Table Of ContentThis book is dedicated to my mother, Clare, who dropped off the perch a few
years back.
Table of Contents
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE - The End
CHAPTER TWO - An Alligator Up My Arse in Roanoke, Virginia
CHAPTER THREE - The Menace of Darwinism
CHAPTER FOUR - What Goes On
CHAPTER FIVE - The Trail of Tears
CHAPTER SIX - The Last Guest at the Magnolia House
CHAPTER SEVEN - Clarence Darrow
CHAPTER EIGHT - Gloria in Excelsis Deo
CHAPTER NINE - My Mother
CHAPTER TEN - Heyall Is a Lake of Fah
CHAPTER ELEVEN - John Thomas in Exile
CHAPTER TWELVE - God Takes a Shot
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Monkeyville
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - My Favourite Creationist
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - How to Get Along Sensibly with Girls
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Mth4U
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Home Is Where the Heart Is
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Flowers and the Promise of Moonshine
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Head Symptoms
CHAPTER TWENTY - Stumped
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Sediment in the Mouth
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Where Did Cain Get His Wife?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Achtung, Rocky!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Barefoot in the Glass
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Spelunking with the Christians
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Consenting Adults
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Stumbling in the Wilderness
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - A Ticket Home
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - 92760
CHAPTER THIRTY - Saint Matthew’s Epilogue
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright Page
PROLOGUE
In the spring of 1998, Tom Hedley, publisher of Duckworth, invited me to write
a book. He had read a screenplay of mine and felt I could handle something
larger. I decided I’d like to write about the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial, the trial
of a schoolteacher accused of teaching evolution in defiance of Tennessee law.
This was not an arbitrary choice. My great-great-grandfather was Charles
Darwin, something I had given little thought to as an adult until I came to
America and discovered his theories were still rabidly contested. A recent Gallup
poll found that 40 per cent of those surveyed favoured teaching creationism
instead of evolution in public schools. In 1999 the Kansas Board of Education
voted to delete virtually every mention of evolution from the state’s science
curriculum.
I suggested to Tom that I should take a Greyhound bus from New York,
where I live, down to Dayton, Tennessee, the small town where the trial took
place. Apart from doing historical research, I would also find out what had
changed in the town in the past seventy-five years, if anything. I had heard that
once a year the town staged a re-enactment of the trial. I would cover the event,
the largest in the town’s calendar, and this would become the hub from which
I’d throw out the other spokes of the intended work. We could even call the book
The Voyage of the Greyhound.
What I hadn’t taken into account was that I was on the verge of my own crisis,
spiritual and otherwise. I’d been writing screenplays for ten years, two or three a
year, each one overlapping the next, and had taken only one vacation during that
time where my computer had not accompanied me. Some years I made close to a
million dollars but I was never more than a month or two away from bankruptcy.
I was married to a beautiful and interesting woman, had a stepson I liked and
admired, and a daughter I adored; but when I left New York in June, I was in a
rage at my excessive life and all the obligations and stresses of middle age.
And then I was on the bus. At first I thought about the trial, then about my
own connection to it. By an accident of birth, I was the descendant of one of the
most influential men of the last two millennia, a man whose research and
theories challenged not only Christianity but most other religions as well. How
much of my sense of failure and panic, I wondered, could be traced to my
freakish antecedents?
Now, when I looked out the window, what came to mind were scenes from
my past, waves of them, too many to ignore. In particular, I thought about my
mother, great-granddaughter of Darwin, a woman of enormous intelligence and
promise whose decline into alcoholism was one of the great puzzles of my
childhood. I started writing some of these memories into a second notebook.
Another book, a book within a book, began to form, an accidental memoir,
fragments of an overshadowed childhood. I could have suppressed this, but I
began to see that what initially seemed a diversion from my main purpose might
in fact be entirely part of it. The fundamentalists who tried to banish the theory
of evolution from the schools did so because they feared it would destroy faith in
God and leave only a vacuum in its place, and here was I, up to now a more or
less cheerful and defiant atheist, suddenly overwhelmed by an inexplicable sense
of spiritual emptiness.
I had fallen off the rails. Perhaps this other book would help me climb back
on.
CHAPTER ONE
The End
It’s a Sunday in June and I’m at the Greyhound Bus Station in New York,
waiting to get on a bus. You buy the ticket but it does not guarantee a seat. For
that you have to take an escalator down into the vast, clinical basement and stand
in line at the appropriate gate. Two African-American women are ahead of me.
One of them says, ‘I wouldn’t do that wit’ my own flesh and blood’ The other
replies, ‘She did that, she did that, she did that wit’ me.’
The gate opens and we all shuffle forward, deposit our bags in a cavity
beneath the bus, and climb in. The seats are tall and narrow, the windows don’t
open, but the air is cool. The engine gurgles in a dull, self-satisfied way and the
vehicle jolts forward and climbs a ramp into daylight. As the bus heads toward
the Holland Tunnel, I look out the window and see a middle-aged man in a well-
pressed beige suit, white shirt and tie, piss copiously through a chain-link fence,
shake himself, and walk back toward a clean Honda with a brisk stride and a
smile of accomplishment.
There are twenty-two passengers on the bus. Fifteen are African-American,
four are white, two are Sudanese, and one is Hispanic. In front of me sits one of
the African-Americans. It’s eighty-five degrees and humid. He wears a wool hat
with the hood of a sweatsuit top pulled over it. His eyes are hidden behind
menacing shades and a thick beard conceals what’s left. A wire goes in under the
hood and I can hear the music from his headphones three seats back. This is not
someone who wants to intersect with reality too much, perhaps even less with
his own thoughts.
We enter the Holland Tunnel and a couple of minutes later are spat out of
Manhattan into New Jersey. For the next five hours we grind down the Eastern
Seaboard toward Washington, D.C., through a suburban and industrial landscape
so featureless it’s forgotten as it enters the eye.
I’m heading south to Dayton, Tennessee, the small town where in 1925 a
schoolteacher, John Scopes, was prosecuted for teaching Darwin’s theory of
evolution. The first trial ever to be broadcast live—by radio—not only to
America but also to Europe and Australia, it was given the title ‘The Trial of the
Century,’ and for my money it remains so. A philosophical skirmish between
religion and reason, between the most famous fundamentalist of his day,
William Jennings Bryan, and the most famous humanist, Clarence Darrow, it
was played out in an atmosphere of hucksterism and commerce uniquely and
hilariously American.
Inherit the Wind, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, was a
fictionalised account of the trial which then became a movie starring Spencer
Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly. Not a bad piece of work, it cannot
compare with reality, which is far funnier and more poignant.
Seventy-five years after the trial I’m going to see what has changed in the
town, if anything. I want to find out if they still believe the world was made in
six days and is only 6,000 years old. It seems incredible that they might, but
word has it they do. Every year the town stages what they call a ‘re-enactment’
of the trial. As the trial lasted for several days, and as the outcome was not
favourable to the fundamentalists who still dominate the region, I’m intrigued to
see what gets lost in the editing. I’m going down now, a month in advance of the
show, to do some research, and will then return for the play in July. My idea,
although it’s not fully formed yet, is to spin the whole book out from the play.
Revisionist religious history as theatre.
In my bag, I have two books, one a guidebook called The Old South, the other
a biography of Darwin. I pull out the guidebook and find an essay by Tim
Jacobson about the origins of the region. He says that while the North was
colonised for ideological reasons, the South was always about business. Sir
Walter Raleigh first tried to settle Virginia in 1584, but the settlers couldn’t take
the loneliness and hardship and came home to England without having turned a
profit. In 1587, Raleigh sent out another 150 who made camp on Roanoke
Island, now in North Carolina. Three years later he sent a crew out to check on
them. All they found was a tree with the word ‘Croatan’ carved on it, that being
the name of the local Indian tribe.
In 1606, 120 men were dispatched by the London Company, also for
commercial reasons. Sixteen died on the voyage. The rest sailed up the James
River and settled. Within six months, all but thirty-eight of them were dead from
malaria. In 1609, some women were sent out to breed with the survivors. Talk
about Natural Selection.
Here on the bus I’m pondering a different but related matter: Survival of the
Fattest. A black woman weighing at least 250 pounds sits across the aisle from
me. She is dressed in a large, colourful dress and, were it not for her obesity,
she’d be beautiful. Her face is so large it almost engulfs her humorous eyes, and
her chest and stomach have merged to become a monumental, rippling hillside.
She feeds constantly on potato chips and Teddy Grahams. The hand she’s not
eating with holds a book. It’s held high so she can read it over her cheeks. The
door to the Greyhound shitter is very narrow. Even I have to turn sideways to
pass through. So far she has made no attempt to enter. If she does, I’m convinced
it will end in failure or worse and I’m getting curious. Next to her is an amiable,
uncomplaining child. Everyone is amiable. You leave New York—or maybe any
big city—and suddenly the neurosis level drops.
Much to my disappointment, the woman doesn’t hit the WC until D.C., when
she scrambles off the bus, child dangling from her arm, and plunges into the
crowd, the eyes above her cheeks seeking the symbol of the skirted woman.
I have to change buses and I’ve got some time to kill, so I get my bag out
from under the bus and walk outside to the parking lot behind the bus station.
A white Southern woman in tight white jeans and a tank top is trying to
compact ten boxes and suitcases into six or less. It’s a comedy about futility, and
it has drawn a good crowd. She and her African-American boyfriend are
relocating to Virginia, where she was born. They were going to get a train from
New Jersey, where they met, but he—she casts an admonishing look at the man,
who, in stark contrast to her, is extremely handsome and muscular—woke up
late and so they had to change their plans. On the train you can take as much
luggage as you want. On the bus, there’s a limit and they’re well over it. She
must be around thirty, he a few years younger, and it’s one of those pairings
which is endearing if only because it seems so improbable.
She keeps saying, ‘My Lord!’ and ‘I swear!’ as she wrenches and pushes and
tugs. Now she straightens up and brings her hands to the sides of her head. ‘Oh,
my Lord,’ she exclaims before leaning in again with all the heft of her upper
body.
He stands back, shaking his head pessimistically. ‘It’s going to be an
odyssey,’ he declares, as if commenting on someone else’s life.
‘It’s going to be shitty, that’s what it’s gonna be,’ she responds.
I could take one of their bags—I only have one of my own—and I should
offer to do so, but I don’t. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve been
locked in a room writing for ten years. Or maybe it’s because I’ve always felt
myself to be exactly what the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
describes me as: a Resident Alien. I am here but I am not here and I like it that
way.
By paying an extra few dollars, they manage to get what has now become
eight dense, misshapen bags onto the bus and we’re all headed for Roanoke,
Virginia. It’s a new gang on a new bus with a new driver. Every time you get a
new driver he gives you the rules. Each driver has his own style. This one
welcomes us aboard and then lists every single stop along the way to Roanoke.
Finally, he concludes with:
‘These are the rules: no smoking, no drinking, no sex in your seats, no sex in
the bathroom, and no boomboxes. If you have a Walkman don’t have it so loud
it disturbs anyone. With that in mind, just lean back, close your eyes and dream
about tomorrow. Or yesterday …’
