Read Online Kinfolks by Lisa Alther - Free Book Online Page A

rogues, close, suspicious, inhospitable, untruthful, cowardly, and, to use their own word, sneaky.”
    None of my sources mentions cave dwellings or extra fingers.
    I persuade a couple of magazines to commission articles from me — one on snake handlers for the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
and another on the Melungeons for a London sociological journal called
New Society
. Both require me to go to Tennessee, where I’ve spent very little time since leaving for Wellesley. I’ve popped in for holidays every year or two. But this time I stay long enough to take a look around.
    As I stroll the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, I realize that two kids I played Trail of Tears with are now dead — Martha from the car crash and Pam from lupus. They say the good die young, and my own continued existence gives me pause. Martha and Pam were definitely good people. But it’s also possible they didn’t have enough time in which to be bad.
    Martha’s brother Nie works for Tennessee Eastman. Stacy is a long-distance trucker based in Texas. Stanley flies a corporate jet out of Mississippi. It’s hard for me to picture the funny little kid who helped my brother Bill burn down our tree house piloting a plane with other people’s lives in his hands. But he no doubt feels equally skeptical about my being in charge of a small child.
    The girls with whom I cruised Broad Street are now living all over the country. Marty works for Proctor and Gamble in Cleveland. One Jane is a city planner in New Orleans. Another Jane is an executive at ABC in New York. Barbara is a banker in Massachusetts. Portia is a real estate lawyer in Chicago. Susan is an investment analyst in New York.
    My brother Bill is in medical school in New Orleans, and Michael is at Vanderbilt. After MIT and Columbia, John joined the sociology department at UNC Chapel Hill. He married his high school girlfriend, a gifted pianist with degrees from Duke and Harvard, and they have two young daughters. He’s on the vestry of the Episcopal church. He wears handsome tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, and he smokes a pipe. He has clearly negotiated his identity crisis more successfully than I.
    It would be stretching credibility to claim that we’re all part of the Appalachian brain drain, but it’s true that we’ve all left town. Even my grandmother has flown the coop. She’s commandeered my retired Latin teacher to tour the Holy Land, sending my parents a photo of Miss Elmore and herself, both wearing Arab keffiyehs, sitting astride camels with a pyramid behind them and two sinister-looking Bedouin guides below.
    I borrow one of my parents’ cars and drive downtown for old times’ sake. As I cruise a deserted Broad Street to the boarded-up train station, I discover that J. Fred’s has been turned into a discount furniture store. The movie theaters are closed, one having become a cheerleading school. Many stores are vacant. Nobody is walking the streets. The Model City has become a ghost town. Everyone must be shopping at the new mall or eating at restaurants on the franchise strip along the highway. I realize that you really can’t go home again, but only because home as you knew it no longer exists.
    As I approach the church circle, I study the four red-brick churches with their white spires. Apart from my wedding day, I haven’t been inside a church since I left for college. My grandmother was right to worry that once I left here, I’d never look back. But in order not to, I’ve performed an autolobotomy, renouncing religion, Republicans, and the Vietnam War. I help distraught women find abortions. My favorite members of my consciousness-raising group are lesbians, a category I didn’t even know existed when I lived here. I’ve attended several of their gatherings, one a costume party at which I dressed as the Virgin Mary in a blue nightgown with a halo made from a foil-wrapped coat