Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds by Robert S. Griffin

Author:Robert S. Griffin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2018-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

16. To West Virginia

"You moved from the Washington, D.C. area in 1985 to this remote area in West Virginia," I said to Pierce. "What precipitated the move?"

"I'd lived in Washington for eighteen years and it was getting to me," Pierce replied. "I finally decided that I am just not an urbanite. For one thing, I don't like crowds. They make me nervous. Now, I don't even like going to shop in Lewisburg [a town forty miles from where he lives in West Virginia]. I prefer having just a few people around me whom I know and trust. I suppose psychologists have a name for it, label it a neurosis of some kind, but I don't think it is all that uncommon or unnatural, really. During the development of this country, many people if they had neighbors within a mile of them started to feel cramped and they moved further west. I just wanted some space around me, some privacy. Plus I don't like noise and I don't like pollution. And I don't want to get up to an alarm clock and put on a suit and tie and drive someplace. And the truth is I had just sort of OD'd on blacks in Washington. I was reacting in a very negative way to the sight of all of them around everywhere. I was doing some things back in Washington that if I'd been caught it would have gotten me put in jail for the rest of my life. So I figured that I had better get out of this town, and I did."

"When you say you were doing some things in Washington that would have put you in jail for the rest of your life, is that just a figure of speech?"

"No, I was doing some crazy things. I wrote Hunter [his novel, begun in 1983 and published in 1989] about what Oscar Yeager was doing and why he was doing it. 1 [Yeager was killing interracial couples and Jews.] Yeager was engaged in what could be called terrorist activity, but he was doing it primarily for therapeutic reasons. When he started blowing away racially mixed couples he didn't expect to make a big change in society. 11 was just that he couldn't live with himself if he didn't do something to oppose what he saw happening around him. I didn't do what he did, but I was doing things that were ill-advised. Washington is very cosmopolitan and imbued with government spirit. I was drowning in that goddamn environment. I hated it. I was feeling a sense of desperation, and I reacted. If I had stayed I probably would have gotten caught. But fortunately I was able to get away from there."

I never found out what Pierce was doing in Washington, if anything, that would have gotten him into trouble. One other time, he briefly mentioned a "blackness" he had felt in Washington toward the end of his time there and said that if he had stayed they would have caught him blowing something up and put him in prison.

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