*
Years later, I visited Megan three days before she was married. I presented her with a book of poems, a book I had helped compose. They were college-age poems and poor excuses of the Great Emotion, but I had nothing else to offer. We sat in her living room and talked of earlier days of perfect harmony and laughing, racing moods. (“Do you remember…?” “Of course, I do; you were nervous…” “And you said…”) We had coffee and cake. She was wearing the floating opal necklace I had given her; the opal rested in the pool of her throat. She wanted me to see her wedding dress. It was white and lacy and belonged to a woman I had known only as a young girl. Then, as if by signal, we both became silent. There was nothing more to share. “I should go,” I said. She smiled and nodded, and then she walked with me to my car.
In the awkwardness of that moment, I had a chilling sensation of being lost, of being alone in a place too far away for turning back. I said to Megan, “I will miss you. If you ever need me, find me.” And I meant it.
She tucked her head and nodded. I could see a shudder strike her body. She touched the floating opal with her finger and pressed it against the hollow of her throat, and then she again looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes. Pale green eyes.
She put her hand on my face and pushed the hair back off my forehead, an easy habit recalled from easy times.
“Oh, I bought you so much candy,” she said softly. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I told her.
She leaned forward and kissed me. Gently, she kissed me. “I love you,” she whispered.
Then she turned and walked away.
It was one of the rare, clean moments of my living, and it ended the Emery years. Wesley, Freeman, Otis, Paul, R. J., Alvin, Dover, Willie Lee, Baptist, Dupree, Sonny, Wayne, Annie, Granny Woman, Shirley Weems, the fight, the REA, church, Emery Junior High School, the hayride—all of it ended there, there with Megan. Ended with a finality that made me shudder.
From that day, everything was different.
And there are times, so often, when I long to adopt Alvin’s old habit and walk backward—quietly, shyly, as Alvin walked.
On the Big Gully Oath, I would try it. Cross my heart and hope to die.
But I know what Wesley would say. “The problem with walking backward is that you see only where you’ve been.”
AFTERWORD
By William J. Scheick
IN THE YEAR THE LIGHTS CAME ON, Terry Kay makes good use of the memories of his youth on a forty-acre farm near Royston, close to Hartwell Lake on the northeastern border of Georgia. His book conveys a vivid impression of the life he knew in the rural South during the late 1940s. But The Year the Lights Came On is not finally autobiography, history, or even a reminiscence. It is a romance, a fictional act of the imagination celebrating the very nature of imagination.
The first clue to this concern with the imagination surfaces in the Author’s Note, which informs the reader that this novel represents an attempt to render faithfully “those sensations of awe and innocence that visited our imaginations—the year the lights came on.” Kay clearly announces that he is not writing a work of mundane facts, but a book of perceptions and impressions, the product of an imaginative interaction of mind and place that contains a truth higher than mere facts. Kay’s romance particularly emphasizes two primary acts of imagination: dreaming and remembering.
The very narrative medium of The Year the Lights Came On originates in memory. As in such contemporary American rural portraits as William Inge’s My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971) and Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975), Kay’s novel presents memory as a creative power forging patterns of continuity, both real and imaginary, that are like the designs of art. For Kay, memory is as much an act of imagination as is art, but it has for him a somewhat limited capacity. The limitation of this retrospective mode of imagination is emphasized in the closing words of Kay’s novel, where reminiscence is equated to “walk[ing] backward—quietly, shyly.” But as Wesley Wynn, the narrator’s brother, would say, “The problem with walking backward is that you see only where you’ve been.”
In contrast, walking forward, looking forward, anticipating, dreaming—these acts comprise another mode of the creative imagination, the prospective mode poignantly remembered and celebrated in Kay’s romance. The youths of Our Side Gang dream of what progress, specifically the coming of electricity to their homes, will do for their sense of place and honor in their community. They anticipate a kind of golden age in their lives, a personal and social enlightenment surpassing the mere attainment of electric light in their homes. As Colin Wynn, the twelve-year-old narrator, says, “wondrous changes were taking place…. The REA was coming, and its thin wires would knit us into the fabric of the huge glittering costume, Earth.” As the word knit suggests, Colin looks forward to, dreams of, some ideal pattern of communal integration and identity.
This anticipated pattern is an act of Colin’s and his friends’ imagination, a mental design produced by “a dreamer’s pride” and manifested particularly during “long, dreamy hours” spent in Black Pool Swamp. In their innocent dream of the world, they are already close-knit, if not to the outside world as they perceive it, at least within their own community. On the first page of the novel, Colin asserts their sense of this bond: “Ain’t nothin’ never comin’ between none of us!” However, the very excess of the too-insistent negatives of this remark spells the doom both of such a naive belief and of the hope that the web of electric wires will connect the Our Side community better to the outside world and at the same time preserve their bond to each other.
Colin’s mother predicts the actual result of the coming of electricity. As a mature woman she suffers from what Colin sees as a characteristic problem with adults: the loss of imagination. No longer dreaming the innocent sort of fantasy which youthful imaginations summon, she admonishes her children to remember the last rain storm they experience together before their home is connected to the REA wires. “Remember how warm a kerosene lamp can be,” she tells them, because “soon, it’ll be different every time it rains. When we get the REA, we won’t all be bunched up in a corner like this.” She knows that closer ties to the outside world will untie the inside bonding of the Our Side community. And in the Epilogue, Colin admits that the coming of electricity “drove us from huddling” and “weakened our dreams.” This change includes as well the “huddling in the dark corner of a school bus” shared by Colin and Megan Priest, who presumably “were inseparable.” With technological progress as with growing up—“progressing] forward,” Colin says—the imaginative designs of being close-knit fade away with the adult loss of imagination (that is, in Kay’s terms, the prospective imagination).
In Colin’s narrative, one feature of this imaginative pattern which unites people is the perception of boundaries. As Henry David Thoreau indicates in Walden (1854), which argues for the recovery of prospective dreaming, all boundaries are only acts of the imagination, even those borders legally constituted by official land surveys. But whereas Thoreau sees all perimeters as mental constructions—Blakean mind-forged manacles—to be transgressed and transcended, Kay registers an ambivalence about such restrictive bounds. On the one hand, the youthful imagination, looking forward, fails to recognize its role in the generation of perceived borders and seeks only to transgress them. On the other hand, the older, less dynamic imagination, looking backward, acknowledges boundaries as mere mental demarcations and also appreciates what positive factors they provided. That such perceived limits can have at once negative and positive qualities is, in Kay’s novel, one of the vexing complexities of life.
The most obvious boundary in the novel is Highway 17, which separates the Our Side Gang from the Highway 17 Gang. Colin reports that his and his allies’ “perspective was conditioned by boundaries,” and he is correct; but by the end of the novel he also indicates that those perimeters were themselves a matter of Our Side perspective, so that it was imagination governing their
perspective all along. At midpoint in his narrative, Colin yokes borders and imagination: “It was a part of the swamp we did not know well, because it was outside our boundaries, north of the imaginary north line that protected us, isolated us from threat and danger” (emphasis added).
This remark not only correlates borders and imagination, but also points, retrospectively to an un-Thoreauvian positive feature of restrictive perimeters. Whereas the Our Side Gang initially “were very sure boundaries, even invisible boundaries, were meant to keep [them] in,” they become “just as sure those same boundaries were meant to keep outsiders out.” In fact, restrictive bounds do protect and isolate their inhabitants from threat and danger, to use Colin’s words; they specifically protect the close-knit, boundary-dictated Our Side community. When the REA wires connect Our Side to the outside world, the bonding of that once insulated community dissolves, even as, according Colin’s mother, will the huddling of the Wynn family. As Colin laments in his Epilogue, “The REA also destroyed us. Destroyed something—some intangible security people have always enjoyed in isolation.”
And what is lost cannot be recovered. When Colin watches loving Megan sink into despair over his dissolution of their huddling, their relationship, he momentarily tries “to retreat back into [his] circle of isolation and protection, my boundaries of north and south, east and west, my boundaries of Black Pool Swamp.” Of course he cannot successfully retreat, anymore than he or Kay can truly regain the lost past through the nostalgic narrative comprising The Year the Lights Came On. That narrative is a form of walking backward, which reveals only where one has been. As an act of less dynamic retrospective imagination combining memory and art, Colin’s account is redeemed principally by the fact that what it recalls is the memory of a more primary and vital artistic act of the imagination: the prospective dreams of youth.
Colin’s memorial narrative might celebrate the wonder of these expansive prospective dreams, but finally it is bounded by time, or, more accurately, the fall of youthful imagination into time. Before 1947, for Colin and his buddies, “Time was bodyless, formless.” After the coming of electricity, of technological progress, “Time became placeable” for them. As his inability (when he dissolves his relationship with Megan) to retreat into the timelessness of the past and as his account relentlessly dramatizes, Colin is not able to emulate Dover’s “good sense to resist adulthood,” the stage of human development characterized by the loss of the dynamic prospective imagination, by the deprivation of the capacity to dream. Whereas Dover (at least from the children’s disputable perspective) somehow apparently manages to maintain the ability to “not separate Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Colin falls into time.
Having fallen out of a timelessness in Eden County, Colin learns that in time nothing keeps: not summer, not youth, not innocence, not love, not (excluding, or insulating) boundaries, not prospective imagination. Nothing endures. There in fact had been hints of this characteristic of temporal reality in the seemingly timeless dreamy world of Colin and his friends. For instance, a sense of history (time and memory) abides in the apocryphal story about the haunting of Wind’s Mill by the ghost of a Confederate deserter who probably died in his hiding place. But Colin does not detect in this legend any intimation of the condemnation of the fallen human spirit in time; the story seems to him to be something apart, separate, even if the name Wind disguises the fact that originally the place was called Wynn’s Mill, suggesting a connection to Colin’s family and his own destiny. Appropriately, it is during a hayride to Wind’s Mill that Colin ends his romance with Megan and that their fall into time is completed.
Just as Colin and his friends turn a blind eye to the press of history upon their dream world, they ignore the implications of the very activity of the REA in their beloved swamp, that refuge into which Freeman Boyd successfully escapes and into which Colin (looking at despairing Megan) wishes to retreat. Nevertheless, the death of Colin’s oldest brother while hitchhiking to an assignment with the REA foreshadows the demise of Colin’s youthful imagination. Likewise, the fact that the right-of-way crew of the REA literally “hacked through the swamp” in order to bring electricity to Our Side readily indicates the devastating incursion that progress, technological advancement, will make on Colin’s dream world. But Colin, whose surname ironically promises victory (Wynn, win) ignores such signs of inevitable loss.
With the fall into time, with progress and “progress[ing] forward” (maturation), comes the dissolution of former boundaries, those imagined borders which at once excluded and insulated Our Side. With this rupture comes a new perspective, an enlightenment corresponding to the acquisition of electric light. Primarily this enlightenment erases imaginary partitions, suppliants unique identity with commonality, and displaces the soft simplicities of the dream world with hard complexities.
One insight into this complexity includes the realization that perimeters are indeed imaginary and can be good as well as bad. Another includes the insight that in time nothing endures. Most significantly, however, this new sense of complexity reveals the paradox at the very heart of progress and maturation: that for every gain there is a loss.
In gaining the termination of purlieus, one loses a special kind of identity. In gaining access to the cold world at large, one loses the warm communal or family huddle. In gaining the technology of artificial light, one loses sunny nature—a fact symbolized by the devastation of the swamp. In gaining a new perspective (temporal enlightenment), one loses a certain kind of vision, the prospective imagination of youth. These and similar deprivations are significant, and Kay’s novel subtextually raises the questions of whether what was gained was worth what was lost. Loss, however, is inevitable.
With the demise of the prospective imagination, of youthful dream, comes the attainment of the retrospective imagination, adult memory. Memory is not as wondrous as the more dynamic earlier mode of imagination, Kay’s novel suggests, but like youthful dreaming it is aligned to art in its construction of pleasing aesthetic patterns. These nostalgic artistic designs of memory, of retrospective imagination, to some extent compensate for the privation of the glorious youthful dreams of the prospective imagination. As Kay’s novel intrinsically demonstrates, remembering is also a precious art.
Kay’s theme that the advancement of social technology and of personal maturation banishes imagination, in its most active and vital mode, is also a common Romantic concern of early nineteenth-century literature. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet: To Science” (1829), for example, laments the passage of the narrator’s youthful “summer dream” just as Colin’s story recounts the passage of his last summer as an innocent child with a visionary prospective imagination. Similarly, the “echo of the ax” wielded by the REA crew slicing through the swamp recalls the sounds of the axes of progressing civilization that drives Natty Bumppo farther and farther westward in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827). Poe’s representative concern with the atrophication of a certain kind of imaginative vision concerning one’s self and Cooper’s characteristic uneasiness over the destruction of a certain kind of vision concerning the natural and the rural combine in some late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American literary works focused on the declining West as a symbol of a diminished dream of an ideal America. Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (1966) is an excellent example but a precedent book also evocative of this loss, a book Kay’s novel time and again calls to mind, is Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Clemens’ romance, like Kay’s, presents a dreamy summer world of youthful imagination that falls into time as Huck’s adolescent perspective changes when he crosses former imaginary boundaries to discover a new reality of loss of freedom (slavery), loss of innocence (maturation), and loss of vision (civilizational progress). The West, which was always from the first a creation of the American imagination, serves in Huck’s narrative as an elusive refuge from this fall into time, as do places like Black Pool Swamp in Coli
n’s narrative, which specifically speaks of Big Gully as “the West.” Just as in Big Gully the Our Side Gang imagines that “there were cowboys and Indians,” so too Huck and other members of Tom Sawyer’s gang dream of undertaking “howling adventures amongst the Indians, over in the Territory.” And just as in Kay’s romance the REA right-of-way crew cuts through the seemingly charmed landscape with axes and transforms it into civilization, so also in Clemens’ romance the wondrous land west of the Mississippi River has been trampled by Tom Sawyerish forces and has been civilized (in an ironic sense). Huck’s final assertion, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it,” is as forlorn a hope as is Colin’s wretched wish “to retreat back into…[the] isolation and protection…[of the] boundaries of Black Pool Swamp.” Neither can escape the fall into time, for in both instances the Territory, the Swamp, the West is receding fast before the march of civilization.
Colin’s association of the construction of electrical lines and the laying of “some east-and-west railroad track” suggests the corresponding imminent demise both of his youthful vision, objectified in his southern locale, and of America’s youthful vision, objectified by the land west of the Mississippi. The Territory, the Swamp, the West were always merely mental reifications, psychological terrains with imaginary boundaries, perspectives fashioned by the prospective imagination dreamily looking forward toward some vision of what might be. From the first, however, they were doomed by the inevitable fact of existence that nothing lasts; and what is gained from this demise is the less exhilarating, yet poignant, capacity for retrospective imagination. Both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Year the Lights Came On are acts of artistic memory nostalgically recalling the close of the West: that is, the curtailment of an active and vital creative vision represented in the idea of the West; a diminishing which finally signifies the close of the dynamic, prospective imagination.