Russell Banks - The Darling

We were delighted to know that you are safe and in good health, although astonished to hear from you at such a vast distance. I looked up your country in the atlas and encyclopedia (I confess, I barely knew of its existence) and am learning quickly as much as I can about its rather intriguing history and culture and its perverse connection to the roots of our homegrown racial conflict. I feel almost as if you have joined the Peace Corps and have been stationed out there for two years, and I do wish it were so, for, sadly, I fear that your stay may run a bit longer, no? I do believe, however, that someday there will be a general amnesty declared for all of you who put yourselves on the line against the war and the men who ran, and continue to run, this country as if it were their own private fiefdom. I won’t go into specifics here (as I’m not confident, all indications to the contrary, that our letters are not being copied by the FBI for J. Edgar Hoover to peruse at his leisure), but there are signs, thanks to Jimmy Carter, that clemency is in the air, and not just for Agnew and Nixon this time. It may take several or perhaps five or more years for it to happen, unless, of course, someone like the idiot actor who’s currently cast as governor of California becomes president after Carter, which seems extremely unlikely to me, after what this country has been through. But who knows? I’ve guessed badly on presidential elections before. Remember Nixon vs. Humphrey?

By the time I entered the sixth grade I’d passed to the left of my father. It was either that or go to his right. His liberalism, cleansed of anger and tainted by melancholy, ill suited my temperament, and temperament always trumps ideology. He was like Adlai Stevenson. He even looked like Stevenson, a tall, angular version with the same high forehead, the same sad eyes and too-pretty mouth. He believed in non-violence because he himself was incapable of committing a violent act and, to work his will on others, frequently resorted, therefore, to manipulation. He was charming, articulate, witty, and of course intelligent and reasonable, and if you valued those qualities — and who among us did not? — then you bent your will to his. Which was all he wanted, the mere concession that he was right and that you, as a result, were wrong, implying, if you persisted in your belief and acted accordingly, that you were unintelligent, unreasonable, witless, inarticulate, and boorish. And who among us valued those qualities? He was a hard man for a wife and a female child, an only child, to resist.

Well, I did not mean to get into politics. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear from me. Despite everything, your mother and I are fine, one might even say happy, except of course for the continued absence of our beloved daughter from our daily lives. Even at our advanced age — not so old, really, still hale and hearty at 68 and 66 —we’re as engaged and busy as ever, me with the clinic here in Emerson and over at the hospital, although I’ve cut back some on the latter, and with my books and a certain amount of political activism, and your mother with the house and her gardens and bonsai collections and with helping me. She continues to be, as always, my irreplaceable amanuensis. I’ve had to travel a great deal in the last year or so, more than I like, mostly lecturing in the U.S. and Western Europe, where they find my ideas on child-rearing a little more challenging than useful, perhaps, but worth listening to nonetheless.

After my father died, I hoped that I’d find among his papers the first letters I wrote to him and Mother, their only child’s letters home from Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp, a funky, pseudo-socialist, overpriced retreat for privileged kids from the suburbs. The camp was located in the Adirondacks, not many miles from my farm here in Keene Valley, as it happens. For five summers, my liberal parents shipped me off to the wilderness to be with other rich white kids with liberal parents, until I began to see through the hypocrisy and cynicism of the camp directors and was finally old enough to insist on staying home in Emerson doing volunteer work at the hospital. Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp is defunct now — not enough affluent parents in the 1980s and ’90s, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years, wanted their kids to experience the rigors of manual labor, which happened to save the camp considerably on staff, food, and maintenance costs, or learn the words to folk songs that helped us love and admire the oppressed, exploited workers of the world and ignore our own mild version of it. But I was innocent of all that then, at least at first, and for eight weeks every summer was free of my mother’s hovering, fearful shadow and my father’s constant, watchful evaluation of my behavior and development — I was always his Exhibit A, don’t forget, the visible proof of the wisdom of his theories on child-rearing. And every week for five summers, from that happy, unguarded center of consciousness, I wrote a letter home. After he died, I wanted to hold those letters in my hands and read them, to reconnect my adult self, inasmuch as I had a self, to the girl I was then. During those eight weeks at Saranac every summer, I was truly happy and as near to being my natural self as I have ever been, before or since. I never questioned then the simple fact of my own essential reality. It’s why, so many years later, when I went looking for a farm to buy, I came up here to the Adirondack Mountains and bought Shadowbrook Farm and why I have settled permanently here, hoping to find again that lost self, and finding it, cling to it. My father, as you might have guessed, did not save those long-ago letters from Saranac. Nor did my mother. Among his papers were the letters written to him over the years by the readers of his books, his colleagues, ex-students, ex-patients, state governors, cabinet officers, and presidents, and even the letters written to him by my mother from Smith when he was at Yale Medical School. But nothing from little me. I had even less hope of finding anything from me among my mother’s papers. Daddy, who’d always intended to write his memoirs, saved everything he might someday want to refer to; but there was nothing in Mother’s life, other than her relationship to Daddy, that she deemed sufficiently memorable to preserve for posterity. Predictably, when it came time for me to sift through her papers, I found every love letter and note, every Christmas and birthday card, that Daddy had written to her over the years, starting with his formal invitation to a mixer in New Haven in 1939 and ending, forty-five years later, with his final instructions to her on the dispersal of his personal library and manuscripts. But not a shred from their daughter. Before Mother died, I asked her why she and Daddy hadn’t saved my early letters from camp or any of the hundreds of letters I’d written from boarding school and college and later from the South during my Civil Rights stints and when I was organizing mothers on welfare in Cleveland, before going underground. “Well, after you were indicted and didn’t show up for the trial and disappeared,” she said, “Daddy thought it would be wise if we destroyed them. I think he showed them to Ron Briggs, his lawyer, and he advised it. To keep them from being used against you by the government or the press or whomever else might want to hurt or expose you. So we burned them. Besides, you know how protective he was of his private life. Don’t forget, Daddy was famous practically from before you were born.”

We miss you, my darling, and pray for your continued safety and well-being. Speaking of prayer, Bill Coffin was here this past weekend, and we took the liberty of sharing with him the good news of your letter (the fact of it, not the letter itself, of course). He sends his love and prayers. We continue to be as circumspect as possible in all matters regarding you. Many, many people ask after you, of course, both your friends and ours and also numerous longtime supporters from the Movement, who come by from time to time or who call and/or write me at the clinic. In any event, inasmuch as it’s somewhat unclear to us how careful you want us to be regarding your current whereabouts and circumstances, we remain utterly discreet concerning both and shall continue to do so. There will come a day, I know, in the not-too-distant future, when we shall all be together again. In the meantime, please remember that we love you.