The Evolution of Annabel Craig by Lisa Grunwald

Author:Lisa Grunwald [Grunwald, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

“Why weren’t you at the banquet?” I teased Lottie later that night, trying to answer her scolding with some of my own.

For once we weren’t sitting in the kitchen but on the steps in the backyard, where she’d lit a cigarette, and I’d willed myself not to find it shocking.

“I wanted to meet some of the supporting characters in the play,” she said, exhaling contentedly.

I asked her who.

“Well, I met John Scopes’s father, for one. He came down from Paducah today. He was hauling three huge grain sacks filled with mail.”

“Right, I’d heard John was from Kentucky,” I said.

“And would have been there now if he hadn’t stayed in town that week after school closed.”

“How’s that?”

Lottie grinned like a person who’s just had the most delicious bite of pie. Prolonging the suspense, she took another drag on her cigarette.

“Seems he met some blond girl, and she told him there was going to be a box social at her church. The only reason he was even in Dayton the day that Rapp got ahold of him was for the chance she’d invite him.”

“So, if he hadn’t met that girl—”

Lottie laughed. “Well, for one thing, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Nor would the whole history of Dayton’s summer take place the way it did, or the thousand arguments that went with it, or, perhaps the shape of the rest of my life. But for now I laughed too.

She had met other visitors, she told me, clearly satisfied: Wilbur Glenn Voliva, an evangelist who hoped to testify that the earth was flat; John Butler, the Tennessee legislator who’d written the law being tested; and Reverend W. H. Moses, who represented the largest Black Baptist organization in the country. She had managed a lengthy interview with T. T. Martin, the evangelist who had written the book Hell and the High Schools and who, Lottie told me, said that Germans who gave children poisoned candy during the war were angels compared to the Tennessee teachers who taught evolution.

But the person Lottie was most anxious to meet was the Baltimore writer H. L. Mencken. He had already made himself notorious in town. Airplanes landing each evening on the little strip past town had been bringing the latest papers—so we already knew he’d been writing about the people of Dayton as “rubes” and “rednecks” and “Homo Neandertalensis” (a term I didn’t understand but knew was no compliment). He had already written about John as “the infidel Scopes”—not because Mencken himself believed John was an infidel, but because he was making fun of the way he thought my people saw him. I wasn’t sure I was that eager to meet Mencken myself, but I had to laugh when Lottie talked about him. Here was yet one more celebrated man who had a nickname that sounded as if it had been given to him as a royal title. I knew that Bryan was the Great Commoner and Darrow was the Champion of Lost Causes; Mencken, it turned out, was known as the Sage of Baltimore.

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