Varina

by Charles Frazier

And heaps of guilt too, for failing to find a bloodless way to end ownership of people—choosing a bloodbath instead. Since then, South and North have been busy constructing new memories and new histories, fictions fighting to become facts.

If you haven’t noticed, she says, we’re a furious nation, and war drums beat in our chest.

V recommended a couple of her favorite Greeks, and Jane asked for justification, the basis of her recommendation. V said that in her opinion, when the old Greek writers committed to cutting, they drove bone-deep with the first stroke.

Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?

The first sound of a culture collapsing from its highest steeples starts as a whisper, a sigh. The rattle of windows in their frames. Nobody listens until it thunders, when its structure—all the massive weight held in air as by a magician’s trick depending on sleight of hand, misdirection of attention—collapses to its foundational sins.

V holds this body with its reluctant spark of life inside, compassed by such a frail container of skin, all its messy fluids and mysterious greasy dark organs held within a membrane hardly more substantive than a soap bubble. Touch it gently and it pops. Gone to nothing.

but it looks like a hotel. —Except, last week I thought I heard someone scream. —Words fail, V says. To live is to rant.

V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it’s not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.

Don’t think about the existence of an artifact representative of that time, the whipping post. It played no direct part in their decades together. One could be with them for days and forget that their fundamental relationship was anything but friendship and respect and mutual responsibility stretching back to youth. But then something would happen.

A small shift in Jeff’s tone of voice asking for the second time that some minor task be done, a moment of ignoring Pemberton as if he weren’t there. Flashes of language and particular tones of rudeness revealed that the relationship between the two men was deeply complex. That the fundamental note of their long history together condensed to a simple fact—one member of the friendship was owner and the other was both labor and capital. And then the shadow of that post traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.

V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it at about nine or ten—not the wrongness or the sin of it, the strangeness only.

she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.

Only a little more time—three seasons, V speculated—until all sense of man’s dominion over them would fade and they’d start taking down stray children and elder folks. Two or three dog generations after that, they’d go wholly wolf. Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’s all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.

On how civilizations crumble

Subtract everything inessential from America and what’s left? —Geography and political philosophy, V says. The Declaration and Constitution. The Federalist Papers. —I’d say geography and mythology, James says. Our legends. He gives examples, talks about Columbus sailing past the edge of the world, John Smith at Jamestown and Puritans at Plymouth Rock, conquering the howling wilderness. Benjamin Franklin going from rags to riches with the help of a little slave trading, Frederick Douglass escaping to freedom, the assassination of Lincoln, annexing the West. All those stories that tell us who we are—stories of exploration, freedom, slavery, and always violence. We keep clutching those things, or at least worn-out images of them, like idols we can’t quit worshipping.

Violence is the story of America

wet-nursed him from the day he was born until he turned three. It’s hard for me to believe he hates me, and hard to hate him.

Fame. All it means is, people who don’t know one true thing about you get to have opinions and feel entitled to aim their screeds your way.

Don’t wait, do it now, not decades later when every throb of feeling ebbs, every action and choice becomes tinged with regret and harsh judgment, a sense of waste and loss and emptiness, life narrowing down to little more than an endless railway tunnel. Let go, son. It will be all right. Take one deep breath and then just rise from this bad place and from your broken body and keep going. I’ll sit here with you and hold your hand until you’ve made it past the bend in the road and into the green woods.

On dying while young and idealistic

Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—ten out of ten—he’ll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building. And that’s how freedom and chains and a whipping post can live alongside each other comfortably.

How slavery can live with concepts of freedom, because money always wins

You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.

Every beautiful thing in the country darkens to one degree or another by theft of lives.