Chasing Phantasms

The black women, in layers of worn dresses, shirts, jackets and scarves, move between the pecan trees in the early morning October light. The old man, in faded khaki work clothes from Dickies points here and there to different rows of trees, with gruff, unintelligible instructions that the women seem to understand, changing direction among the rows in response to the old man’s mutterings.

I have met him here, at the “big house” of my Great-grandfather and grandfather’s stewardship, so that he can guide me on a tour of acreage owned by my family over two counties and across one elevation of the shard of the Cumberland Plateau known as Lookout Mountain. Failing at college, ill content with the family business, yearning for a simpler and more organic existence, I want to see the rural past that underlies my family history. I have in the past week subscribed to “Mother Earth News,” and begun to read up on organic farming, with emphasis on raising pigs. I read lengthy essays by English 19th century eccentrics on the sanctity of raising your own bacon and brewing your own beer.

I do not speak of these things to the old man, who has spent his life first driving my great-grandfather’s car, then managing the farm and surrounding acreage for my grandfather and his sister, following my great-grandfather’s death. The old man still remembers most of my unknown family history, and briefly and elliptically touches on many things I would like to know. But in his declining years patience with children, which at 22 I surely am to him, grows thin. He looks blankly at a TVA topo map I have marked with the property I want to see, says vaguely, “don’t use maps much,” and rides shotgun with me in my car to tour the land he knows firsthand.

Over the mountain, in a back valley threaded with a dirt road, he directs me into a weedy track leading up to an old house on the side of a ridge. An old couple are tenants there, among the soybean fields planted by help hired by a doctor who rents the land. The old man gets out of my car, steps behind the small horse barn, and urinates into the mud and straw of the pen, shielded from the house by the barn. Continues to talk about the land and crops as he pisses. Suburban fastidiousness I brutally suppress. This is real, unadorned rural society.

At the end of the day, I return the old man to his truck at the big house, the pecan harvesters long gone. He genially wishes me a good evening, and follows me out the drive, stopping to lock the gate. I drive home to my apartment, feeling oddly unfulfilled. Is that all there is? Several years later, I find, that for me, it was. Farming is not an amusement park for suburban gentry, un-conversant in the arts and understanding that comes with years of dependency on making things work.

I was twenty-two. Eight years later, with two children and a wife, I tried again. With more consequential results. Experience is the only school in which I have learned anything, and I learn it again, and again.

God’s mercy on all his children.

Nifonged in Durham

The news in the past few days reported that Duke University had reached a “private” settlement with the three former Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, charges since dropped for massive prosecutorial misdeeds. Tearful interviews ensued with the players and their parents.

The sorry banality of this whole case made me think of my first year at college, when my father drove me up to the University of Virginia. Like the lacrosse players, I was entering a male-dominated collegiate society, with freedoms and temptations I had never faced outside of the support system of my family. It was 1962, and young men were expected to sow a certain amount of (hopefully) inconsequential oats. On the drive up, my father addressed exactly two subjects with cautionary injunctions. He warned me that I would see daily students and faculty who were handicapped. Perhaps in wheelchairs, perhaps more subtly impaired. He said that I should treat them no differently than those currently regarded as able-bodied. The second topic, introduced more gingerly, with hems and haws and hesitations, was on the likelihood that I would be encouraged at some point to patronize prostitutes. He said that I should be guided in that decision by considering how a gentleman treated all other persons, which meant, of course, he was telling me “hell, NO, don’t go there.”

Sumptuary Laws and Skanks

In the middle ages and later, sumptuary laws were passed to regulate the degrees of luxury allowable to different classes in their clothing. Some fabrics were reserved for the nobility, the better to preserve the distance between social classes.

An oddity of the late twentieth century is a sort of reverse sumptuary law trend among young women. In my youth, any woman of any age, other than totally debased wrecks on the margins of society, would be mortified if any item of underwear, even so slight as a slip hem or a bra strap, should escape however briefly or slightly from under he outer layers of her clothing. Such sensibility is a dead letter since the late sixties, at least. Women, especially young women, routinely display bra straps, the tops of panties and more as part of their wardrobe.

Tonight I saw another example of this studied adoption of trash clothing, one that I have seen often before. A young woman, attractive and by her conversation educated and intelligent, was wearing a pair of jeans that had ripped seams from her mid-thigh to almost waist height. Apparently she was wearing no panties, since skin was visible nearly to the upper edge of the gap. In my youth, hormones might have made this quite exciting. But I am old. I have a young granddaughter who should not ever display herself in this way, lest her old granddad keel over on the spot, victim of a thundering apopolexy.

I know that my objections are akin to trying to sweep back the sea, but I wish that young woman, and her peers, would recover a sense of basic propriety and finally realize they look awful in such clothing faux pas.