1

WE WERE ALL BUCK-NAKED, wearing only our watches, maybe our potato-sized high-school rings, and toting our wallets. We were almost surely hapless American citizens, summoned for pre-induction draft physicals in our time and place. We were upstairs in a dim building in downtown Raleigh. I’d got home a couple of weeks earlier to find, on the night of my arrival, the letter I’d dreaded. It was waiting on the desk in my boyhood bedroom among welcome letters from English friends (no one, in those days, corresponded with the ferocious loyalty and promptitude of the English). The return address said, in letters of flame, Selective Service System.

And here I was, obedient to the call. Some two hundred of us—black, white, and a very few others from one of the surviving eastern Tar Heel Indian tribes—had appeared with astonishing unanimity at seven in the morning. As I entered the dark room and looked round for any encouraging face, I glanced into the farthest corner and saw an old high-school classmate. He had a magnificent name—Brutus Bloxton—and looked exactly like such a man—tall, built like a three-story brick warehouse, and blessed with a likably handsome face. I went toward him, and Brutus and I soon caught ourselves up on our lives since high school—a long seven years.

I’ve forgot what Brutus had been doing meanwhile—and now he’s long dead—but before we were summoned to the first event of an ominous morning, he reached into the watch pocket of his trousers and slowly drew out something apparently precious. He whispered “Look here.” When I looked, he was half concealing a small pill, much smaller than an aspirin. I had to ask what it was; and Brutus whispered again—“See, I’ve got the high blood” (a regional term for hypertension). “This is just to make sure it stays high today.” With that, he put the pill in his mouth and swallowed hard—just as a tiny corporal called out that we must now assort ourselves under unmistakable letters of the alphabet, hung from overhead wires. We obeyed in the usual semi-distracted Southern fashion (some of us slowed by an uncertain knowledge of the alphabet).

Then we were led upstairs and slotted into small rooms. There we spent a silent hour answering two kinds of printed questions. First there was a straightforward intelligence test of the sort many of us had taken from grade school onward. Next came a page headed Do you now have or have you ever had? That question was followed by several dozen Yes/No possibilities—measles, epileptic seizures, syphilis, and so on into a final sweep of more complicated choices like nervous breakdown, prison sentence, homosexual relations. I had no trouble answering all the questions honestly, though several of them had never confronted me before—not in writing at least.

Next we were herded into a wide room that seemed to run the length of the building, back toward the State Capitol (some two blocks away). Here we were told to remove all clothing—barring jewelry, watches, and wallets—and leave the clothes, with the shaving kits we’d been told to bring, in a row of unlockable lockers. Then we passed down, one by one, before a line of doctors and medics and were given further brief commands. First, we were weighed. A short black man, who’d cheerfully introduced himself to me as Bernice, stood immediately ahead. He climbed on the scales, and the arrow slammed past the maximum weight—300 pounds. The unamused medic looked at my new friend’s paperwork and said “Bernice, estimate your weight.” Bernice admitted he didn’t know but allowed it was “Bound to be more than three hundred.” He looked back at me and winked. The medic said “Nothing funny about this. Move ahead.”

Already Bernice was disqualified for service; but his wink helped me onward in the grim process (we’d been commanded to bring a shaving kit since, if we were found fit, we’d be instantly inducted and shipped out). My robust friend and I were parted at that point, but several other laughs proved helpful. One doctor said to another man before me in line, “Bend over and spread your cheeks.” The man bent way forward, inserted two fingers into his mouth, spread his facial cheeks, and looked back at the doctor before he could be told to spread his buttocks for a rectal exam.

I provided no amusement to anyone wearing a uniform but performed all commands abjectly—trapped already in the prevailing atmosphere of semi-civil, total control. When I turned to proceed through other physical tests, I nearly collided with a small cot. On it was lying Brutus Bloxton, likewise naked and surrounded by medics with blood-pressure sleeves. The pill seemed to be at work; and when Brutus saw me standing above him, he gave me my second wink of the morning. I silently mouthed “Good luck” and kept going, half expecting to hear Brutus explode behind me.

As little as I wished to serve in the army for several years—quitting my job at Duke and my hopes of writing—I was nonetheless moving forward here, in typical American-boy fashion, as passively as a castrated ram, a wether. Other than obedience I had only one choice—I could quietly dress and walk out. Likely no one would stop me. But sooner or later I’d receive another letter; and if I failed to obey at that point, I’d presumably be arrested and compelled either into service—if acceptable—or confinement in a federal prison. In any case, after twenty more minutes of simple challenges—a blood test and a chest X-ray—we were shepherded into short lines before three open doorways.

*        *        *

Three yards behind each door, a military physician was seated with a pencil. We waited three yards outside the door and were waved forward as the prior man concluded his interview. My particular doctor wore navy whites, a pleasant-looking man, not yet thirty. When I stepped to his desk, I remained upright—still naked—as he found my papers in a short stack before him. He spent a silent minute glancing at my intelligence-test score and my answers to the Have you ever questions. At closer range I could see he was young, hardly older than I and likewise black-haired; and he spoke very softly as though to prevent the next man from hearing us. Finally he beckoned me nearer still, and his pencil pointed to the question about homosexual relations. He said “Edward, do you know what this means?” (Edward is my first name).

I said “Yes sir.”

It took him twenty seconds, looking down all the while, to frame his next question. “Have you consulted a psychiatrist about this problem?”

I said “Sir, I’ve never felt the need.” I’d thought from the start, with Bernice at the scales, that it was odd to be addressed here by our first names; was it a studied attempt to calm us?

At last the doctor could look up and face me.

In my wallet I had a letter from my local physician attesting to the true fact that I had a lifetime history of serious respiratory allergies. I handed the letter over. The doctor read it slowly, then handed it back. He opened a small black book to his left, consulted several pages, and entered a long line of coded information at the bottom of one of my forms—a total of maybe ten letters and numbers. Then he faced me again—“You can dress and go to the next room.” I assumed that my exam was finished; my fate was sealed and, for now, encoded in that penciled formula. Soon I’d know what it meant, so I dressed as told and went to the next room, a smaller space. Some dozen men, mostly younger than I, waited on a long bench against the wall. I joined the others.

A condensed, muscle-packed man sat opposite—five yards away. Soon he called my name, Price Edward. The reverse order seemed bad news, but I advanced to face him and surrendered my papers.

He wore army khaki and had every physical characteristic of the ultimate hard-assed drill sergeant. He confirmed that I was Price Edward, then looked down at the crucial line of code, opened his own black book, consulted a few pages slowly, entered another line of code beneath the first, then looked up with what I’ve always remembered—maybe unfairly—as a look of pure despisal (though maybe he faced his wife and child identically at each predawn breakfast; he was not a happy man). “Price, you’ve been found unfit for military service. Take your kit and leave.” He didn’t specify my failings, but I doubt I’ve ever heard two more welcome sentences in conjunction. Of course I concealed my elation.

But Brutus Bloxton—who’d filed in behind me, still undressed—called out “All right.” I’d seen no one all morning who couldn’t have been curled into pretzel shape by Brutus, so I gave him a V sign in unalloyed thanks. Then I quietly drove to Mother’s house and phoned her at the store with welcome news. Later in the week I tried to phone Brutus, reached his mother, and learned that the high blood pressure (native or not) had apparently saved him. In any case, the army had sent him down to Fort Bragg to rest overnight under observation before concluding he was too big a risk.

*        *        *

Classes had almost started and I still hadn’t found the country dwelling I wanted. I was staying mostly with Mother and Bill in Raleigh; but I also spent as much time as possible in Warren County—our poor and underpopulated but beautiful home place an hour to the north on the Virginia state border. Lifelong affection for kinfolk on both sides of our family, and the hope of real news about our shared past, led me first to my aunt Ida Rodwell Drake. She’d reared Mother, when their parents died in Mother’s childhood, and was living still in the village of Macon in the rambling white house built by my grandfather John Egerton Rodwell in about 1886.

I’d been born in the same house and had spent a good many of my happiest days there with Ida in the 1930s and ’40s. She was eighteen years older than Mother; and in the absence of a maternal grandmother, Ida had always been—in effect—my grandmother. She’d borne and raised three sons of her own, each of whom had devastated her hopes again and again with their alcoholism. For a good part of my childhood then, without knowing why, I’d gladly received—and, I think, reciprocated—a quantity of love that had lain untapped within her. We’d written each other often in my years abroad; and her husband had died while I was in England, so she was now alone in the old house.

Freed at last of army dread, I felt more than ever poised to complete a volume of stories with the long account of Rosacoke and Wesley; and before my teaching duties began, I was hell-bent on moving Oxford and Britain far to one side of my mind and filling all available space with the materials of language and narrative I’d need—the languorous words and rhythms of eastern Carolina in those last days before the universal blighting eye of television had begun to substitute itself for the rich old speech that had built itself on seventeenth-century British English and a single other great contribution.

*        *        *

The site of the first permanent English colony in North America was only some ninety crow’s-flight miles from Macon, and it was at Jamestown that African slaves were first bought in 1619 from Dutch traders. The brand of the English language that those inventive captives (and their two or three freed generations of descendants) had made for their own daily intermingling with owners and neighbors was another rich influence on my early speech and thought—an influence I was especially eager now to recover, both for my pleasure and for use in my story. Few places in the South preserved as rich a brand of black English as Warren County, North Carolina.

As late as my return home, many black people were living there in conditions that—so far as housing, food, and clothing were concerned—were often worse than those maintained by any slave owner concerned with protecting his largest investment. Still the vigor of black English thereabouts—the rising pitch and the endless wit of its sentences—was intact, thank God, wherever I turned: perhaps the most potent of several inventions that had kept these people alive and stable for so many years.

I’m well aware that such a description may read like a long-outdated defense of the slow years of oppressed segregation that followed abolition. It’s not. It attempts to describe honestly the convincing welcome I always got from black men and women in Macon as long as I was known there (I mainly stopped going in the mid-1980s when paraplegia ended my driving). But did that apparent sincerity from those welcoming African-Americans conceal degrees of hatred or hostility? No doubt many of them had long practiced the deployment of intricate layers of concealment in their dealings with white folks, yet don’t all human beings search out an inner core of kinsmen and friends to love or like (or tolerate with amusement)? Those older natives of Macon had surely found occasional whites whom they could like, however selectively. They’d also developed wary skills for selecting the few likable characteristics of highly prejudiced whites and acknowledging those traits in the language of daily discourse.

I could sit in Ida’s kitchen, for instance, and talk with a black woman who’d blessed my childhood with ceaseless generosity. Her name was Mary Lee Parker, and she’d cooked there as long as I remembered. Her father was a prominent local white man; and Mary Lee knew it, though the paternity had never been publicly announced. I’d occasionally witnessed, in my summer visits, rare brief flare-ups of temper between Mary Lee and Ida. But I never came in for the least trace of whatever resentments this more than half-white woman had stored; and until her death some twenty years later, Mary Lee and I remained in good touch.

While I doubt she ever read more than a few pages of my subsequent fiction (pages that transformed the death of her daughter in childbirth), I know that she had some sense of participating in it through years of the free-flowing talk between us. Free-flowing as it was, however, it was only on my last visit to her—in her sweltering house with the Kennedy postcard propped on her mantel—that she asked me finally, as though I might know, “Reynolds, why do the white people hate the black people so much?” I could only tell her it was the deepest mystery we had, and she gave a one-note chuckle at my helplessness.

After a kitchen morning with Mary Lee or an afternoon on the porch with Ida—asking her to tell me, one more time, some story from the past she’d actually known (it extended to her birth in 1888 and far beyond in her memory of stories told by others)—I could ride out into the country in Mother’s car (my own had yet to land) and find old black friends of my mother and father, most of whom met me pleasantly on my return from “over the pond.” One still-active man who might have been born a slave—that was a question you didn’t ask—wanted to know how I liked Mr. Churchill (pronounced as two distinct syllables, Church-hill). But not once did I encounter a whiff of rancor or indifference, only the same old readiness to surround me, submerge me, in magically looping tales of the past—their own, my mother’s girlhood, my infancy hereabouts. My difficult birth and my dangerous escapade at the age of two in a runaway goat cart was still a memory of considerable vitality and laughter (and in numerous versions).

I could drive five miles to Warrenton, where my father’s three sisters still lived. There I could stay with two of them in the old Price place where the two kept house for themselves and an aged and difficult maiden aunt who—whatever problems she presented—was never committed to a nursing home. In fairly typical American fashion, the mother repeatedly takes the children to visit her own family home, and the father passively agrees. Thus my brother and I had seen little of these women in our childhood. By the time Bill and I were on our own, though, we quickly learned that the Price women—famous for their sharp tongues (the two oldest had experienced monumentally sad marriages)—could give us fascinating company in a good many ways, at times even more so than the Rodwells. They shared the Rod-well willingness to speak quite freely of family calamities, including our scandals; but the Prices spiced their stories with even more wit and humor—tendencies that were perhaps endowments of their mixed Scottish, Welsh, and French Huguenot blood.

In short, with the personal tragedies receding into the past, they could recount the lives of others—all of them were our kin and nearby friends—with a detailed and not-quite-cruel delight in the spectacles of human folly (they loved nothing more than a joke on themselves). As a grown man I’d just begun to comprehend and join them in that delight, a skill that had been unavailable to me in childhood; and once I possessed their tales, I could pass them on with the only narrative skill my aunts lacked. That final skill was a gift of my father’s to my brother and me (is it chiefly a male trait?)—we could mimic the voices and manners of our subjects to apparently startling, and laughable, degrees.

In addition to those human reconnections, I spent long hours simply driving through the county. In those days its fields were mainly devoted to raising tobacco (cotton had mostly moved farther south); and its apparently endless clusters of pines were providing pulp wood for the manufacture of paper just down the road in Halifax County, where one paper mill offended the air on any damp evening. Peanuts were grown also but it would be nearly two more decades before the diminished number of American smokers made peanuts and pulp-wood the county’s substitute main crops.

What I was mostly seeking on my rides was the solitude that had been such a gift to my childhood—the dappled silent woods and streams through which I rambled, well before I could drive, and kept long company with nothing but my own mind, stocked as it then was with little more than the books I’d read, the movies I’d seen, and the dreams of becoming a grown man with power to make my particular art (not till I was sixteen or seventeen did I turn, as so many writers have, from being a painter to the writing of fiction and poetry). Apart from the care I’d received from my parents and other kin, that country silence—a substance as real as trees and sky—had brought me to where I was then and there. I was a hopeful man who’d nonetheless reached his mid-twenties with no large piece of public work, no partner I hoped to trust forever, no children, no money, and no job that promised regular pay for more than three years.

Yet a close confrontation with those realities left me oddly happier than maybe it should have. By then in the States, a middle-class man at twenty-five was still a young man (not the post-adolescent he often is today). But no one I knew had managed to say Get your ass in gear and finish this book you’ve promised to any number of well-wishers. When I headed back to Mother’s to search the classifieds for a country dwelling in easy reach of Duke—a residence I could both afford and soon turn into my usual cocoon of books and pictures around a central desk—I did so with more than a few nightmares suggesting that my aim was misguided if not ludicrous. My father had been well on into his thirties before he managed to quit his drinking and hear his life click down on the track it could follow with any degree of rewarding response. How long would life take before I heard a similar click?

Again the hard thing was—and I didn’t realize it was hard because I didn’t know it existed as a problem—I didn’t truly know how to proceed with my writing (and I’ve still never heard of anyone who was taught a useful means of managing the problem). If nothing else, the work on my Samson thesis should have shown me this. I hardly doubted that I had an endowment for words and rhythm, and I’d already looked down into a deep potential well of subjects. How, though, could I persuade my mind—my actual hands—to put the words and their story on paper, day after day? It was as real a problem as if you told an apprentice potter to persuade a lump of damp clay to rise on a wheel and form a sturdy but handsome bowl—not a question of technique but of sheer procedure: how to move from one to two, A to B, without losing force, and how to do it daily. The answer wouldn’t come to the potter, or me, till we’d worked and failed a good many times.

*        *        *

Soon after my liberation from the draft—and numerous discouraging visits to country landladies with airless garage apartments to rent—Professor Blackburn phoned me one evening at Mother’s and said that he’d seen a promising ad in that day’s paper—a trailer/house combination on the edge of Duke Forest. There’d been no further details in the ad, though in his paternal way, Blackburn had already phoned the listed number and got directions for seeing the place if I was interested—he clearly thought I should be. His own hunch fired my hopes in the matter.

In an hour I’d got to Durham, collected Blackburn, pushed on west of town, and entered the dense dark that surrounds (and still encloses) the west side of the university—seven thousand acres of evergreens and hardwoods. With some initial difficulty we found the landlord’s house at the junction of two dirt roads just on the edge of Orange County, four miles from campus—the southwest corner of Kerley Road and Cornwallis. Henry May proved to be a talkative middle-aged alumnus of Duke and a teacher in a local junior high (we didn’t yet say “middle school”). From the moment we arrived, he assumed I’d already rented his property—he thought it was that irresistible. And in deep dark anyhow, it was. The dwelling itself was thirty yards from the house where he and his wife lived.

It consisted of a faded blue pre–World War II trailer (maybe ten yards long with a built-in bed and a convertible sofa); then a three-foot-long connecting passageway led into a brand-new pale-green cinder-block house that sat parallel to the trailer and contained a small living room with a salvaged car-seat sofa, built-in bookshelves; a kitchen with a sink, a stove, a shower stall, a toilet; and outside was a separate garage. There was no air-conditioning, and the only heat would come from a huge oil burner in the living room—two matters that seemed of little importance to a recent dweller on Sandfield Road. I couldn’t yet see the alleged adjacent pond or the nearby woods, but the rent and Mr. May’s confidence in me turned the deal. I’d pay the monthly sum of forty-five dollars, less than ten percent of my monthly check; and I could move in tomorrow. A few days earlier I’d gone down to Charleston by bus and rescued my car. Amazingly it had survived its own Atlantic crossing with literally no scratches, and the customs duty turned out to be small.

Next morning then I loaded a few things at Mother’s and began to move myself into the first freestanding house of which I’d be the master, however bizarre its architectural components. I awarded myself a long walk in the ample, and amply promising, adjacent woods (Mr. May had purchased more than a hundred acres, on a schoolteacher’s salary during the Depression); and that night Blackburn opened a bottle of Almaden Pinot Noir, baked two large potatoes, and broiled a thick sirloin in his bachelor apartment near campus. That was the launching of a friendship that built on our old teacher-student days, our 1956 week in London, and would become an enduringly supportive and unintentionally draining long-term experience.

In Raleigh I’d busied myself, harvesting from Mother’s excess a sturdy worktable, a few dishes, minimal eating and cooking implements, plus sheets and towels. My cousin Mildred Drake cheerfully volunteered to make the plain curtains for my several windows; and a day or two before I’d teach my first classes, I hung my English-acquired drawings and etchings, and laid out my sizable table. Though I could only hope for it then, it would be the surface on which I’d write all my first book and a good part of the second and third. I especially liked the fact—and read it as a good omen—that the table had been a family dining table for numerous years.

Then I set down my short stack of completed fiction. It consisted of “Michael Egerton,” “A Chain of Love,” “The Anniversary,” “The Warrior Princess Ozimba,” and the last story begun in England—“Troubled Sleep”—which lay uneasy, awaiting the last light touches for completion. Thin as the stack might be, I still believed in the goodness of what I’d achieved so far (and I still didn’t know that it’s, in many ways, more difficult to write a good short narrative than a long one—a novel). To the right of the stack, I aligned a few filled fountain pens. It had always been crucial for me to have an orderly desk—orderly to a fault, with the various items of my work laid out in parallel spaces to one another as if I might go blind in the night and be forced to fumble next morning for some way to write a few lines till I found someone who could take dictation.

The view from my trailer/house in Orange County, North Carolina in one of the oddly frequent snows of the late 1950s. I’m back from Oxford, living in the country four miles from Duke where I teach full-time. I’m also writing my novel A Long and Happy Life; and that job is greatly benefiting from the woods around me and the nearby pond. Small as it is, it nonetheless harbors a ferocious snapping turtle, a loyal great blue heron, foxes, raccoons, deer, and other wildlife. In the far distance of this picture, the hillside will eventually become the site of the house which I’ll buy in 1965 and where I’ll live and work ever since—much the most enduring residence in all my life.