Your Father is a Better Man Than You Are, Right?

J.D. Phillips

Chapel Talk

December 8, 2005

One of the reasons for having a core course, like C&T, is that it gives us the opportunity to talk about the books in the course with just about anyone on campus. All students have taken, or will take, the course. Most of the faculty have taught, or will teach, the course. And an increasing number of staff members have taken the course. The books in C&T, then, are one of the very few things we genuinely have in common in our intellectual community here at Wabash, which is otherwise dominated by the necessarily narrow and mostly isolated concerns of disciplinary discourse. So today, I'm going to speak from our commons about a few books in C&T, and about a few other things as well.

One of the books we now read in C&T is an epic from old Mali, called The Sundiata. Here is the provocative first sentence from the penultimate paragraph of the book:

"Men of today, how small you are beside your ancestors."

Now, one of the many ways in which this is true is that we tell stories about our ancestors, and characters in stories are larger than we are; in fact, they're even larger than the people telling the stories. And as you know, we read stories in C&T, lots of them, as this year's sophomores will eagerly attest to. I take as one of the main aims of C&T simply learning how to read stories, including (maybe especially) stories about our ancestors. So let me tell you about one of mine.

My maternal grandfather, Gerald Lillie, was born in 1904 in north central Nebraska, on the edge of the former Dakota Territories. His family was literally dirt poor; landless peasants in the dusty, hinterlands. My grandfather was forced to drop out of school in the fourth grade to help support the family. He cadged work as a hired man on the ranches scattered across the Dakotas. But he had a way with animals, they say, and so he found his niche as a horse breaker. During the winters he made his way west and worked the orchards of the Pacific Coast. So by the age of 12, he was a grammar school drop out, and he worked full-time as, in today's argot, a stable boy and a migrant farm worker. The poverty was grinding. There was no welfare; child labor laws hadn't yet found their way to the Dakotas. This was my grandfather.

My mother was born in 1942. Two years later, her father died. He was, by the way, one year younger than I am today, so in a bitter inversion of the natural order of things, I am older than my own grandfather, which, if you think about it, is kind of like telling stories. The elder, the "father," founds, he creates—children, myths, stories. In fact, listening to these stories helps you move from childhood to manhood. So back to my story.

My grandfather's death was painful, but relatively quick. From the first symptoms until he died, only three months passed. There was no insurance, no money, no real medical care. They say he didn't miss a day of work until the day before he died. Kids need to eat; fathers need to feed them; that's all. I think of him during those last days, 20 years before I was born, a man I never met—coughing up blood, hardly able to walk, but still tending to the horses—whenever I hear a student or a colleague, or more likely, myself, whine about a cold or a headache or a sore back. Like the men of Mali, how small I seem beside my grandfather.

I spent the better part of the winter of 1977, 33 years after my grandfather died, and when I was 12 years-old, begging my father to take me along on the winter calf round-up. This is always an important ride, but in those days of the brave new world of farm foreclosures, it seemed especially important; at least it did to me. All the margins, the profits and the losses, were in the calves. But mostly, I could tell it was important, because, unlike other work on the farm, only the men rode on the winter calf round-up; the boys stayed at home with their mommas. But this winter, my nagging worked; somehow, Dad relented; he let me ride.

On the morning of the round-up, I was surprised to see no horse was saddled for me. If I was going to ride with the men, then I was going to have to saddle my own horse. And I did it with gusto, with the zeal of a child. We rode over the hills and through the drifts in the valleys—dad, me, some neighbor men—gathering the cows and their calves, finding a few strays. I was a good rider then, in the way that children often are—small and sensitive to the horse, too. So when we came to a calf—a scrawny little black-baldie; I can still see it clearly—scared to death, struggling in a drift in a gulley below the dam, his momma on the ridgeline above, lowing pathetically, Dad saw that it was a tight spot, calling for a good rider, and so he sent me in. My heart soared. I raced the mare I was riding down the hill, toward the calf in the snowdrift. She galloped so gracefully, faster and lighter than she would for a man, responsive to all my commands, finally stopping on a dime when I gently pulled back on the reigns ten yards from the panicked calf.

That's when I remembered that I'd saddled her that morning, and I could now feel Newton's First Law, set in motion by my own boyish weakness in not being able to buckle the cinch tight when I saddled her, inexorably working its relentless logic, as the saddle and I slid forward on the saddle pad until my face was flush against the thick mane. Now, most times when a horse, especially a spirited one like this mare, gets her front legs tangled up in a saddle, she'll throw you in a desperate buck and kick. But I'd been good to this horse; we were friends, and she trusted me. So she paid me the courtesy of just bowing her face down into the snow and, with a little jump, very gently letting the saddle and me—clinging like an idiot to the saddle horn—slide off over her head into a heap. Still, I managed to hit my nose on her jaw on the way down, and sure enough, it started bleeding. Well, you can imagine the pathetic scene I was now the star attraction in: a 12 year-old boy lying tangled in his saddle in a heap in a snow drift, blood smeared all over his face, mare with a bare saddle pad on her back nervously trotting around him in circles, cow and her stuck calf both lowing pathetically, and my dad and the neighbor men looking at me like I was the sorriest piece of crap they'd ever seen. My face was red with blood and shame, and all I wanted to do was to crumple up and have a good cry. But, and remember this, a boy can't cry in front of his dad. So I squinted my eyes, bit my lip, and thought angry 12 year-old thoughts to keep me from crying.

One of the neighbor men looked at me, and then turned to my dad and said, "Ah, shit Jon, why in the hell. . ." But my dad cut him off. "Just shut your god-damn mouth, Floyd." He gave me a hard look, pulled on the reigns of his horse, and rode off with the neighbor men, leaving me there to clean up the mess, which I eventually did, the whole time thinking of the grandfather I'd never met, and who, at my age, was working full-time breaking horses on the big ranches across the Dakotas. Like boys in Mali, beside him, I felt small. Beside him, I was small.

When my grandfather died in 1944, he left a widow and four young children, one of whom was my mother. As I said, she was two-years-old when he died. Her oldest brother was six. And they were now destitute, living in the sort of abject squalor that beggars description. Life was not easy for a widow and her four young kids in Yankton, South Dakota in 1944. There was no government assistance—no welfare, no ADC, no medicaire, no social security. Nothing. Grandma took in laundry from the rich folks in town, but it wasn't nearly enough. So Sacred Heart Parish helped out with tins of food and coal in the winter, which in South Dakota sometimes lasts for nine months. Still, sometimes the house was cold; sometimes they went to bed hungry. Later, when her kids were a bit older, my grandmother kept her family together by working as a maid and a cleaning lady. She scrubbed toilets for the rich folks in town until she was 80 years old. As an aside I note that when I was a young professor at a rich private college in California, I taught a few courses in that college's graduate liberal studies program. And one of my students was the son of a retired lawyer from Yankton, South Dakota. I think Grandma was pleased that her grandson was the professor of the son of a man whose toilets she'd scrubbed for thirty years.

My grandmother rented a tiny, one-bedroom house for the family; there might have been 600 square feet. My mom and her sister slept in a walk-in closet. My two uncles slept in the tiny bedroom. Grandma slept on the couch in the main room. They lived like this for 20 years, until each of the kids got married and left home. I know that house well. Grandma lived in it—couldn't afford to buy it, always rented—for 60 years, until just last year, in fact, shortly after her 90^th birthday, when she finally relented and moved into an assisted living unit. Her house always seemed impossibly small to me, too small even for one person, to say nothing of a family of five. Being in that house is one of the few experiences I've had that has awakened in me a visceral sense of the human horror of utterly desperate poverty. My mother grew up in that house.

I thought of these hard things when we read The Joys of Motherhood in C&T this semester. Among much else, this novel captures the devastating toll on the human soul of grinding poverty, and how there's little anyone can do about it, do-gooders' cloy intentions notwithstanding. Some people are poor, and that's just the goddamned way it is.

I should note, though, that my hopes for this novel were initially low, very low, in fact, in no small part because of a dreary John Updike blurb on the back cover avering that the novel "bears a plain feminist message." And I don't have much interest in reading novels that bear plain messages, about feminism or anything else. Instead, we ought to read novels that bring us into a more unimpeded relationship with the complicated nature of things, especially in C&T. (Put it another way: let the Dannies read the easy books; we should read the hard ones.) Liberal education, genuine inquiry, doesn't tell you what you ought to think, what you ought to conclude, again, about feminism or anything else. And this is because—brace yourselves, because this is very nearly heresy in some circles—genuine liberal education doesn't know what it is that you ought to think. Let me say this again: we ought not tell you what to think because we don't know what you ought to think. And this is not an arch, pedagogical trick or lurid academic posturing; it is a simple logical necessity. So my hackles were up when I began this novel that appeared to pretend otherwise. But still I read the novel (hey, it was assigned; like you, I had no choice), and happily it turns out that John Updike was wrong; it's a much more complicated novel than that. This book does not bear a plain message, feminist or otherwise. And, hey, there's even more! For instance, while it's set in Nigeria, happily again it is not "about" those "weird" people and their "strange" customs way over "there." It turns out that it's actually about people I recognize; I know these characters. And I suspect that maybe you do, too.

As I read this novel my own transformation as a reader, from John Updike-inspired resistance at the beginning, to a kind of cautious, slowly awakening Eros as I read on, was mirrored by the same transformation in the heroine, the perfectly named Nnu Ego, that's N-n-u E-g-o, Nnu Ego. She moves from angry resistance at the beginning of the novel to a kind of grudging embrace at the end; it's her New Ego, that's N-e-w E-g-o. But you have to actually read the book in order to be open to this kind of transformation. Reading it as course material, a la John Updike, with a lesson to be absorbed, forecloses on this as a possibility.

And of course, as I was reading this novel, I thought of my grandfather. As far as I know the family has only two photographs of him. One of them is my grandparent's wedding picture. In it, my grandmother has a dour—can I just say it? a pissed off—expression on her face. But my grandfather has the goofiest, bandy-rooster grin on his face you've ever seen. When I was a child, I used to look at this picture and feel sorry for Grandma. She just looked so damned sad. But when I was older, I noticed there was more to this picture than I had first realized. Something wasn't quite right about the color in my grandfather's face. So I asked his brother-in-law, my great-uncle, about it. Turns out my grandfather had a black eye, a cut above his lip, and a broken hand, and the photographer had gamely tried to hide all of this. That's right, my grandfather had gotten himself into a fight the night before he got married, and Grandma had threatened not to marry him because of it. Eventually, though, she relented, and that's what you see in the picture—a man, giddy, like Nnu Ego's naif of a husband, Nnaife, over his good fortune in marrying such a lovely young woman, and a woman, like Nnu Ego, pissed off at the giddy louse next to her, but not sad, defiantly not sad, as I'd mistakenly thought when I was a child. And today, happily married for 16 years, my sympathies are with my grandfather in this picture, at least in part, and with Nnaife, too, because my understanding of this sort of male foolishness is by now very deep. And, like my grandfather, and like Nnaife, too, I have a special kind of expertise in that look—and I should say, it's a kind of loving look—of "you're a damn fool" that only a wife can give to her husband. As I said before, I recognize these characters—in their poverty, in their maleness, in their femaleness, in their humanness. And I think that most of you probably do, too.

Let me turn now to The River Between, another novel we read this year in C&T. In this novel, Waiyaki, a young Kenyan from a line of prophets, finds himself between those in the tribe who have adopted the white man's Christianity and those who have made a last defiant stand for their tribal traditions. Waiyaki navigates this delicate situation in a way that flatters my own sensibilities: by pushing, gingerly at times, harder at others, for education; for liberal education, I'd like to think. To put it another way, a way that might sound vaguely familiar to some of you: between anger and piety (that is, between the anger you feel at the culture that you come from and the piety you feel toward that same culture) there is room for inquiry. Let me make three points about this. First, I note that, yet again, here is a character from an African novel who is familiar to us, who is not simply an "other" for us to fetishize. Second, it is precisely this sort of inquiry that ought to be the focus of our energies here at Wabash. And third, to do this right—that is, to inquire and then to talk about it like this—is dangerous in a way that's familiar to all of you who have freely followed a line of inquiry in class to wherever it may have taken you, consequences be damned. In fact, it's so dangerous that it might kill you. The River Between ends with Waiyaki's murder. I am indebted to Jacob Klein for making this point clear to me in his story of how Archimedes met his demise, which I shall now recount for you.

Now it happened that Archimedes took an active part in defending his hometown, Syracuse, against the Romans, by devising ingenious military machinery; the smart bombs of his era. One day during the battle, Archimedes, it seems, was lost in thought, computing and reckoning with his figures in the sand, when a Roman soldier happened upon him. Here, then, is how Plutarch relates the end of this story: "A Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him. . . Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing by his entreaty, instantly killed him." It seems, then, that genuine inquiry, i.e., liberal learning itself, is oftentimes incommensurable with the political realities necessary to secure the very existence of our communities, communities that themselves, then, might allow the opportunity for inquiry, inquiry that then might be crushed. And so it was for Archimedes, and for Waiyaki, too. And alas, since it is precisely this sort of mortally dangerous questioning and inquiry, which is the focus of our energies for some of us at Wabash, so it might be for you, too. Let me say this again. Liberal education—that is, to be liberated from slavish devotion to received opinion, be it from parents, clan, race, culture, or even, dare I say it, your professors!—is a treacherous business. It is treacherous in all the familiar ways that this plays out for you in your family, here on campus, and far, far beyond. And it will be treacherous in ways that are as unfamiliar to you now as leaving the family you came from, in all of its forms (imagine it!), and founding your own family (someday your grandsons will tell their sons stories about you; it's how our ancestors help boys become men.).

Let me tell you, then, one final story about my grandfather. One muggy night, in the summer of 1981, when I was sixteen years old, my cousin, Joe, stole the rusted-out, old GMC pick-up his neighbor kept in the barn on the back of his property. So naturally, Joe and I concocted a strategy to put the truck in the higher service of trying to pick up some girls. The strategy we settled on sounded wise at the time, but my God. Basically, we pooled our money and bought as much beer as we could (two cases of Grain Belt, as I recall), put the beer on ice in the back of the truck, drove down to the loop where all the teenagers in Yankton, South Dakota zoomed round and round all night long, parked the truck, climbed up into the bed, and hoisted our beers, pointing enthusiastically at them and grinning like idiots every time some girls drove by. What girl wouldn't find it irresistible? Need I say that we didn't pick up any girls that night? But we did manage to add a drinking buddy to our little crew later in the evening. One of the Indian kids who bussed in to Joe's school from the Santee Reservation, Jimmy Littlefeather, drove by and no doubt struck by how pathetic we looked, climbed up in that peculiar, laconic Indian way and joined us in the back of the truck, to help our prospects.

Eventually, the loop died down; all the girls went home, and all the boys dispersed to lick their wounds and map out their strategies for next time. Jimmy Littlefeather, Joe, and I decided to go to the only refuge we knew where it was safe for teenagers to drink in Yankton, South Dakota in 1981: the cemetery north of town, where my grandfather is buried. We parked not 25 feet from his grave and drank deep into the night. Jimmy Littlefeather told us lies about his own grandfather, a medicine man with special powers, he said, passed on from father to son, father to son, and so on, down through the generations, with all of the resulting powers therein now residing in Jimmy himself, bristling through his teenage, medicine man soul. My response to all of this, which I enthusiastically shared with Jimmy, was a simple and brilliant single word: bullshit. After the three of us enjoyed a good laugh at this, Joe and I told Jimmy Littlefeather about our own grandfather. We continued in this way, pouring libations and making burnt offerings to our ancestors for many hours—like Telemachous and the boys of Mali, and Waiyaki, too—praying in our way, all the time me wondering about Jimmy's special powers, and whether or not he could really talk to his dead ancestors, and whether or not I might not be able to also, sitting here so pious next to my grandfather's grave, and with the favored progeny of all those generations of Indian medicine men worshipping here with me.

Some time later, I remember looking up with a start, woken from a dream, spooked, staring motionless into a bright light, breathing hard, covered in sweat. It seemed that Jimmy Littlefeather was right; was this my grandfather? "What did your grandfather say," you might wonder? What did he say? He didn't say a goddammed thing. Aren't you listening to the story? I told you, he died in 1944. And he didn't say a goddammed thing in 1981; he'd been dead for 37 years. Jimmy's an Indian; so what? He can't make a dead man talk. You've got to hear what's in the story, not what you want to hear. It turns out that Jimmy Littlefeather, Joe, and I drank until the small hours, until I finally fell asleep piss drunk in the back of the truck. And the light? It was just the summer sun, high in the sky, blinding me and burning my hungover face the next morning. My grandfather didn't talk to me; I just have stories. That's all there is, the story.

And so, finally we come again to the opening question: is your father a better man than you are? Are you small beside your ancestors? Listen carefully, because I don't do this very often, but here is the answer: in all possible ways, it is entirely up to you.