Part 19 (1/2)

”What are those plywood shacks I keep seeing out there?” I ask the stubble-faced man behind the counter. ”With the tarps.”

The man gives me a squinty look. ”You don't want to go near those,” he says. ”There's dawgs in 'em.”

”Dogs?” I say. ”Are they mean?”

”No, but their owners might be.”

”What kind of dogs are they?”

”Virginia c.o.o.nhounds,” he says. ”Gentlest animals there is, 'less you're a c.o.o.n.”

IN 1856, following the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. In it, Nina Gordon inherits the family plantation, which through soil depletion and runoff has become all but worthless. The plantation is run by her slave, Harry, who of course turns out to be her half-brother.

The t.i.tle character is another slave, Dred, who has succ.u.mbed to the mental disease of ”drapetomania,” the unreasonable yearning of a slave for freedom, and is living in the Great Dismal Swamp, where he preaches his abolitionist doctrine. Dred, it seems, was based on Dred Scott, the most controversial slave of the time. Scott was born in 1799 in Virginia, the property of Peter Blow, who moved to Missouri in 1830 and sold Scott to John Emerson. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott filed suit for his freedom, claiming that since Missouri was a free state, he ought to have been freed in 1830. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1857 that Scott actually had no case, since ”according to the Declaration of Independence, any person descended from black Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States.”

Runaways and freedmen-including the swamp dwellers, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred, and my great-grandfather-were not and could not become American citizens. It took an amendment to the Const.i.tution to overturn the Dred Scott decision; my great-grandfather was eighteen before he was allowed to become a citizen of the country in which he was born. Until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, he and his family were citizens of nowhere. Their nationality was ”Colored.” They lived in what James Baldwin called ”another country.”

Here in Virginia, we are in the very mother state of that country. The first slave s.h.i.+p to land in America sailed into Chesapeake Bay, up the James River to Jamestown, in 1615. George Was.h.i.+ngton was the son of a slave owner. Thomas Jefferson owned 187 slaves. Slavery persisted in Virginia almost until living memory. The novelist William Styron, a Virginian, could recall his grandmother telling him about the days after the Civil War, when her slaves were taken from her. While I was in Alabama and Georgia, I was in such emotional turmoil that I was tempted to compare myself to a Jew visiting Auschwitz, but Styron corrects me: ”Slavery,” he wrote, ”was not remotely like the Jewish Holocaust-of brief duration and intensely focused destruction.” Slavery persisted for 250 years and represents what Styron called ”the collective anguish from which white Americans have always averted their eyes.”

That sense of longing for redemption in the heart of American literature, and therefore of the American psyche, must spring, at least in part, from this collective anguish, for it is clear to me now that black Americans may have forgiven white America for slavery, but they have not forgotten, and neither have white Americans recovered from having imposed it. ”The drama,” Styron wrote, ”has never ended.” Slavery is still ”a world that may be dead but has not really been laid to rest.”

MARYLAND stretches ahead of us, Chesapeake Bay under our feet. We're driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a twenty-three-mile double ribbon of highway that curves elegantly across Chesapeake Bay like a partially straightened strand of DNA.

My father used to sail this bay every September with his best friend, Jim, a Virginian he got to know in Brazil. They'd take a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter and a loaf of bread and sail off together in Jim's boat. My father would never have stood for such a meal served by my mother, but he ate it ten days straight on the boat and told us about it, laughing. We could hardly imagine him out there on the James River, leaning into the breeze, dining on peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches instead of roast beef. That couldn't possibly be our father. I understand now. That's what America offered him: the chance to be something he never knew he could be.

We've seen it throughout this trip: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia, Powell on the Colorado, Huck Finn and Jim on the Mississippi. No wonder my father loved the United States. It was where he was touched by that powerful American baptism: an ordinary man transformed as he is carried by a great river to the sea.

THE BRIDGE slides us onto the Delmarva Peninsula, named for the states that share it-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. The Delmarva is a plump uvula of land that dangles down into the Atlantic, creating Delaware Bay on one side, Chesapeake Bay on the other. We're in Virginia for a few miles, then we're in Maryland, which claims the western half of the peninsula, known as the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, which, from the perspective of the state, I suppose it is, since it wraps the east side of Chesapeake Bay.

The Delmarva Peninsula doesn't have a sh.o.r.eline so much as a lacy edge penetrated by rivers with names like Sa.s.safras, Wicomico, and Choptank. The land itself is flat and sandy, as if it has only just risen above the level of the sea. Not all of the state is like this. Closer to the bay, bald cypress grows in marshlands, and in the north there are rolling hills of oak forest, with pine groves in the mountains to the west. Maryland's culture s.h.i.+fts with its geography: it's Appalachian on the west, more like the Northeast in the middle, while the part we're driving through is indistinguishable from the South we've been traversing since Georgia. No wonder the state calls itself ”America in Miniature.” The only thing it lacks is lakes.

”Did you know there isn't a single lake in Maryland?”

”Glaciers never made it this far south,” Wayne says, and I look at him in wonder. His friend the novelist Matt Cohen once said that if Wayne's brain had a yard sale, it would take up a lot of sidewalk. Several blocks, I would think.

The part of Maryland we see through the winds.h.i.+eld is fis.h.i.+ng and farm country. Small towns dot the landscape: Eden, Greensboro, Locust Grove. The bulk of Maryland's population is cl.u.s.tered in Baltimore, the capital, and around Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., which absorbs a chunk of the state. Intent on avoiding cities as long as we can, we head north up through Delaware, known as the First State, since it was the first, in 1787, to ratify the Const.i.tution of the new United States of America.

We're crossing state lines every few hours now: North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware. No two of them, it seems, can agree on how fast we should be travelling. On our way to El Paso it was eighty. In Arizona, New Mexico, and deer-infested Utah, it was seventy-five. Through the southern states it was seventy, and now, it seems, the powers that be have deemed speeds above sixty-five miles an hour suicidal. When we move to a two-lane highway, the legal speed drops again, to fifty-five.

”I wish they'd make up their minds,” Wayne says, glancing at the rear-view mirror. Delaware is on a level plain, the lowest mean elevation of any state in the nation. There seems no good reason not to breeze along.

Before we know it, we're in Wilmington, slipping onto the I-95 and into Pennsylvania. No state signs here on the interstate, no cameos of William Penn, no prettily painted panels with Enjoy Your Visit or Welcome! or even the simple and direct State Line. Even the sign painters know it is hopeless to try to distinguish one blur of this throughway from another. We're in another megalopolis, the mirror image of the one we drove through at the beginning of this journey.

We skirt close to the Mason-Dixon Line, the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania that was defined as the line of lat.i.tude fifteen miles south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when, exactly, we cross from the Rebel South into the Yankee North. The view outside the window is relentlessly urban, but on the map, I spot a note of elegance: the shapely arc of the Delaware border with Pennsylvania, drawn at a twelve-mile radius from the cupola on the courthouse in New Castle. It is the only circular state boundary in the United States. In fact, I can't think of anything else like it on any map I've ever seen. It's nothing we'd be able to see as we drive, but Delawarians must surely be aware of this curve, like a rose window at the top of their state.

All this time we have resisted what Steinbeck called ”these ribbons of concrete and tar” that slash through the landscape, stopping for nothing, but we're road-weary, we're overstuffed with impressions. The d.a.m.ned throughways are almost soothing now.

It is dark by the time we take the exit for Princeton and pick up Route 1, the most easterly in the country. We stop for gas, and the attendant is terse, not unfriendly exactly, but not open either, held back in that northeastern way, waiting for us to speak first. Not like Bay Bridge Betty, not like Mary in Jefferson, and not at all like the man in Jackson who led us to the parade. In moments, we will be with our friends, with Canadians, but already I feel an ache for those places where strangers speak to us without reserve, where a man we've known for five minutes spreads his arms wide and grins, ”Well, then, we're all of us connected.”

WALKING with us up Witherspoon Street, in downtown Princeton, our friend Lauren is recounting history. The street is history. The very air in Princeton is historical.

”The street is named for John Witherspoon,” she says, ”one of three Princetonians who signed the Declaration of Independence. The other two were Richard Stockton and Joseph Hewes.”

Here in the East, I can't help feeling that history has weight, that the streets teem with the ghosts of the distant dead. New England has become Old America. There was history in the West, of course, but most of it was geological: four-thousand-year-old trees, four-billion-year-old canyons, ancient volcanoes, ageless deserts, timeless rivers. The land was old; the people were new. Here in Princeton, history seems to have galloped at a furious pace; the land recedes into the background, a backdrop to the human parade.

”On your way into Princeton, you came along Stockton Street, named for Richard Stockton,” Lauren continues. ”Hewes moved to Wilmington, I think.”

Here is the parsonage where Paul Robeson was born. Here is Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, where Robeson attended the Witherspoon School for Colored Children, which was started in 1858 by Betsey Stockton, one of Robert Stockton's freed slaves. Here is Lahiere's, the restaurant where Albert Einstein often ate lunch. We can see his favourite table through the window. Einstein lived in Princeton from 1933, when he came to work at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study, until his death in 1955, by which time the inst.i.tute was being run by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Lahiere's was owned by Joseph and Mary Louise Christen, who were from Zurich. For Einstein, eating there must have felt as though he were reliving his happiest years, which were spent in Zurich. Time collapsing and expanding, memories merging with contemporary events, faces dissolving and reappearing with altered features. No wonder he came to believe that there were aspects of reality that quantum mechanics, based as it was on mathematical probability rather than observation, couldn't explain. Life was improbable, and yet there it was.

Lauren and her husband Ron are expat Canadians, she from Montreal and Ron from Quebec City. Ron is the executive vice-president of customer management with Zurich Insurance, and Lauren is a novelist. They like the United States and have been welcomed into the Princeton community. Lauren is involved in a number of volunteer organizations and is the writer-in-residence at Trinity Church, where she teaches creative writing.

We walk past Princeton Cemetery, which occupies a huge portion of the town at the corner of Witherspoon and Wiggins. Merilyn, of course, has a brochure.

”President Grover Cleveland is buried here,” she says.

”And Paul Robeson's parents,” Lauren adds.

”Oh,” Merilyn exclaims, ”and Sara Agnes Pryor-founder of the Daughters of the American Revolution. And here's one for you, Wayne: John O'Hara, the novelist.”

”b.u.t.terfield 8,” I say. ”But you two are the novelists.”

”He wrote his own epitaph. Haven't you always wanted to do that?”

”What did he say about himself?”

”'Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional, he wrote honestly and well.'”

”I should start working on mine,” I say. ”I'm Canadian, so I can't say 'better than anyone else.' How about, 'As well as he could, under the circ.u.mstances, and given his limitations, he told what he knew of the truth about his time'?”

”You're too modest,” says Merilyn. ”And it's way too long.”

This exchange brings us to Na.s.sau Street, Princeton's main drag. On one side is the university; along the other, where we are walking, is a series of shops, including a bookstore.

”Why don't you two go on,” I say to Lauren and Merilyn. ”I'll just pop in here and meet you after lunch.”

Micawber's is having a going-out-of-business sale. I feel like a vulture at a roadkill, sidling up to its half-price tables, but a bargain is a bargain. I gorge.

”Why are you closing?” I ask the young woman at the cash as she starts going through the pile.

”The university bookstore is expanding to two floors,” she says. ”We can't compete.”

”You needn't worry,” I say, thinking of the university bookstore in Athens. ”The first floor will be all sweats.h.i.+rts, coffee mugs, and backpacks. You'll need a tracking device to find the books.”

”You're sweet,” she says, smiling. ”Do you need help carrying these to your car?”