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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2011 The Kings of the Cannibal Islands Kent Wascom Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE KINGS OF THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS By KENT WASCOM A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2011 Copyright © 2011 Kent Wascom All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the Thesis of Kent Wascom defended on day of March 30, 2011. _______________________________________ Mark Winegardner Professor Directing Thesis _______________________________________ Robert Olen Butler Committee Member _______________________________________ David Kirby Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________ R.M. Berry, Chair, Department of English _____________________________________ Joseph Traves, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii To Lauren iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my wife, for enduring the process, my parents for a lifetime of support, and my country, the Gulf Coast, for existing despite all odds and providing me such a place to come of age in. Andrew Smith for being the first reader of this manuscript; no glass has been raised with a better friend. Bob Shacochis for his teaching and friendship, whose intense dedication to his craft I strive to emulate, and without whom this novel would not have been. Mark Winegardner, who was the first to see this novel in its germinal form, for his commitment to me and this program, and without whom I would not have breached the walls of the Academy; may I justify the faith he put four years ago in an unproven undergraduate with a miserable GPA and a worthwhile short story. Robert Olen Butler for instruction in intensity. David Kirby for the music of language. All of those who, whether already mentioned or by circumstance must go unmentioned, staked their reputations and prevented me from being ground in the gears of capricious fate. The writing faculty at LSU: Randolph Thomas for telling me, eight years ago, to put down Hemingway and Carver and pick up Hannah and Crews, and James Bennett, without whose encouragement and teaching I would not have made it here. And finally, those two who prove that blood is a poor provision for brotherhood: Chris Tusa and Michael Garriga. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Epigraph ........................................................................................................................................ vii PROLOGUE ....................................................................................................................................1 BOOK ONE ...................................................................................................................................12 BOOK TWO ................................................................................................................................105 BOOK THREE ............................................................................................................................192 BOOK FOUR...............................................................................................................................372 EPILOGUE ..................................................................................................................................503 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................505 v ABSTRACT The following is a novel in the form of a gospel, telling the story of religious fanaticism in the early years of the United Sates and the rebellions in West Florida in the year 1805 and 1810. vi PROLOGUE A prayer for the city Dec. 22, 1860 Tonight I went from my wife’s bed to the open window and pissed down blood on Royal Street. She shrieked for me to stop and use the pot, but below the secession revelers were packed to the streetcorners, giving up their voices, and I swear they cheered me on. They’re still out there, flying high on nation-making, suddenly gifted with a new country like children at Christmas. I could see their numbers swelling all the way to Canal, and in this corner of the crammed streets the celebrants were caught and couldn’t move away from my red blessing. A heard of broadcloth boys passed under my stream while a homegirl howled as I further wilted the flowers in her hair and drove her customers off; and yawping stevedores, too drunk to mind, were themselves bloodied even as they tried to shove others in. And if I could I would’ve written out a blessing on all their faces, signed it with my vitals in the mud, anointed them with the red, red water from my Holy Sprinkler, and had them pray with me. Pray for the children of this city drowned in sin, plague and muddy water. We breach the filmy surface but can only manage whiskey-choked howls. The season’s passed when diarrheal flags of bedsheets are flown from the windows and balconies of New Orleans and now come winter the city’s flying upstart banners, claiming to be free. There’s more tongues spoken than you’d expect to hear at Pentecost, in this place where lacy gentility meets whip-scored flesh sold pound by pound and fierce lamentations are only to be heard when the barrel’s run dry. I’ve made gold run from black flesh and built myself this perch of finery where I can slip from the arms of my catholic octoroon and pour out a prayer for wastrel thousands while our son sleeps in the next room. So pray for the deliverance of those who are annually subjected to tropical atrocities and do our carnival penance dancing and wailing in the streets. Pray for us who live along the fertile nethers of the Southern States, in hellish heat that purges the body with face-slickening expurgations, where we gather at the river’s edge and beat giant cane rats to death with clubs. Stretching eastward along the Gulf lays the Holy Land I wished to make with my brother, but failed. I lost him and we lost our war after we’d won it. Pray for that coastland, where the true seed is kept behind the gelded cock of Florida. The people here have suffered some and soon will suffer more. Pray for the ones who scream for War. This afternoon was a rage of flags, as every man whose wife knew how to stitch poured through the Square with his idea of a new nation’s standard trailing behind him like a cape. A madness of stripes and stars, of bloody-breasted pelicans, of crowns, of snakes, of skulls—all dragged, tossed, raised and trampled by the crowd. And it was in this chaos of colors that this prayer was fixed in me, which grew like a seed to bursting earlier in the night and overflowed into the gospel I now set out to write. The moment came while I watched some boys who’d fought through the tumult climb General Jackson’s statue and tie their flag to the hat he holds at the end of his outstretched arm. It hung limp at first, just dangling blue-colored cloth, until a gust of wind blew in from off the river and unfurled their flag to roars and cheers and churchbells; and in that instant, like a vision breaking over my head, I saw it was the same flag as we’d flown for old West Florida back in ’10—a field of blue shot through with a single white star, like the fist of God punched a hole right through the sky. 1 I might’ve hurrahed with the rest, I was so shook by the sight of my resurrected banner, which now they call it the Bonnie Blue. But it was a sorrowful kind of glory, and soon the ringleaders caught the people up in song. I listened hard for a word about our long-gone Republic of the coast, and finding there was none, I wept. Southern rights, Lincoln, niggers and cotton were all I heard from them. My War and my country were a lifetime ago for these children. I wept at that great fool voice of multitude. I wept to be forgotten, for my Cannibals and our flag now cannibalized. Pray for planter-boys like the one who saw my weeping and, amid their song and celebration, took me by the arm and said, Don’t squall now, old man, we’ve won! I shrugged him off and left that scene. He didn’t know that winning’s not the thing. We won our war at first, and afterwards lost more than just battles. My brother understood these things better than I ever did. The thing is you’ve got to win and win again. That’s the American way of War. You can’t just win; you’ve got to win forever. Kemper knew this, but I was a doubter. I was a slack brother and I failed him. Besides, the only planter wants to fight a war is bored so crazy with whipping his niggers that he’d like to try his hand at whipping something greater, so he can see if it cows. I’ve fought alongside planters and I know their stomachs for it. Atop lovely thoroughbreds and in fine uniform they’ll ride out to fool’s deaths, drawing scores of others behind them. There’ll be enough dead to pack the mouth of Hell with