Joyce Oates - Sourland

Not the horror of the incident was emphasized, in Mr. Karr’s telling, but the irony. For the victim, in Mr. Karr’s version of the stabbing, was a Caucasian male and the delivery-van assailant was a black male — or, variously, a person of color . Rhonda seemed to know that Caucasian meant white , though she had no idea why; she had not heard her mother identify Caucasian, person of color in her accounts of the stabbing for Mrs. Karr dwelt almost exclusively on her own feelings — her fear, her shock, her dismay and disgust — how eager she’d been to return home to Princeton — she’d said very little about either of the men as if she hadn’t seen them really but only just the stabbing It happened so fast — it was just so awful — that poor man bleeding like that! — and no one could help him. And the man with the knife just — drove away… But Mr. Karr who was Rhonda’s Daddy and an important professor at the University knew exactly what the story meant for the young black man with the knife — the young person of color — was clearly one of an exploited and disenfranchised class of urban ghetto dwellers rising up against his oppressors crudely striking as he could, class-vengeance, an instinctive “lynching,” the white victim is collateral damage in the undeclared and unacknowledged but ongoing class war . The fact that the delivery-van driver had stabbed — killed? — a pedestrian was unfortunate of course, Mr. Karr conceded — a tragedy of course — but who could blame the assailant who’d been provoked, challenged — hadn’t the pedestrian struck his vehicle and threatened him — shouted obscenities at him — a good defense attorney could argue a case for self-defense — the van driver was protecting himself from imminent harm, as anyone in his situation might do. For there is such a phenomenon as racial instinct, self-protectiveness. Kill that you will not be killed .

As Mr. Karr was not nearly so hesitant as Mrs. Karr about interpreting the story of the stabbing, in ever more elaborate and persuasive theoretical variants with the passing of time, so Mr. Karr was not nearly so careful as Mrs. Karr about shielding their daughter from the story itself. Of course — Mr. Karr never told Rhonda the story of the stabbing, directly. Rhonda’s Daddy would not have done such a thing for though Gerald Karr was what he called ultra-liberal he did not truly believe — all the evidence of his intimate personal experience suggested otherwise! — that girls and women should not be protected from as much of life’s ugliness as possible, and who was there to protect them but men? — fathers, husbands. Against his conviction that marriage is a bourgeois convention, ludicrous, unenforceable, yet Gerald Karr had entered into such a (legal, moral) relationship with a woman, and he meant to honor that vow. And he would honor that vow, in all the ways he could. So it was, Rhonda’s father would not have told her the story of the stabbing and yet by degrees Rhonda came to absorb it for the story of the stabbing was told and retold by Mr. Karr at varying lengths depending upon Mr. Karr’s mood and/or the mood of his listeners, who were likely to be university colleagues, or visiting colleagues from other universities. Let me tell you — this incident that happened to Madeleine — like a fable out of Aesop. Rhonda was sometimes a bit confused — her father’s story of the stabbing shifted in minor ways — West Street became West Broadway, or West Houston — West Twelfth Street at Seventh Avenue — the late-winter season became midsummer — in Mr. Karr’s descriptive words the fetid heat of Manhattan in August . In a later variant of the story which began to be told sometime after Rhonda’s seventh birthday when her father seemed to be no longer living in the large stucco-and-timber house on Broadmead with Rhonda and her mother but elsewhere — for a while in a minimally furnished university-owned faculty residence overlooking Lake Carnegie, later a condominium on Canal Pointe Road, Princeton, still later a stone-and-timber Tudor house on a tree-lined street in Cambridge, Massachusetts — it happened that the story of the stabbing became totally appropriated by Mr. Karr as an experience he’d had himself and had witnessed with his own eyes from his vehicle — not the Volvo but the Toyota station wagon — stalled in traffic less than ten feet from the incident: the delivery van braking to a halt, the pedestrian who’d been crossing against the light — Caucasian, male, arrogant, in a Burberry trench coat, carrying a briefcase — doomed — had dared to strike a fender of the van, shout threats and obscenities at the driver and so out of the van the driver had leapt, as Mr. Karr observed with the eyes of a front-line war correspondent — Dark-skinned young guy with dreadlocks like Medusa, must’ve been Rastafarian — swift and deadly as a panther — the knife, the slashing of the pedestrian’s throat — a ritual, a ritual killing — sacrifice — in Mr. Karr’s version just a single powerful swipe of the knife and again as in a nightmare cinematic replay which Rhonda had seen countless times and had dreamt yet more times there erupted the incredible six-foot jet of blood even as the stricken man kept walking, trying to walk — to escape which was the very heart of the story — the revelation toward which all else led.

What other meaning was there? What other meaning was possible?

Rhonda’s father shaking his head marveling Like nothing you could imagine, nothing you’d ever forget, the way the poor bastard kept walking — Jesus!

That fetid-hot day in Manhattan. Rhonda had been with Daddy in the station wagon. He’d buckled her into the seat beside him for she was a big enough girl now to sit in the front seat and not in the silly baby-seat in the back. And Daddy had braked the station wagon, and Daddy’s arm had shot out to protect Rhonda from being thrown forward, and Daddy had protected Rhonda from what was out there on the street, beyond the windshield. Daddy had said Shut your eyes, Rhonda! Crouch down and hide your face darling and so Rhonda had.

By the time Rhonda was ten years old and in fifth grade at Princeton Day School Madeleine Karr wasn’t any longer quite so cautious about telling the story of the stabbing — or, more frequently, merely alluding to it, since the story of the stabbing had been told numerous times, and most acquaintances of the Karrs knew it, to a degree — within her daughter’s presence. Nor did Madeleine recount it in her earlier breathless appalled voice but now more calmly, sadly This awful thing that happened, that I witnessed, you know — the stabbing? In New York? The other day on the news there was something just like it, or almost… Or I still dream about it sometimes. My God! At least Rhonda wasn’t with me.

It seemed now that Madeleine’s new friend Drexel Hay — “Drex” — was frequently in their house, and in their lives; soon then, when they were living with Drex in a new house on Winant Drive, on the other side of town, it began to seem to Rhonda that Drex who adored Madeleine had come to believe — almost — that he’d been in the car with her on that March morning; daring to interrupt Madeleine in a pleading voice But wait, darling! — you’ve left out the part about… or Tell them how he looked at you through your windshield, the man with the knife — or Now tell them how you’ve never gone back — never drive into the city except with me. And I drive.

Sometime around Christmas 1984 Rhonda’s mother was at last divorced from Rhonda’s father — it was said to be an amicable parting though Rhonda was not so sure of that — and then in May 1985 Rhonda’s mother became Mrs. Hay — which made Rhonda giggle for Mrs. Hay was a comical name somehow. Strange to her, startling and disconcerting, how Drex himself began to tell the story of the stabbing to aghast listeners This terrible thing happened to my wife a few years ago — before we’d met —