Last Trip After Education

For three weeks after graduate school in May and June 1981, I visited a number of friends. The trip took me to Springfield, Illinois; Columbus, Georgia; Fort Rucker, Alabama; New Orleans; and along the Mississippi River north through Vicksburg Mississippi; Portageville and Ballwin, Missouri; and then home to Iowa City. It was the last trip after finishing my education and before applying said education to my life. I had no idea how things would turn out.

The trip was unlike the Grand Tour I made after undergraduate school. Since then, I had served in the military, lived in Europe for three years, attended graduate school on the G.I. Bill, and moved through degree preparation like a fish swims through water. Two artist friends brought a bottle of champagne to my place and helped celebrate my graduation. We discussed audiences and art. How much are artists influenced by their audiences? Should they be influenced? I believed then, and more so now, a writer must concern themselves with an audience. In 1981, I had no art, little public writing, and no concept of audience other than people who held a certain undefined social status.

Each place I went held vestiges of antebellum life. From the black housekeeper of an IRS worker, to racist attitudes among my former Army buddies, to a local culture where the next Ku Klux Klan meeting was all the social buzz, it was everywhere I went.

What struck me more than anything was the ordinariness of people I met. People stood at odds with the American culture I know. Or maybe, they represented an American culture I hadn’t come to know. While Lincoln’s bones rest in Springfield, the living there seemed unprepared to take up the unfinished tasks of the dead. Instead they participated in a culture devoid of life as they performed old, well-patterned ceremonies of living that had lost their meaning by 1981. My trip was a hard reckoning with reality.

Near Columbus, Georgia I visited a place that today is called Historic Westville. The ticket I bought is printed with the message, “Westville. Where it’s always 1850.” Westville is a fabricated village made from buildings built before 1850 and moved to what was once an open field. It was to represent the zenith of cultural life in the antebellum south. People who had visited Colonial Williamsburg would be disappointed by Westville, yet the designers did the best they could. Attendance was slight the day I visited.

In one building I met a period costumed woman who showed me an example of home spun thread. There was a spinning wheel and she showed me how it worked. However, despite the knowledge, she didn’t know how to make homespun herself. I found something about this disappointingly characteristic of modern day Americans. We may know the ideas behind how things work, to actually do such work, to put ideas into motion, is a step too far for many. Americans, above all else, must practice those things they know are important. When it came to equality under the law, the south of my trip failed to measure up.

After finishing my long education I had to get going in life. I felt an urge to put into practice what I learned during the first thirty years. I knew then I couldn’t be like some of the friends I encountered on this trip south. What I would become was both unknown and an open book. As much as any other time, I began writing that book in 1981.