Oh, my goodness.
You're ready, but I wasn't.
Our next reading will be Wednesday night, March 9.
We'll have a visiting poet, Stephen Dobyns.
And we'll be back in our regular place in the Modern Languages
Auditorium for that reading.
Next Thursday at 4:30 is the deadline for submissions
to this year's poetry contest.
And I brought some rules and entry blanks with me.
I'll have them on the refreshment table
after Mr. Marius' reading.
And we'll have our refreshments right in the back
of the auditorium tonight.
Richard Marius comes to us from Harvard University.
He'll be speaking in the morning, the university's
Conference on Articulation, which is sponsored
by the composition program.
And his address, I believe, is open to everyone.
That will be at 9 o'clock in the Union Club of the Student
Union.
Richard Marius has published two novels, The Coming of Rain
and Bound for the Promised Land, and a biographical study
of Martin Luther called Luther.
And his next book will be a biographical study
of Sir Thomas More.
I'm very happy to have him with us tonight, Richard Marius.
[APPLAUSE]
I really appreciate being here.
I've had a wonderful time.
It's been raining up in Boston.
It's so nice to come to Arizona.
[LAUGHTER]
I have had a wonderful time.
I am not going to try to explain very much about what
I'm going to read to you--
a novel that I've worked on.
I actually put it up a couple of years ago,
after getting about 700 pages into the first draft.
And I finished my biography of Thomas Moore, which I just
got done in the autumn.
And I started back through this, doing something
for the first time that I've ever
tried to do it in writing fiction,
to write in the first person, which I find very difficult.
But it also has become a very different experience for me
in that as I write in the first person
it seems sometimes almost as these things really,
really happened to me.
The conceit of the book, if you can call it that,
is a man sitting in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Tennessee,
night after night in the summer of 1941,
recalling night after night his life
since he arrived in East Tennessee.
The genesis of the book comes from an afternoon almost
exactly 10 years ago, when I'm sitting out
in our front yard with my father shortly after--
a few months after the death of my mother.
And my father was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor.
But for reasons that are too complicated, I suppose,
to explain here, I grew up in Belgium,
and in the summer of 1914 joined the Belgian army,
and was severely wounded by shell bursts
before Antwerp was pulled out by a British Yorkshire rifle
stretcher bearer group and taken to London,
where I spent three years in the hospital,
and came to America in 1917 to work for Southern Railway
because he met a man in London when he was convalescing
before he was discharged in the Belgian army, who gave him
a job, first of all, in Birmingham, Alabama.
And then later, he moved up to the little town
near where I grew up, called Lenoir, Tennessee,
which is the Bourbonville of my books.
I was sitting out in the yard with my father,
and something came up.
I don't remember what.
And he said something about something
being the color of German feel gray.
And I was struck by that.
And I said to him, suddenly I--
it's funny-- we never talk much about this.
He never has talked about the war.
But I said to him, how close were you
to the Germans at any one point?
And he said, oh, about from here to the vineyard,
which was about as far as from here to the back of this room.
And I suddenly began--
I don't know why I was so late in realizing all this
because I did grow up with him--
but I said, do you know that you ever killed a man?
And he burst into tears and said,
God has forgiven me for that.
We sat and talked that afternoon,
one of the relatively few times we talked about his experience
in the war.
And so I thought about that.
I published Bound for the Promised Land.
I was working on that at the time we had that conversation.
But in some sense, this is a kind
of fictional telling of his story.
And it is fictional.
It's not quite the same.
He did tell me at one time, sometime
after that, that he had dreamed for 20 years of being
under shell fire and that he would
have terrible headaches for days at a time after these dreams.
And I remember, of course, as I was a child, that he
would have terrible headaches.
And we had a little place out in the woods behind our place,
which we called--
still called the playhouse.
And when my father was knocked down
with one of these headaches, we would
have to go out there and play because he
couldn't stand for any of us to be around the house.
So this is a fictional telling of that story.
And I guess that's all of it I need to explain because--
I won't get anything read.
But anyway, it goes--
I'm going to just take you through the first part
of the story, which is the Pinkerton part of the story.
And I did work for a while.
My father worked in this foundry,
and I worked in it for a while.
And it was a very important experience in my life.
And I'm going to try to skip through here
and just read you the part of the Pinkerton story.
And the part of Mr. Pinkerton is that he
comes to believe that he is cursed by God for bringing
Black people to Bourbonville.
I apologize for using, from time to time, the word
"nigger" in this manuscript.
And I don't apologize because of the necessity
of trying to recapture speech, as people in the South
did, indeed, speak at this time.
But I apologize for that part of American history
that has given us that it is now necessary for writers
who are trying to write realistically
about their own times, to use.
"I am not sure why I sat writing these lines in a sleeping
house.
Partly, I beguile the night hours waiting for sleep.
I have been an insomniac since that last war,
and my wife goes to bed promptly at 9:00.
My sons go to bed early, too, for they are young,
and they need their sleep.
I seem to be blessed or cursed with less need for sleep
than most people feel.
So I sit here at a kitchen table looking down
over the darkened hillside pasture,
and across the lower field where the hay grows in this hot July,
and beyond it to the highway to Nashville,
where the lights of cars blaze occasionally through the dark
and where the large trucks pass to mysterious journeys,
I think, at this late hour when the world should be fast
asleep.
But then I suppose my solitary light, gleaming here
on the side of this low ridge, must seem mysterious
to them too.
And I reach out without touching across this dark land.
I have decided to write about my ghosts.
I do not know for whom--
perhaps for my younger sons, who may come on these pages
when they are older and when I'm dead and waiting
for the Resurrection in the churchyard on the hill,
so far from where I once supposed
I would wait that improbable event.
I wish they could understand some things.
The oldest will never understand anything,
but it seems that if a father has three sons, at least two
of them should know something about him, something of a life
that he can never tell them because they would interrupt,
or they would not believe, or they
might look on me with that pained embarrassment
and incredulity that I can scarcely bear to imagine.
And I could not make myself see it.
So I explained myself to them here,
speaking in a quiet world where I am master of the page,
and the page accepts what I say, the world
in my little kitchen with the windows open on two hours
before midnight on a hot summer evening.
But I suppose, too, that [AUDIO OUT] for Bernal.
They have been gone now for years.
For a very long time after they disappeared,
I expected them to return.
I would be standing in the doorway to the barn
when the men had finished throwing
the new hay into the loft.
The barn fragrant with the sweet, strong smell,
the myriad fireflies splitting in the soft, white mist,
rising from the freshly-mown meadow, the Moon high
and turning white with the deepening night.
And I would expect Guy's soft laughter behind me
and Bernal's murmur, a friendly reproach
at him, for Bernal always thought
that Guy's laughter had a mock in it,
and he thought the Guy patronized me.
Guy did patronize me, but I loved him anyway.
So I imagined that I would turn and look back
into the gloom of the barn's interior
and see Guy standing there in a luminescent green velvet
waistcoat, with this black tails and the bright red cravat
that he wore to mass on the morning
after he had danced all night.
That was 1912, and we were about to graduate
from the [INAUDIBLE] in Ghent and to enroll
in the University.
So when the [AUDIO OUT] would laugh in his delight
at my surprise, and Bernal would advance, smiling with him,
and the three of us would stand, talking with our old animation
and delight, I suppose that if they came to me anywhere,
it would be in the barn.
It was a fine private place in the evening,
and they had both been there when I built it,
the two of them lounging in the shade, Guy grinning in what
was almost a smirk, while Jim, Ed, and I sweated and grunted,
and old Mr. Munford hammered nails
with other nails in his mouth.
But after they left me that last time, they never came again.
And now I know that they are gone from me forever.
So I write to keep something of them
here in the world of the living.
Perhaps, too, I write to prove to myself
that I was not insane, as if it did not matter.
I heard on the news tonight that Hitler's amazing advance
into Russia goes on.
His generals are predicting that the Red Army
will dissolve in six weeks.
Just tell me I have a son in that army
that now plunges across those vast steps I shall never know.
[INAUDIBLE] if, we had married, I would not be here,
and my sons would not be safely asleep
upstairs in their little rooms.
And in truth, they would never have been born.
Jimbo would never have been born.
How very strange it all seems.
God protect [INAUDIBLE] even in that terrible cause.
But, of course, I do not believe in God.
I also do not believe in the ghosts.
Now almost three decades after I began speaking with them,
I can understand well enough how it all came about,
just as we can understand sometimes
how we had a certain dream.
I knew they were dead and I was alive, barely alive but alive
in London, Chelsea, the Royal Hospital and a long ward,
where the critically wounded lie close together in narrow beds
beneath the high, old windows designed by Sir Christopher
Wren.
I did not know how they had died.
I had witnessed the death of each of them,
but when my mind tried to call up the scenes again,
it stopped and could not produce the [AUDIO OUT]..
It was very much the same as my more recent difficulty
with some names.
I find that if I have not thought of someone in a long
while, I often cannot produce his name when some chance
brings him to mind.
I can remember his face and dozens of things about him,
and should he be present, I can enquire
about his mother, or his wretched back,
or his liking for the city where he now resides,
which I can flawlessly name.
But I cannot name him.
My difficulties with the deaths of Guy and Bernal
were much more serious than the inability to recall a name.
I remembered them alive, so wonderfully
and exuberantly alive.
And I can recall 1,000 or perhaps
10,000 things about them and about our happiness together.
I can also recall waking in the hospital
train in its long, slow way up to London,
feeling the weight of the headache that
was unlike any pain I had ever endured in my life, a pain that
made my bones shriek for the consolation of death
and knowing beyond that pain or beneath it, Bernal were dead.
But I could not recall how they died.
My mind stalled before an opaque wall just higher than what I
could see over, and I cannot penetrate the wall to recall
the horror, not then, not even when I came to Bourbonville.
So I lay in my bed in London, my head, my chest, and my legs
wrapped in bandages that covered the wounds left
by the exploding German shell before Antwerp.
My head hurt in a way that I can never describe,
for there is no metaphor that can convey a pain to those
who have not had it.
Underneath the pain was guilt. I was alive, and they were dead.
The guilt was as bad to my soul as the headache was to my body.
It was a pain beyond the telling,
a weight beyond the bearing.
I wanted to die, but I was too sunk in apathy
to make any contribution towards my fervent desire.
I could only lie there and wait for something.
I knew not what.
The nights were worse than the days.
One eye was left outside the bandages,
and I could see the tiny electric light
gleaming at the nurse's station at the end of the long room.
It was a funereal light.
And around it, awful beings hung in the air.
When I shut my eyes, the outside world still came in.
I could hear the low blast from the horns
of boats in the Thames.
And from somewhere far in the distance,
perhaps from Victoria Station, came the rumble of trains
and the high-pitched shriek of their whistles, sound of a city
at night working at war.
At this null moment, there is not
a sound in all the world except the insects
and the trees that fill the woods not 50
feet from my kitchen window to the West.
Still, when I shut my eyes in London, most of the world
was closed out.
And at some moment when the air was crisp with Autumn,
I began talking to Guy and Bernal.
Bernal was devout, so devout that he always
made me uncomfortable and amused Guy.
At least Guy pretended to be amused,
but I thought that he, too, was uncomfortable.
Bernal prayed in the cathedral of St. Bavo
in Ghent, where we all were before the war.
He kneeled in the chapel before the [AUDIO OUT]
of the adoration of the mystic lamb,
looking up at the green field, and the prophets,
and the saints, and of the white lamb.
And he moved his lips in prayer, and the tears
ran down his cheeks.
I came upon him there once, and I was as embarrassed
as I might have been as if I had seen
him copulating with a whore or defecating in the WC.
Guy was an atheist.
At least, Guy said he was an atheist.
He also said he was a socialist.
He wondered how anyone could prove the existence of God
or that anyone should take the trouble
to go to the embarrassment of prayer.
Bernal said you do not prove that God is before you pray.
You pray, and God is there.
That is how I felt about talking to Bernal and Guy.
If I spoke, they must be there.
It was entirely a fantasy.
I knew it was a fantasy while I was doing it.
But it was a comfort.
While he was dying, poor fat, miserable,
Dale farmer confessed to me that he
had had fantasies about baseball playing long,
long after he had passed the age when he could possibly
have played.
He was almost out of his mind from the fear
of death and [AUDIO OUT] that I was his friend,
though I did not like him very much, so he confided in me.
He told me that he imagined himself
pitching in the World Series against the New York Yankees.
And one by one, the great men came to bat against him--
Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, and all the rest.
And he struck him all out again and again.
In his fantasies, he told me, he pitched the first perfect game
in the World Series history.
And in the seventh game, he won the series with a home run
in the last half of the nine.
He said that sometimes when he was depressed and could not
sleep, he stood out there on the diamond in this fantasy
world of his and pitched the baseball.
He could feel himself doing it.
And as thousands and thousands applauded, he thrilled inside,
and it helped him forget that he had lost all his money.
So it was with me and with Guy and Bernal.
We had been together every day for almost three years.
I knew every intonation of their voices.
I knew their minds, how they would
respond to whatever I said.
What was wrong with talking about them, with them?
Bernal did not believe in such things,
not because they were impossible but because they
were immoral and ungodly.
In the retreat of 1914, when we came on the palm reader
in the village, where every house
had been leveled by shell fire, and she was there,
sitting in the midst of the ruins, a little polished
wooden table, as though she had been seated in an office.
And out of the same madness that afflicted her,
afflicted our world, Guy and I insisted
that we have our fortunes told.
You cannot do this, Bernal said, horrified.
You cannot meddle with the secrets of God.
You cannot practice necromancy.
Remember the witch of Endor.
Again, I laughed at him.
Bernal thought that if we knew the future,
it was because the spirits of the dead spoke to us.
And he thought that God had cursed witchcraft.
So Guy and I had our fortunes told.
And she told me that I would journey across the sea
and marry a blonde woman.
Bernal said that we were cursed after that,
and perhaps we were.
But I wander from my point.
My point is that I did not believe in truth.
I spoke to Guy and Bernal.
Something solid and unyielding in the back of my mind
always told me that our conversations were entirely
made up and that my talking to them
was no different from a foolish desire that made Petrarch write
letters to Cicero or to Livy.
Talk to them in those deep-night hours when
the shoes of the nurses switched along
the smooth floors between the narrow white beds,
where the wounded slept and often died.
I whispered to them so softly that no one could hear me.
They whispered back with equal softness
so that their voices were like distant sounds
and a gentle wind.
One night when it rained-- it rained often in London--
I was whispering to them, and I pretended
that I could hear their voices in the rain falling high above,
and running into the guttering, and passing
down somewhere to the ground.
It was like an optical illusion, only
this was an illusion of the ears, an auditory illusion.
Sometimes I could hear their voices,
and sometimes the deep sound was the distant running
of water in the copper gutters-- their voices,
water, their voices, water, first one, then the other.
I amuse myself talking to them when
the sound was the curious mingling of their voices,
as though they were very far away,
perhaps calling to me from some deep [INAUDIBLE] cleft
and granite.
And when the sound became water again,
I ceased and waited serenely, knowing the voices would
come back, as they did.
And then that night, I heard the voices and the water together.
I mean, I heard the clear, distinct sound of the words,
the voices, and the clear distinct sound of the water
running in the background.
At first, I did not quite understand what I was hearing,
but it came to me-- voices and water together.
Far off, I heard clocks striking 2:00 in the morning, solemn,
heavy ringing of two notes repeated again and again
across the city.
And then the voices were much nearer.
And I heard Guy's voice and his laugh, his unmistakable laugh.
I opened my eyes, and they were there
in the deep gloom of the hospital ward.
Bernal was wearing his uniform.
He was always irritated by it because it fit him so poorly,
and he was vain about his clothes.
The collar of his shirt was too large for him,
and his tunic was far too tight.
But Guy was in his green velvet waistcoat and his black tails,
and from one hand, he dangled a cigarette.
I could not smell the smoke, but I could see it.
I want to affirm here and now that I did not believe
the two of them were real.
I never truly believed.
I saw them, but I did not believe they were ghosts."
I'm going to skip now to the third night, when my narrator
comes to Bourbonville.
"The third night, I have my own [INAUDIBLE],,
saving my life from myself, or perhaps from the dark powers
by telling a tale each evening.
I slept well the last two nights,
awakening with astonishment in my little room
each morning to see the dawn lying in the green grass,
slipping itself under the maple trees that are large now,
so large that I scarcely can believe
they were little chutes of trees when Jim, Ed, and I planted
them.
I have been astonished because I slept the night through,
not waking as I usually do to listen to the silence.
I have never accomplished very much.
With these pages, I feel that I am creating a monument, yet,
the pages are more difficult than I
say would be when I started.
There are so many connections that I cannot possibly record
them all.
And in failing to mention them, I
feel the incompleteness of my design.
I cannot, for example, sort out everything I know about that
first meeting with Moreland Pinkerton and separate
the meeting itself with everything Mr.
Pinkerton told me about it and about himself afterwards.
Mr. Pinkerton believed that he had a destiny, a calling
to be something that the world would hear about and revered.
Afterwards, I supposed, he did have a destiny, a fate.
It was important enough, although it
was different from anything he expected.
He wanted to tell his story to anyone who would listen.
I believe he supposed that when greatness did come to him,
the world would rapaciously devour any details it might
obtain about him, and he wanted to leave his story
with as many people as possible so that they might testify
about it and get it right.
I was silent in those days, as I still am silent.
And people spoke to me because I did not interrupt them.
Mr. Pinkerton used to come by the laboratory in the mornings
and watch me with my bottles, [AUDIO OUT] my kins, my scales,
and he would talk.
He did not require me to answer him.
He assumed that my silence meant that I was
absorbed in what he told me.
He told me the same stories over and over,
taking a delight in them, I suppose,
because in the telling, he seemed to purge himself
of some horror that merely thinking about them
cause to grow inside him.
I put the story together as from a mosaic of all his stories,
and I offer it now as his monument.
People in Bourbon County still execrate him.
I sometimes execrate him myself, but he is worthy of a monument.
Moreland Pinkerton served the Dixie Railroad
as general manager for the Bourbonville car shops.
'One of the colonial officers, he told me,
with affable bitterness, comparing himself
to his superiors on the line, urbane men who strutted about,
an unbearable self-satisfaction, dressed in black-vested suits
with gold watch chains stretched across their prosperous
bellies, men who rolled down from Washington
and their palace cars to inspect his operation so they could
write reports on creamy paper and fill
those reports in copperplate hand
with their own superiors, the moguls who
ruled the empire of speed from their headquarters
in Washington City.
These inspectors had their magnificent mahogany-paneled
railroad cars backed onto a siding within the grounds
of the car shops.
They trooped down to the main office,
the square-framed building painted
bright yellow, and located in the great oval
between the wheel foundry and the brass foundry.
And they consulted the blue-lined ledgers
with the officious care of sorcerers
checking up on the enchantments practiced by their apprentices.
They received as their due the twittering
deference paid them by their underlings,
and they smiled with cold sunniness
on Moreland Pinkerton, who was not one of their kind.
They murmured to each other, taking no one else
into their confidence, certainly not divulging
their collective wisdom to Moreland Pinkerton.
They marched in lockstep like a squad of Marines
out into the shops to look at things.
Here, amid the roar and the den of the foundry, watched
by every eye, they drew conspicuously apart
and consulted with one another.
Sometimes they drew black leather notebooks,
expensively small and stamped in gold,
from inside pockets of their coats,
and they wrote things down.
On occasion, they stood in a row to watch some process,
giving to uneasy workmen an impression
of buzzards lying on a fence and studying
something appetizing dead.
They marched through the steel foundry, the brass foundry,
the pattern shop, the machine shop,
and they stood savoring almost in spite
of themselves the wood-sweet smell of the long shed
where carpenters hammered boxcars together
from oak and pine.
The carpenters were a caste.
They look much alike--
long, narrow faces, high cheekbones,
big hands, sharp eyes, almost invariably blue.
They were quietly diffident because they felt superior
to other men and could afford to be
unassuming in the presence of their inferiors.
They smelled of tobacco, and sweat, and clean wood dust.
Some of them had [INAUDIBLE] the foundry
rose out of what had been a swamp.
A very young Moreland Pinkerton had cooked
took them out of the country, out
of doing first one job and then another,
out of penurious independence.
And he put them to work for dependable cash money,
paid every other Saturday morning
in small, sealed brown envelopes, stamped with a DR,
the Dixie Railroad itself.
Look at them, he said sometimes to me
when they lined up at the pay windows.
They're mine.
If it wasn't for me, they'd be dirt.
They'd have themselves a dime every other week.
He believed that he had brought progress to the county,
and the people did not appreciate what he had done.
And I'm dead, they'll understand, he said grimly.
Nobody appreciated Abe Lincoln until that actor son of a bitch
shot him.
A confident man who came down on their mysterious inspector--
inspection tours believe themselves
to be superior beings, required, like medieval lords,
to make a grand show among the peasants.
They were condescending in the belief
that [INAUDIBLE] was so clearly recognized
that their visits would be received as a great benefit
to be spoken out reverently around humble supper tables.
They spoke with too much admiration
to the carpenters who held them in silent contempt
because these nobles had soft hands.
On Broadway, in Bourbonville, when
they walked through the square to exercise their legs,
they tipped their hats to the ladies.
They admired with a little too much zest
the beautiful rural surroundings of salubrious Bourbonville.
They spoke too warmly of the healthful air
of a country town.
With a little too much sentiment,
they praised the neighborliness and serenity
of this beautiful place.
Among themselves, they laughed loudly, boon companions who
had long shared private jokes.
They smoked strong cigars in the night in their gleaming palace
cars, attended by silent Negro porter.
In stiff-starched white, they drank bonded whiskey
and ignored prohibition in Tennessee.
They invited Moreland Pinkerton to these evenings,
and he came with a face prepared to marvel,
a soul prepared to admire and laugh at their jokes,
flatter them for anything they said or did.
Once they invited me, but I was bad company,
and they did not ask me again.
They took off their coats and flung them carelessly
on fancy oak coat trees.
They exposed their suspenders.
They pulled the heavy velvet drapes, green and white
for the colors of the railroad, and they played poker
into far into the night at a quarter an ante.
I'll call that bet and raise you two bits.
I remember the words spoken around fat cigars
in a kind of choking jocularity.
They treated Moreland Pinkerton just the way
they treated Bourbonville.
They made a little too much of him.
They praised him for qualities he did not have.
They flattered him for the military precision
with which he ran the foundry.
And always, they left him there in Bourbonville, a remote
and desolate little town that he had created and now despised.
And when the train pulled off for the palace car at the back,
Moreland Pinkerton stood waving at them
until the red light on the rear platform
had disappeared around the bend by the brick cotton mill.
And he hated them with a passion that, had it been fire,
would have incinerated their bones.
I stood by him on the side of the railroad
sometimes as their train pulled away.
And I saw an expression on his face
that would have been fitting for a damned soul
in the torments of hell.
Moreland Pinkerton had built the car shops.
'If it hadn't been for me, this place would still be a swamp,
and Bourbonville would still be a village snoring
in the sun,' he told me.
I suppose he was right.
He had been young and strong then,
so handsome he was almost beautiful.
When he was only 17 in Virginia, one of his teachers
told him in a rush of pure feeling, Moreland,
I hope I live to see you famous.
I want the world to know I was your teacher.
He looked like a man born to be famous.
He had a rugged square face that made
even married women turn discreetly
to look after him in the streets.
He was so handsome that people always assumed
that he was thinking thoughts.
He could look across his desk at you
without saying a word for such a long time
you knew he was scouring your soul.
And I believe his most profound thought, one
that stayed with him until his violent death,
was his conviction that he was more
able than anyone else he knew.
He expected success and fame in the certainty
that some people expect heaven and eternal bliss.
He watched the trains rolling by when he was a child,
and he went to work for the railroad
because he loved the trains.
They went places, where there was more life than he had.
And he supposed that if he had the right ticket,
he could go to those places and drink up the life they offered,
drink all of it, until his terrible thirst was quenched.
He did well.
And he came down on orders to Bourbonville
when he was only 25 years old and found a swamp southeast
of town, a swamp that had been acquired
by modest and secret peculations of the railroad,
the ever-thrifty railroad.
He bought this land through the agency of a hired [AUDIO OUT]
traveling evangelist named Sims, a man still remembered by some.
Sims was skinny and pulsating, and he had a big voice.
He told people he wanted to buy the swamp
to prove the power of God.
And when he prayed, God would drive the water out
of the swamp, as he had parted the Red Sea to show
his mind to Israel and Egypt.
And when God had cleared the swamp,
Sims vowed that he would build a tabernacle there.
And he promised to bring Pentecostal holiness down
and have all Bourbon County speaking in tongues.
And he promised to heal the sick by the laying
on of hands, and to open the eyes of the blind
by spitting on them, and to make the lame walk
by praising the Lord.
Pinkerton told me the story, and he laughed heartily
in the telling.
People in Bourbon County who own parts of the swamp
thought Sims was crazy.
And they sold him title to all of it for $5 an acre.
And that's known as a railroad won that swamp.
They had to charge [AUDIO OUT] acre, Pinkerton said.
They believe and the railroad, but they
sold it to God for $5 an acre, the poor dumb bastards.
They don't believe in God.
They did sell the land.
Sims had a cocaine habit.
He did what the railroad paid him
to do-- turned over the title, and got the $5 for every acre
he bought, and hit the high road sniffing cocaine
before preaching hellfire and damnation
sermons in tattered canvas tents, where
he pounded on the Bible and yowled over the book
under the instant inspiration of the inspirited power.
Some people in Bourbon County claim
the man suffered the pangs of conscience.
Over the way, he had led the railroad use him.
Perhaps that was only the wishful thinking
of those who, feeling themselves cheated, when they had meant
to cheat instead, believed that Sims deserved to suffer
for his part in deluding them.
However, that may have been, he decided
to prove his faith to an assembly of doubters.
By faith, you can move mountains, according to Jesus.
And a train was not nearly so big as a mountain.
So the Reverend Mr. Sims decided to stop a speeding train
with his bare hands.
He believed that if only he committed himself
to the tracks, God would vindicate him by giving him
the miraculous power of Samson.
But God nodded.
And the followers of the Reverend Mr. Sims, as well as
assorted curious and mocking onlookers who
had gathered at a grade crossing in the countryside
north of Knoxville, were treated to a daunting and utterly
silencing demonstration of the authority of the material
world over the spiritual.
Pinkerton kept the clippings from the Knoxville newspapers
that reported the event.
Getting Sims to buy the swamp had been Pinkerton's idea.
I know people, he told me.
I sized Sims up in a minute.
I sized this town up as soon as I saw the goddamn little shit
hole.
By the time Sims died, Pinkerton had
been in Bourbonville six months building his own Tabernacle,
the foundry, and car shops, the outpost of the Dixie Railroad
in this remote place.
As I write, I hear the eerie rise and fall of a wildcat
freight whistle and the rumble of a train headed
toward Chattanooga on the line 4 miles across the woods
and fields of Martel.
It is a ghostly sound, and I never
hear a train passing without thinking, however fleetingly,
of the train that took us to the [INAUDIBLE]
almost 30 years ago, in early August, 1914.
Well, Pinkerton came here and plunged out
into the somnolent countryside to find men.
He located men who had never worked
for wages in their lives.
He paid them $2 a day to break their backs
with spades and shovels, with mule-powered dredges,
with wheelbarrows, with axes, with logging chains.
Men in Bourbon County had never [AUDIO OUT] such wages.
Still, he could not drag enough of them away from plows,
and barns, from the familiar realm
of the land and its liturgies.
He raged in frustration at the obstinacy of those who
refused to heed his summons.
And he looked south to Sweetwater
in its broad, rich valley 18 miles away,
and he found Black people left over from slavery and enduring
life with patient dread, living in tiny clapboard shacks
and toiling on land they had no thought of owning.
He went down there and cajoled them and made promises,
and he brought back to boxcars of healthy, strong Black men,
picking them out of the herd, like a man buying cattle
at auction.
He paid them $1 a day, and they cheerfully bent their backs
alongside the whites.
And when the mud covered them all, as it swiftly did,
God himself would have had a hard time
telling the difference between those descended untainted
from Noah and those afflicted with the curse of Ham.
Darcy Coolidge was spoke up for Mr. Pinkerton.
Part of the reason, I'm sure, was that men from the foundry
stayed in her boarding house and gave her a living.
But part of her talk was pure admiration.
I suspected that she was more than half in love with him,
but even she had her doubts about bringing Black people
to Bourbonville. 'That put the curse on him,' she said.
God didn't intend for the races to mix,
and Mr. Pinkerton mixed them.
At the time, Pinkerton was a phenomenon.
And old Bourbonville stretched out for decades,
asleep in the sunny torpor of its riverbank
and its enormous forests and the scattered,
ragged, fields stirred awake, and looked disgruntled,
as the old are when they are awakened from a good sleep.
And the town started up then, amazed and blinking.
There they were-- white men, and Black men,
and young Moreland Pinkerton, some kind of amazing
[INAUDIBLE] quid, working harder than any of them, tireless,
laughing, hollering, clapping them,
white and black on the backs, cracking obscene [AUDIO OUT],,
howling at the jokes of others, bringing out the clear strong
whiskey at just the right moment,
wiping his flat dirty hand over the spout of the jug,
taking the first deep fiery swill and passing it
on, mingling his spit with theirs when the jug came back,
jumping here, jumping there, pointing, beckoning,
commanding, mud in his thick blond hair,
cake on his eager face, cursing, pulling, singing, cheering,
omnipresent, and omnipotent as God.
They dug ditches 5 feet deep.
White men and Black men worked with long-handled spades
and water up to their waist, and they hacked the ditches,
criss-crossing s through the swamp,
sometimes uncovering a terrified cottonmouth snake
that streaked through the water, fleeing for its life, the men
roaring in pursued and triumph, joyfully
slashing the long blackboned and accursed thing in two,
or three, or four, to the glory of God.
And then they returned to their exuberant digging,
advancing their deep ditches relentlessly to the riverbank,
until, at last, the [AUDIO OUT] gushed down
into the brown river.
And the river swirled it away, and land
that had been a swamp for 1,000 years
dried slowly in the summer sun.
They chopped down the oaks, and the pines, the hickory trees,
the black gums, and the chestnuts, and the cypresses,
pushing out of places where the water had
stood above the ground.
And they piled the felled wood and enormous heaps three times
the size of a mansion.
And they had burnings, great celebratory burnings
in the night, moved by some primitive thing that
stole on them as they toiled to destroy
the primitive bog, some awful piety,
akin to the powers of darkness, the kinship
to the underworld stirred out of them
by those flames in the night.
You could see the glow of those fires from 10 miles away,
Darcy Coolidge told me.
There were people who said Mr. Pinkerton built
those fires at night because he had sold his soul to the devil.
Pinkerton roared with laughter what he took
to be a diabolical compliment.
So filthy man, sweat soaked, and weary,
looking in their mud like their original fathers
scooped out from the clay of Eden,
stood around the great pyres and looked on the burning
with a voracious delight of vandals burning a city.
There was a demon leaping in the fire, dancing to strange music,
and they could see the dance, though their eyes could not
quite make out the demon.
And the dance cast a spell on them
and made them forget what they had been
and remember things they did not know they knew.
The Blacks danced with the fire, moving faster and faster
and stamping rhythms of Africa, clapping their hands together
in a slow, steady crash of power,
making hypnotic reverberations over the swift motions
of their dancing feet.
And the white men slowly began, one by one,
to dance after them.
And the whiskey jugs passed from hand to hand,
while the great dance went on and on.
And they howled at the night, howled
with the release of some terrible and glorious thing.
Bourbonville lie quite awake now, forever from its slumber.
And from miles around, men came in bare feet
to the windows of bedrooms and stood
sniffing at the smoke from the great fires.
And they saw the red burning against the night
and saw the endless fountains of sparks rushing up
to die against the cold stars.
And they saw the arrival of progress in their land.
And in the faint, wild cries of shouting
men carried on the night air and made inhuman by distance,
they heard also something remote and savage from an age
before progress began
I was writing of how the foundry was built
and of Moreland Pinkerton's great work.
The buildings went up as the summer swelled and burst
and declined into a brisk autumn.
It was 1890, and Moreland Pinkerton was everywhere,
seeing if lines were plum, and Cornish square,
and concrete firm.
He inspected beams and rivets.
He peered at levels and perused blueprints.
And sometimes, out of simple exuberant delight,
he plucked the hammer out of a hand [INAUDIBLE] speechless
carpenter and drove a nail expertly home,
and handed the hammer back, and strode
on grinning, swaggering, his proud head cocked back,
like the hammer of a revolver ready to fire,
leaving the carpenter slowly smiling and looking after him
and thinking that Moreland Pinkerton was
a star fallen to Earth.
'We loved him,' Mr. Manfred told me years later,
as the big tears came into an old man's eyes.
That's the fact of it.
We loved the goddamn mean son of a bitch.
And the Blacks, the color, the Negroes, the niggers,
whatever they should be called, at first, they camped in tents
on the low hill South of town, squatted on eroded, red land,
overgrown with brambles and piney woods,
land that the Reverend Mr. Sims had
bought for the railroad exceeding his commission,
the railroad not carrying, and Sims making
$5 more an acre for every morsel of worthless real estate he
could buy.
The Blacks brought up their women and their children
from Sweetwater, and they sat at night
in the steaming dark of summer in Eastern Tennessee,
and they smoked their pipes, and they
talked in their [AUDIO OUT] and offensive way,
as if they feared to have careless speech
drift into the white man's town where it could cause trouble.
Sometimes Moreland Pinkerton came walking up among them
like some spirit of the dark.
He squatted by them on the ground
or else sat on one of the rough benches
they had hammered together from scrap.
He leaned back, and smoked cigars, and told stories,
and he listened to their tales, and they laughed.
They all laughed.
He looked down on their children when they had fever,
and he complimented their women on flowery dresses sewn up
from [INAUDIBLE] feed sacks.
The women bent their heads, and looked at the ground,
and giggled with pleasure.
He ate cake baked in clay ovens with molasses to sweeten it,
cake that was heavy and soggy.
And he pronounced it the best cake he had ever eaten.
And he wrote the recipe down in the back of a brown paper bag
to send off to his mother in Virginia.
Sometimes he'd slip a quarter to somebody with a bad tooth
and direct him to a white farmer who
would, for that silver quarter, yank a bad tooth out
of a Black head.
I heard again and again the story
of a hot afternoon when a stupid white man named
Reed, who greasy and hostile, squint-eyed,
with a round, bald head and a belly that
fell over his thick leather belt slapped a Black water
boy who did not have water in his bucket
when Reed was thirsty.
Someone else had drained the last drop,
and the boy was starting back to the well for more
when Reed wanted a drink and not able to get it,
slapped the child.
And when the child cried--
he was about 13--
Reed pulled out a little blue pistol and threatened to shoot
his head off just so there'd be, so Reed said,
'one last nigger in the world to fuck white girls.'
Moreland Pinkerton came on the scene out of some sure instinct
for danger.
And he jumped on Reed like a tiger out of a tree.
He slapped the pistol out of his hand
and sent it flying off into the muck.
And almost with the same smooth, hard motion,
he slapped Reed flat across the mouth with an open hand,
brought the hand back again across Reed's eyes, forward
again across the mouth, repeating
the motion so fast that it sounded like somebody hammering
nails.
And when Reed brought his hands up dumbly to cover his face,
Pinkerton stepped back and delivered a hard swinging kick
right up into Reed's testicles.
People told me then that Reed just dropped on his hands
and showed a bloody face petrified in amazement,
then pitched forward into the mud,
holding his crotch with both hands
and lay on his [INAUDIBLE] incredulous.
And then Pinkerton grabbed his head
and picked it up, the body following.
He spat in Reed's face and told him
that if he, Moreland J. Pinkerton of the Dixie Railroad
should see Mr. Reed five minutes hence that he would personally
twist a pen knife up Mr. Reed's prick.
And with that, he hollered for a knife,
and maybe two dozen were instantly
produce out of denim pockets.
Mr. Reed thereupon discovered an energy
and a purpose he had previously supposed
departed from him forever.
And it is said that he removed himself with such speed
that he left wake in the swamp.
And Pinkerton turned fiercely around to the water boy
and to the water boy's father and shouted,
'You may be niggers, but by God, you're my niggers.'
As I say, I heard the story many times
from both Blacks and whites, and it spread
at the time like a hurricane.
White Bourbonvillians had one short article of social faith,
and that was that Blacks should be kept in their place.
Many people in the town watched a stranger
changing their ways [AUDIO OUT]
And Pinkerton turned fiercely around to the water boy
and to the water boy's father and shouted,
'You may be niggers, but by God, you're my niggers.'
As I say, I heard the story many times
from both Blacks and whites, and it spread
at the time like a hurricane.
White Bourbonvillians had one short article of social faith,
and that was that Blacks should be kept in their place.
Many people in the town watched a stranger changing their ways
and muttered among themselves about the mythical days
when the Klan would have settled Moreland Pinkerton fast enough.
Later in the muttering was Mr. Oswald Mahoney,
keeper of a hardware store that was still here
when I came to town, still presided over by Mr. Mahoney,
although he was steadily losing business to Kinlaw.
Mr. Mahoney was paunchy and prim,
carrying himself with the stiffness of an elderly woman
who has lived her life in fear that if she relaxes,
her vigilance for an instant, obscene little boys
will look up her dress.
Mr. Mahoney's long English face was as white as milk
because he could not go out into the sun
without raising blisters on his skin.
So he ventured out only at twilight and in the dark,
like a vampire bat, Virgil Weaver said.
Virgil's friends laughed at the aptness of the comparison.
And Virgil's friends were some of the best people in town
because he was well connected through his family.
But I get ahead of my story.
Mr. Mahoney did represent an opinion,
and some people nodded when he spoke.
And the town fathers of Bourbonville passed,
without discussion, a law forbidding any Black person--
man, woman, or child--
to be on the streets of the little town
after 6:00 in the evening.
Mr. Mahoney put out the tale that Pinkerton
meddled with Black women.
'Why else does he go down there at night?
Hell, he gives husbands a quarter,
and the husbands let him get himself a little poon time.
He ain't the first.
I don't reckon he'll be the last.
You know niggers.
A nigger would sell his own mama's kind if he didn't ask
him change for $0.50.'
The tale gave Mr. Mahoney something
to laugh at in his spitty way in the dark of his hardware store,
where he was King of steel plows,
and prince of pocket knives, and lord of barrels,
and nails, and saws, and leather harness,
and where he was safe in his kingdom,
he supposed, from invasion from without.
Pinkerton got word of the slander.
And so he told me much later on, he was amused by it.
He chewed tobacco then, as most men
did who worked with his hands.
And with his cheek packed full, he
marched them to the hardware store
on a hot Saturday morning afternoon,
when idle farmers lounged in the cool, dark,
and Mr. Mahoney stood behind his counter,
grinning a superior grin, wearing his white shirt,
his black suspenders, his black necktie,
and his hot black coat.
People heard Pinkerton's hard boots pound
across the porch planking, and they looked up
and they saw him, saw him move into that smooth, resolute
hesitancy of his, saw him sweep to the counter,
pluck Mr. Mahoney up by the lapels,
yank him over the counter, saw him
begin methodically and with maximum liquidity to spit
brown tobacco juice in Mr. Mahoney's face.
'I seen the whole thing, old Brian Ledbetter told me.
'Mahoney was squawking like a duck held up by the neck.
And Pinkerton would chew a little, and he would spit.
I tell you, it sure did make a mess out of Mahoney.
In the end, Mr. Mahoney began to cry.'
'We just sat there,' Brian Ledbetter said.
'Tell you the truth, I never cared for Mahoney,
not that I took Pinkerton's side, you understand.
But I figured fair was fair.
And Mahoney had a runny mouth.
He deserved what Pinkerton done to him.'
When Mr. Mahoney began to cry, Pinkerton started to laugh.
And he spat the whole cud of tobacco on Mr. Mahoney's face
and tossed him back as if Mr Mahoney had
been no more substantial than a sack of straw.
Pinkerton was on his way out when Mrs. Mahoney rushed
into the hardware store from the living quarters upstairs.
She was a student of Bible prophecy,
and she had in her hands a large black Bible.
With it, she began to beat Pinkerton over the head.
Pinkerton was laughing at Mr. Mahoney and Mrs. Mahoney,
and her Bible made him laugh at her.
And that is the way he made his exit--
Mrs. Mahoney running after him, bend to the air,
bringing down that floppy limber book on his head with all
her force until she fell away exhausted, and turned back
to the interior of the store and began
to berate her husband for being such a worthless coward.
And Pinkerton walked across the square laughing
and went back to work.
The Blacks stayed out of the way.
They worked hard all day long.
And in the afternoon, when quitting time came,
they walked home along the railroad tracks,
keeping their eyes averted from white people,
keeping their heads slightly bowed, showing every gesture
that they intended to stay in their place.
They thought Pinkerton was Jesus Christ, and Abraham Lincoln,
Moses, and Ulysses S. Grant.
And they built a Mount Zion Baptist Church
on the highest of their low hills.
And on Sundays in this, the first framed house,
and what Bourbonville called "Bucktown,"
although the Blacks named in "Huntsville" for one
of their preachers-- the first roof of wood shingles,
that grasped and held their collective religious patience,
and shook with a thumping and shouting of their frenzies.
Their preachers prayed every Sunday for God's blessings
to fall on the United States of America
and on Moreland Pinkerton.
And men and women in the throbbing congregation swayed
and shouted do it, Lord, do it.
And as the years passed, they named their sons after him.
And at least one girl was named Morelanda.
They took off their hats in his presence.
He grinned at them, and slapped them on the back,
and they grinned, smiled back at him
and laughed with a quiet he, he, he,
when he said something funny.
They were the first people in Bourbonville
to call him the name he loved best-- captain.
So the founders for brass, and steel, and iron
rose where the swamp had been.
The trains heaved in to metal parts of the furnaces
and pieces on flat cars and with bricks and gondolas.
The Black man and the white man toiled, and groaned,
and cursed, and put the furnaces together.
And they built too-tall brick chimneys that
pointed to the sky like spires.
And a bricklayer named Hicks died when he leaned back
too far, too high, and admired his creation
and lost his balance on the wooden scaffold,
and fell tumbling and flopping his arms like a great bird
until he struck the unyielding earth.
Moreland Pinkerton wept real tears,
and Black and white men came to the funeral
and sat around the open grave and the closed coffin
and sang sad songs.
He died for progress, Pinkerton said in the eulogy he spoke.
Progress takes a toll.
And our dear brother, Jack Hicks,
has paid that price for all of us.
And we must remember when we enjoy
the fruits of his sacrifice and taste the goodness of progress,
that Jack Hicks did not die in vain.
The carpenters who put out the buildings
became builders of boxcars.
The brass foundry made journal bearings
for the great steam locomotives and for the boxcars.
And the steel foundry made the truck frames
that held the wheels and the wooden cars.
But the glory was the iron, the wheel foundry.
Men who had never known anything more complicated
than seed time and harvest, rain, and snow, and drought
learned to prepare the damp sand for the molds
and how to press the oak wheel patterns into the sand,
and how to tap the great furnace,
and how to dance away from the great gush of the molten iron
into the bull ladle, and how the colors, cherry red
to incandescent, told him what the Iron was
and what it would be.
And some of the religious men long
afterwards told me that the hot iron
made them think of Tubal Cain.
The Black man learned to be molders' helpers and the haul
coke to stoke the furnace that melted the pig
iron in the scrap.
And they learned how to take the 850-pound gray iron
wheels with the crane, hauled out of the annealing pits,
wheels so perfectly round that a nickel would not
lie flat on the curved surface that rode the rails.
And they could balance them on the flange
and roll them like barrel hoops before the great drill.
They cut a hole in the middle where the axles would fit,
and then they would roll them out into the long shed
where Moreland Pinkerton's carpenters-- he always called
them his men-- solid, and hammered,
and fitted wooden boxcars together.
And they could, these Black dancers of the wheels,
working in couples, and swing the wheels onto the axles,
and fastened them in place--
and they knew what they could, do and they were proud.
Moreland Pinkerton looked at all of it,
saw the foundry turning like a great machine with human parts,
and he was the engine that made it all run.
And he believed that nothing was impossible.
'I knew the railroad would call me up to Washington City
in time,' he told me.
'I could see myself in black tie,
and tails, shaking hands with important people,
shaking hands with the President of the United States.
I thought I'd be president of the lines.
And if things had turned out right, hell,
I might have been president of the United States.'
The man who spoke those words to me
was soaked with whiskey, red eyed, bewildered, and angry.
And he spoke them years after the Spanish War
came, when he made his one great mistake that made his dreams
collapse around him and trapped him in Bourbonville for life."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]