My Monticello(5)
Beyond all of this, I understood a separate truth, one not yet found in any publication. I knew that they had chosen you out of all those wasted students partying on the strip of college bars. I knew this because I’d worked late that night, the first warm evening of spring. I’d decided to walk home through the carnival of youth, and only by chance spotted you out front of that bar on the corner. You were right there in the fray of students, half swaying to music that spilled from an open patio. You tilted your head toward me—did you see me too? Did you recognize me? I can’t adequately explain it, but I must tell you now that I was the one who called the precinct, claiming to have seen a “suspicious young man” at the corner of University and Fourteenth. I called, but I did not specify your height, your color. Afterward, I hurried home, reassuring myself. Nothing will come of this, I tried to tell myself—and I will finally be able to let it go, or be let go by it. Son, please believe this, if you believe nothing else I’ve written: This was a test for them—for the world!—not for you!
But here, again, we must take a step back, and remind ourselves that this has all been in service to something bigger: that someday our sons’ sons might be spared. Your mother used to say to me, The seas are rising, whatever you believe. Soon we will all be wet together, and together we will gasp for air.…
I saw you again the other day, out on the lawn at the student-led protests. At first I didn’t recognize you, with that white bandage plastered across your head and the new bowed way you held your body. But then they delivered you to the front, the small crowd swelling in support. I’ve read there have been other demonstrations on other campuses along the East Coast. A rainbow of faces chanting and wailing, as if there are multitudes of watchers now. When I saw you, I knew that you would recover, and it felt like I could breathe again for the first time in a very long while. But even closer to the bone was a feeling of grace that may well soon release me. I mean, look at you—look at all you’ve accomplished, in spite of everything. You made it here, just like they did. And I saw you, son, turning and wild—free, even—for a moment at least.
VIRGINIA IS NOT YOUR HOME
They hung that name on you at birth, but Virginia was never your home. Read Nausea by Sartre and give yourself a new one. Trumpet your new name to the liver-spotted washroom mirror, like a coronation. Gape your mouth then angle your tongue behind your teeth. While you’re at it, work to remedy those other afflictions: that fetid high-hill r that has planted itself in the middle of words like wa-r-sh. Scrub the stink of manure from your clothing and, while your young body churns over the basin, keep whispering your new, still-secret name. Believe that if you can just change this, you can change everything.
When your furtive girl body begins to unfold, pull your hair back so severely that the boys don’t tug you down below the bleachers. Take to wearing Father’s faded stable flannels to ward off solicitations to a string of tissue-paper dances. Don’t accept it when they ask, Who do you think you are, whenever you test some sweet, protracted word on your tongue. Don’t accept the moldy hymnals, the marquee salvations—the wayward way that Momma courts heaven like a scornful lover. Don’t ache too badly for milk cows in the pasture, their slick contoured ribs pressing through. Take French, lock your doors, and trust in your own sixteen-year-old self.
Fill out an array of applications, but don’t tell Momma when you win a scholarship to an all-girls college toward the center of the state. Instead, let the screen door clap closed behind you. Feel brisk air rush by as you sprint barefoot through her hand-me-down fields. Run past the paddock—where your father attends to their cruelest horses—all the way to the muddy creek banks. As breath stings your lungs and a stitch claws up your rib cage, howl victorious into the night sky.
At freshman orientation, chew up and swallow the first name tag they give you: Write yourself a new one. Someday soon you’ll make it official, this new and chosen name. Smile with restraint so that no one can question the slant of your eyeteeth—those hidden incisors, white as fresh milk, since, according to Momma, there was fluoride in the well water. According to Momma, she did not expect a dusky girl-child like you, never mind Father’s complexion. According to Momma, nothing is promised in this world.
Tell the other girls you’ve lost both of your parents when they ask why you didn’t go home over Thanksgiving break. In the coming months, they’ll invite you places: a cottage on the Cape, a brownstone in Georgetown for New Year’s Eve. These young women who grouse over dining hall menus, who can’t imagine divining supper from scraps. Take note of the weight of their family silver, the briskness of their Black butlers’ hands, cuffed in starched white. Take note of the line of first-edition books along their parents’ mantels. Read Camus and Kafka to tatters. Read Simone de Beauvoir.
Work harder still and, as soon as you are able, transfer to a bigger school, one with a better language department. Don’t fret that it still sits in your namesake state—Virginia or Ginny, like your one sweet-faced grade school friend used to call you. Those girls you grew up with, who preened in pickup headlights, who got themselves knocked up then abandoned before they reached legal drinking age.
Study your new suburban suitemates but don’t follow them to their beer-soaked parties. Instead, take a Greyhound to a protest near the White House. Lead a chant against the bombs being dropped in a desert you can’t properly name. Shake your fists at those suited, greedy men determined to devour the world before you even taste it.