Posting an essay here, since very few of you read my writing LJ.
I was giddy when the clerk saw what I was proffering at my boyfriend and took up my cause. She said that Sarah Vowell called Robert Todd Lincoln “Jinxy” and when Matt smiled I knew he’d been sold.
The drive to Athens from Gainesville (one thriving micropolis college town to another) takes five hours if the traffic is clear and I don’t drink too many sugar free Red Bulls (five and a half if its not and I do). Usually I am towing guests, boyfriends, or fellow concert goers, but in this first of quite a few future zig zags meant to establish the next phase of my life, my trip back to Georgia is shared only with a load of white Office Max document boxes containing books, books, books, clothes, shows, papers, and books. By cuing up all six discs of Assassination Vacation in the trunk’s cd changer, I am lessening the risk of music collection burnout for trips to come and the lonesome feel of an interstate drive on my own, which if not monitored very closely, had the potential to morph into a session of my already overtaxed mechanism of self-reflection.
For me, Sarah Vowell represents the possibilities currently crowding me as well as the failures already catalogued. Fellow TMBG fan and culture fetishist. Friend of many of my heroes, contemporary to the rest (my god, what I wouldn’t give to have Dave Eggers listed in my cell phone contacts). Her success serves to highlight the panic-inducing possibilities of this summer, my first after college graduation. Sure, she’s older and has had a chance to make successes and I can’t know what her failures were (and she must have had failures, because all writers have failures, don’t they?). Am I even poised to attempt to achieve at this point in my life, or would I be better off continuing my scribblings and observations until a truly great idea takes hold and germinates in my fertile brain?
I listen to Sarah chatter away about presidential facts and assassination plots as the dwindling Floridian distance bleeds into Valdosta. The sky is a magnificent expanse of grapefruit red and royal purple, bright and huge in a way that only the flat far South can boast. I think about these sunsets and how far from my south Florida adolescence I have come. How much further I have to go. When her friends take on the voices of the historical characters (Conan O’Brien as Robert Todd Lincoln, Jon Stewart as James A. Garfield), I begin to imagine which of my friends would read roles in one of my audio books. Lee, with his cartoonish announcers’ voice, similar in some ways to Fred Schneider of the B-52s. Matt, with the patrician drawl and Russian-toned character voice. Clara, who can sound as harsh as soundpaper or as sweet as honey. Cam, whose Depression-era fixation and Louisiana heritage have afforded him an unmistakably commanding drawl.
As Sarah’s nasal yet pleasant voice talks me past the state line, I think about the other similarities between us. Her personal library runs toward kitsch Americana and cocktail party factoids, much like my own. When she references Barbara Tuchman, I picture the shelves I’d just left behind. A glowing feeling of comradeship tingles in the fingertips that grip my steering wheel. A surge of power, of belief in my future, urges me to step on the gas pedal, as though each second on the road is a precious second of possibility lost.
In the ever darkening twilight, I spot a brown notice on the side of the road. Brown is the stately color chosen by our government to denote historical sites. This one is indicating that if I get off at the next exit and continue on for 20 miles, I’ll see the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site. Positively awestruck with my luck - the timing! the serendipity! - I pull off the highway.
Fifteen minutes into the sparsely populated country, I’m revisiting the wisdom of this decision. What, exactly, would there be to see? The historic spot I’m aiming for is the historic patch of grass on which, historically, a company of soldiers and the historical figure they were guarding historically were captured by their enemies. So will there be a load of mannequins, or maybe a Toussaud’s-style reconstruction of Jefferson Davis looking wide-eyed, hands in the air?
I turn left onto a thin two lane road. On my right are a series of notices tacked to a utility pole (lost dog, barn party). On my left is some sort of factory which deals in what I deduce to be corn. The stubby sand parking lot has spaces set aside for each of its secretaries. Their names are embarrassingly Southern and I want nothing more than for it to be afternoon so I could drop in and meet the two secretaries who keep the tiny corn mill up on its gossip and connected to the world.
The Jeff Davis Capture Site is just ahead on my left. As I’d suspected, it is closed, and also as I suspected, there’s doesn’t seem to be much to see. There’s a museum, but lord only knows what they’d have in there. Fossilized crusts of bread dropped in the captive’s haste, primitive camo sheeting used to hide the Davis contingent from sight?
I realize as I climb back into my car with my unused digital camera in hand that my cheeks are burning. This patch of South Georgia land is embarrassing, cringing, and uneasy. This is the site of historical failure - failure which meant the success of a truer cause. I’m torn between admiration that Georgia and the greater South were gallant enough to make a site of defeat a historical landmark and the eyebrow-knit confusion as to why they thought that was a good idea.
When I was much younger, I visited a mansion in Abbeville, South Carolina that had been the site where Jefferson Davis was said to have made the decision to dissolve the confederate government. That warm and charming house seemed appropriate to what I, an elementary school aged child, knew about wars and documents and declarations. I felt as though I were visiting history when I stepped through each staged room in my Keds.
Now that I’m older, having learned the truth about carpet baggers, the crippling poverty of the reconstruction and permanent damage to a region’s infrastructure, I find an appropriate poetry in the soggy grass and destitute agrarian landscape of Georgia’s historic site.
Epilogue
Sitting at my desk at work, almost nine months after first beginning this piece, I’m no closer to Sarah Vowelldom. I haven’t been published. I’m only twenty pages into my novel and I can’t seem to stop editing what little I have. I’ve written countless short blurbs of prose, but nothing like what I was writing at the time when I left school. A dense four month cloud of depression, deeper than any I’ve experienced before, has only recently been lessened with the aid of pharmaceuticals.
I checked out Georgia’s official web page for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site. After a remarkably perky account of the capture, there are a list of links and info, including picnic times and coloring book pages which you can print out and color. The first is titled “A Volunteer and Companion”. I’m not sure whether I’m more appalled at the suggestion that the typical Confederate soldier was a volunteer (much less as cheerful as this fellow who holds his gentleman’s gloves in his hand) or that they felt including a gaudily appointed Southern dame in the picture and calling her a “companion” was appropriate.
Again, I’ve been blessed with timing. As I rally myself for a second attempt at my future with renewed energy (and realigned sanity), I came across this essay I’d begun last summer. Rereading it reminds me of how I felt and inspires me to try again, even without the dauntless spirit I had in those heady, manic days as a nascent resident of the red Georgia clay.
Like Jefferson Davis, I have made mistakes so monstrously huge that I believed I could never recover - that I did not deserve to recover. Like the South, I have been hampered by a deep gash in my history. Part of this history is something I need not relieve again. If I stick to my medication, redouble my efforts in my vocation, and create my own Assassination Vacation, I think things can be okay.