The Amalgamation Polka

a novel by

Stephen Wright

Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, 304 pages, $24.95

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

The porcelain sky that a cannonball shattered over Fort Sumter in 1860 not only rained screaming shards of broken glass over this nation but also seeded the stratosphere with even finer particles of whispering destruction that still dusts the air we breathe. Once inhaled, they rasp their way through our guts, eviscerating us from within. Until the bleeding stops, until the unfulfilled promise of healing is delivered, novels of the Civil War and the dissension the Union victory failed to pacify will remain a contemporary field of engagement, and not just a nostalgic war game waged by boys fascinated by guns and gore. Among a resurgence of novels about those terrible times, none is finer than the one by Stephen Wright. Unlike other novels in the arsenal of literature, The Amalgamation Polka is not about the caissons and casualties of that revisited war —it is about the racism that took us there.

We are immediately engaged and inspired upon opening the book to find a reproduction of a print, circa 1850, entitled “An Amalgamation Polka”. Imagine a cotillion. Couples dancing sprightly upon a polished oak floor, mingling beneath the glow of a chandelier, frivolous in flirtations, stealing a glance or even a kiss, toasting the night air, enraptured by one another and by the moment. But impose upon this convivial scene the fact that the dance floor is completely integrated, without self consciousness or animosity, and this blissful extract from the past is exposed as only a pretended history, a wish. We glimpse the revelers’ future as it might have been, as it might yet be. A caption addresses the readership of the times:

“A Lofty Destiny for the Human Race— A clergyman at Milford, Massachusetts, called the Reverend E. S. Best, has published a sermon in which occurs the following paragraph–’This blending of the two races (Caucasian and African) by amalgamation is just what is needed for the perfection of both. You will then have the highest, noblest, and most God-like species of humanity. Such a race will constitute the real people of America. Here the human race will reach its loftiest destiny, and this nation will become the glory of all lands; the place which, above all others, shall most resemble heaven, and be nearest to it.’ ”

Just how far from heaven this nation found itself in1860 thunders like the artillery of hell throughout the telling of Wright’s tale. The sentry of his embattled ideals is Liberty Fish, a boy who becomes of soldiering age when dry powder and restless flint sit down together to negotiate the future of North and South. And when the anger compacted in the barrel of a musket is emancipated by spark, no one buys the Lincolnian notion that the war is about preserving the Union, or the Confederate posturing that it’s all about state’s rights; it’s about slavery. Good was never so Good, Evil was never so Evil, Right and Wrong were never so…Black and White. Wright tints the daguerreotype as deftly as Matthew Brady.

Liberty is born into a family of what we might now call social activists, what was then called social misfits. The locomotive of social upheaval screeches to a halt at their front door in bucolic New York State, their home a station in the underground railroad. They are far enough north to operate openly, too far south in moral evolution to escape the wrath and disdain of their neighbors, who refer to the family (when they are being kind) as “amalgamators”.

Thatcher Fish, Liberty’s father, is devoutly religious, and the dimension with which Wright animates him is a pleasure to read in these modern times when “devoutly religious” is an almost interchangeable euphemism for dogmatic. Thatcher has a sense of humor, but also a passion for human rights that is genuine, and not a manifestation of mindless obedience to what he perceives as God’s call to action. He threatens to give religion a good name, and at much risk to himself journeys about New England (Liberty in tow) as an orator for the abolitionist movement. Wright is led not into temptation to sermonize, with one well-chosen exception. When Liberty as a small boy makes his first foray from his front yard into his neighborhood, only to be driven home (“Get back to your nigger hotel!”) by a baffling salvo of stones, his father gives him comfort: “All (are) touched by this curse that has been laid against this land. I know it hurts, but sometimes, Liberty, all one can do before such malignant idiocy is be polite and gracefully withdraw. There are certain terrains the wise general seeks to avoid. Because there will come other days, other fields, where one will be presented with the opportunity to beat back the tide of hatred and work to lift the curse that weighs heavily as chains upon us all, free and bonded alike.”

The other days, and other fields, present the opportunity. Liberty Fish is off to war.

For Liberty, the soldier, an awareness smolders that the Civil War actually began before his birth, when the slings and arrows of outrageous bigotry compelled his mother, Roxana, to secede from the union of her mother and father, Carolinian slave-holders, to marry Thatcher, Yankee and abolitionist. As a child, even without a reference point of enlightened adults, she rejects the moral validity of slavery and its biblical endorsements, and is horrified by her parents’ cruelty. There can be no armistice while Roxana subscribes to the heretical notion that slaves are actually human. A soul under siege, she abdicates wealth and privilege, but is incurably distraught by her parents’ hideous inhumanity. She begins to self-destruct.

When the flame of the War Between the States slowly starves as it forages for sparse remnants of combustible timber, Liberty goes awol to track down Asa and Ida Maury, the grandparents who so damaged his mother. This encounter, as the war collapses everything, is the terrain where Wright chooses to beat back the tide of hatred, and unleash the dogs of war. So stunning is his delivery of words, so breathless are we left by the cavalry charge of his prose, there is almost no space in the cavity of our lungs to inhale the full meaning of the book or the author’s vision. The truth is, Asa and Ida are a decomposing Simon and Simone LeGree, brutal beyond redemption, and they feel no moral quandary from which they must extricate themselves. Wright’s only flaw is flawless writing; he articulates the position of “malignant idiocy” that so reviled Thatcher Fish with such virtuoso sarcasm and wit that his villains become caricatures of evil, which perhaps undermines their credibility and may render them less potent than evil itself. Asa Maury proposes a much different interpretation of “amalgamation” than the one that has drawn us so deeply into the novel, or actuated its author. The battle of good and evil becomes the battle of reason and madness, and Wright’s work is the blade of that terrible swift sword of illumination.

Most books can be judged as good or bad immediately upon consumption. “Can you put it down?” is the usual standard. Great literature, on the other hand, often needs time for assimilation into our senses. So let it be with The Amalgamation Polka. This emancipating novel has all the elements of enduring art; a high purpose, a masterful use of language, engrossing conflict, catharsis. More than this, The Amalgamation Polka, the book with the deceptively frivolous title, does what we ask all great literature to do; it inspires us to a loftier destiny.

Thornton Sully is a freelance writer living in North County.

(1287 words)

Addendum, direct quote (253 words)

“My life is over,” she (Roxana) sobbed. Around them the frozen trees swayed and creaked like giant chandeliers caught in a draft. Tinkling crystals of ice plopped without cease onto the thick carpet of snow.

“No, no,” said Thatcher, his own voice a stranger’s to his ear. “No.” He had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t know what to do but keep patting her mechanically on her quavering back, his uncertain hand running up and down the hard china knobs of her spine.

When Roxana finally dared to look up at her husband, her expression emptied of all defenses, she gasped, reaching out to touch the monstrous swelling around his half closed eye where the skin bulged with organic color normally kept from view.

“It’s nothing,” Thatcher said, brushing her hand away. “The mark of Christian love. Tell me what’s happened here.”

So she did, and the very words themselves, spoken out loud at last to the one person they’d always been directed toward, settled like ballast deep inside her. “And I keep thinking,” she concluded, in a surprisingly firm voice, “of all those babies who need me.” She could see them, too, infinite acres of squalling infants, manacled each to each, each fresh tiny mind merely another receptacle of sufficient dimension to contain entire the whole of the world’s pain, the chorus of their shrieks and wails rising like incense unto the stone nostrils of the father whose true features were perpetually obscured by the human mask of God.

Alternate addendum, direct quote (330 words)

At the sound of approaching footsteps…the dinner party turned as one to observe an ancient woman…bearing a huge chipped bowl of steaming vegetables. Her crooked nose had obviously been broken sometime in the distant past and never correctly reset, and her left ear reduced to a twisted knot of cartilage stuck to the side of her balding gray head.

“What in the weeping name of Jesus is this?” demanded Mrs. Maury, indignantly examining the dish placed on the table before her. “These aren’t potatoes, they’re goddamn turnips!”

“There ain’t any more potatoes,” replied Ditey… “This here is all we got.”

“There were potatoes yesterday,” insisted Mrs. Maury, stabbing a turnip with her fork. “What happened to ‘em?”

“All et up, I expect.”

“Yes, and I’m sure you thieving ingrates made a fine meal of it too, leaving us to dine on this miserable hog food. And they aren’t even properly cooked. These things are hard as stones.”

“I did the best I could, Missus.”

“Well it isn’t good enough, and it’s never been good enough, you worthless bitch.” Grandmother lifted her knife as if preparing to carve some fowl. “Hold out your hand.” And with a single swift movement she opened the cringing woman’s palm to the bone. In an instant, with a savage cry, Ditey was upon her, the chair overturning, both women toppling to the carpet, Ditey’s hands, blood spilling from the one in shocking amounts, locked tight as iron collars about her mistresses scrawny neck, a stunned Liberty only half risen from his seat as Grandfather, with astonishing celerity, charged around the table, seized a chair and brought it crashing down upon Ditey’s head in a dreadful splintering of wood and skull…

Out in the kitchen, the other servants having briskly fled, Liberty found only a distraught girl crouching under a table. “What’s going to happen ?” she cried frantically. “What’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know,” he replied calmly…”You’d best get out of here.”