Long Time Leaving (43 page)

Because our politicians and Cuba's maintain pissing-match relations, to the politicians’ mutual advantage—Castro can blame his people's poverty on the American embargo established by that great Southern statesman Jesse Helms. Up with Enmity! There are people out there who are against us, and whatever's wrong is their fault! That is so Southern, I thought, until I moved to the Northeast and detected there a similar sentiment toward the South.

Then I went to Cuba. With my inamorata Joan Griswold and her sister Mary and brother-in-law Geoffrey. Havana was like an abandoned wedding cake that ants have moved into. Blocks and blocks of fancy architecture—columns and balconies and arches and porticos— thoroughly inhabited and crumbling. People living in the first floor of a row house whose second and third floors were all gone except for the façade. Billboards with heavy-handed revolutionary slogans all around, and bright-color-clad, hip-swaying people (a ghost town full of live wires) getting by on rationed food—eight eggs (but five pounds of sugar) a month.

We ate in tourist-oriented restaurants where the food wasn't bad and the live music was rousing. The hip request is for a song called “Hasta Siempre
.
” Ask for that and they look at you like you understand—they really get into that song, which celebrates the martrydom of Che and the foreverness of the revolution. It reminded me of things I sang growing up in church like “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of glory divine.”

But we never found a good local hole-in-the-wall eatery. Just plenty of holes in the walls. We were walking through a neighborhood where
structures that used to be nightclubs or theaters had become improvised tenements. We were peering at a santería effigy in a dark foyerish space behind a sagging antique front door that looked like it had been ornate but had undergone heavy sandblasting, when suddenly a walleyed man thrust his head out at us. He had a scar running from his sideburn to his lip that drew up one corner of his mouth. Oh Lord, I thought, a pirate; what is he going to want?

He wanted to know whether we would take a package back to the States and mail it to his relatives in …some place we couldn't quite make out at first, not having any Habanero Spanish to speak of. His relatives in …?
Kentucky?
Kentucky. When we conveyed our polite reluctance to get involved in whatever traffic that might entail, he asked us if we had any soap, for his children.

Well. We had, in fact, brought a couple of suitcases full of staples, notions, and wash-day products that we had heard people needed over there, but we had given all that to a neighborhood Communist committee to distribute. Which my mother would have regarded as the sort of thing we could have done just as well back home. The kind of thing she did do, through the church. To her, doing it abroad (since we weren't missionaries) would have been exoticism.

But then she was a person who, when she came to visit me in New York in her fifties, looked out the car window at some Puerto Rican women yakking at their children and shook her head and sighed—it was the sigh that got me—and said, “I reckon they love 'em just like we do ours.”

“Well …yes!”
I sputtered at her, and she jumped like I'd turned against her, had turned inexplicably foreign myself.

With regret, we told this man in Havana we didn't have any soap on us. He didn't respond the way you'd expect somebody with a face like his to respond. He said all right, said he loved the people of the Estados Unidos, smiled so that the other corner of his mouth came close to matching the drawn-up one, and faded back inside. Where he didn't have anything to wash his children with. He was making do, though.

Chugging and smoking through the streets of Havana were American cars of the fifties, like the ones my family used to drive down to Jacksonville in, only rebuilt under the hood with juryrigged miscellaneous parts from Mexico and sporting multiple hood ornaments, say, a Packard one on top of one from an Oldsmobile. Substitute for the Communist slogans the old hymns I grew up singing—which I'm inclined to believe we put as much flavor into as people in Havana do into their colors and hips—and large personal-history areas in the back of my mind are like Havana, decomposing but layered and homey.

I know, I know, there is such a thing—tell me about it—as deep-rooted unresolvable difference. But what a shame to lean in that direction. “What would Jesus do?” is a trendy question in some quarters today. But surely not in the highest corridors of American government, because would Jesus insist on keeping a window open for torture? Perhaps Che Guevara, whom Cubans are urged to emulate, would not have done that either—he left Cuba, to take the revolution abroad, when he saw Castro nailing the revolution down dictatorially at home.

Che was killed before long. To deeply rooted people, martyrs are most useful dead. You don't see Castro's face iconically displayed in Havana, you see Che's face, and the face of José Martí (already a martyr when Castro took over), and the face of a hero who was new to me: Camilo Cien-fuegos, the happy revolutionary in a cowboy hat, “who,” according to a caption in the Museum of the Revolution, “was always trying to improvise a kind of joy.” It is widely suspected that Castro arranged for his old comrade Camilo's plane to be blown up because he'd become too popular to stay alive.

I never heard anybody say “What would Jesus do?” when I was growing up. We knew Jesus would most likely do what he did do—something crazy by community standards, some far-out-liberal, crucifiable offense, something we weren't about to do. In the Bible, Jesus refers to the salt of the earth as the select, the righteous, as opposed to the widespread sinful. But when I was growing up, people used
salt of the earth
to mean pretty much the same thing
as good old boy,
only ungendered. Just good plain solid folks. We saw no virtue in hobnobbing with people who weren't plain and solid.

How can I travel and still stay in touch with such roots? Well, the parts of abroad that make me feel like I'm getting somewhere—okay, now,
this
is Peru, or whatever—are the parts where people live who don't gad about the globe themselves. Don't you imagine that applies in reverse? Say you're a Moroccan visiting the United States. Do you want to meet Ameri-cans who are eager to tell you about their favorite hotel in Marrakesh, who run into the house to get the fezzes that they got in Fez, who are in fact rather shocked that you yourself have never tried the camel's-eye soup at that great little place in Rabat? Or would you want to meet Americans who will steer you to where you can get funny-named free-range fish of the vicinity fried the way they are fried by local people? I had some fish in Venezuela once that were so freshly gutted that they were dropped into a pot of oil still wiggling, so they came out in suspended animation.

If American foreign policy upheld the values I grew up with, we'd be
trying to get relations going with down-home Cubans, so they could afford to share with us some beans and rice that hath not lost their savor.

Because here is something I think we can say, generally, about Southern travelers: if we are going to pack up and find somebody to look after the dogs and the cats and the plants, and go to the damn airport and wrangle our way over to some damn foreign place where the airports are even harder to get through than ours, and figure out different money, and spend a lot of it that turns out to be worth more in real money than it looked like, and miss the Tangerine Bowl, and give the opposing faction on the Board of Stewards a chance to ram through some kind of crazy damn scheme involving the design of the porte cochere outside the new Sunday school building—I tell you what. The eating. Had better. Be good.

A
ll I know about top-notch bird dogs is, you're not supposed to pet them much; they're more serious than that. All I can say about myself as a horseman is, I guess I am just not gaited.

Yet in February I risked—for the third time—being trampled under several hundred hooves and Garth Brooks hats to ride behind elite dogs (Quicksilver Pink, Willie Freedom, Red-Necked Woman, Reedy Fork Reb, Miller's Crossbow, and Chinquapin Bisco Buck) as they competed in the National Field Trial Championships at the Ames Plantation in Grand Junction, Tennessee.

I rode to the bird dogs partly because no American boy wants to pass up a chance to die with his boots on, so to speak. But mostly I did it for the figures of speech.

The first time I attended the field trials was in 1979, at the invitation of my old college friend Ruff Fant. Ruff grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi, which is just over the state line from the Ames Plantation. Ruff's Holly Springs friend Jerry Bolden keeps horses that he rents to rodeos and kindly lends to us for the field trials.

It was raining, in 1979, and a good many people were drinking quite a bit, and Jerry put on an exhibition of riding that—well, do you remember Lee Marvin in
Cat Ballou?
How he, or his stunt double, would reel along at all angles to his horse until you thought he was bound to topple?

Jerry Bolden did topple, and his horse toppled with him, and the two of them
rolled,
together, through deep mud. Jerry is a big man, and he was wearing one of those long dark green all-weather coats like they
wore in the movie
Long Riders.
The sight of Jerry and his horse rolling together, now one on top and now the other, and coming up all jaunty and looking like they'd both been dipped in chocolate, Jerry still wearing his good non-country-singer hat, was just one of the highlights of that sporting event.

Before I get to the figure-of-speech highlight, let me explain what I mean by the expression “I am just not gaited.” I mean I can go, “Git up,” and I can go, “Whoa,” but I have never mastered the body language for, say, “Let's break into a nice lope.” At various times over the years, I have been up top a cutting horse, a bulldogging pony, a Brooklyn rent-ahorse, a Dorsetshire moors pony, a thirty-year-old gelding named Ollie who let cats and chickens climb on his back (not while I was on him), a blind Florida farmhorse, and several different Texas cow ponies.

I have stayed on all of them. (The bulldogging pony and I were mostly separated for a moment, but I hit some cactus and bounced right back up into the saddle without ever losing hold of the reins, an extra-equestrian feat that several observers, as they picked quills out of my back that evening, called one of the most striking, I think is the term they used, that they had ever seen.) And I have generally been able to exert considerable influence over direction, as long as it meant going some way that made sense to the horse.

But whether it was the cutting horse jumping entirely over the rump of another horse stumbling crosswise in front of us as we negotiated a rushing stream, or the rental horse electing to break into a gallop at Grand Army Plaza, I have largely deferred to the animal in the matter of gear selection.

The horse I rode in 1979 was used to leading brisk rodeo processions. His preferred pace was the surging walk. He wanted to be
at least
in the avant-garde of horses—ideally, I believe, he would have liked to get out ahead of the dogs and maybe the quail. Certainly ahead of me. So he and I would forever be getting up too close to the marshals, who would therefore be saying to me, and to ten or twenty other hard chargers, “Hold your horses, boys.”

I love it when a figure of speech comes out literally. It doesn't happen too often in modern life. Maybe someone will compliment you on your shirt and you'll say, “Oh, it's just run-of-the-mill,” or you'll be in the Easter parade with someone who starts whacking at her headdress and you can say, “Got a bee in your bonnet?” But usually when you say, “Hold your horses” in today's world, you mean, “Don't crawl off till I get your Pampers fastened.” No wonder today's young people have such a tenuous grasp on language.

I got into an argument the other day with a college student. She had heard someone say, “You can't beat that with a stick,” which struck her (so to speak) as an inappropriate way of speaking—
beat
in that connection just meant
do better than,
she said; it didn't have anything to do with sticks.