without a cat—and a well-fed, wellpetted, and properly revered cat—may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?” Twain’s self-deceptions and disguises are cat behavior. Nabokov, of course, pretended cats were irrelevant and would not admit that his omnipotent paw was in the birdhouse. When Twain, as lecturer and entertainer, told his famous scary hark-from-the-tomb story about the Golden Arm and sprang the punch line on the unsuspecting girl in the first row, he was just like a cat pouncing on a mouse. (“Who’s got my Golden Arm?”—(pause)—“YOU’VE got it!”)
To see and hear Twain tell that story out loud now would be worth an earldom. The desire to hear his voice is enough to send one to a séance. As the century draws to a close, I’ll bet there’s a secret yearning in Mark Twain circles for him to materialize. Where is Colonel Sellers when we need him?
XI
Atomic Fact and Fiction
When the Washington Post reported on plutonium contamination at a uranium-processing plant in my home region in western Kentucky, once again I seized on a story that had a personal connection. First, I wrote a nonfiction piece for the New Yorker about the fallout from the nuclear fears suddenly stirred up in Paducah, Kentucky. And then, feeling the limits of journalism, I wrote a novel inspired by this situation so close to home. Yet I deliberately set the novel, An Atomic Romance, not in Kentucky but in an indeterminate place in the heart of the country, in order to suggest that nuclear mischief could take place anywhere in America. It is a threat that affects us all. I didn’t want it to be dismissed as something out in the boondocks.
But the novel is a romantic comedy. It’s all about dancing, I think. Spinning, whirling, and dancing are central images: flocks of birds, centrifuges, minds and moods, the Artie Shaw big-band tune “Dancing in the Dark.” The title An Atomic Romance is a celebration of the life force in the face of indeterminacy and chaos. That’s dancing in the dark, one of the most exciting phrases I know.
—BAM
Fallout
Featured in the New Yorker, January 10, 2000
On the national radar screen, Paducah, Kentucky, is a provincial town with a funny name, but here in the western end of the state it was never an inconsequential place. I grew up on a farm near the small town of Mayfield, and Paducah was so far away—twenty-six miles—that we went there only on special occasions. It was the city, the Mecca for several counties of farmland. It had department stores, fine ladies’ shops, movie theatres. I was dazzled when, as a child in the nineteen-forties, I went shopping with my grandparents on a Saturday. We dressed up and wandered through the riverfront Market House, where exotic produce—even oysters—arrived by train. On the way into Paducah, we passed the railroad repair shop, with huge locomotives squatting in the yard—an impressive sight that made me think important industry occurred here, something that linked our area to the whole world.
Downtown Paducah was ritzy. In high school, I attended a dance at the swank pseudo-Tudor Hotel Irvin Cobb, named for a novelist and humorist who had appeared in a movie. He won the O. Henry prize for the best short story in America in 1922. But Paducah’s true star was Alben W. Barkley, who was born in a log house and worked his way up in society and politics through a long career in Congress, eventually becoming Vice-President under Harry S. Truman. After President Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan to end the Second World War, Barkley—Paducah’s favorite son—contrived to bring one of the nation’s first atomic plants to his home turf. Everybody called it the bomb plant, even though it didn’t really make bombs; it processed and enriched the fuel for them. Paducah, Barkley argued, had just the location—the site of the Kentucky Ordnance Works, which had manufactured explosives for conventional bombs during the last war. It was a logical shift to the new technology that America’s defense depended on. And, in a gesture of pork-barrel politics gone nuclear, Barkley bequeathed a lasting gift to his hometown—uranium.
The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant began enriching uranium fuel in 1952. This top-secret business was something like increasing the octane in gasoline—putting the oomph in the bomb. Helping to create A-bombs was a giddy, lucrative endeavor, and Paducah began to change. The first apartment buildings I ever saw shot up while the plant was being built, in the early fifties. Twenty thousand construction workers jammed the town, and local people rented out spare rooms and barn stalls—any available nook—for the newcomers to sleep in. At a time when “The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom” was a popular book, and Nikita Khrushchev’s name was on every tongue, and Sputnik was terrifyingly in orbit above us, Paducah was called upon to be alert—and secretive—in exchange for good jobs and the chance to beat the Russians. It wasn’t afraid. Doomsday wasn’t going to happen in Paducah, not as long as the plant helped supply the nation with its friendly atomic arsenal. Today, the plant enriches uranium for nuclear-power reactors instead of atomic bombs, but workers still affectionately call it the bomb plant. License-plate holders from the nineteen-seventies show Paducah’s namesake, Chief Paduke, on the left and an atomic cloud on the right, framing the words “Paducah, the Atomic City.”
Last summer, Paducah’s deal with atomic energy seemed to be exposed as a bargain with the Devil. The news was packaged in one explosive bundle in the Washington Post, on August 8th: radioactive-waste dumps, safety violations, bureaucratic lies, cancer, env
ironmental pollution. Whistle-blowers, in a sealed lawsuit filed in June (it has since been opened), charged that former operators had defrauded the government by covering up knowledge of widespread radiation contamination, without regard for the safety of the workers. The Post reported stories of nuclear waste being treated lackadaisically—as if it were no more dangerous than kitchen compost. Workers routinely breathed heavy black uranium dust and some said that supervisors sprinkled it on the cafeteria food—to prove that the dust was harmless. Workers handled so much of a uranium compound called greensalt that their skin turned green, like the Jolly Green Giant’s. Their bedsheets at home were stained green.
Even worse, the Post reported that many workers had also unwittingly handled plutonium—for decades. Plutonium, which is deadly and cancercausing, was never supposed to be at the Paducah plant. It had arrived during the Cold War along with other highly radioactive fission by-products, as an impurity in shipments of used uranium. And it remained in the plant, like an unwelcome guest, dirtying up the place. The plutonium was in the uranium dust that the workers breathed.
The workers never made much fuss about safety conditions, although the plant was becoming its own toxic-waste dump—tons of radioactive scrap metal and cylinders of depleted uranium were piling up with nowhere to go. Toxic trash was tossed over the fence into an adjoining wildlife area, and local wells had become contaminated. Then plutonium was detected in a ditch outside the fence. And a radioactive, technetium-tainted underground plume of water was inching toward the Ohio River. Paducah, exemplary heartland town, where people went to church and gave the time of day to strangers, thought it had been spared such modern ills. The local press—the Paducah Sun—had downplayed the dangers. Until the Washington Post showed up, it was as though all the toxic trash were just part of the furniture—the price Paducah paid to have a thriving economy, the price paid to help win the Cold War.
Plutonium is heavy and it doesn’t move fast, but, when I heard that it was present at our local nuclear-fuel refinery, I felt as if a plutonium-polluted plume were headed toward me. This wasn’t Chernobyl—a nuclear power plant run amok. It was personal. My sister had worked at the bomb plant for several years during the late seventies. I emailed her in Florida, where she now lives. “I guess I was exposed,” she answered. “But don’t worry. If you got it you got it, and there is nothing that can be done—but maybe it can for the next generation.” She reminded me how good the plant had been to its employees. The salaries were the highest around, and the benefits were off the scale. Besides, she told me, everything was so secret there. Nobody talked. You felt you were doing something important, something good for the country.
It was late in the dust-bowl summer, and dust from the desiccated fields sifted onto my car when I drove to Paducah from my home in central Kentucky. I was trying to think of a reasonable synonym for “freaked out,” which was just about how I felt. The guy who pumped my gas said there was too much else to worry about in this world for him to be concerned about loose isotopes or technetium seepage. Wars, earthquakes, and such.
From Paducah, I continued west to Future City, where construction workers were housed when the plant was being built. Now it was just a crossroads, with a grocery and a barbecue eatery. The bomb plant was nearby, and just up a parallel road was Heath High School. The school had been the site, in 1997, of one of the first of the string of school shootings. A fourteen-year-old boy gunned down three of his classmates in a prayer meeting in the lobby. I remembered the responses and the television crews descending on the place like paratroopers, and I imagined that Paducah must feel jinxed now. The atomic-waste scare was bringing the news crews rushing back. The same barbecue joint fed both frenzies. I came to a halt at the crossroads. I was reluctant to look at either of these scenes—the plant or the school—and I didn’t know if it was from fear or from sadness. I drove back to Paducah.
Dottie Barkley has been a family friend for twenty years. When she was seven years old, she was a guest on “I’ve Got a Secret,” one of the old TV quiz-game shows. Her secret was that her grandfather was Vice-President Alben W. Barkley, Paducah’s local hero. On another occasion, she was taken to the Plaza Hotel in New York where she pitched a fit because the Palm Court didn’t serve catfish. She cried, “If I can’t have catfish, then I don’t want anything!”
We were sitting in Dottie’s backyard among morning glories and gourd vines. Seven cats and Winnie, a chow-shar-pei mix, crowded around us. “This is outrageous,” Dottie said, fuming about the local coverage. “The other Sunday, the Louisville Courier-Journal had a big front-page story about plutonium in Paducah, but there wasn’t a peep about it in the Paducah Sun until the next day. Most of Paducah didn’t even know about this!”
Did she think people felt betrayed? I asked.
“Hell, most people don’t really care,” she said. “Everybody at the plant knew they were working with dangerous stuff. Maybe they didn’t all know it was plutonium, but they knew. Now people don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to lose their jobs.”
To visualize Dottie, imagine Marilyn Monroe—outfitted by the Limited—with a pickup truck. She is glamorously bohemian, with a blond heap of curly hair. And, as Alben Barkley’s granddaughter, she holds a unique social position in Paducah, even though she avoids the cocktail-party carrousel of the local big dudes, where she might rightfully belong—not her style. She works at the Party Mart (“Paducah’s Most Interesting Store”).
She explained how the plant got here. “Granddaddy just muscled it through. He was best friends with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. And it was such an exciting thing when the plant came! The plant gave people good jobs. It kept a lot of people from starving. And now look what’s happened. There’s so much good—and so much horror.” She shuddered. “Granddaddy couldn’t have imagined this. He couldn’t have known how it would turn out. Could he?”
A cat named Dinah Shore jumped into my lap. “Dear Hearts and Gentle People”—the song by the real Dinah—ran through my mind. I thought of the fifties, when a war-weary nation quelled its fears of the bomb by listening to songs like this, or to Doris Day’s “Que Será, Será.”
Dottie said, “The people out at the plant were so innocent back when it started. They used to handle uranium with their bare hands!” She bent over briefly to hug her dog. “You know, you should talk to my ex-husband Joe. He’s worked at the bomb plant for twenty-six years, and he can tell you what it’s like. They’re like a big family out there, and he’s been exposed to just about everything.”
As I was leaving, I noticed a photograph in the dining room of Dottie with her parents and her grandfather, taken when Barkley Airport was dedicated, in 1948. Dottie, a child in a shiny taffeta dress with a cross-sash, has a missing front tooth.
“Look at me in my queen outfit,” Dottie said, laughing at herself in the picture. “Get Joe to take you out to the bomb plant. It’s so eerie.”
A different Joe, Joe Harding, had known about the dangers years ago. He died in 1980, of stomach cancer. He began working at the plant in 1952, and his jobs included flushing impurities out of the processing pipes. Apparently, a residue of all kinds of radioactive things—plutonium, neptunium, and other contaminants—remained in the system once the processing was completed. Even today, there is a residue clinging to the pipes, like what’s left in the skillet after you cook onions. Harding was chronically ill, but when he declared that he had radiation poisoning no one believed him. He had weird toenail-like growths coming out of his elbows and kneecaps, but people only laughed. The management said his illnesses were caused by eating too much country ham. His disability benefits and insurance claims were denied. A few years after his death, lawyers representing his widow ordered that his body be exhumed, and his bones revealed a level of uranium hundreds of times above normal.
Normal? Radiation is good for you; it boosts the immune system, according to a local engineer in an August 23, 1999, Sun column. “Radiation … may benefit t
he health of those exposed … a low dose of radiation actually increases immunity,” he wrote. The plant’s neighbors must glow with good health, then, because radioactive technetium-99 has turned up in the gardens—in banana peppers and turnip greens. Traces of plutonium were found in deer in the wildlife sanctuary—not enough to hurt you, officials said. To be in any kind of danger, “You would have to eat the whole deer,” the Kentucky state health commissioner insisted on TV last summer—his remark delivered with the fervor of a political stump speech. Why, I wondered, do people always seem to be telling us that we can eat radioactive waste?
Downtown is “Historic Paducah”—antique stores, funky shops, and Saturday-night street parties. Like many other towns, Paducah is energetically reclaiming itself from the mall, and you can almost imagine the main street in its heyday. Tourists from the Mississippi Queen and the Delta Queen stream in through gates in the flood wall, which is being painted with murals depicting the history of the city. The showpiece of downtown is a quilt museum. Paducah is morphing from the Atomic City to the Quilt City. You might think that quaint old quilts are a clever atomic-age coverup, but the museum is on the cutting edge. Its quilts are postmodern.
I was headed for the Paducah Public Library. I had been mulling over the phrases “acceptable risk” and “eat the whole deer.” (“I can’t believe I ate the whole deer!”) And for that matter, just what is a “trace”? What is an acceptable number of picocuries of plutonium? How many would you want to have settle in your brain, your lungs, your islets of Langerhans?
Plant managers claim that the amount of plutonium that came to Paducah was only twelve ounces—a piddling amount. Neptunium may be a worse problem. It is less radioactive than plutonium, but forty pounds of it were brought to the plant in the ill-fated uranium shipments. Plutonium and neptunium are transuranics, metals that are heavier than uranium. They are artificially created radioactive elements. They don’t occur in nature; they pop up when atoms are split. I knew that plutonium is a hundred thousand times as radioactive as uranium, with a half-life of twenty-four thousand years—longer than civilization has existed. A beeline to the encyclopedia revealed to me what no one was admitting: twelve ounces is a lot. Theoretically, that much plutonium contains as much energy as nearly six thousand tons of TNT. More to the point, it’s incredibly toxic, even in microscopic amounts. The “safe” dose for a human being is 0.13 micrograms. Thus twelve ounces is enough to provide a maximum legal limit of ingested plutonium for about two and a half billion people, or nearly half the world.
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