Against the Country Read Free Page A

that a pony or a half-dead mule could be had out there for as little as fifty dollars, her claims about when the promise was first made, and how often it was repeated, might be considered tainted by a former
Black Beauty
enthusiast’s understandable thirst for revenge.
    I myself do not care what plans my parents made or unmade or altered or adhered to: no blame can attach to those caught fast in a pit of excrement who flail around for something by which they might pull themselves to safety, or who opt instead to remain immobile so as not to be sucked under any sooner. I do not care whether Richmond was, in fact, the sturdy overhead branch we required at the time. Richmond was, and still is, suited primarily to wealthy people able to tolerate the boredom and tastelessness and humidity that account for most of the culture there. Nor do I care if my parents neglected to make an honest grab for that branch: the countryside to the west of Richmond was clearly the better match for us, being suited primarily to poorer people who could tolerate their own measure of boredom and tastelessness and humidity, or who had no choice but to try. I can find fault with my parents only for theirfailure to hammer out the terms of our surrender with more finesse, and to recognize that the place one’s children hail from is a tattoo ever afterward, and to steer us with what strength they could still summon into a county with a more agreeable name than the one we would all come to loathe and deny.

Ugliness
    That my siblings and I hail now and forever from Goochland, Virginia, and not from Powhatan, or Chesterfield, or Hanover, or Louisa, or Fluvanna, or Appomattox, or any number of decently named counties within a bankrupt gas tank’s reach of Richmond, is indeed a heavy log to bear, but even here I see evidence of a cause larger than my parents’ inability to consult a map properly and think ahead. For into this same county, which in 1743 encompassed a wider swath of uselessness than it does today, was born Thomas Jefferson himself, and it was within its present bounds that he wasted his childhood among the tobacco plants which prior to our arrival had relieved the soil of what simple nutrients it once possessed. Cornwallis passed through on his way to Yorktown, and later Sheridan on his way to Petersburg, and before him a detachment of soon-to-be-dead Union fools who believed that a tiny band of horsemen could penetrate Richmond’s western defenses and canter away with the Confederate president as a prize, but the county holds real historical worth only insofar as it witnessed the birth and early schooling of that rash ginger prophet who would, through his words and deeds and acolytes, convince millions of Americans to martyr themselves on the altar of an agrarian delusion. No more is wanted: if great holiness can be claimed for Bethlehem and Mecca because of the careers launched there, then surely I am justified in my own claim that a certain unholy uglinessemanated from within the bounds of Goochland County, and commanded our attention, and beckoned us out into those pine shadows and those unremitting fields.
    Richmond has since been generous to the eastern part of Goochland, having long ago saturated the intermediate county, Henrico, with the customary gifts of townhouses and strip malls and golf courses and industrial parks, and I hear the Goochland teens are now taught in a modern facility that does not ask them either to confront or to ignore the reality that they attend the white high school, as opposed to the black, which after integration had become their impoverished junior high. Well-paved roads now obtain throughout the county, where dirt and gravel were once the norm, and one may detect a species of progress in the satellite dishes so prevalent on roofs and in yards as to imply that all of Goochland is host to some grand project to contact the aliens, which would interest but hardly surprise me, as I often enough prayed to be