CROSSING STATE LINES TO NOWHERE: Of Wonders of the World and Realities of Beauty, Chivas Regal and Beer in a Can

WEST COLLEGE CORNER, Ind. (ZP) -- The bartender shouted last call! just as we stepped out the back door, out into a steel cool October and into the divide that separates two U.S. states.

A town of a thousand residents, split like firewood by a line drawn on a map. College Corner, Ohio, lay less than 75 feet from the doorway of the tavern- disturbingly still, as menacing as a drowned kitten. But in West College Corner, Indiana, on the Hoosier side of town, there's still a packed bar, still life and country laughter and singing.

The Last Viking digs through his pockets for a tin full of mints. He's trying to quit smoking. The temptation offered by an evening's worth of secondhand smoke satisfies nothing, the mints mere placebo to keep the mouth from asking for a cigarette, for one just one more drag off of the ol' coffin nail.

He crunches mints and his eyes water. I puff away of my thirtieth cigarette, a pack and a half in just under 22 hours, trying to remember to turn my head on exhale. We're both three sheets to the wind, firewater eyes filled with bloated pupils, diluted blood forced from our faces faster by the cold.

Mr. Chops, the designated chauffeur, disappeared, lost to tables full of women and slow sips of Indiana-legal cans of Budweiser. Mr. Chops tends to be everyone's friend, even sober - especially if those everyones happen to be fellow musicians, own their own breasts, or can carry on an intelligent conversation.

Calling Chops a sociable guy would be an understatement. Trust me. It's like staring at a naked supermodel for hours and then saying, well, she's kinda cute in the face...

The Viking tells me that he has to let his dogs out, that he wants some company walking the two blocks back to his house. And he tells me, too, that this is his world, his life outside of the quaint brick-and-bullshit facade of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

He sounds almost embarrassed to admit that, yes, the town that feeds us both has become nothing more than a running academic joke, that our paychecks revolve around perpetuating the myth of 1950s ivy-covered youth, and that, yes, he feels more at home crossing the state line, home to a blue-collar nowhere.

As we stumble along crumbling sidewalks and orphaned railroad tracks, I can't help but be envious of a man who finds something meaningful in a place as real as West College Corner, Indiana.

Fuck the myth of Christopher Columbus and Spaniard conquistadors - history remembers their legends, their gilded discoveries of the New World, just as local alumni recall the glory of Oxford. Leif Ericson, and descended spirits, yearn to discover the very real world, to silently find meaning in America's lost nowheres.

Ain't no shame in being a real man in a real world. Hasn't been any shame in it, in North America, since the first settlers crossed over from Asia, since the first Scandinavian explorers came and lost the continent to Spanish, Portuguese, and English conquerors.

The Last Viking popped open a bottle of beer as his dogs ran free into the steel cool October. My jealousy boiled over and I lit another cigarette, my only weapon against a man so free.

My envy could, at least, help keep the mint makers rolling in the dough.

* * * *

The women, the Last Viking promised, wouldn't be much to look at, wouldn't be the sort of barroom eye candy Mr. Chops and I were used to back in Oxford. At least, he promised, we could catch the end of the Boston-Cleveland league championship free of chest-beating, bandwagon Indians fans.

Neither Chops or I were surprised when the Last Viking, in his deviousness, had forgotten to mention that the infamous Viking Tavern housed as many real women as real men on a Saturday night, women who smelled of workweeks and overtime, who spoke with twangs and who danced slow dances with farmer boyfriends and mechanic husbands and weathered strangers.

Jesus H. Christ! I thought, watching these women put in requests to the deejay. Beauty! Pure fucking Venus beauty, free of the bourgeois, the airs of Entitlement!

America the Beautiful, tangible tits and cowgirl ass! Dance Brad Paisley and Kenny Chesney and sing Karaoke into the Indiana night so loud the rich city girls burst into shallow, plastic pieces!

The eye candy be damned. Even Mr. Chops, the Red Sox fan, seemed too distracted to catch the final out of what proved to be a pivotal game in his team's march towards the World Series.

Watching real women dance can make men forget about almost anything, even an American League pennant.

* * * *

The Last Viking didn't need the company to walk his hellhounds. He didn't ask me to walk back to his house for my health, either.

Every human being, every second of every day, exists as nothing more than a motive with a pulse. Motives are the blood of consciousness and impulse, the fuel that feeds the fires of thought. Some motives are mysterious and potentially sinister, like the motives behind the tips of shoelaces, those plastic aglets that nobody seems to question. And some motives are innocent and fruitful.

Some motives, too, are esoteric, supernatural and inspired by God. And men can be motivated to play hands of fate just as surely as men can be motivated towards creation or destruction.

The Viking popped more mints as we walked towards an old shed behind his house, a bright-blue building scarred by sections of missing siding. A lone spotlight illuminated the east side of the garage, a simple incandescent bulb standing watch over a wall and an improvised workbench, cans of red paint and paintbrushes.

The Last Viking didn't say what motivated him to invite me deeper into nowhere. He didn't have to say a word, actually, because, like a mother knows love for a child, some monuments to hope speak more with silence.

The side of the barn contained one of the most beautiful testaments to humanity's enduring spirit, to the power of life and death, I've ever seen. And it's in the middle of a blue-collar nowhere, in West College Corner, Indiana.

* * * *

I've walked the Mall in Washington, touched the names of the Vietnam War casualties on the Wall and stood on the spot where a great man once set my country free, at last, in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. I've heard lectures by Nobel Peace Prize laureates, listened to speeches delivered by some of the world's leading humanitarians and defenders of those who cannot defend themselves.

And beneath a watching heaven, in the heart of Middle America, across a simple state line and down paved arteries through cornfields and soybean patches, the working class of nowhere in particular created a masterpiece so divinely inspired that the great religious texts of the world seem like coloring books.

You see, there's a woman, a wife and mother next door, fighting cancer, who's endured several rounds of chemotherapy. She spends most of her time in this one lonely room, strength coming and going like a bullet train as she fights a battle that she may lose.

There was a time, not long ago, that the woman stared out of the room's one window and saw nothing but an old blue barn. And then the woman's family decided to paint We Love You, ____, in big billboard letters, on the side of that barn. Friends soon started painting their names and wishes beneath the banner, in bright red. And then strangers started stopping by, too, adding their names.

There are now so many names, so many people stopping by, that there's a can of paint and brushes always ready and waiting, night and day. The owner of the barn not only sanctioned the vandalism but embraced it. And people began cooking for the family, taking different nights a week.

The Last Viking had a real man's tears running down his face as he told the tale - he and his roommate were flipping the bill for the eternal light that allowed the woman to see the wall, any time she wanted to, even in the middle of the darkest night. He cooks on Mondays, when he can.

Not even the most damned demons of hell could laugh at such a monument.

In the cool steel night, beneath a star-filled sky, another man was motivated, by unknown forces, to pick up a paintbrush, pry open a can filled with stiff acrylic, and to add his name to the great organic work:

Jason
Green Bay, VA

The Last Viking wasn't the only one with tears in his eyes.

* * * *

The Last Viking put his dogs away, popped another handful of mints. I lit another cigarette as he talked about the sheer wonder of being able to look up at night, at any time on a clear night, and to see stars - he pointed out Orion, that great bowman in the sky, his belt marking not some silly border between Ohio and Indiana but an ethereal state line between Mankind and Eternity.

We were both still drunk, still lost in conversation and thoughts of the wonders of the world one finds in blue-collar nowheres as we headed back to the bar, back to find the elusive Mr. Chops. As we crossed the railroad tracks, one of those real women and one of those real men walked together, towards an old pick-up. Both said hello, as if the world was perfect.

The world, of course, is far from perfect. But sometimes, crossing state lines to nowhere, mere yards from an Ohio somewhere, can make even imperfection a thing of beauty.

- # # # -

LA FEMME ASSOIFFANTE: Demensions of Lust, The Chastity of Lies, and Eating Adam's Apple in an Ohio Eden

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I used to care, used to take everything a woman said at face value before sex, once believed in concepts like relationship and marriage and engagement.

And then I realized that, sometimes, being naive about the nature of illicit affairs leads to nothing but trouble.

Caring too much about what may happen in the future usually stammers action in the present, emotional reasoning nothing more than an excuse to find guilt where none exists. A romantic trust, when there's lust involved, is nothing more than an opiate manufactured by the editors of women's fashion rags and dime-store romance novels and soap operas.

Trust, for men as for women, is earned. And while discretion should be executed with a surgeon's precision, trust exists beyond the scope of a simple tryst.

And when, say, a man spends the night with a woman who uses words like relationship and marriage and engagement as a means to make a quick exit, as a way to imply my friends read you and nobody saw us, so let's not hurt my husband-to-be to someone they'd bedded almost solely based on his ability to write, it usually takes a good bitch slap to the face to remind me that there's a reason I no longer play along with the deceptions of others.

I know I shouldn't have lied to you, she said as she dressed Sunday morning, but nobody saw us and I love him.

I love him. It's a lovely sentiment. Completely meaningless when prefaced by but nobody saw us.

* * * *

Love. When I'm in love, lust ceases to matter. I guess I'm just a bit old-fashioned, in that sense. The world becomes perfect, moments destroy the concepts of time and space.

But for others, nobody saw us is just another way of defining love within a set of boundaries so transparent they disappear the moment lust springs from the earth like blades of grass.

I guess there's a reason I haven't fallen in love in a while. Lust is an easier thing to master, as lust is merely a sin. Sin, in the Judeo-Christian sense, takes almost no effort. Love requires a world where keeping secrets becomes irrelevant.

One day, I'd probably fall in love again. But, well, only after I'm certain the boundaries are as easy to tear down as a fence made of paper. I've been the Other Man way too many times to be one of those dumb and blind bastards who believes in that love conquers all horseshit.

Call me a cynic.

* * * *

A writer and reader join in the darkness, and no one notices, physical intimacy preserved without a written record of a tryst, as if cheating on a fiancé disappears without witnesses.

But who can be that blind when two people start a fling with a romp behind an art center, in the bush, in plain view of any passerby and clothed only in the modesty of darkness? Or believe humanity so deaf? That a woman's voice loudly whispering Gonna come, gonna come, FUCK! from behind shadows would escape squinting, curious groups of drunken undergrads or alumni?

She joked about the flower garden, called it our Secret Garden, as she leaned back against me in that darkness. I watched the silhouette of her back melt into the shadows of my chest. She'd wanted to be on top, thought I really gave a damn about staring at her skirt-covered ass as she ground her hips into mine, as she stared out towards High Street.

I should've known when she couldn't look me in the eye, should've learned by now that a woman who talks a good game, who flatters too much and flirts too much, who compares me to a dead French writer, usually plans on nobody seeing anything except for the goosebumps on her fair shoulders.

But several people saw us, out there, in our Secret Garden. Every garden has serpents bearing the fruit of knowledge, you see, and nights in college towns are always filled with squinting eyes in the darkness, tongues that flicker in the breeze for the taste of gossip.

* * * *

The first indication I had came Sunday, when a chef here in Oxford made a comment about my previous night - he may not have seen anything, but it's always a bad omen to have a friend assume that you'd had a fling so soon afterwards. Men, somehow, can smell sex on another man better than most women.

The venom spread quickly, the illusion of secretive Eden revealed through the spread of snake-bitten information.

I started hearing from other female readers who'd heard or seen things, who thought they'd seen me walking the streets with a strange woman, a woman who seemed to be a little too comfortable with a writer. Women, somehow, can smell lust on another woman better than most men, even in this great Information Age of mobile devices and digital realities.

My mystery lover was even mistaken for a woman I only know through the marvels of modern technology, a fellow writer from the other side of the world, a woman who I probably wouldn't have to sneak behind bushes and art centers to lust after like a madman.

If she'd been in Ohio, had circumnavigated the globe for a tryst... there'd at least be good wine and seduction involved, and, yes, we'd probably both write about it. Maybe even videotape it, sell it, and live off the royalties.

When I emailed her about the rumors of Ohio, she responded with a hello, gorgeous!, asked when she was to receive her engagement ring, and demanded a big arse SUV and a white house on a hill.

Writers. Pfft. Sure beats reading, sometimes.

* * * *

The venom finally killed its victim, the ghost of secrecy, when several coworkers and readers began asking about my engagement the previous weekend, to an alumna of the good ol' Local U. And one of the engaged woman's friends, who'd apparently seen us together, even asked me, from across Cyberspace, if I'd run into ______ while out and about, if my fiancée had met ______'s fiancé when we'd gotten together for drinks.

Apparently, we were supposed to be discussing writing and reading and literature and librarianship. We did discuss writing and reading, literature and libraries, but probably not in the way her friends think.

As we made it back to my apartment and hit my living room floor, as clothes came off and the tryst continued, she proclaimed that she couldn't help herself, that she'd lost control and just wanted to fuck me until I broke. I'm a writer, an artist - I've painted abstract paintings with women's breasts, live like an intellectual and like discussing strange things with bartenders and strangers. And I'd seduced her with my passion.

The whole tryst began, too, because she asked if any reader had ever told me that they've masturbated reading my work, looking at a digital photograph of my face, if I'd ever had cybersex with distant readers, if I'd ever fucked anyone in my own library, in between the stacks of books. When I told her no, her whole person changed, the aura of reader transformed into lover.

Eve began touching Adam, leaning into him, her eyes filled with the quest for a different sort of forbidden knowledge, as they moved from bar to bar, from campus to city streets, the lustful march towards the Tree of Life.

* * * *

As the sun came up Sunday, I had my laptop open wide, the screen's glow turning my white legs almost scallop-translucent. The sounds of The Vandals, the legendary punk band, poured through earbuds as a naked woman curled up next to me, with her hands and chin tucked into my shoulder.

A nice moment, I remember thinking, as I checked my email. Too bad even the very real present always seems to give way, eventually, to the surrounding universe.

No covers. Body heat kept the open window's chill at bay. I looked at the reader's body, memorized essential details of physical form. She was not a natural blonde, the stubble in between her legs telling a tale in a way her mouth probably couldn't.

Her mouth hadn't spoken many truths in the few hours we'd been together, now that I think about it...

The guy she lived with wasn't really her roommate. That much I'd figured out on my own. She wasn't just sort of seeing somebody, either - a woman casually dating doesn't turn off a cellphone and hide it so discreetly in her purse.

The hands. Her hands betrayed her.

There was something odd, something she probably didn't think would let a writer figure out that the reader wasn't exactly a master of deception. Writers tend to be very observant, librarians well-read. And a naked reader, no matter how well she hides her eyes, can speak volumes with just her fingers.

A simple, nondescript ring, decorated in crosses. Not an engagement ring, or a wedding band, either. Those are objects most women remember to take off before they conveniently decide to lose control, when they're planning on asking writers questions about cybersex and masturbation and sex in libraries.

A purity ring.

She'd been trying to convince somebody that she was abstinent. I gingerly lifted up her hand to examine the strange symbol of White American Protestant chastity. The irony, to a writer, made for too tempting of a future plot twist - I knew, eventually, I'd have to write about it.

A name and the phrase Until Marriage stamped into platinum. I'd spent the night with a woman who was planning on marrying some man who has no clue she's not really a virgin, a man who probably suspects nothing. I realized, instantly, that I probably wasn't the first blogger, writer, artist, or academic she'd gone fruit-picking with in the orchards of Eden.

She awoke just as I let her hand drop. I hastily folded up the laptop, sat it off the bed as she sat up and rubbed her eyes. She crawled on top of me as I settled back against the pillow, kissed me, and asked what I'd been doing online. The paranoia, clearly, had already set in, the fear of discovery heavier than any guilt she may have felt.

I told her I was writing about our meeting. Terror filled her face. She mentioned that she didn't think she was worthy, that it was important, that anyone really wanted to know-

I told her I was writing about Jean Follain, the dead French writer - an obscure favorite writer for an American woman who went to college in such a small college town.

Not quite a lie, as you, dear reader, are reading now.

Satisfied, she kissed me again, slid her hips down onto mine, and turned herself around once more, avoiding eye contact again, and the tryst continued as if nobody saw us the night before, as if nobody knew.

For fifteen whole minutes, I thought about Jean Follain, thought about the Book of Genesis, and watched as another man's future wife bounced on my lap, brown stubble tickling my groin.

She told me that she'd never had a guy last that long. She just kept coming, her purity ring's metal against my chest for balance.

And I just kept thinking about how to write about how my snake ended up in Adam's promised apple of an ass.

I told her at the sixteenth minute that I just wasn't in the mood anymore, that maybe we should talk...

Sometimes, the fruit just doesn't taste right.

- # # # -

COLLECTIONS OF THE DAMNED: The Historical Records of Dead Men Are Never Worth More Than the Lives of Those Yet to Come

"Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

- Cassius, from Julius Caesar (I.ii.140–142)

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHSIDE VIRGINIA (ZP) -- He almost wept as he showed me the largest piece from his personal collection, a lithograph print of the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest, ringed in tiny black-and-white photographs.

My knees buckled for a moment, as if his shame suddenly became mine as the artifact changed hands for the first time since the 1970s. That weight pulled me down onto his couch as the strong desire to vomit almost overtook me.

If I hadn't been sitting on that couch, the amount of smug, smiling hate in those mugshots would've eaten me alive.

Even years later, I can still feel that old widower's couch devouring me in its plushness, comforting my body so my senses could absorb it all.

* * * *

Some of the most prominent citizens from my own corner of Virginia stared up from behind the glass, their younger 1950s selves captured forever in white robes, my memories of them as simply nice old men shattered like a ceramic Jesus in hell.

One of the men used to cut my hair - I have many fond memories of my time in his barber's chair. Another face, that of a prominent retailer, a friend to not only my family but of many, glowed with his beautiful, Tobacco Country smile - a shopkeeper by day, and a Grand Dragon by night.

The most exclusive of fraternities, one of White Protestant Male paranoia, from the end of the Second World War through the end of Vietnam, residents of counties with such regal, Old World names: Prince Edward, Charlotte, Lunenburg, Cumberland. They hailed from towns like Farmville and Keysville and Burkeville, from Victoria and Kenbridge and Darlington Heights.

I knew all but four of them, at some point in my life, personally. The four I didn't know had all died before I was even born. But the record of their time in the Ku Klux Klan had been trapped in that old man's closet, in that frame.

Up until that point, several years ago, they had all been men I respected. The grandparents of classmates and friends, men who'd mentored my mother through her years as a business owner in the area, men who gave me candy and free bottles of soda in their shops, told wonderful stories and who entertained me before I could even walk.

And for all of the anxiety and terrifying expectation...

I wasn't even shocked.

* * * *

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

- James Baldwin

The elderly man finally broke down as we went through this one box, one full of photographs and, of all things, a ledger.

This one branch of Virginia's Klan, during the 1950s and 1960s, operated like other popular fraternal organizations, like the Kiwanis or the Moose or the Shriners. Members paid dues, paid for their robes and hoods. They even contributed money for timber and fuel oil to hold their rituals.

And someone, probably the local chapter's Klabee, kept very detailed records.

More than 50 pages of writing in that one ledger, filled with addresses and old switchboard phone extensions - and, of course, names.

Names.

How many of these men knew that almost a half-century later, society would change so drastically? Did they know how wrong they were? Did they realize, like my old collector, that society would not remember them for working to save the South but as an instrument of terror, a symbol of intolerance and fear?

* * * *

It was the snapshots in that box, however, that offered real insight into the true dynamic that drove racism and prejudice in the South.

The origins of segregation and slavery lie not in the color of skin but in the gluttonous insanity of unchecked capitalism, a pursuit of wealth and power devoid of compassion, reason, and responsibility. The quest for money, guns, and land gave rise to the social construct of race in the New World, just as surely as the monarchist traditions of Europe gave rise to Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism in the Old.

It was easy for slave owners to justify oppression as just another cost of doing business, for example. And after slavery, it was equally easy for white landowners to justify the system of sharecropping - a system propped up by Jim Crow policies designed to keep not only former slaves unable to escape agrarian servitude, but the descendants of the white non-landowning classes as well.

While the ledger detailed the business transactions of an organization, the basic bookkeeping that goes into any exchange of capital for privilege and property, the black-and-white images testified to the corrupting nature of the quest for profit.

One series of prints, banded together with an event program and several anti-integration pamphlets, spoke volumes about the true greedy, childish face of institutionalized racism:

The event, sponsored by a supposedly less-offensive white citizen's group dedicated to what in Virginia was known as the Massive Resistance Movement , touted the evening's keynote speech, about the dangers of integration to certain businesses and communities.

The speaker that night back in the 1950s was not George Wallace, or Gov. Byrd, or some other blowhard Southern Segregationist politician - the keynote was delivered, instead, by a prominent Negro leader speaking, supposedly, on behalf of concerned colored business owners.

And in the photographs, I beheld an interesting rider upon a very different pale horse - a black community leader and racial separatist, preaching to a Caucasian choir, with the Confederate colors flying above him. In some of the prints, he posed with old Daughters of the Confederacy ladies and with local football heroes from the all-white public high school.

And he posed with some of those same Klansmen, too, shook their hands and smiled beneath the ol' Stars and Bars. Sure, the Klan hadn't shown up in robes and hoods. There wasn't a flaming cross anywhere to be found. After all, who would want to offend a business partner?

And, I remember the old man explaining, many white folks had no problem with a Negro leader who blamed the social disturbances and protests of the era on what they saw as the real threat to America - the Northern pinkos and godless Muslims, the flashy Hollywood communists, and, of course, the Jews.

And again, nothing shocking. Does anyone really think there were no black men who supported, who prospered under the laws of the Old South? And that those same men never did business with white supremacists?

Makes perfect sense, actually, in a time when the whole of society was based on a flawed separate-but-equal system, including the economics. The elimination of segregated facilities and services signaled the death-knell for race-based businesses, both black and white.

Who, at the dawn of the dreaded Big Box Stores, would want to keep paying for the right to shop free of other races, for a Whites Only section, would continue to pay extra for it, as competition grew? And did anyone think that black folk really wanted to pay more for a dozen oranges at the Colored grocery than at one of those new-fangled, integrated supermarkets?

* * * *

It took five years' worth of correspondence to get the old man to even discuss the his activities, much less admit that he'd been a member of an organization that once corrupted the minds of many decent folks, a blasted society that fed on its members' fear of change as much as it fed upon the fear of the outside world.

At one point, it was an obsession - to expose something called the truth, the righteous concept of social justice driven by a personal need, a self-righteousness more akin to that of a lynch mob than to anything else. I'd planned a book, done the library research, studied my prey like a scholarly assassin.

I needed dirt to throw upon the graves of my enemies, the ghosts of the Old South. I didn't, at the time, care who I hurt. Hurt was, at the time, just what I intended to cause, through my quest to expose the truth. I'd made the mistake of so many, those who mistake arrogance for social justice - I'd passed sentence well before I'd judged the crime.

Though the mid-20th century Ku Klux Klan in Southside Virginia was abhorrent, it never was the violent terror that plagued the American Deep South. Sure, there were cross-burnings, and hateful speeches, and even acts of intimidation. But for the most part, history seems to record that its leaders failed to convince the majority of white folks in the area that their black neighbors were somehow deserving of violence. It wasn't the dreaded midnight monster of the 1800s or early 1900s. And, by most accounts, it was nowhere near as insane as the current White Pride movements.

Even a clergyman, a leader at a historically black church and veteran of the Civil Rights Movement I'd interviewed early on in my pursuit of truth, back when I was still in high school, wondered why a white boy would want to dig up such skeletons.

It took me watching an old man cry over his sins, the sins that terrified him as he prepared to meet his Creator, to understand that my quest to expose the truth looked a whole hell of a lot like the sort of insanity groups like the Klan generate.

What right does anyone have to sacrifice the future in order to preserve the past?

* * * *

Come to hate hypocrisy and the evil thought; for it is the thought that gives birth to hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is far from truth.

- Christ, according to The Apocryphon of James
[Jung Codex, Nag Hammadi Library]

I asked the curator of the Collection of the Damned why he'd left the Klan, why his incarnation had disappeared into barely an urban legend, a silenced joke without a punchline.

It was, strangely enough, Martin Luther King, Jr. Not the man, or the minister, or even the activist.

Dr. King's corpse changed him, changed his view of the Nig'ra people, saved him from becoming just another hateful man damned to a cultural hell of stagnation and bitterness.

You see, sometime after King's assassination, while the evening newscasters rattled off tributes and the newspapers ran stories of mourning and the demands for justice, the old man realized something that probably changed a lot of men like him.

King was a Baptist like the curator, a Southerner like the curator. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, had preached nonviolence and tolerance, and had died at the hands of a coward. A coward who, well, held the same views the curator held, who'd sought to silence agitators and protect the Old South - who'd taken fear to the point of murder.

And while those Klan meetings often began with prayers to God for guidance, nobody ever brought up that hating thy neighbor was, indeed, a sin, that murder was a sin.

The old man told me that it took days for him to remember what that sort of propaganda reminded him of. It kicked like a mule when he finally figured out the connection between his fraternity and the murder of a Nobel Prize winner and fellow Southern Baptist.

Europe.

He'd heard it in Europe, seen it as he'd marched across a continent towards the stronghold of a madman from Austria, witnessed what hate and murder really cost a man, a nation, a continent.

Adolf Hitler's not remembered for preserving Europe's traditions, either.

* * * *

I asked him what he intended to do with them after he'd confessed his sins, had asked for absolution in the form of the kind of anonymity that only a young man can grant a man close to death.

He didn't know.

But he did know that he didn't want his descendants to ever know and figured that the rest of his former knights probably wouldn't want their descendants to suffer for their sins, either. And that Negro leader? What price would his family pay?

Men, armed with such records, could blackmail, could drive others to murder others as James Earl Ray did, could seek not reconciliation but lustful, bloody revenge in the name of social justice. People are fallible, will punish whole generations for the sins of their ancestors, will reign destruction upon the brows of the countless innocent.

Let's be realistic here: People kill to acquire such records. And people will murder their own kin to bury it.

He offered me the records. I declined. I have no right to such power. And I had no right to risk the safety of my own Virginia kinfolk, either.

Information is, indeed, the most brutal form of power - and power can corrupt even a young man's promises to the old, corrupt his honor for things like money or some sense of self-importance.

I offered him a solution, however - a way to be free.

* * * *

I spent $40,000 on graduate school, learned the proper ways to select and preserve historical records, to digitize them and make them available for future generations.

Sometimes, one just has to accept that teaching a man how to un-preserve the past means more to the future than any amount of academic argument.

On my last trip back to Virginia, prior to my most recent journey, I learned that that old man has moved on, has been called back to His Father, Who Art in Heaven.

I have no clue what happened to those records, but I have a good idea.

But I'm sure, wherever he is, that he got a chance to meet that fellow Baptist Southerner, to be free at last, free at last...

And my notes have conveniently disappeared, and that book will never be published. Names? Well, my memory isn't what it used to be...

* * * *

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

- Nelson Mandela

It's the last week of September. I'm staring up at the new town hall in Farmville, the county seat of my home, built atop the ruins of a former strip mall that'd burned at the turn of the century.

I'm sipping on a cup of Joe from one of several coffee shops that now dot Downtown. When I was in high school, there was nothing remotely resembling a coffee shop in downtown Farmville. And now, on this trip back, in 2007, there are independents and national chains to choose from - I even found a shop that serves the best fairly-traded, organic Ethiopian blend.

It's a Wednesday, midmorning, and Main Street's a happening place. For more than 20 years, for most of my childhood, it'd been the home to not progress but the economic abandonment that plagues many small Southern communities.

But now, today, a group of international undergrads from the local college, speaking what sounds like Mandarin, pass behind me, bags full of touristy items clamoring as loud as their conversation. A black police officer, up the street, pulls over a pick-up full of white teenagers for violating the town's new noise ordinance, for playing G-Unit tunes too loud in a business district. An artsy-looking woman, plain and strangely beautiful, snaps photographs in front of the county courthouse.

Art. It's everywhere in town these days. There's even a museum where an abandoned department store used to be, on the corner of Third and Main. Plasma screen TVs fill its plate-glass storefront, a multimedia exhibit that wouldn't have been possible in 1996, much less 1956.

I turn on my heels, head south on Main. I walk past the site of the old State Theatre, remembering that my parents took me to see Fox and the Hound at a corner that now serves as an outdoor park and amphitheater. New brick high-rise apartments cast shadows down on the real estate beneath them - they're built atop property that once contained a decrepit shopping center, a liquor store, and a parking lot full of midnight drug dealers.

I stop in front of a Baptist church that now rests beneath the shadows cast by the high-rises, a church founded by former slaves, right after the U.S. Civil War.

A sign proudly proclaims that Martin Luther King once spoke there, proudly proclaims its place in history.

Without that visit by that martyred Baptist peacemaker, I wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have graduated from what became one of the most successfully integrated public school systems in North America. I couldn't proudly proclaim that I come from a community that spawned the most successful, peaceful student protest in U.S. history, a small town on the outskirts of change so monumental that some of its records are stored in places like the Library of Congress.

And King did more than simply visit, than simply speak and inspire during his lifetime. Even in death, he helped drive another nail in the coffin of one of the darkest times in Prince Edward's history.

He liberated a Klansman from his hate.

And he freed a bit of my soul, too, in the process.

The importance of burying the past, sometimes, paves the way for a greater future.

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VIRGINIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN FOR LOVERS, BUT WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT THAT:Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings...And The Bed That Made America

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (ZP) -- The last time I stood inside of Thomas Jefferson's bedchamber, George H. W. Bush occupied the White House, Saddam Hussein had just been driven from Kuwait, and the Soviet Union was in the midst of its nervous breakdown.

Fall. Nineteen-Hundred and Ninety-One.

I'd just started eighth grade, all of 13 and already a troublemaker of some notoriety, and my Civics class was visiting the Founding Father's home as part of field trip.

And during that tour of Monticello, as I stood next to the bed of one of the greatest minds of the 18th century.

Principle author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Founder of the University of Virginia. Third President of the United States.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating stuff, really.

But I had a mission back in 1991.

I just had to, well, touch IT.

On this visit, while the tour guide rambled on about architecture and agriculture and life on the man's plantation, I just had to touch IT again.

Wait... IT?

* * * *

IT.

IT, as in, Thomas Jefferson's alcove bed.

The place where not only Jefferson slept, but...

... Probably, Sally Hemings as well.

* * * *

Everything's in that one bedchamber, unspoken and buried beneath every nail and plank, just about every aspect of the social fuckedupness that was Virginia pop culture, from 1607 through 1865. The three-fifths of a man horseshit, chattel slavery realities and plantation pipe dreams, the myths of racial superiority, inferiority, and eugenics, the utter insanity of the human concept of race itself.

And Jefferson's bed, well, represents the most controversial interracial relationship in U.S. history.

Hemings and Jefferson probably stole precious moments in that bed, clandestine kisses and witching-hour moments of foreplay, caught up in the blatant hypocrisy of Colonial and Post-Colonial North America.

IT's quite comfortable, actually.

Hell, I'd hook up with Tommy Boy in the sucker. Homeboy really knew how to design a built-in bed.

* * * *

I waited for my moment this time, waited for the tour guide to be distracted by some old lady from Madison, Wisconsin, or Peoria, Illinois, or Birmingham, England...

And then, when the time came, I reached right over the rope barricade, pushed my fist down into the replica down mattress, left my own wrinkles in the very fabric of American history.

Fall. The Year of Our Lord, Twenty-Hundred and Seven.

At 29, I'm only slightly less of a troublemaker.

* * * *

Back in 1991, I'd pestered a poor tour guide about Hemings and Jefferson's rumored sexual relationship, about how the man behind the All Men are Created Equal Doctrine may have Founding Fathered as many as six children with a woman that he owned as property.

My overzealous questioning drew the scorn of one of the teachers escorting the field trip. I was warned, threatened with a detention slip, if I didn't simmer down.

I was such a rebellious arrogant brat - I told the teacher, in advance, that I was going to do it, going to sit right on the edge of the bed of Thomas Jefferson. That act, the educator warned me, would lead to both a phone call to my parents AND in-school suspension.

So when we entered the bedchamber during our class tour, I waited for the guide to be distracted, waited for the teacher in question to look right at me, and plopped my 13-year-old ass down on the bed where one of the greatest minds of the 18th century once slept...

... And maybe his mistress, occasionally, too.

One whole day. My act of civil disobedience earned me one whole day in detention.

Technically, it earned me three days of in-school suspension, but I skipped class for the other two, forged a note from my high school's disciplinary official regarding my satisfactory completion, and never served out my full sentence. The teacher never called my parents.

It was so worth it.

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