American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  If Haddy’s eyes had been open, he would have seen that Lurlene, moving and kneading her body on top of his own in a steady and cyclical pattern, was not looking at him. She was looking at the closet. If Haddy’s eyes had been open, he would have seen that Lurlene, whispering, “This what you wanted, baby?” between moans, was not talking to him. She was talking to his brother Lance.

  The heavy drapes fell behind Lance as he stepped into the room, his eyebrows arched higher than usual, the grin on his face creating multiple, concentric parentheses around his mouth. He clapped a round of rapturous applause, cupping his hands so that the sound seemed to shake the gelatinously muggy air. “Bravo! Bravissimo! What a performance!” Lance said to his older brother. “Who’d have guessed you could fuck like such a champ!”

  Harold scrambled to hide himself. His trembling beneath the white sheets that soon covered him from head to toe made the sheets look like the surface of a milk saucer carried roughshod on a tray. He had done something bad, so very bad, but he did not know what. His mind fluttered through all of the rules his mother had taught him over the years. Stand up straight. Look people in the eye. The greatest tragedy of the world is that people can get used to anything. Overpraise is the worst kind of insult. Address your elders as “sir” and “ma’am.” Use silverware from the outside in. Sometimes the world can get so biting you have to start biting back. Napkin first.

  Certain he was a disappointment but confused about which of his mother’s rules he had broken, Harold raised the sheets and saw, through a crack that kept the rest of his face hidden, something that left him even more confused: his brother caressing Lurlene’s cheek.

  “Baby, you did good,” Lance said.

  Lurlene slapped his hand away. “You didn’t tell me all you wanted was to embarrass the poor boy.” Unconcerned by her own nudity, she got up from the bed and walked across the room and then sat down at the desk, lit a cigarette, and filled the air with smoke. She pleated her legs and laced her arms, a piece of origami going from lewd to chaste.

  “Now why would I want to embarrass my sweet big brother?” Lance ripped the sheets off Harold. He lay down next to the naked, trembling knot of his brother’s body. “I love the idiot. You know, Haddy,” Lance said, staring at the ceiling, his hands placed on his stomach, “you didn’t do anything wrong. Sex is perfectly natural.” He paused. “I just worry what Mother’s going to think.”

  Haddy began to wail and could not stop.

  Over the years ahead, the next few moments would, in Harold’s mind, appear as two pairs of numbers, 5–6 and 4–2, the chance appearance of which in a game of solitaire would render him momentarily catatonic. The former pair was how he pictured himself, knees touching his chest and his head bent forward, like the number five, in tandem with Lurlene over at the desk, the bottom half of her body looped into itself, a number six made of limbs. The latter pair was the scene after his sister suddenly appeared in the doorway to the room. On taking in the tableau, ceiling fan chopping the smoke of a cigarette into confetti, dipped candles sputtering flecks of beeswax, feathers poking through the seams of an unmade mattress, Ramsey glared at Lance, who had stood up from the bed and was running his hands through his hair. “The fuck have you done?” Without waiting for an answer, she grabbed Lance by his throat and shoved him up against the wall, her arm’s extension, bent at the elbow, making her look like the number four, her brother’s bent knees and drooping, flushed head turning him into a two.

  Ramsey let go of Lance. The little shit wasn’t worth the effort. She needed to get Haddy out of here quick. From the floor she picked up a sheet and wrapped it around her crying brother. Ramsey pried loose his hand latched onto his ear, coaxed him from the bed, and led him across the room’s unpainted floorboards.

  “Not a single goddamn word out of you,” she said to Lance, coughing while on his knees, and then to Lurlene, frantically gathering her clothes, she added, “I’ll decide how to deal with you later.”

  Outside, where the cicadas were still going strong, Ramsey fetched to a standstill. She listened to make sure there were no stirs coming from the house. Satisfied she could get him in unnoticed, Ramsey gathered the sheet tighter around Harold, whose hand was back to pulling on his ear. She grabbed his wrist and told him to look at her.

  “Never think about tonight again. Okay, Haddy? It would be too much for you.”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. Instead he mumbled, “Please don’t tell Mother what I did. Please don’t tell Mother what I did. Please don’t tell Mother what I did,” as persistent as radio static. To get him to stop Ramsey promised not to tell.

  “But only if you do what I asked.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “What was it I asked you to do?”

  “Don’t think about tonight ever again.”

  She said, “Why?”

  “’Cause it’d be too much for me.”

  “Good boy.”

  That night in June of 1928, as she snuck her brother into the house, got him to his room, put him in his bed, and read from a storybook till he fell asleep, Ramsey genuinely intended to keep her promise not to tell, and for a time she did. She did not tell their parents, and she forbade Lance to so much as look at Harold. Most important, rather than have Lurlene fired for misconduct, a risky maneuver if the goal were to keep matters quiet, Ramsey had her placed on back-of-the-house duties, ones that would keep her out of Harold’s sight most of the day. She also had her switched to quarters that came with a roommate, in order to ward against potential visits from inappropriate guests.

  The situation, though appearing to have been resolved, was anything but. Three months later Lurlene started to show.

  * * *

  A key player in her family’s swift rise to affluence, Annabelle Forster was once described as having the bearing of a Plantagenet and the ruthlessness of a Tudor, but people who knew her well, from either before or after her marriage, understood those two points could be conveyed in one: she was a Teague. That fact was part of the reason why, when Ramsey knocked on the door to her study, entered after being permitted, and told her the story concerning Lurlene the maid, Annabelle’s internal response was, This again?

  She had dealt with sordid affairs before that day. One in particular came to mind as she considered how best to handle the maid.

  In 1893, her father, convinced by his friends at the Choctaw Club that a win was all but guaranteed, campaigned for a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. He ran against a candidate backed by the Populist movement, whose slogan, “I ain’t in league with Teague,” solidified the resentment many New Orleans citizens felt toward the Old Regulars, an influential group of conservatives. Following the landslide defeat, which hurt his willpower as much as his pride, Royal began to frequent a neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter that, despite its future nickname, exhibited only one kind of story.

  Sweetwater Grange was located at no. 137 Basin Street. On a foggy morning in early autumn, Annabelle, nineteen going on twenty, visited the “pleasure palace” and, unsatisfied with the answer to her initial request, said to the proprietor, “Tell me which room he’s in or I’ll have this place turned into a mule lot.”

  She was quickly led to a parlor in the back. There, among potted palms and scarlet curtains and decanters of whiskey, Annabelle found her father lying on a plush magenta divan, like the leftover stick in a bolt of velvet unspooled. His shirt was halfway unbuttoned, and his eyes were lacquered from booze. Next to him lay some kind of pipe fitted out for purposes other than the smoking of tobacco. Its floral stink hung thick about the room.

  “Get up, Father. We’re going.”

  In a delayed response, he lolled his head in Annabelle’s direction, squinting against the dusky glow of a pillar candle. “Is that my little girl?” The parlor’s chandelier threw shards of light onto his smiling face. “I do believe it is.” Royal got up from the divan and lumbered across the room, somehow managing not to trip on the dozen Oriental
rugs overlapping each other on the pillow-strewn floor. He made it to the doorway where Annabelle stood, and with his knuckles curled inward, as though he were holding an umbrella, he rubbed her cheek. Annabelle’s mother used to rub her cheek the same way. Her touch was so gentle it was as if she were petting a baby bird. Annabelle could still see her mother’s shaking, emaciated hand reaching toward her from the bed where she’d lain for days, coughing and sweating, her skin flecked in tiny red spots.

  “My, but you’ve grown,” Annabelle’s father said. “Look at you,” the man who raised her said. “Grown up so pretty,” the man she idolized said. “My beautiful, beautiful girl.”

  His fingers, one of which no longer bore a ring, trailed down the length of Annabelle’s cheek, along her neck, across her collar, until they reached the piping of her dress. The pressure of his hand cupping her breast was replaced almost immediately by the sting in her own hand as it slapped his face.

  The following day, sitting across from him at the breakfast table, Annabelle spoke to her father in the calculating, authoritative manner of a chairperson addressing the board. “The events of the previous evening, as well as the degenerative behavior of the past year, will be forgotten, you have my assurance, if three provisions are met. One, you will no longer visit any house of assignation. Two, you will not imbibe of the amber fluid nor smoke anything other than tobacco. And three, you will give your blessing, in public and in private, to my marriage to Houghton Forster.”

  “Who?”

  “‘Son of the nostrum peddler,’” she said. “He proposed two days ago.”

  Several decades later, Annabelle used that same tone, calculating and authoritative, during her talk with Lurlene Culp, and she minced not a word. Due to indiscretions that would go unnamed and unreported if her instructions were followed, Annabelle told Lurlene, it had become apparent that the latter’s services were no longer required of the household. She was to leave town on the afternoon train. If she did so without argument, Lurlene would be given $2,000, delivered in cash by Branchwater, who would take her to the depot. Annabelle concluded by saying, “When people ask, you are to tell them the child’s father was a migrant worker, someone just passing through. You don’t even remember his name. Am I understood?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Am I understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  That afternoon Lurlene boarded a train for Kansas against her will. None of the Forsters saw her again. They carried on as though she had not existed. Even after receiving word that the baby had been lost during childbirth, neither Annabelle nor Ramsey ever spoke to anyone of the reason for Lurlene’s departure, a secret that most historians, present one included, believe they kept their entire lives.

  2.4

  Secret Ingredients, Public Biographies—Public Biographies, Secret Ingredients

  In his seminal work on corporate strategy, United States of Advertisement: How Cars, Computers, and Cola Shaped a Nation, Jeremy Turnbull posits that PanCola’s “secret ingredient” ad campaign was the first modern use of marketing in America. “Not only did Houghton Forster provide a compelling—one might even say ‘viral’—narrative by which to interest customers in his product,” Turnbull writes, “but he also created, during that process, the concept of CEO-as-a-household-name, predating Lee Iacocca by over half a century.” Public engagement with Forster’s life story began on November 12, 1927, when Forbes published an interview with the inventor of Panola Cola. In the interview, he spoke of what he would leave behind, noting that his product belonged to the customers but that its creation, a singular moment alchemized into a singular taste, would forever and always belong to his family.

  “I’m just a soda jerk at heart,” Forster told Forbes. “I got to do by me and mine.”

  His claim later in the interview to have discovered the secret ingredient during childhood did little to narrow the range of clues by which to identify it. As a child the world for Houghton Forster was one of myriad flavors. He would cringe at the pungency of tobacco cud hocked by farmers onto the board sidewalk. He would grin at the piquancy of his own sweat dribbled from the dirty brim of his woven flop hat. Over corn bread he liked to pour redeye. Into gumbo he liked to crumble saltines. With a biscuit he liked to sop molasses. He cooled off with Neapolitan ice cream during the summer. He warmed up with Old English wassail during the winter. Beneath a walnut tree he savored his first kiss from Annabelle, those crinkles in her lips, that down on her ears, tinged with the scent of honeysuckle, mellow and cool and buoyant, latticing the damp soil beneath them. He sneezed from dandelion at age ten. He chewed on birch bark at age four. He inhaled of rosemary at age nine. He teethed with sarsaparilla at age one. Near his mother’s dressing screen he could almost taste the eau de toilette, “A Smell Fresh from the Rhine,” that she bought by the quart from a perfumer based in Knoxville, and near his father’s medicine chest he would often smell the chicle lozenges, “Taste the Orient in Every Chew,” that he ordered from a circular sent by the T. Eaton Co. Limited. He preferred banana cake to monkey bread for breakfast. He preferred hush puppies to fried catfish for dinner. With confusion he sampled a piece of saltwater taffy. On a dare he took a whiff of a lady’s discarded underthings. After misspeaking he had to gnaw on a hunk of soap.

  “What makes Panola Cola the sweetest thing around?” asked one of the first print ads for the secret-ingredient campaign. Under the sketch of a man glugging at a bottle of soda appeared the answer, “Our lips are sealed. Yours aren’t.”

  Less than a year after the debut of such advertisements the initial wave of cola hunters arrived in Mississippi. Who they were varied as much as where they looked. At the schoolhouse where Houghton had been taught, a retired beekeeper made a rubbing of algebraic formulas etched into a desktop, clapped yellow dust from chalk erasers, and sifted through a pile of pencil shavings with a yardstick. A mother of five staked out the police station. A father of two cordoned off the fire department. Over an extended period of months, a team of experts, including a horticulturist, biologist, geologist, landscaper, chemist, and even an archaeologist, studied the lot where, decades earlier, Fiona Forster had tended a garden, its tilled rows of squash, collards, tomatoes, okra, and snap peas surrounded by various flowers: four-o’-clocks and verbena, old maids and phlox. The cartoonist for a syndicated gazette drew sketches of every show window in the business district. A subscriber to Popular Mechanics posed as an electrician in order to ransack the Avalon Cinema one town over. The coach of a champion basketball team kept a playbook of all train routes into the nearest depot. No matter who comprised the cola hunters or where they chose to search for clues, a raconteur panning a cakewalk, an asthmatic panning an orchard, a hypocrite panning a bait shop, what drove them to Panola County was the very same emotion felt by Houghton Forster on the day when, after finally discovering the sweet or savory or bitter or salty or sour taste of his secret ingredient, he combined a prototype of the syrup with carbonated water.

  “Not a doubt in my mind,” he once said. “It was love at first sip.”

  Although the concept of a secret recipe, ingredient, or formula would later be used to market everything from baked beans to fried chicken, few people realized how revolutionary it was at the time. What made the particular campaign so unique, J. Mumford Simms of Simms & Powell claims in Mum Is Not the Word: An Ad Man Tells All, wasn’t its sense of intrigue but rather of intimacy. “Prior to my agency’s work with PanCola, nothing was personal to the consumer,” writes the ad man, “but after my agency’s work with them, PanCola was like a part of your family.” J. Mumford Simms never shied from giving credit to Houghton. He would often admit it was Forster who thought up the campaign. He would often admit it was Forster who sold the idea to his country. On May 7, 1956, the Wall Street Journal corroborated those sentiments by concluding its obituary of Houghton Forster with the statement, grandiose but prophetic, that PanCola’s secret ingredient was “the rosebud to his entire family saga.”

&
nbsp; 2.5

  June 10, 1923, Weekend Edition—Anything Goes—Everything Goes—Contrite and Lonesome in Greenwich Village

  criqui knocks out kilbane. our children reading pro-british textbooks? delta man buried own tractor, insurance company says. princess helena dead at 77. road closure on frontage, detour via pancola drive. germany asks for, denied, reparations. lon chaney’s shocking in “the shock”!

  At the breakfast table, surrounded by his children, Houghton scanned the day’s headlines in the Batesville Gazette, his face scrunched into the smile of a proud father. The impetus of his pride was not his children but the newspaper. It was free. Two weeks earlier, his daughter, Ramsey, had won the Gazette’s annual contest, in which a year’s subscription to the paper was offered to whoever in Panola County, Mississippi, brought in the first bloomed cotton boll of the season.

  “So you just spotted it in a field on your way to school?”

  “Yes, sir,” lied Ramsey.

  The previous winter, unbeknownst to her father, she had built a small-scale, rudimentary but functioning hothouse on the outskirts of their property, and inside the contraption she had planted cottonseeds. Nobody at the paper thought even for an instant to question the twelve-year-old girl who brought in a boll two months before one should have matured.

  “Well then, isn’t that something,” Houghton said, turning a page. “Good to know you don’t need glasses.”

  Across the table Lance glared at his sister, who beamed at their father and said, “Thanks, Daddy!” Lance’s glare sharpened, and his lips turned colorless, he was pressing them together so tight.

  The Forsters, like most southern families, typically had one of two intentions when conversing among themselves: to make each other laugh or to make each other bleed. Earlier that summer, when Annabelle complimented Houghton’s new hat, a straw boater with a blue paisley band, she had meant that he needed to throw the ugly thing away, perhaps even burn it for adequate measure. Any anecdotes told on the porch or in front of the fireplace—whether they concerned how John “Turtle Food” McDonald lost his pinkie while noodling for catfish, the time Houghton was almost arrested in Memphis for driving tight and the officer wrote in his report, “Suspect asked, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’” or Fiona’s “extremely” difficult-to-bake dessert, for which, the family later discovered, she used a recipe entitled Easy Berry Cobbler—none of those anecdotes were ever a cautionary tale or a story of woe, and they never had a moral. A true Forster, Lance intended to strike an artery when he asked his father that morning at the breakfast table, “What’s black and white and doesn’t cost any green?”