The important things are hidden

On my recent trip to North Carolina, I got to spend the night at my godfather's house, way back in the woods in Brown's Summit where I grew up. He was often a bachelor in those days, but for almost two decades he's been happily mated to the same wonderful woman. The youngest of their two sons is almost ready for college now, and the four of us spent a few hours around the woodburning stove last week talking about how the world has changed.

At one point, my godfather's wife said that when she was growing up, her mother convinced her that all the important things in the world, like injustice and prejudice, had already been fixed and now only needed to be perfected. My godfather said something along the lines of how he grew up believing that all the important things were just waiting to be fixed with science and logic and reason. 

And without really thinking about it, I replied that I grew up believing that all the really important things were hidden. 

There was a slice of silence that followed, when all four of us seemed to look down at our hands, and the fire hissed in the woodstove, and I wondered if I'd said something inappropriate. It took me a moment to realize that without meaning to, I'd inadvertantly described a thing that has animated my entire life. 

Maybe there are some lucky people who grow up in worlds where all the important things are out in the open, where love and merit and talent are enough and justice falls as naturally as rain.That's the world I want to believe in yet, even as life teaches me that most of us grew up in a much more shadowed mirror. When that's how you see the world, you either learn to question everything or to question nothing at all.

The South, of course, has evolved an entire culture based on mutually agreed-upon fictions, and the pleasant lies continue even as we flirt with 21st century modernity. The genius of Southern Gothic literature, of course, is the third-person objective view of our shared absurdities, for we are gracious and mannered so that our violence and our appetites don't cause us to set upon each other with pistols and sharp-edged weapons. Our religion is strict and haunted because it covers up the drinking and the raging and the midnight wandering. The South has a face it shows the world, and that face hides our incongruent passions. The comfort of being Southern around other Southerners is that they join us in celebrating the disconnect between the trivial surface and the secret depths. 

Of course our culture of secrecy and deception goes beyond that, too, and there's nothing romantic about the way it warps us. Corruption and its sister vices love the shadows of secrecy, and there is nothing quite so chilling as the moment when you figure out the fix, and who put it in, and where it points. As a young man, that search kept pulling me back to journalism, where on a good day you can spend your hours tracking signs into places good Southern boys aren't supposed to go. So power and evil are hidden, too, and when you reach the places where you can finally see them, they look back at you. 

My hippie-kid childhood introduced me to special flavors of deception.It flowed between people, yes (usually between their loins), but it also festered between the people and their government in pools of corrosive suspicion and dysfunction. Governments sent undercover agents to spy on us, to plant evidence, to question our motives and activities; We flirted with radicalism, hid our activities, grew pot and sold dope. We loved America and we feared it.

When Tallahassee police tear-gassed us at the airport in 1969, reporters said it was because the protestors had gotten violent. But I was in that crowd, herded like cattle into a chain link pen, and there was nothing thrown by our side before the police circled us and the cannisters arched over the fences puking white smoke. A decade later, when the Klan drove its caravan into Morningside Homes and shot down five leftwing activists, we understood long before the rest of the world that the fix was in at the Greensboro police department. Like everyone else, we watched the video of the Klansmen calmly murdering people under cars, and yet there was no surprise for us when not a single one of those men was convicted of a crime. The Greensboro Massacre of Nov. 3, 1979, was just more proof that whatever was hidden was more powerful than anything you could see with your own eyes.

My young adult life was a dance with deception: In the Army they gave me a security clearance and the phone numbers for spooks up and down the East German and Czech borders. As a reporter, I learned to trade in secrets, swapping knowledge and favors for threads that always seemed to lead back into the darkness and disappear. I thought following those threads was my job: I soon found out otherwise. All too often, a good investigation was something reporters did in spite of editors, not in conjunction with them. 

Soon I was living in suburbia, going to parties and ballgames with people whose stories were far darker and more nuanced than the faces they showed the world. I learned that hiding my essential nature was the cost of moving easily through that world, and so I kept my opinions "reasonable" and learned to pass as a suburban Southern white man. 

And when I became a newspaper editor, I danced along a wobbly fence, trying to tell as much truth as we could learn, yet spending more time rationalizing and compromising than anything else. For years I deceived even myself, believing that sacrificing a few pawns was worth staying in the big game. Eventually I knew better. After that, my eventual excommunication from the Church of Mainstream American Journalism was a fait accompli. 

I'm 45 now and adrift. There are no instructions for this new world yet, and so I float through it almost dreamlike, sifting through a kaledescope of ideas and images and reflections of myself. And I wonder: What is the hidden thing? What is the important thing hidden at the heart of this new emerging world of wonder and terror and possibility?

Because I don't want to find that thing and wring a secret life out of it. I still want to find that essential, hidden thing and strip it naked and share it with everyone, even though some people howl that I've killed it, or rendered it plain and devoid of magic. That's how I know I'm not dead yet.

 

Comments

[Tom Lassiter]

This resonates on lots of levels. But I'm struck that you got tear-gassed at such a tender age.

[Jean McGreggor]

Thats beautiful Dan.

[Dan]

I was fortunate at during the tear-gassing that my father recognized what was about to happen and fought his way through the crowd, with me on his shoulders, and managed to get out of the pen moments before the cannisters flew. We still got dosed, but it wasn't nearly as bad as if we'd been in the middle of it.

I didn't have much memory of all this until basic training, when I caught my first whiff of CS gas while marching to the chamber where we had to breathe it, etc. The smell brought back a cascade of vivid memories of that day at the airport, almost like watching a video replay.

The pretext for the attack was that one person with a sign jumped the fence and waded through the crowd toward Nixon's airplane (honestly, it could have been 1968 during the campaign, for all I know). That was when they circled the fenced enclosure and my father got nervous.