The Truth According to Us

“Same as ever, same as ever, Jottie thought, sinking into her shredding seat. She watched her nieces commence their nightly rite of selecting chairs. They were young and they didn’t understand. They believed that one chair was better than another. They believed that it was important to make distinctions, to choose, to discern particulars. Like crows, they picked out bits from each evening and lugged them around, thinking that they were hoarding treasure. They remembered the jokes, or the games, or the stories, not knowing that it was all one, that each tiny vibration of difference would be sanded, over the course of years, into sameness. It doesn’t matter, Jottie assured herself. They’ll get to it. Later, they’ll know that sameness is the important part.”

As Jottie watches her nieces squabble over chairs, she reflects on the differences between their youthful passion and curiosity and her own placid dependency on habit and routine. At this early point in the novel, Jottie is deliberately numbing her own grief for Vause and suppressing her doubts about Felix’s conduct. As events unfold and she returns to her memories of her own childhood, she will restore some of the childlike qualities that she observes here within herself.

“‘I wish we could be like everybody else. I get real tired of lying.’ It was a special distillation of shame, to have to lie about your family, and a special distillation of agony to learn of it. Jottie’s mind flickered over her own heedless childhood, recalling the protection and authority she hadn’t even known she enjoyed. How light and lordly she’d been, how free, how certain that her happiness was the product of her own virtues and powers. How wrong she’d been. How foolish. And how very, very lucky.

If only Willa could have what I had, Jottie mourned. If only she could be so certain and proud. It was an illusion every child should have. And Willa was losing it, right before her eyes.”

Jottie recalls childhood as a period of wrong-headed but blissful and blessed self-assuredness. She is heartbroken to see the teenage Willa prematurely losing this innocence as a consequence of the family’s precarious situation.

“Character fascinates me—the power of it, I mean. One hero—or madman—may beget an entire history. For example, the little town of Macedonia exists solely because there was a lunatic named Hamilton who took it into his head to settle here and destroyed everything and everyone that opposed him. I suppose circumstance plays its part, too, but I think character, even a nasty one, holds a stronger hand, and I intend to give characters their proper due in the History of Macedonia, even if I am run out of town on a pike for my trouble.”

This passage is characteristic of Layla’s desire to overturn traditional patriarchal narratives. Rather than following the officially sanctioned, archetypally heroic narrative of Hamilton’s life, she presents him as a flawed human being who is cruel and, potentially, genocidal.

“Jottie’s eyes followed Felix and Vause, watching them hungrily as they turned away, released from captivity, free to do whatever they pleased, free not to please, free not to serve, free not to lie about olive whip.”

The teenage Jottie resembles her niece Willa in her envy of the apparent freedom and status that comes with age. The inequality between Jottie and her brother is compounded by gender, another central concern of the novel.

“I wondered if something had happened to Sam to make him the way he was or if he had grown that way without noticing. If a person could grow to be like Sam without noticing, there was a chance that I was just as strange and hadn’t noticed it. What was I like? I wondered. Did most girls my age feel the way I did, as if the people I thought I knew turned out to have a thousand little tunnels leading away from the face they showed the world? Was this something everyone else had already grappled? The buried parts, now, they were fascinating but ominous, too. And I thought, maybe that’s why Sam Spurling decided to live with a million cats. Maybe a million cats were easier to understand than one or two people.”

A visit to an eccentric retainer who shares his home with a large feline colony leads Willa to reflect on the complexity of human personality and motivations—the impossibility of truly knowing others or understanding how others perceive us. This is one of the principal challenges to history as it is depicted in the novel, which will preclude any moralization of past events.

“I think they want history to show that what they are now was inevitable […] But that’s crazy, isn’t it? If history is, well—destiny, then we’re all completely trapped forever.”

As Layla continues to reflect on history and historiography, she ponders the question of destiny and free will. To present history as the workings of destiny is to assume that human agency is an illusion and that everybody is permanently trapped. This is, to some extent, the condition of both Jottie and Felix at the beginning of the novel, as they feel unable to overcome the devastating fallout of the fire and Vause’s death.

“I was thinking about the story and how it had ended. Jottie had stopped telling it, but it wasn’t really finished. Afterward, something else had happened with Mr. McKubin, something that made Jottie turn pink when she saw him. And afterward, Jottie had liked Vause Hamilton especially. So the story wasn’t over. No story was ever really over.”

Willa is here considering how historical narratives (unlike stories in books) never really have a beginning or an end. While Jottie considered her romantic life to be over with Vause’s death, the events in the novel reveal that this kind of absolute closure is never really possible.

“I loved Miss Cladine. In real life, she was an algebra teacher over in the high school, but she was crazy about the Bible. Not in a preaching way, though. She never talked about being good or bad. Instead, she told the Bible in stories, acting out all the parts, with yelling and wailing as necessary […] I kept looking at the picture of the blind Samson and the scattering Philistines. Maybe the roof fell on them, but it fell on him, too. I didn’t think that was such a happy ending as the bible made out. Beautiful Delilah had sold Samson down the river. She had stroked his head until he got sleepy and told her the secret of the seven locks. I pictured my father with his head in Miss Beck’s lap, her little fingers coiling in his hair as he told her everything about himself, everything he had never told me.”

Willa’s description of Miss Cladine’s Bible classes represents another example of how stories change depending on who is telling them. Willa’s association of Layla and Felix with Delilah and Sampson reveals her reluctance to think badly of her father. It is easier for Willa to adopt a classic, patriarchal narrative and condemn Layla with misogynistic stereotypes. As elsewhere in the novel, Willa associates initiation into the elusive world of adults with secret knowledge—“everything he had never told me.”

“All of us see a story according to our own lights. None of us is capable of objectivity. You must beware your sources.”

In yet another of the novel’s reflections on historiography, Miss Betts warns Layla that no two people will read a story in the same way. Each reader casts a different “light” on events and therefore subtly alters them.

“She wanted The History of Macedonia to spurn the dull and to amuse the witty, to advance the Romeyns and to trounce the Parker Davieses, and to announce that she, Layla Beck, had perceived all they had been blind to.”

Layla reflects on her own motivations in writing the History of Macedonia. She conceives of her text as an act of rebellion against the “dull,” conventional, and patriarchal world personified by Parker Davies. She also wishes to prove her own worth as a mature, independent, insightful, and intellectual woman.

“I was beginning to think that Miss Beck might be just as much of a natural-born sneak as I was.”

As Willa goes looking for the elusive, secret “knowledge” of adulthood, she classes herself as a “sneak,” a rather negative epithet that characterizes her ambivalent feelings toward her own activities and to the approach of womanhood and the end of childhood. Although she longs to hate Layla, because she desires to see her father as an innocent victim, she cannot help but notice that their lodger shares her own insatiable curiosity and rebellious nature.

“Go away, Vause. And you, too, Felix. Neither of you is an honest man. Go away and let me live.”

Jottie’s painful memories of the past make it impossible for her to live in the present. Her remembrance of her first love for Vause remains but is constantly poisoned by Felix’s false narrative of events.

“It’s not history yet. It’s just a fight. It’s not history until someone wins.”

In another interesting reflection on the nature of history, Emmett invites Layla to come to the factory and watch the industrial dispute unfold, claiming that it is history in the making. Layla counters that an event cannot become history until one party or another has emerged victorious.

“College was hard-won. It was her theater, her chance to make herself new, the one step she could take that might lead her someplace else. But against lighting out? With Vause? It couldn’t hold its power. Lighting out, a brilliant cataclysm of light, eclipsing everything.”

The young Jottie viewed college as a unique opportunity to define her own narrative—”to make herself new.” However, in her youthful adoration, the prospect of “lighting out” with Vause had a transcendent, epiphanic quality—“a cataclysm of light, eclipsing everything.”

“When Mae bought a new lipstick, she let me try it. Carefully, I smoothed it on, making sure I dabbed extra on my top lip. It was called Cherry Pie, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw a grown-up lady, twenty years old at least, looking back.”

As she enters her teens, Willa is cautiously exploring and becoming aware of her own sexuality and approaching womanhood. The sight of herself looking (from her point of view, at least) sensual and mature initially inspires feelings of pride.

“They were laughing, but Father wasn’t. His eyes came back to me, not in the usual way but kind of leery, like you’d lift up a rock and see what was underneath.”

Willa’s pleasure at her adult appearance is abruptly curtailed when she perceives her father’s misogynistic reaction. When Willa ceases to be a little girl, her father views her in a “leery” manner that seems to combine erotic attraction with disgust. Willa is mortified and abruptly wipes the lipstick away.

“I tiptoed through the front room to the bookcase. They thought they could hide Gone with the Wind behind The Decameron of Boccaccio, but I was too smart for them. Suddenly, it occurred to me that this was an opportunity to broaden my horizons, and I plucked out The Beautiful and the Damned, which I wasn’t even supposed to touch. Also Private Worlds, which Jottie said would give me nightmares, and Crime and Punishment, which she said I might as well hit myself over the head with as read. That’s what you get for leaving, I told her silently.”

For Willa, books are a way to see outside the limited world in which she lives. Willa is particularly drawn to those books that are withheld from her. All of these novels in some way reflect her own situation and background. Gone With the Wind presents a strong but flawed heroine engaged in a doomed, passionate relationship against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its fallout. Crime and Punishment, which reflects on the stories people tell themselves to justify appalling actions and the suffering of a man struggling with his conscience, finds many parallels in Felix’s situation. The Beautiful and the Damned perhaps echoes Willa’s fears about her father’s relationship with Layla, a socialite from the big city. Private Worlds describes the struggles of a compassionate and innovative female psychiatrist struggling against the patriarchal establishment, suggesting some parallels with the struggle between Layla’s “alternative” history of Macedonia and the traditionalist, authoritative vision of others.

“In books, even in books like The Beautiful and the Damned, things were connected; people did something and then something else happened because of that. I could understand them. But outside, here in the real world, things seemed to happen for no real reason I could see. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe people just drifted here and there, aimless and silly. But no, people had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden for knowing, so there must be something to know, reasons, all the time and everywhere, for the way they behaved. Reasons I couldn’t see yet, no matter how hard I tried. I had always hoped that Jottie would call me into her room and tell me the secret, the thing I needed to know to understand why people did the things they did. So far, she hadn’t. When she called me into her room to explain where babies come from, I thought I was about to get wind of something good, but I was disappointed. What I wanted was bigger, a giant blanket that would hold the world. I had become ferocious and devoted so I could learn the secret truths, but I still didn’t know them. Did Father love Miss Beck? More than he loved me? I couldn’t understand why, I couldn’t understand how, I couldn’t understand it. It seemed so hard to work out the answers on my own, but that’s what I had to do. I had to keep at it, guessing what would happen next, fighting for the right ending, trying to save them all.”

Here again, Willa reflects on the adult “knowledge” that she continues to desperately pursue but that nonetheless eludes her. A lover of fiction, Willa laments the fact that literature (and even the “forbidden” texts that she has been rebelliously perusing) is inevitably more simple than real life. It has a beginning, an end, and a clearly contained narrative trajectory. Willa’s association of the forbidden knowledge that she seeks with the Fall is indicative of her ambivalent attitude thereto and will be recalled when Willa, Layla, and Jottie begin researching into apples together at the end of the novel, recalling the forbidden fruit in the biblical tree of knowledge. Willa here still prefers to cast Felix as an innocent victim and Layla as a misogynistic stereotype of the evil temptress.

“Father was breaking Jottie, and if she broke, I would split into pieces, too.”

When Willa perceives the devastating effect that her father’s lies are having on her aunt, her loyalties abruptly shift. Thus far, Willa has idealized and romanticized her father. However, at this point in the narrative, she understands that her own dependence on Jottie, her adopted mother, is absolute and that to betray Jottie would mean betraying herself.

“I suppose I made a choice between the two of them in that moment. I think I knew even then I was making a choice, but in a way I was choosing myself, because if I had waited one more second, I would have stopped being who I was.”

Here again, Willa reflects on the choice that she is forced to make between Jottie and her father. Ultimately, it is her aunt who has mothered her and shaped her personality. Jottie is the person with whom she most strongly identifies as an emerging independent, intellectual woman. Therefore, to betray Jottie would be to betray herself and dismantle her own identity.

“She stared in amazement at Sol’s face, reading the story she found there. It wasn’t a story about Vause; it was about Sol. It was about how he had been right all along. All these years, he had been fighting to win this particular piece of property from Felix. For eighteen years, Felix’s version of the tale, unpopular though it was, had been the official one, the agreed-upon reality, and Sol’s version had been wrong. It had been the hole in Sol’s life, and now it was filled: he was now the rightful owner of the truth about Vause Hamilton’s death.”

When Felix’s lies are finally exposed and Jottie distances herself from her brother, the stage is clear for Sol to emerge as Jottie’s new companion and as the new purveyor of historical truth. However, it is at this moment, which should herald the beginning of a relationship that has long been stalled by Jottie’s misplaced loyalty to Felix, that Jottie’s feelings for Sol begin to cool. Having lived her life thus far in the thrall of one patriarchal narrative, Jottie is reluctant to submit to another. Although Sol is, ostensibly, telling the “truth” about Vause’s death, Vause is no more relevant to Sol’s narrative than he is to Felix’s.

“My education has been broader, perhaps, than you intended. In addition to my new dedication to labor, I’ve also widened my social perspective, and I now include teachers, farmers, union agitators, and people who have never been to a country club among my friends, which is a great improvement, in my opinion. I’ve learned other lessons, too. I’ve learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love.”

This passage from Layla’s final letter to her father lays out her conclusions of the historical and historiographical reflections and research that she has carried out across the course of the narrative. Layla’s father, by sending her to Macedonia, hoped to bring his wayward daughter back under patriarchal control and to persuade her to submit to his wishes and return to her preordained social sphere. Instead, she here reveals that she has broadened her perspectives and left his sphere of influence definitively. Layla remarks on the subjectivity of all history—that history can never be anything more than the “autobiography of the historian”—and on the importance, nonetheless, of learning the lessons of the past and of being prepared to rebel against the prevailing narratives.

“Because it made you and I love you.”

When Layla agrees to marry Emmett, she says that she will only do so when she has heard all of his memories of his early childhood and personal history. Even when Emmett assures her that the information he can provide will be both boring and inaccurate, Layla insists that his own history (as he himself subjectively perceives it) is vital to any understanding of his identity.