Living Blue in the Red States

14. How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Swamp in South Carolina

14. How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Swamp in South Carolina Gilbert Allen 1. The Interview (February 1977) The air is bright and windless. In the shade, the temperature hovers in the mid-fifties. But here, in the campus parking lot, in the sunlight behind the magnolia trees, I can imagine it’s summer. To me, this is truly amazing. Before today,I’d been south of the Mason-Dixon line only once—on a brief trip to Washington dc. When I left upstate New York yesterday, it was snowing. When I return tomorrow, it will still be snowing. I’ve just turned twenty-six, and I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation (on the poets of World War I) two months ago. I’m headed for a meeting with a half-dozen of the college’s brightest English majors. (One of them will eventually become a celebrated novelist; another a prominent eighteenth-century scholar and college administrator.) All are lively and respectful, interested in my thoughts on Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, and even curious about my own poems. They call me Doctor, as if I had the power to heal the sick. I’ve just had conversations with the English department faculty. Everyone seems to like me, and everyone seems to like each other. To me, this is beyond amazing. This is miraculous. I have come from a university where people routinely turn around in a corridor and walk away, leaving those present to wonder whose face was responsible for the scowling change in direction. This, I think, is a better place to be. 192 How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Swamp | 193 Late that afternoon, I return to the office of the department chair. He looks and sounds like Faulkner’s Colonel Sartoris auditioning to play Shakespeare’s Henry V. But beneath his theatrical bearing is authentic hospitality. He, a full professor, will personally chauffeur me to the airport at 6:00 a.m. the following morning! Without either of us knowing it, we will drive, in darkness, past the empty house that will become my home. But first, before this day is over, he must take me to the Administration Building, to meet the Man in Charge. As we walk, he opens fire doors for me, as if we were out on a date. “You might hear some questions that sound—strange,” he says, stopping before the final door. “Just answer them honestly, and be yourself.” He sounds as if he already knows what that self is. He is destined to become a dean, and (despite our more-than-occasional differences about university governance) a lifelong friend. He points to the office of the Man in Charge and says,“I’ll wait outside.” The Man in Charge looks as if he’d been born in this dark, woodpaneled room. Indeed, he has been at the college for over three decades . He asks me what I think of the local weather (splendid, I say), and nods when I mention my wife’s passion for gardening.After a few casual questions about my literary interests, he asks me where I go to church, and whether I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Even in 1977, these last two questions seem more than strange. If I hadn’t been forewarned, God knows how I would have responded. What I say is this.“I don’t attend church regularly. But I consider myself a Christian. I can’t imagine my personal or my professional life outside of the Christian tradition.” The Man in Charge seems to be reading something—it could be my letter of application, my references, or my curriculum vita. Or it could be his church newsletter. He nods, without looking up. “I see,” he says. I already know that the Man in Charge has only recently abandoned his practice of walking around campus, telling men not much younger than myself to tuck their shirttails inside their trousers.What is he thinking? Perhaps that in a benighted decade—a decade in which even the president of the United States admits that he has committed 194 | Gilbert Allen adultery in his own heart—some bland, blond Yankee might be the best thing lurking at the bottom of the barrel. Months later, after I’ve moved to South Carolina, the Man in Charge will host a luncheon for first-year professors, from all departments. He will...