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 41 august 2, 1997 Through the use of fictional strategies, the writer offers us a clue about oppression. I n 1963 my wife, Jane, was teaching a fourth-grade class in Atlanta, Georgia. All her students were of African American background. The South at the time was very much in the midst of social struggle and change. In fact, the two of us were then studying the progress of school desegregation in Atlanta, after observing an earlier version of it in New Orleans. One morning as the class was discussing American history, the Civil War in particular, a girl raised her hand, ostensibly to offer her take on the nature of and the reasons for Sherman’s well-known “march through Georgia,” which had taken place almost a century earlier. But instead she treated the class to a disquisition of sorts. She mocked those who have criticized that campaign as too cruel and destructive (“After all, it was a war they were fighting”); and she went further, wondering why Sherman’s military behavior has become for some so notorious, whereas the everyday experience of slavery “doesn’t get a lot of people upset,” as she put it. Others in the class disputed that comparison. One girl made a racial distinction, observing that “it’s white folks who worry about what Sherman did.” She went further and told her fellow students the following : “Even for us colored people—how can you really know what it was 42  like being a slave? My momma, my grandma—they say it was so bad, you can’t imagine how bad, so it’s better you don’t try.” I thought of that long-ago discussion, recorded in a teacher’s journal my wife kept, as I recently read an extraordinarily powerful novel about an American family, first published in England four years ago under a title, Theory of War, that suggests a ponderous political science text. The novelist, Joan Brady, has chosen her own grandfather, Jonathan Carrick , as her story’s protagonist; and she tells us about him in an author’s note: “My grandfather was a slave. This isn’t an uncommon claim for an American to make if the American is black. But I’m not black. I’m white. My grandfather was white, too. And he was sold into slavery not in some barbaric Third World country: he was sold in the United States of America. A Middle Western tobacco farmer bought him for $15 when he was four years old; not many people knew about such sales, although they were common just after the Civil War.” The book makes sure that more of us will know what it means for a child to grow up as the legally and socially sanctioned property of people who aren’t parents, but rather owners—willing, therefore, to demand, insist, deny, and punish not out of love or concern or respect, but in the tradition of the market’s brute calculations. To some extent the writer has given us a social history of our country’s nineteenth-century prairie life; she has also summoned the tape recorder as an instrument of remembrance , and parts of her narrative are devoted to “oral history,” to her determined effort to learn of her grandfather through the recalling voice of his physician son, Atlas, who was her uncle. Moreover, she keeps invoking the military strategist and essayist Karl von Clausewitz, who understood that war is a test of will (and desperation) as well as a matter of arms wielded.  43 Clausewitzisthereigningthinkerofthischroniclebecausetheauthor wants us to think of the consuming bitterness that arbitrary subjection and humiliation can prompt. This is a novel about America’s westward expansion—aboutsaloonsandwhorehousesandthebuildingofrailroads, about farming and the weather that makes it or breaks it, about a version ofpopulismthattookholdinsmalltownsacrosstheland.Butthenovelis reallyapsychologicalautopsyofamanwhowas,asayoungchild,stripped of his human rights and who eventually would run away from his callous and cruel masters. But he could not get them out of his head. Slavery, we are meant to learn, won’t so easily yield to new circumstances , be they the favorable accidents or incidents of life or even the achieved successes that hard work and applied intelligence can accomplish .InTheoryofWar,theprotagonist’sobviousagilityofmindandbody, his relentless determination to make a go of it, no matter the obstacles in his way, are not enough to placate his soul, to bring him the proverbial peace of mind that, in fact, will elude him all his life. Instead he is haunted by the past and...

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