IBID (7 page)

21.
It was the second tornado to hit Wilkinson County in as many months.
According to Blashette’s step-granddaughter Vicka Lovett (interview), Jonathan was in the barn as the twister lifted the roof off the farmhouse. Emmaline was in the kitchen and Addicus was out in the field. Jonathan’s diary disputes this. He places himself in the field, his father in the barn and his mother visiting with Pastor Stoddard’s myopic wife Margaret at the parsonage. By Addicus’s account (letter from Addicus to Lindy Blashette), Emmaline was in the barn, he was in the kitchen and Jonathan was off fishing with his friend Raymond
Beams. Raymond (letter to his birth father soliciting funds) said that he was in the kitchen with Margaret Stoddard looking for Emmaline’s canning lids. Pastor Stoddard was in the Blashette barn looking for Margaret’s eyeglasses. Addicus and Emmaline were at Claiborne’s General Groceries and Sundry Dry Goods Store. Pastor Stoddard (church newsletter) said that everyone was seated at the Blashette kitchen table playing Uncle Wiggly. Margaret Stoddard (Bible Methodist Church Missionary Circle Circular) remembers that when the tornado touched down, Raymond Beams was in a barn located somewhere in the tri-county area helping her husband look for her eyeglasses. County historian Ida Sheridan (interview) insists that Pastor Stoddard was at Claiborne’s store buying an Uncle Wiggly game and a comical monocle fob. Everyone else was at the Pettiville ice cream social discussing crop rotation and bungled Montgomery Ward mail orders.

1.
The first day at Devanter went smoothly.
Devanter College and Seminary was founded in 1866 by three Confederate veterans who implemented an early Dixie version of the G.I. bill, offering free tuition, room and board to any veteran of Jefferson Davis’s army whose application for its eclectic program was accepted. The school was financed by a wealthy British eccentric, Lord Hallowell who owned vast acreage in England’s Lake District and whose large family fortune (acquired over a century of trade with southern planters) also financed full-scholarships at an art school in Leeds for students willing to paint only portraits of his estranged wife Tildy whose oft-reproduced image clutters the walls of that city’s “Museum of Tildy” to this day. Alwin Chambers,
The Little Brown College in the Wildwood
(Pittsburgh: Academe Press, 1992), 222-25.

Devanter offered courses in the sciences, business management, and the “Biblical arts.” Since Jonathan’s interests included both of the latter two disciplines, the small Tennessee college seemed the ideal choice.

2.
Jonathan was assigned to Orville House.
Ibid., 225-26, 301, 321-23. Lord Hallowell’s endowment carried several stipulations. First and foremost, Devanter College would be multi-racial, a place of study and fellowship for men of all races. Over the years, the college’s charter had been altered to allow only half-white mulattos, then quadroons, and finally octoroons. It was because Jonathan was admitted to the school one week late that he was placed in Orville House (regarded by most as the “dormitory of last resort”), which bunked the college’s twenty-two octoroons and its only
Chinese student, Wing Lu, who, though there to study the recently developed quantum theory of German physicist Max Planck, found himself spending most of his non-classroom hours running the college laundry and grousing heavily over his lot.

A second stipulation: That students were to be of strong moral character. Smoking and drinking were strictly prohibited, although the young men were permitted a glass of watered sherry from time to time at the home of President and Mrs. Greaney when “some of the boys would be invited over for social and intellectual intercourse with the faculty.” Most importantly, the men were to visit nearby Chucking with “only the most extreme caution.” A wild and wooly railroad town, Chucking had twice as many saloons as churches. Any student found to be frequenting saloon, brothel, or dental parlor (where, it was understood, nitrous oxide parties sometimes degenerated into giggly orgies of lust and “just plain undignified tomfoolery”) would risk expulsion.

Ironically, it was here in Chucking that Jonathan met one of the enduring loves of his life, a pocked syphilitic former prostitute named Great Jane.

3.
“She is the earth, the moon and the stars.”
Though never allowing Jonathan to consummate their relationship, there is no doubt that Great Jane did permit him to hand her his heart. Nor is there any doubt that she felt the same. Such a love many have found inexplicable. Lucianne Flom in her study of love, romance and venereal disease,
A Canker of the Heart
(New York: Koppelman Publishers, 1990), offers the following stab: that Jonathan, being somewhat the social misfit himself, given his disability, identified with others who viewed the world through a slightly skewed lens, and it is entirely plausible that such empathy might in a special circumstance extend itself to romantic attachment. I believe
that Jonathan’s feelings for Great Jane went much deeper than simple romantic attachment. To call the two soul mates would not be a far-reaching assessment.

4.
“Jonny, give me paradise!”
Ibid., 125. Great Jane was misheard. What she actually said was, “Jonny, give me a pair of dice!” The diseased ex-hooker loved craps almost as much as she loved Jonathan.

5.
Two months passed before Jonathan found the courage to mention Great Jane to his mother.
The reference was strategically buried within the letter Jonathan sent home on November 2, 1905, an excerpt of which follows. JBP.

6.
Jonathan displayed a knack for making easy friendships with some of the other students.
Jonathan befriended even the terminally friendless among the residents of Orville House. This group included Jiminy Crutch, a mestizo who
lived in fear of squirrels, and thus found himself constantly confronted by them in his bed, wardrobe, and dresser—placed there by the more mischievous among his dormitory mates. Young Jiminy won abundant sympathy and support from Jonathan, who encouraged the quaking, stuttering young man, to shake hands with his fear and turn it to positive use. Following Jonathan’s advice, Jiminy went on to become the nation’s foremost expert on squirrel aggression, and in 1941 was awarded the prestigious Van Weems Small Mammal Research Prize for his paper on the infamous 1826 Hamilton County, Indiana, squirrel migration—an aberration of nature that residents of Noblesville still speak of today. Contemporary accounts note that thousands of squirrels one morning decided to move
en masse
across the county. Swimming like otters across the picturesque White River, and foraging voraciously along the way, the squirrels were met by angry club-wielding farmers at every turn. The devastation wreaked by the two-week rampage took months to repair. Cordell Glover,
Three Legs, One Heart
, 45-48; Belva Curry, “On the Move”
Sciuridae; Journal of the American Squirrel,
1952, No. 4, 366-75

7.
Jonathan sold ads for the little literary journal; his friend Finley Sanders offered illustrations.
A passionate anti-war socialist, Jonathan’s artistic college chum Finley Sanders was to gain some notoriety in later years through his opposition to what he referred to with great disdain as “The War to Trump All Wars,” “The Industrialists’ Carnage Party,” and “The International Killing Machine Wilson Lubricates with His War-lusting Salivations.” A political cartoon in
The Worker’s Brow
in which Sanders depicted President Woodrow Wilson gleefully dining on a goulash of roasted miniature American soldiers while Lady Liberty tearfully serves him heaping seconds, resulted in a lengthy stay for Sanders in a federal penitentiary. He passed the time by forming a barbershop quartet with fellow anti-war
advocate Eugene Debs; Philadelphia bond forger Gordon Roman; and Dubuque serial ax murderer Eldred Jorguess, whom the others nervously allowed to carry the melody even when he seemed to be making it up as he went along.

Incidentally, Sanders’s equally rebellious brother David was a stowaway on the ill-fated “Peace Ship,” a Scandinavian cruise liner that had been enlisted to transport a disparate group of American pacifists to Europe in November, 1916 with the ambitious goal of convincing the warring armies that human bloodshed was an expensive price to pay for national hegemony. Though bankrolled by Henry Ford, the most recognizable member of the delegation, the effort was doomed to early failure. Pope Benedict XV, the ubiquitous Helen Keller, and Ford’s lifelong friend Thomas Edison all expressed early interest in joining the international diplomatic venture, but backed out long before the ship left port. Helen allegedly confessed that she had always been a poor shuffleboard player and, besides, Edison generally got on her nerves: “His lips never stop flapping; my fingers get so tired.” (
Helen Keller, At Ease
[Indianapolis: Three Senses Publications, 1988] 238). Ford himself bailed out of the endeavor as soon as the ship reached Norway. In his uncharitable, self-published biography of the automobile titan,
Henry Ford, Jew Hater
, Garner Qualms surmises that Ford hadn’t realized until he was already at sea how many of his fellow neutralists were Hebrew deniers of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and this discovery left him irritable and unmotivated. David, for his part, spent the trip rolling matzo dough in the ship’s galley while happily debating the merits of the Zionist movement with the many shipboard followers of Theodor Herzl.

8.
“I promise to stop being so sesquipedalian.”
Jonathan’s Diary, 4 April1906. A difficult task, it would seem, since the word itself means “given to use of long polysyllabic words.”
The irony was, nonetheless, lost on companion Crutch, whose attention had been diverted by the sudden unsettling appearance of a tree squirrel upon the open-window sill.

9.
By Jonathan’s second year, correspondence with his mother had become comfortably routine.
The following is typical of the many letters Jonathan received from his mother during his years at Devanter—brimming with chat and reportorially framed gossip. JBP.

10.
Jonathan’s experiences at Devanter shaped his politics for years to come.
One individual, in particular, made the strongest impression of all. His name was Andrew Bloor and he was a young history professor who had taken an instant liking to this intellectually curious three-legged student. Ostracized by most of the Devanter faculty and subsequently sacked by the school’s administration for his liberal views on race and gender, Bloor obviously recognized Jonathan’s nascent early progressive tendencies and sought to encourage and nurture them.

His employment terminated only a week before Jonathan’s graduation, Bloor wrote the following letter to his favorite student from a rooming house in Oberlin, Ohio, where he was in the process of applying for a faculty position with the famed liberal arts college there, a paradigm of progressive pedagogy. The letter has been preserved in Jonathan’s papers.