Writing Region across the Border: Two Stories of Breece Pancake and Alistair MacLeod
1996; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoIn a Tennessee folk tale from the early twentieth century, a Yankee traveling salesman receives a dose of regional wisdom when his car breaks down in the southern backwoods. Judging from the last hour of his trip, the salesman decided his best chance of reaching civilization lay in abandoning the road and cutting through the surrounding forest, which he did, only to find himself hopelessly lost minutes later. Luckily a young farm-boy was hunting nearby and offered to guide the salesman to the nearest service station. Grateful for this rescue, the salesman tried to strike up a conversation with the boy along the way. That's a mighty fine rifle you have, he told the boy, who shrugged and responded, It's the same rifle my granddad carried in the Civil Duly impressed, the salesman asked if he could take a look at it, so the boy stopped and handed him the gun. The salesman turned it over in his hands. That's a good-looking barrel to have gone through the Civil War, he said. Oh, it's not the same barrel, the boy rejoined. Granddad put on a new one not too far back. The salesman fingered the gun respectfully. it's still a fine wood stock to have lasted all these years, he offered. s'pose, the boy responded, my daddy put that stock on not five years before giving it to me. The salesman scratched his head. see. Well, it's still a mighty nice trigger to have stayed easy all this time. The boy shook his head. put that on just last month. At this final admission, the salesman returned the firearm, practically beside himself with amusement. Son, I hate to say this, but that rifle's practically new. The boy took it solemnly. Nosir, it's the same gun my granddad carried in the Civil War.(1) The story of the gun has always struck me as profound, in particular for the way it seems to inform the process of identity-construction in the regional community. The salesman, the outsider who has no sense of the community or its spirit, reduces his understanding of the rifle to an assessment of its use-value after he has determined that it was not, in fact, carried through the Civil War. For the boy, however, the rifle remains both a figurative and literal intersection of past and present, not so important because it dates his ancestry as far back as the War Between the States, but because it provides him with a tangible fink to that ancestry, a fink that justifies his present occupation of the land and continually articulates his relationship to it. The gun is not, as the salesman would contend, mere memorabilia, but a symbol of the hunting and fighting, with their implicit emphasis on reading the landscape, in which the boy's ancestors participated and in which the boy now participates in order to survive. History for the boy, then, becomes not only dates and facts, but a genetic tie to the land itself, his inheritance of the gun representing an external affirmation of his passage into manhood and his ascent into this physical, almost life-and-death, relationship. This kind of understanding, of course, allows the boy to navigate the woods where the salesman cannot, and his clear vision of the forest implies a clarity and rationality about his correspondent sense of history, symbolized by the gun. Nonetheless, there remains a side of me that sympathizes with the salesman; in his world of contracts and premiums, the gun can only be a gun, and its worth is dictated almost solely by the changes that have been made to it, changes which in this case serve only to decrease its value. Moreover, if the gun is symbolic of the land and the people who occupy it, then the salesman's comment strikes even more sinisterly at the changing value of the regional community itself. …
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