These Dreams of You

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That was when he came home one afternoon from school and on his parents’ stereo played a record of country songs sung by a blind black man. This wasn’t the sort of music that Zan had heard before, and though for decades afterward purists would declaim the aesthetic offense of a soul genius committing his voice to such white songs and white strings and white arrangements, to the twelve-year-old Zan the music’s surrounding whiteness made the blackness of the voice all the more shocking.

Decades later Zan understands that, as epiphanies about race go, this is pretty pathetic. Still, it rearranged the furniture in Zan’s head, knocked out one or two of the walls. Zan would know for the rest of his life that this was the most subversive record ever made, the white trojan horse that smuggled a blind black man into the gates of Zan’s white city. Every afternoon, returning home from school, Zan snuck the record down to his own room and listened to it over and over, the volume low because it felt like something he should get in trouble for, like reading a forbidden book.

The only child of a socially and politically conservative family, lower middle class when he was smaller, on the edges of upper middle class by the time he finished high school, Zan was a fifteen-year-old rightwinger before the erosion of his adolescent certainties by the television images of Negroes at the mercy of flying police sticks. That erosion was the end of one nascent political identity, such as it ever was, and the beginning of another, such as it ever would be, and by the time Zan was a college student, he found his political psyche outflanked on all sides. Students graced their dormitory walls with posters of the leader of a revolution in China, one of the great killers of the Twentieth Century; and for all the ways that Zan’s parents came to suspect their son was kidnapped in the night by leftwing professors who implanted a Marxist chip in his brain, in fact Zan felt less a part of anything and more an odd man out of everything. One afternoon between classes, in the tumultuous aftermath of four students murdered by the National Guard at another school in another part of the country, Zan stopped in the middle of the campus quadrangle to note a line of armored police to one side and protesting students to the other, with him squarely in the middle alone, which so summed up his ambivalence that it would seem to have been staged. Whatever else was true, however, and for all ambivalence’s varieties that cluttered philosophical clarity, one thing was incontestable to Zan and it was that his political conservatism failed the nation’s great moral test of the decade, which was how to redeem the transgression of slavery that betrayed his country’s original promise.