The Last of the Savages (21 page)

One snowy night shortly before Christmas break I returned to my room to find Will waiting with pinwheel eyes and a black velvet cape, sitting in a lotus position on my bed, the stereo blasting some funky new record of his. Unfolding his legs and rising slowly from the bed, he clapped his hands on my shoulders and attempted to look into my eyes, his actual focal point somewhere outside the walls behind me.

“Looking very Yale,” he said.

“You look … medieval,” I said.

He seemed to like this idea. Any sane person would have felt absurd floating across the Yale campus dressed as Will was, but you could sense immediately that he didn’t. And in his company you became a little self-conscious about your own appearance, your conformity, even on this, your own turf. I would have blamed this on my own insecurity, but Aaron, whom we ran into in the Branford courtyard, commented on it the next day after Will was gone. “Guy’s from another planet,” Aaron remarked, “but he makes you feel like he’s the one that belongs.”

Of course, to Will the campus must have seemed half real at most, the right-angled brick melting softly, the gray stone dressed up in brilliant chemical hues—his mind being literally elsewhere. Or so I imagined. I didn’t know what he was on. He was whacked out and yet he was coherent and self-contained.

I wanted to show him Yale or, rather, show him
me
at Yale. But he’d already seen it once with his father, well before Will had chosen a very different brand of higher education, and he was invariably condescending about the whole thing. “Kind of a big museum to Apollonian culture,” he said. “Sarcophagus of the status quo.”

I, for one, was hoping this relic would last long enough to award me a diploma. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not sure which of us picked the winning side. At the time, Will definitely had the edge. Yale is still
Yale, but I suspect that the world my daughters are inheriting has been shaped more by Will’s followers than by Old Blues like his father. Or me. After his visit I sent Will a letter quoting a tract that I suggested could serve as a fine description of the Age of Aquarius, declaimed at a convention of southern states by one Leonidas Spratt of South Carolina in 1860:

At Rudy’s, an off-campus dive, Will kept leaning farther and farther forward across the table until his chin was almost in my beer, the scar beneath his left eye seeming to pulse under my nose. He assured me a revolution was at hand and worried that I might end up on the wrong side.

“I’ll just tell them I know you.”

“Better not,” he said. “People around me have a tendency to get hurt.”

“Look, I’m sorry about Elbridge,” I said. “But you know it wasn’t your fault.”

Will reared back in his chair as if I’d slapped him. He swallowed half a mug of beer and shook his head.

“Thank you for that absolution, Father Keane. But his blood is still on my hands.”

“He could have borrowed anybody’s car,” I pointed out.

“But he borrowed mine,” Will said. “And I let him.” He leaned even farther forward and hissed, “And they were after
me
.”

“Who was after you?”

“L.B. was in my car. Everybody knew that car. They were tailing him.” He paused one of his long pauses, staring off into the ether. “Out there
on the highway they thought they could take me down and say whatever they wanted later.”

“Will, he was high,” I said. “He was speeding and the cops gave chase.”

“Were you there?” Will demanded.

“Were you?”

“You’ve got to free your senses from the official version of events,” he said. “Sacco and Vanzetti, Sam Cooke, Medgar Evars, John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King—there’s always a cover story. Resisting arrest … lone gunman … drugs.” He looked around, reconnoitering, and whispered, “They always try to make it look unconnected.”

“Was there an autopsy or a coroner’s report?”

“Haven’t you been listening?” Will rolled his eyes. “
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
” he quoted, retrieving a chestnut from senior-year Latin class. “It’s the motherfucking foxes guarding the henhouse. Hell, L.B. was the guy who first clued me in. He lent me the books, showed me how to look behind the veil.” He fell silent, and for a moment I was afraid he might cry.

“Maybe you should move out of Memphis.”

Will sighed and settled back in his chair. “Maybe so.” Will’s lips disappeared as he sucked them inward. “L.B. was always telling me to get out of town. I don’t know why he couldn’t take his own advice.” After a long pause, he said. “It’s in the blood. You can’t run from a curse.”

This emboldened me to ask, “Did you ever read that diary you gave me?”

“I might have looked at it.” He smiled cryptically, then reached down into his shirt and extracted a hoary, carved stone which hung from a thong around his neck. “Remember this? The
uzat
, mystical eye.”

I nodded, having seen it in his father’s collection on my first visit to Memphis.

“Protects against ghosts, snakebites and envious words.”

“You ought to give one to Taleesha,” I said. “She’s the one who needs protection.”

He smiled as if at a dim child. “You see her as the noble victim,” he said. “But, let me tell you—she’s way better than that. She could eat you for breakfast. Hell, she could eat
me
for breakfast. Fact, she nearly did.”

He suddenly pulled off his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his vivid shirt; on the inside of his bicep was an ugly bruise that looked exactly like the imprint of a set of teeth.

He grinned as if he were immensely proud of this trophy.

“Taleesha did that,” I asked.

“Don’t worry about Tally. She’s gonna be fine.”

He was right: Will himself was the one to worry about. When he still had a brother he was free to be the errant son. Now that he was the last of the Savages, he had to struggle even harder against his heredity, and I could see that it was wearing on him.

“Who are these people?” he demanded, looking around us. To my horror he suddenly stood up on his chair and shouted, “Hey, Yalies, you think you’re so fucking smart—who here knows where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog?”

I thought for sure we were in for a fight, but the comparative hush which this exclamation evoked was suddenly broken by a rebel yell. A big jock at a nearby table stood up on his own chair. “Moorhead,” he shouted. “Any good ole boy knows the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog at Moorhead, Mississippi.”

The Mississippian lumbered over to our table with his pitcher and soon we found ourselves carousing with several members of the football team. Incredibly, Will seemed delighted with this company and they with him. I was amazed not only that Will got along with these guys better than I could, but also that he knew how to talk about football, while our new friends proved to be extremely well versed in soul and blues. They were, in fact, big fans of Lester Holmes. After an eternity of bonding, I tried to extract Will; I had classes in the morning.

He said he’d be back in my room within the hour. I did not see him again for several weeks, although the football player from Mississippi always had a hearty greeting for me after that whenever I saw him on campus.

F
or Christmas that year my parents gave me a ’63 Corvair that my uncle had taken in trade on his lot. In this Ralph Nader—condemned chariot—bidding farewell to my folks, little Jimmy, Aunt Colleen and Nana Keane—I set out a few days later for Jackson, Mississippi. My plan was to visit Will in Memphis and then follow the river south through the Delta to Jackson, there to scour the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for further clues about the alleged slave uprising at Bear Track.

Three hours short of Memphis I pulled off the interstate and made my way to Franklin, Tennessee, site of one of the bloodiest battles of what was still known in these parts as “the war.” The man who would have been my great-great uncle died there. In the years since, the postcard-perfect Victorian town had spread over much of the battlefield, and I stopped at a gas station to ask directions. The attendant asked, “You one of them reenactors?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Reenactors. Those folks dress up in uniforms, do the battle. There was a big one here a few years back—must have been five thousand of ’em, blue and gray, camped out in the field there, drinking and carrying on. Next day they acted out the battle, realistic as hell, carrying the colors,
marching up against each other firing their muskets, falling over like fainting goats. It was a hell of a thing to see.”

After I disclaimed any such affiliation, he directed me to Carnton, an antebellum mansion where four Confederate generals had been laid out on the porch, and where thousands of lesser rank lay buried. As we do in such places, I tried to conjure up from the serene landscape some mystical sense of connection to the hallowed bloody past, but I couldn’t feel anything except a vague reverence until, on my way out of town, I encountered a young soldier in the olive-drab uniform of the U.S. Army standing beside his car at the pump next to mine. Inside the Pontiac a fat girl in a white dress was dabbing her eyes with a dirty handkerchief. He was about my age, nineteen or twenty, crewcut and skinny, with a thin face that seemed to be all pimples and bones. Young as he was, his face had a wizened quality; it was easy to imagine him in a daguerreotype, leaning on his musket, a member of the doomed Army of Tennessee.

He suddenly looked up at me, nodded and said, “How you doing?”

All I could manage was to blush and mutter some pleasantry—suddenly ashamed of the educational deferment which would keep me out of Vietnam while boys like him went in my place. According to Nana Keane, a Boston banker had bought an exemption from service in 1861 and sent my great-great uncle as a substitute to be killed here in Franklin. For all I knew the descendants of that banker were known to me from school. And I couldn’t help wondering if this boy would be so friendly if he knew he was my substitute.

If this were another kind of story, the protagonist’s life would be forever changed by this political epiphany—Saint Paul dashed from his horse. But for most of us these moments of clarity fade as quickly as the flash of a camera, recollected, if at all, as a faded picture in the album of memory. The young soldier dutifully paid the attendant and drove away to his fate as I proceeded toward mine.

Dusk was falling on New Year’s Eve as I arrived in Memphis. I succeeded without much difficulty in finding the Peabody Hotel, one of the more prominent features of the Memphis skyline, but there was no answer to my calls in the Savage suite.

I think it was Faulkner—usually a safe bet in these matters—who said the Mississippi Delta originated in the lobby of the Peabody. Certainly no one would have mistaken this for the Boston Ritz-Carlton, or for the Plaza in New York. That curious and beguiling southern blend of ease and formality were in the air—that rhythm oscillating between languor and hysteria. The lobby was thronged with revelers in evening dress. Sitting in a leather chair, I watched an elderly couple step from the elevator. In a tuxedo which looked as if it had been handed down through half-a-dozen generations and might dissolve into dust at any moment, the man bowed gallantly from the waist to a pair of women getting into the elevator. When the women had passed, his silver-haired spouse assisted him in regaining his upright posture. Young women in ball gowns wafted about the two-story lobby, while their male counterparts lurked in corners, conspiring and breaking out into sudden fits of suppressed hilarity. These young swains applauded as a tiny man in livery marched the ducks from the fountain in the center of the lobby across the floor and into the elevator en route to a pen on the hotel roof. The ducks were the descendants of a batch of live decoys—or so Cordell Savage once told me—which had been dumped into the fountain one afternoon by a band of liquored-up hunters fresh from the duck blind who wanted to continue drinking at the hotel bar.

After I grew tired of sitting, I orbited the lobby, looking in the shop windows and seeing only myself in the glass, a ridiculous figure pretending to be occupied while the festive couples swirled past, too busy to notice. Finally I took to the streets, which seemed desolate. Beale Street, the scene of Will’s initiation into the blues, was being sanitized and demolished. Only after lingering over a dinner of ribs in a tacky restaurant catering to tourists did I return to my vigil at the Peabody.

I tried the house phone every fifteen minutes, and finally claimed a stool in the bar, sorely tempted to press on with my trip and say to hell with Will. I was tired of living on Will Savage time, being always the one left waiting and wondering whether he would show. And I was tired of being alone again on New Year’s Eve, that most melancholy of holidays. I had a terrible premonition of a solitary life, of dinners on TV trays and odd-smelling, transient rooms. Something was wrong with me; I was
afflicted with a terrible self-consciousness which seemed to set me apart, doomed forever to be a spectator at the ball, watching the dancers from the sidelines. I tried not to inquire too closely into the sources of my alienation, but sometimes, as on this particular evening, it was impossible to resist the pressure of self-knowledge. I tried to divert myself rereading Binnie Pilcher’s diary: