Starting The March

Posted by: Zahiruddin Alim
Date: Fri 01/25/2008 03:58 PM
New Topic: Starting The March

CL201, January 24:
We listened to the first four chapters of “The March”, about
forty pages, played on a DVD. The lights were turned off (we
couldn’t find a dimmer), and the only light came from the graphics
on the monitor. We enjoyed the treat of being read to, without taking
notes, or any interruptions for comments or questions. I had my
coffee and cookies, and it was a short period, but I still felt
myself drifting a little towards the end.
I got hold of a copy of the book to work on some “close reading”,
to follow up on the first week’s teaching, and looked over the
first sentence:
“At five in the morning someone banging on the door and
shouting, her husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing a rifle,
and Roscoe at the same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet
pounding: Mattie hurriedly pulled on her robe, her mind prepared for
the alarm of war, but the heart stricken that it would finally have
come, and down the stairs she flew to see through the open door in
the lamplight, at the steps of the portico, the two horses, steam
rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the
driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience
even in this, and the woman standing in the carriage no one but her
Aunt Letitia Pettibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in
anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming,
this Dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up
in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove
to be.”
Phew! There is some meat on that bone for sure, it is a long sentence
indeed. And talk about in media res: We are thrown right into the
action. Even ignoring all our historical foreknowledge we know the
storm is coming. It is a blast before the lull before the storm, so
to speak.
The description is more than solid, it is stark and hard hitting. We
don’t have to imagine anything as the words project a graphic and
dramatic scene. Nothing diaphanous here.
Characters come flying at us. We are seeing things from an omniscient eye:
The anxiety stricken lady of the house, her husband leaping to arms,
their mood infecting one of their slaves, running, as he does,
barefooted, from the backhouse. (The word processor does not
recognize the word “backhouse”). Along with there being a
backhouse and the bedroom being upstairs, there is also a portico,
indicating a substantial building, a plantation mansion, (Named
Fieldstone, we later learn). Standing outside is the harbinger of war
in the description of the horses and the carriage, occupied by a
coachman who is a slave, his stolidity a contrast to his mistress, a
fine lady of regal comport, transformed into an anguished “hag of
doom”.
Already we see the social structure of the time and place beginning
to teeter and totter. Even in the panic, plantation owners are
characterized in cultured language that suggests gentility to the
point of claiming an aristocratic standing, and their distress is
tragical. The underclass of slaves are a counterpoint, of one kind or
another, to the existence of their owners. One class exists because
of the other, occupying polar extremes of their common world, one is
the dominant and the other subservient. This class structure is about
to be brutally annihilated, and that must transform the individual
members of each class traumatically.