The rest, as they say, is history: your history, darling. After all, without that splintery crash on the blacktop, the tale would not have existed and you might never have been born. Now that you have reached the age of the White Boys, I am passing the story on to you as a kind of heirloom, unencumbering, but also undefined. There are so many questions that come with it. Why, for example, does it stick? Why, though your father and I are now long divorced, and divided by a carefully groomed terrain of indifference, do I still feel that it is important? And what is the actual story—just the tale of the pulpit, or my listening to the tale of the pulpit? Is it a story about black people and white people, or men and women? And, behind all these words, what is the flickering presence I keep glimpsing, insubstantial as the shadow of a fly? Is it something funny, or something sad, or something completely different?
Your father remembered the misery he felt on the country road outside Barreville when he had almost forgotten what the election meant for Tenlow County. The accident became the definition of that Alabama summer, and the image stayed sharp and clear through his senior year in high school, through the waning of the sixties, and the perfectly natural death of his friendship with McGinty. It stayed with him as he set aside his raw idealism, and grew slowly into tolerating the knowledge that the world, the real world, wanted nothing more than to put White Boys like him into power. It remained vivid until one evening when he was in law school he found himself telling the tale to another black girl he had a crush on. A minister’s daughter like Nicolette Basnight. A girl who, as the story progressed, laid aside her rudeness and indifference; and at the end suddenly laughed and raised her eyes to meet his across the table.
What’s that? Did he ever write to Nicolette? You know, that’s something that in all these years I never found out. My dear, that’s one more question you’ll have to ask your father.
Sicily
The first thing I knew about Sicily was marzipan. It’s a specialty there, and whenever my stepfather goes down to visit his Palermo relatives he brings it back to us in Rome. Marzipan is candy made from almonds and is so sweet that as you eat it you feel slightly nauseous. Federico, my stepfather, says that Arabs brought it to Sicily a thousand years ago. The reason I love it is that they make it in every shape and color; they even copy things like asparagus or salami. It’s a weird feeling, biting into a marzipan pork chop, because even if your brain knows that it’s candy your tongue still expects something else. When we went off to spend four days in Sicily over the May twenty-fifth school holiday, Federico bought me a little basket of marzipan clams and mussels at the Palermo airport. Mom was annoyed, as she always is when Fede buys me candy, which is often, because he has a sweet tooth himself. But I was happy, because the streaky brown-and-black shells looked completely real. Later, on the beach, I even fooled my stepcousin Ginevra by pretending to dig up a marzipan clam and then taking a big bite out of it. She screamed. It was all jealousy: she can’t stand anyone showing off any more than she does.
Ginevra was part of the group of Federico’s friends and family who had come from all over Italy to meet up with us for the holiday in a very tiny hotel on an island called Favignana. It takes a long ferry ride to get to Favignana, which is far out in the sea between Sicily and Tunisia. It’s an island covered with the kind of white pumice stone you use in the bath, and also with prickly pear cactus. It gets unbelievably hot, so you can’t stay out on the beach in the middle of the day or else you end up fried. Luckily Ginevra and I had brought our Game Boys, and Saturday after lunch we perched on the steps of the hotel terrace and played Tetris, Frogger, and Super Mario. Meanwhile Federico and the rest of the men sat at a big table and smoked and laughed and occasionally shouted over a card game called scopone. The women were all in their rooms taking siestas, except for my mother, who was reading in a hammock, with a sulky look on her face. Mom was sulking a lot on this trip, because she doesn’t like to do anything in big groups, which she always says is the worst of many obnoxious Italian habits. But I knew she was peeved most of all because Fede was spending time with his brothers and his cousins: playing cards, drinking wine, strolling to the store to buy cigarettes, and not paying much attention to her at all. Mom is great, but one of the first things anybody notices about her is that she likes a lot of attention. She kept yanking me aside and hissing complaints in my ear: “He’s reverted. It’s a tribal gathering. I knew we shouldn’t have come.”
We were there on Favignana to watch them kill tuna. This is a Sicilian custom called la Mattanza that happens every year in May, when the tuna migrate. Mattanza means “slaughter,” Federico told us, and what happens is that the fishermen from the islands guide schools of tuna into a special trap and then spear them, and there is a whole ceremony they perform as they do this, with prayers and songs. Fede said that it is a way of fishing that was already ancient when the Normans ruled Sicily in the Middle Ages, that probably it dates back to the Stone Age. Once it was a sort of festival, but nowadays hardly
