When I finished reading Lewis Nordan’s book, Wolf Whistle, a novel based on the Emmett Till murder and thus full of rednecks, I wanted an El Camino. One of those funky Chimera vehicles with a car face and truck hindquarters. The Camino – snorting and roaring like the mythical lion-headed dragon that was the Chimera of ancient Greece - breathed fire across Nordan’s Delta landscape. I so wanted one. I know this is not the impact Nordan wished his novel to have, but it did on me.

 

Then, when I finished Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s memoir about growing up in Imperial Russia, I wanted a muff. A tiny roll of fur that would warm my hands during the long, cold winters of . . . Mississippi.

 

The Camino, the muff - it reminded me of the time a boyfriend had taken me on a trip to New Orleans. I’d been to the city before, with my parents, but this was my first visit as an adult. We walked the sidewalks of the French Quarter, lingering in the richness that is Chartres Street. Leaning close, I peered into the tiny store-front windows, and fell in love with a pair of shoes. Red pumps with low heels. I wanted the pumps sitting inside the window surrounded by the gilded beauty of Chartres Street.

 

When we returned, one of my boyfriend’s pals told me he was glad I’d enjoyed the trip.

 

“Peyton took another girl to New Orleans and all she could talk about was the drunks sleeping on the sidewalks and the garbage in the street. You liked the shoes.”

 

Well. I liked the shoes. What do you know?

 

It wasn’t the shoes, of course. Just like it wasn’t the Camino or the furry muff that I longed for.

 

It was something more

 

***

 

After I fell in love with Nordan’s El Camino, I asked around, thinking I might buy one. Turned out, they don’t make Caminos anymore. Sometimes I would see the cars for sale, mostly sitting in the middle of a field that passed for a redneck’s front yard. I never stopped, never asked to see under the hood. I knew I would never actually buy a Camino.

 

In Nordan’s novel, the woman Emmett Till supposedly “whistled” at was a well-off woman, at least by that society’s standards. The act that cased all the trouble: an African American in Mississippi in the 1950s whistling at a white woman.  In those times, most of her wealth came from the pure luck of having been born with white skin. “Free, white and over twenty-one,” right? That’s all it took. Safely ensconced inside that closed society, she was free to wear her bathrobe to the store; or do whatever she wanted, with no consequences whatsoever.

 

The woman’s freedom tangled in my mind with the El Camino skittering down the dirt roads that shot between the cotton fields, roaring into the setting sun, kicking up dust and headed for whatever might come next. I wanted that freedom, I wanted to wear my bathrobe to the store if I chose. I wanted no one to be able to say a word, because I was Mrs. Prewitt – I could do whatever I wanted.

 

Problem was, the Camino also figured prominently in the murder of the young Emmett Till, who violated the restrictive code of the white Delta and ended up dead. Now you listen, boy: that white woman may be prancing around half-naked, but don’t you whistle. Don’t you even look. We’ll slam you in the trunk of the Camino, teach you a lesson. Gun her up!

 

The white woman’s absolute freedom, that which attracted me, was also that which was the evil of the time.

 

It did have consequences.

 

Paid for by the young boy weighted down in the river, his eye gouged out, his mama up in Chicago wailing over his open casket, her baby long gone.

 

***

 

 

That was redneck Mississippi. Nabokov writes of aristocratic Russia. But it’s not so different.

 

Nabokov’s family lolled in the time of Czars and Czarinas. Nabokov wasn’t a Czar, but he was close. Real Russian aristocracy, not like the fake white woman of the Delta who was so low class as to let a headache send her to the store in her bathrobe.

 

Nabokov had class. His father had old books in the house; the little boy Nabokov collected butterflies. Mornings were made up of shaded walks; lovely music always played softly in the background.

 

The little girls who paraded through life with the young Nabokov – the lucky, petted, indulged little girls who had their every desire met – got the muffs. The Russian peasants got the scrawny potatoes, if they got anything at all. Potatoes planted and hoed and dug for the families that sat in their great libraries gazing at all their musty old books.

 

To say that Nabokov in his memoir doesn’t focus much on this divide is an understatement. His memories of a lovely childhood are unsullied.

 

My knowledge, on the other hand, is too great. No matter how much I want to be that lucky, petted little girl - just as I cannot buy a Camino - I cannot buy a muff.

 

***

 

 

I’ve bought shoes, of course. Red pumps, even. Recently, I bought a stunning pair, red patent with pointed toes and four-inch heels. But I didn’t buy them from one of the wealthy shops of Chartres, where gilt abounds, where shoes sell for two hundred and fifty dollars, and excess is the point. I bought them on Summer Avenue in Memphis, from a discount store where they turn your check into an electronic transfer because they don’t trust the check to be any good. The pumps do not represent the cocooning wealth of Chartres, but the hidden treasure of low-down, second-hand Summer Avenue.

 

I can live with those types of red shoes.

 

***

 

I know the shadow price of complete freedom, total security, great wealth. But that doesn’t prevent its Siren call from piercing my brain.

 

If you have the means, if you’re able to respond, the tempters sing to you: come to me, indulge yourself, take that which it is your right to have. You were born to it, after all. You with your white skin, your aristocratic wealth, it is yours to do with as you will. Your daddy worked hard for that money, your mama would have wanted you to look good in that muff. Go ahead – just a bit closer, that’s a good girl.

 

Answer that call, and you’ll hit the rocks, wreck your ship and drown. Because it isn’t your right. No one has the right to indulge themselves at the expense of the oppressed lying unattended at their front gate. If things seem too good to be true – you, with no more than an eighth grade education, can rule the Delta! You, lacking a single marketable skill, can be an aristocrat! – they usually are.

 

To believe otherwise is to deceive yourself. To indulge in unreality. To chase Chimerical dreams.

 

***

 

Option Number One: pull the drapes, eat expensive chocolates in your silk-covered bed, ignore those who make your life possible.

 

Option Number Two: ignore the desire instead. Pretend there is nothing you want, pack away the longing and hope that while you’re ladling soup at the soup kitchen the smoldering desire doesn’t burst from the top of your head, sending flames into the spot where your halo’s supposed to be, turning you and it into heavenly ash.

 

Sometimes Forgotten Option Number Three: if humanly possible, work an accommodation.

 

Piece it together as best you can.

 

Take a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

 

Create for yourself an entirely new chimerical creature.

 

***

 

Yesterday, while I was stopped at a stoplight on Summer Avenue, a sleek black Camino slid up beside me. The car was in great shape, its new paint throbbing.

 

I studied the driver. He wasn’t a wealthy white woman. He was a black guy, probably in his early thirty’s. A thin layer of black stubble covered his jaw, his left hand rested nonchalantly on the car’s steering wheel. He looked good, sitting in the Camino.

 

Good, but not as good as I did.

 

For on my feet, I wore four-inch, nineteen dollar, Summer Avenue-bought, fully accommodated red pumps.