by John Barth
In 1966 he made an impassioned but cogent appeal to the Tidewater Foundation to underwrite the Black Power movement on the Eastern Shore, for Our Own Ultimate Good. Jane and Harrison were indignant, the other conservative trustees scornful, the “liberals” opposed on principle to committing the foundation politically. All were concerned for the delicate negotiations, then in progress, for annexing Tidewater Tech to the state university system. The vote, but for Drew’s own, was unanimously negative, the executive director abstaining. Drew thereupon abandoned his efforts to Work Within the System and urged his most militant colleagues to burn Whitey down. The following summer, as you will recall, a modest attempt was mounted to do just that, and Yours Truly (who this time did not abstain) came near to being blown up for the second time in his life. One day I shall tell you the story.
Better, I’ll tell you it now, and so wind up this calliope music. I belong to that nearly extinct species, famously discredited by history, contemned alike by the Harrison Macks from the right and by the Drew Macks from the left: I mean the Stock Liberal, whom I persist in believing to be the best stock in the store. He is the breed most easily baited for half-measures and most easily caught in self-contradiction, for he affirms the complexity of most social-economic problems and the ambivalence of his own approaches to their solution. If he is in addition (as I have been since 1937) inclined to the Tragic View of history and human institutions, he is even easier to scoff at, for he has no final faith that all the problems he addresses admit of political solutions—in some cases, of any solution whatever—any more than the problems of evil and death; yet he sets about them as if they did. He sees the attendant virtues of every vice, and vice versa. He is impressed by the fallibility of people and programs: it surprises him when anything works, merely disappoints him when it fails. He is in short a perfect skeptic in his opinions, an incorrigible optimist in his actions, for he believes that many injustices which can’t be remedied may yet be mitigated, and that many things famously fragile—Reason, Tolerance, Law, Democracy, Humanism—are nonetheless precious and infinitely preferable to their contraries. He is ever for Reform as against revolution or reaction: in his eyes, the Harrison Macks and A. B. Cooks live in the past, the Drew Macks and H. C. Burlingames perhaps in the future, his kind alone in the present. Yet, as a connoisseur of paradoxes, he understands to the bone that one of St. Augustine’s concerning time: that while the Present does not exist (it being the merely conceptual razor’s edge between the Past and the Future), at the same time it’s all there is: the Everlasting Now between a Past existing only in memory and a Future existing only in anticipation.
Harrison and Drew delight in pointing out his inconsistencies: he values private property, even affluence; savors elitist culture; prizes maximum personal liberty and freedom from exterior restraints; yet he argues for public ownership of anything big enough to threaten the public weal, an ever more equitable distribution of wealth and privilege, and government regulation, for the public interest, of nearly everything except free speech, assembly, and the rest. He readily acknowledges this inconsistency, yields to none in his distaste for bureaucratic inefficiency, officiousness, and self-serving mediocrity—but will not be dissuaded from his conviction that these apparent inconsistencies in part reflect the complexity and ambiguity of the real world, and affirm the indispensability of good judgment, good will, and good humor. Drew and Harrison agree, if on nothing else, that either the Father kills the Son or the Son emasculates the Father. The Bourgeois-Liberal Tragic-Viewing Humanist tisks his tongue at that and plaintively inquires (knowing but not accepting the reply): “Why can they not do neither, but simply shake hands, like Praeteritas and Futuras on the Mack Enterprises letterhead, and reason together?”
What a creature, your Stock Liberal: little wonder his stock declines! Especially if he makes bold to act out his Reasonability between the fell incensed points of mighty opposites: in this corner (the black Second Ward of Cambridge), a Pontiac hearse bearing a casket packed to the Plimsoll with boxes of dynamite, plastic TNT, blasting caps, and black incendiaries bent on blowing up the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, to cut Whitey off from his pleasures at Ocean City and to dramatize the Fascist Insularity of the Eastern Shore; in this corner (somewhere suspiciously near Tidewater Farms), a platoon of paramilitary red-neck gun-nuts armed with a pickup truckload of automatic weapons filched from the National Guard Armory and bent on wiping out that Pontiac hearse in particular if not the Second Ward in general. In the background, a detachment of the Maryland National Guard itself, with less firepower by half. And in the center (the second lamppost south of the trusses on the Choptank River Bridge, as shall be shown), your Bourgeois-Liberal TVH aforedescribed: fishing tackle in one hand, picnic basket in the other (in which are two corned beef sandwiches, two Molson’s Ales, a bullhorn, a portable Freon airhorn, and a voice-operated tape recorder); the sweat of fear in his palms and of July in his armpits; the smile of Sweet Reasonableness nervously lighting his countenance.
I have never been an especially brave or an especially emotional man, sir. The Todd Andrews of your story had by his 54th year felt powerful emotions on just five occasions: mirth in 1917, when he lost his virginity in front of a mirror; fear in 1918, in an artillery barrage in the Argonne Forest; frustration in 1930, at his father’s suicide, which prompted his Inquiry; surprise in 1932, when Jane Mack came naked to him in his bed in her summer cottage (the same I now own, and sleep and dream in); despair in 1937, when impotence, endocarditis, and other raisons de ne pas être met in plenary session on a certain June night in his Dorset Hotel room. To these was added, this humid airless early-Leo afternoon, courage, which I had admired as a quality but not thitherto known as an emotion. On the contrary, I had imagined it (I mean physical courage, not mere moral courage, a different fish entirely) to be a sort of clench-jawed resolution in the face of such emotions as fear, and surely that it often is. But it can be an emotion itself, a flavor distinct from that of the fear it overvails and the adrenaline-powered exaltation that garnishes it. If fear feels like a draining of the heart, I report that the emotion of courage feels like a cardiac countersurge, and that not for nothing are heartened and disheartened synonyms for encouraged and discouraged.
Join to these vascular tide-rips and crosscurrents the thunderous pulse of anticipatory excitement—a Bay of Fundy colliding with a Gulf Stream!—such as might be felt by a 67-year-old man who, having learned from sources in the Second Ward that the Pontiac hearse, Drew Mack at the wheel, is preparing to head for East Cambridge and the Choptank Bridge en route to the Big One over the Chesapeake, and from other sources close to “George III” that the red-necks plan to station themselves on the Talbot County shore of that same bridge and bazooka that same Pontiac to Kingdom Come—who having learned this, I say, in the forenoon, has made several fast phone calls from his office, left instructions for other such calls, snatched up said spinning reel and prepacked picnic basket (the news was not unexpected), and been dropped off by his secretary at the second lamppost on pretext of casting after a few hardheads on the running tide…
Where was I? At the conjunction of all these currents, with the oldest case of subacute bacterial endocarditis in the county, a myocardium supposed to have been on the brink of infarction since 1919: no “ticker” now, but an Anvil Chorus in double-time…
Your Stock Bourgeois-Liberal Tragic-Viewing Humanist, if he happens to practice law for a living, will be a soft touch in the needy-but-deserving-client way: a one-man chapter of the ACLU, a little Legal Aid Society. I hope I’ve never exploited the gratitude of poor whites and blacks whose legal fees I’ve written off to BLTVHism; on the other hand, to scorn what they gratefully offer in lieu of cash were priggish, no? And when good people hope they can one day return a considerable service, they mean it from hearts much steadier than mine. Now, Dorothy Miner was one such, in the Second Ward, Drew’s mother-in-law, who, having toiled her life through to build her children’s way out of the ghetto, disapp
roved of demolitions, whether of bridges or of people. She it was who had apprised me of the bomb plot in the first place, and who now put through the crucial call to Joe Reed, another ex-client, tender of the Choptank River Bridge. From his little house up in the trusswork of the center span, Joe Reed had seen the Chevy pickup go under half an hour before, called his buddy (a third former client) at the liquor store just off the Talbot end of the bridge, and confirmed the intended ambush—which confirmation he relayed to the second lamppost by a single ding of the traffic warning bell at the draw-span gates, hard by. He then telephoned his colleague and counterpart (for whom he had once done a favor) on the Cambridge Creek bridge, who returned the favor by returning the call when the hearse crossed his bridge en route to ours en route to its. Got that? Two dings.
Fishing, you will remember, is permitted only on the west side of our bridge, facing downriver, there being no sidewalk on the east. The incoming tide, not quite slack, still carried fishing lines under the roadway. Only a few black families were out in the heat. It is my custom, like your Todd Andrews’s and my late father’s, not to change out of my office clothes for chores and recreation: I am the only skipjack skipper on the Bay who sails in three-piece suits. But given my purpose, I felt disagreeably conspicuous cutting up peeler crabs for bait in my circuit-court seersuckers—all the while watching the Cambridge shore near Mensch’s Castle, where good Polly Lake (my coeval, my irreplaceable, a widow now) had parked after dropping me off. Thence came, just as I baited my hook with the black and orange genitals of the peeler, best bait on the beast, three flashes in series of her headlights—1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3—and three blasts of her portable Freon airhorn, counterpart to the one in my basket, both from my boat. I returned the signal; my fellow fisherfolk looked around to find the approaching boat, three such blasts being the call to open the draw. Joe Reed replied in kind, set his dingers dinging and flashers flashing, lowered the stop gate just inshore from each end of the trusses, and set the big center span turning on its great geared pivot. As it swung, and his office with it, he also telephoned the highway-patrol barracks up in Easton, advised them that he was having some difficulty closing the draw, and requested troopers to be dispatched to both ends of the bridge to get the waiting traffic turned around in case the problem persisted.
As you know, the Choptank Bridge is a two-laner nearly two miles long with the draw-span roughly in the middle. A light flow of traffic in both directions guaranteed that Drew could not much exceed the 50-mph limit; we had about a minute, then, from Polly Lake’s signal till the hearse should reach the draw. Three-quarters of it remained when I’d set the bullhorn beside my basket and, not to alert the quarry prematurely, turned away and cast my baited line. At 30 seconds the gates were down; the line of waiting northbound cars was accumulating down toward my lamppost; the last of the southbound traffic to clear the span had passed on toward Cambridge. I turned in that direction; the hearse was just drawing up to the end of the line, two lampposts away. I saw one pink face behind the windshield. Something struck my hook hard, bowing the glass rod and taking line off the spinning reel with a whine.
My hope had been that before he grew suspicious Drew would be pinned by the cars before and behind him and obliged to listen as I warned him of the waiting trap. Perhaps the reflex motion of my setting the hook drew his attention; by the time I’d set the drag on my reel and had begun to pass the rod around the lamppost to secure it, he’d stopped a few yards behind his predecessor and popped out to size up the one white fisherman in sight, summer-suited to boot. Then up on the hearse’s running board to con the shipless channel as a lean and goateed black colleague emerged from the passenger door. Both then ducked furiously back inside.
I went for the bullhorn; Drew whipped the hearse out into the empty left lane as if to run me down or crash the gate—beyond which, however, now yawned the full-open span. He slammed the machine into reverse, either to attempt a turn-around or to back up the mile to the Cambridge shore; whereupon good Polly Lake, who had started across the bridge at once after giving her signal and was drawn up now some ten cars back in line with room to maneuver, swung out smartly, turn-signal flashing, as if she meant somehow to pass the whole line of waiting cars. As the hearse backed madly toward her she stopped, leaned on her horn, turned off her motor (pumping the gas pedal deliberately to flood the carburetor), and coolly played the role of Rattled Nice Lady.
For a moment I feared collision. Then Drew hit the brakes; the hearse rocked to a stop; he and two cohorts jumped out; curtains parted along the side of the hearse until Drew waved them shut. I saw hands in pockets and put down the bullhorn, fearing pistols; ran instead (the final trial of heart) to where they craned and conned en route to Polly.
“God damn it, Todd!” Drew was livid with frustration, as you writers say; almost in tears, I thought. One of the blacks, the lean goateed chap, was ordering Polly to clear her car out fast or he’d do it for her. She flutteringly apologized, made as if to offer him the keys, dropped them on the floorboard, went scrabbling after them. The other black, a squat muscled fellow in a lavender tank-top and white wool cap, surveyed us from a little distance. The idling drivers watched with interest.
“You know this cat?” Goatee asked Drew, who assured him I wasn’t a policeman and half threatened, half pleaded with me to get the bridge closed and/or Mrs. Lake out of the way before someone got hurt.
“He know what we up to?” Goatee demanded.
“They together,” Tank-Top concluded of us to Goatee. Rapidly I told the three of them that I was aware of their intentions, sympathized with their anger, and had intercepted them, not to turn them in to the police, but to spare them the ambush waiting at the far end of the bridge. I advised them to show no weapons before so many witnesses; I urged them to turn the hearse around and head back to Cambridge before the state police arrived to clear the stuck bridge.
“Here come the mothers now,” observed Goatee. I too, with sinking and still-pounding heart, had seen the red flasher of a highway patrol car that swung now into the left lane at the end of the bridge, to which the backed-up traffic nearly extended, and raced toward us, penetrator whooping. Polly Lake (my clear master in the grace-under-pressure way) had cranked and cranked her engine, wondering aloud why it wouldn’t start, it was always so dependable. Seeing the patrol car, she put by her helplessness and cranked with the pedal full down to choke the flooded engine to life.
“Tell Sy to start the timer,” Drew suddenly decided. “We’ll blow this one instead.” Tank-Top, to whom the order was directed, hesitated a moment, looking to Goatee for confirmation. They’d be blowing themselves up for nothing, I argued quickly: Ocean City traffic would merely be rerouted, and their self-demolition reported as a murderous accident by inept amateur terrorists. How this honky know so much? Goatee demanded angrily of Drew. Polly Lake backed up to stop the patrol car a few hundred feet away; went into her Fuddled Lady act with the irritated trooper, whom with relief I recognized. Again Drew urged immediate demolition. I pointed out that all the fishermen and many of the waiting motorists were black; exhorted them to retreat, regroup, replan: the red-necks wouldn’t spring their trap in full view of the state police on the other side of the draw, but would certainly make their move in the hour’s drive between the Choptank and the Chesapeake Bridge—which (I lied) was by now surely guarded by troopers alerted to the event.
“Get in the car, Todd,” Drew ordered me. “If we get it, you get it too.”
I considered. Trooper James Harris had sent Polly backing to her slot and now walked our way, shaking his head. Ignoring Drew’s threat, I saluted him by name, told him that these people had an important funeral to get to: could he get them around and off the bridge fast?
“Jesus H. Christ,” the young officer replied, and in three glances sized up ourselves, the hearse, and the still-empty space in the line it had pulled out of. “Come on, then, swing your ass around here. You with them, Mister Andrews?”
I sho
ok my head. “Just fishing, Jimmy. Much obliged.” And I turned my back on all of them, not knowing whether they or my banging heart would let me regain the second lamppost.
They did, and here are five postscripts to the anecdote:
1. Both bridges still stand, across which so much traffic moves from Baltimore and Washington to the ocean that the state is constructing new ones beside the old to accommodate the flow: 90% white, though the cities from which they stream are more than 50% black. Had our quarter-hour drama occurred on a summer Sunday night, the Route 50 traffic would have been backed up for a dozen miles. I despise this saturation of our Eastern Shore enough to wish sometimes that all the bridges were blown; but I take at last the Tragic View of progress, as well as of insularity. These 1960’s have been a disaster; the 70’s will be another—but the 50’s don’t bear recollecting either, not to mention the 40’s, 30’s, 20’s, 10’s. History is a catenation of disasters, redeemable only (and imperfectly) by the Tragic View.
2. The young men in the hearse went home, revised their plans, and fetched in H. “Rap” Brown to liven up the movement’s oratory and focus the media on their grievances. Arson ensued. But so far from “burning Whitey down”—for any serious attempt at that they’d have been massacred—the incendiaries were Effectively Contained in the Second Ward. When alarmed black families then appealed to have the white volunteer fire department sent in to deal with the blazes, they were told, in effect: You brought that bastard to town; put out your own fires. And so the sufferers from the riots—and from the crudest second-person plural in the grammar books—were all black. But this is not news to you. Only the Tragic View will do, and it not very satisfactorily. Must one take the tragic view of the Tragic View?
