Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Read Free Book Online Page B

alcohol. It gives my father migraines, as it did his father. Also, a coalition of preachers and bootleggers — strange bedfellows indeed — has conspired to keep Kingsport dry. Moonshine is available, but some partakers suffer blindness and lead poisoning. To buy branded liquor, you must drive to Virginia. But if you get caught by Tennessee patrolmen on your trip home, you forfeit your car. Hence, the popularity of iced tea in East Tennessee. My blind dates in New England find me a drag because my idea of a bacchanal is half a beer.
    However, I’m soon fixed up with Richard from Cornell. He belongs to a fraternity in which the brothers drink so much that nobody notices or cares that I’m sipping the same cocktail all night long.
    Education at Dobyns-Bennett consisted of the memorization of dates and facts. At Wellesley, I soon learn that facts aren’t facts. Math has always been my favorite subject because the answers to problems are either right or wrong, as opposed to the multiple shades of gray in the humanities. But once I learn in calculus about the existence of imaginary numbers, I decide not to major in math after all.
    In Bible 101,1 discover that even the word of God has been put into His mouth by ancient Christian spin doctors. With magic markers we highlight the verses inserted into the gospels by various factions trying to bolster their own grip on power.
    One day in English class I experience my first true thought. As we discuss “Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter, I notice the recurrence of the word
silver
. In a flash of illumination I realize that Porter has done this on purpose to suggest a parallel between one of her characters and Judas Iscariot.
    My mind promptly retreats into darkness. But I know I’ve discovered a new function for it. Southerners are always trying to prove how nice they are (even when they aren’t), and Yankees are always trying to prove how smart they are (even when they aren’t). It’s the difference between leading with your limbic brain or your neocortex.
    But now that my neocortex has been jump-started, there’s no stopping it. Soon I’m critiquing situations I’ve always blindly accepted, like a brat pulling the wings off butterflies. Along with this newfound ability to tear anything apart comes chronic melancholy. I feel like Eve after her expulsion from the Garden of Eden as she starts to realize that she and Adam are two separate people and that the talking snake is not really her friend.
    Since these are the Martin Luther King Jr. years, I quickly grow less proud of my grandmother’s alleged ancestral land grants in the Tidewater. After the murder of some civil rights workers in Mississippi, a hallmate bursts into my room to announce, “You southerners make me sick!” Another muses over a pot roast dinner one night, “It’s so interesting to hear you say something intelligent in that accent of yours.” This, despite the fact that I’ve passed their damned speech test.
    I’m bewildered. Back home I was teased because my mother was a Yankee and my pronunciation of “cow” was so bizarre. I’d always longed to be a real southerner. Now I’m being accorded that honor, but it’s been transformed into a badge of shame. We learned in school that southerners fought the Civil War to protect our homeland from invasion by immigrant Yankee riffraff. But my hallmates tell me its purpose was to end slavery. I have to admit that, if true, this seems a worthy goal.
    After a couple of days in the library employing my newly activated neocortex, I discover that I’m not even a pseudo-southerner. East Tennessee is so mountainous that most of its antebellum farms were subsistence operations, so there weren’t many slaves. These struggling farmers, many descended from indentured servants, resented those large landowners and merchants who were profiting from slavery. Also, many