The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened 

Bill McKibben (Henry Holt and Company, 2022) 

       Bill McKibben moved to Lexington, Massachusetts in 1970, when he was ten. In their thirty-thousand-dollar house on Middle Street, their family of four represented the archetype of the American Dream. The town of Lexington also makes a pretty fair proxy for American suburbia, though its place in colonial and revolutionary history adds a dimension that McKibben uses to advantage in his story. He's not primarily engaged in memoir, but what he does have to say explains a lot about his career as a journalist and activist. 

        He was a teenage journalist, covering the 1978 gas crisis for the local suburban paper, before he ever got to the Harvard Crimson, and subsequently the New Yorker. "Along with gas station owners, I also got to interview the number three man in the country's energy department. John Deutch was an MIT professor, and in between Washington stints he lived in Lexington, so I talked with him the week before his boss, President Carter, was to give a nationwide address on energy conservation." Jimmy Carter had at least some grasp of how the country needed to reinvent itself in response to changing ecological conditions, but he lost the election to a sunny, confident huckster whose attitude toward such matters was 'nothing to see here.' Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House, and Ronald Reagan took them down. 

         Another job McKibben held in high school was being a tour guide on the Lexington Battle Green, purveying tales of long-ago glory for tips from tourists. The patriotism he felt on the Green has only grown, though it's been complicated by more thought about who was left out of the stories. "If the American origin story that you're telling over and over involves a small force of ill-trained men who, feeling oppressed, decide to take on the greatest empire in the world–well, that story leaves you believing that dissent can be patriotic, that American history is ultimately the story of the underdog, that a sense of shared community and a willingness to sacrifice for it defines who we are." 

          McKibben got an early taste of such willingness on Memorial Day weekend of 1971, when Vietnam War protesters, led by a young John Kerry, came to town. A group following Paul Revere's ride in reverse broke Lexington's curfew by camping out in the middle of town; the police rounded up 458 protesters, of whom more than a third were local townspeople, including McKibben's father. He got out in the morning, and they all went to church, but he did put himself on the line, as his son has done many times since, protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline and the like. 

       That same year, as he learned while researching this book, Lexington's citizens voted to overturn a rezoning proposal for a townhouse development that would have provided some housing for lower-income families. In the pulpits, and in the letters pages of the paper, Lexingtonians were all for diversity and inclusion; in the privacy of the voting booth, they were for protecting property values. And why not? They had great schools, a fine library, sports teams and station wagons, all the comforts of home. Partly because of the young Bill McKibben, in fact, they had an award-winning high school debate team, among all the other stepping stones to brand-name college educations. 

          The repercussions of this kind of thinking, spread over the intervening decades, have only increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. That three-bedroom house on Middle Street is worth well over a million dollars today; but if you never had the chance to buy in in the sixties, what good is that to you? A substantial part of the difference, of course, is a residue of racial red-lining from the middle of the century, and all the doors closed to Black veterans who should have been able to use GI benefits to improve their lot in life. McKibben imagines what a compensatory wealth transfer would look like. 

          One big change in our adult lifetimes is the decline of main-line Protestant denominations and the rise of independent evangelical churches. McKibben has seen it for a long time: he wrote an article for the Crimson about Jim Bakker and his PTL Club, with a predictable degree of mockery; but he did find the people there both sincere and kind. Evangelicalism, he says, may just be part of a larger story of growing hyper-individualism in our time. The youth group trips he used to take, to paint houses and–literally–sing Kumbaya, pointed to a form of religion that was about more than saving individual souls. Perhaps it still could be. The last chapter is a call for people born under Truman and Eisenhower to give something real back. "But older people also have something beyond their kids and grandkids to think about. We also have the chance to partially redeem some sense of our history as Americans, and, for those to whom it matters, as Christians."

 

Any Good Books, July 2022 

Until That Good Day

Until That Good Day

Marjorie Kemper (2003, St. Martin's Press)

     "The coffin was in the living room." What a promising way to start a story! The time is 1928; the place, Myrtle, Louisiana. Five-year-old Vivian is old enough, and perspicacious enough, to spot the paradox of putting the dead in the living room. Her father is a traveling man, peddling groceries to small shops in tiny towns from Mississippi to Arkansas, so Vivian and her eight year old sister Clara move into their grandmother's quiet, gloomy house. In another year, Grandmother Washington, too, is dead, and John Washington goes looking for a wife. When he tells his children he's found one, they respond in character: "Clara wore a sweet little smile on her face the way she might have worn a flower in her hair. Vivian studied the rug and kicked her heels against the base of the sofa. Hard, enjoying the thudding sound it made."

      Antoinette Malone is not someone who could ever replace his first wife, Della, in John's heart. She is young, tiny, beautiful, vain, and stupid. She doesn't much care to be a step-mother, so John sends Clara to a convent school in New Orleans, and Vivian to live with his wife's family. "As time passed, John, without knowing that he did it, began to think of Vivian as a Malone. That this hurt and dismayed his daughter past all reckoning, John was too busy with his own life and with Antoinette and their frenetic new life together to notice."

      Life at the Malones has its compensations for Vivian. Mrs. Malone, the mother of eight, is warm and welcoming. Her widowed father lives under the stairs in some sort of broom closet. " 'He's no trouble,' Mrs. Malone often said of her father, and he wasn't; a heavy drinker and an inveterate gambler, he came home only to sleep off a bender or to hide from his creditors." Vivian finds him soothing, his taciturnity a relief from the chaos of the household. The youngest Malone, Willie, is Vivian's age. He's fragile and pale, and given to sick headaches, but the two form the bond common to outcasts and observers. Clara, meanwhile, develops a crush on Maureen Malone, who is blonde and beautiful, and plays the piano like an angel.

     Antoinette is happy spending John's money, and they build a new house across town from the Malones, so the girls can come live with her and John, awkward as that might be. Mama Malone helps her daughter hire live-in help, in the person of Emmy Clegern. Antoinette has a horror of black people–they threaten her in her dreams–but Emmy, with her twisted lip, should at least be safe from John's wandering eye, in case he has one. She has no idea that in Sylvan, Louisiana, "an island bounded on three sides by cotton, and on the fourth by piney woods," John has a mistress. Odessa is a young black woman who'd like to move far beyond Sylvan; John's gift of his mother's phonograph set lets her take the first steps, immersing herself in Madame Butterfly.

     It's not too hard for John Washington to keep his secrets, because he's always been a traveler. "His territory was his true home, and not even Della, on her best day, had been able to compete with it. Nowadays, the tiny Antoinette disappeared from his mind seconds after he got behind the wheel." Life in Myrtle comes with costs and entanglements, but the road, "particularly in the mornings, stretched out before John Washington like the promise of Life Everlasting."

     While he's gone, Antoinette is "thrown back on her own resources. Of which she had very few. She had no close friends and no outside interests save her house and her clothes–and subordinate to these, John." So, like her grandmother before her, she spends a lot of time sleeping. Emmy keeps Clara and Vivian quiet when they come in from school, because Antoinette is quite erratic–possibly crazy–when she's roused unexpectedly.

     Marjorie Kemper's treatment of this unstable situation is utterly artful, combining compassion and knowingness. I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor, quoting a neighbor to whom she had shown some of her stories: “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do." Probably the more apt comparison, though, would be Eudora Welty. She'd have recognized Myrtle, and the need to occasionally leave Myrtle for New Orleans; and she'd have appreciated the transition from what actually happens to what the town will say about it in later years, and what it will forget.

     One of my pre-readers asked the very reasonable question of why I'm reviewing a novel, which I don't usually do. That is to say, why this one? I first noticed Marjorie Kemper for a story in The Sun, "At Prayer Level," which has stuck with me. She's no longer with us, but I'm seeking out her other work, and it's all rewarding. A God-like narrator who has compassion for the wise and the foolish, the drunkard and the little child, somehow gives me hope.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/415/at-prayer-level

Any Good Books, email 1 June 2022