Wright's title refers to a racist editorial cartoon of the period, which depicted "an amalgamation polka," where whites and blacks dance together in genteel costumes. This was meant to suggest, one presumes, that other mutually enjoyable physical activities might occur between the races later in the evening. Race mixing was the great shibboleth of slavery advocates and segregationists from the dawn of American history almost to our own time, and many of the characters in Wright's novel are obsessed with it. Liberty grows up in a house used as a station on the Underground Railroad, but his mother was raised on a large South Carolina plantation and his father is the scion of a Northern industrial family that has profited greatly from trade with the slave states.
Liberty's parents are devoted to destroying the very institution that made their families rich, and this streak of altruism or perversity or whatever it is runs through the book. When Liberty finally visits the devastated Redemption Hall, his mother's birthplace, near the end of the war and meets his maternal grandfather, the fearsome Asa Maury, the old man is as much a bitter, angry, hardened bigot as advertised. Yet he too, faced with the imminent destruction of slavery, is hypnotized by America's racial dilemma -- and in his own deranged Dr. Moreau fashion, is trying to solve it.
"The Amalgamation Polka"
By Stephen Wright
Knopf
304 pages
Fiction
If these two households are like funhouse-mirror reflections of each other, Liberty's journey from one to the other itself resembles a reckless, exhilarating and almost deadly carnival ride. He survives the horrors of Antietam, is briefly taken prisoner by the rebels, then deserts from the Union Army to go find grandfather Asa and sign on (or so the latter supposes) to his harebrained scheme to escape the collapsing Confederacy and hijack a ship for Brazil, where slavery remains alive and well. And that's not even mentioning Liberty's childhood, when he is educated by a one-eyed former slave named Euclid, taken carousing by his likable but degenerate Uncle Potter and sworn into the secret fraternity of pirates by a vagabond named Fife.
I said earlier that "The Amalgamation Polka" isn't really about the Civil War or the 19th century, but considering all of Liberty's vivid, uproarious and horrible adventures -- which could have occurred at no other time and place -- that's not quite fair. It may be more accurate to say that Wright sees all the bloodshed and tumult of the period as especially good examples of the American madness his writing channels so effectively. Certainly he has drawn on various literary classics of that century as inspiration. My Salon colleague and friend Laura Miller has suggested (in the New York Times) that "The Amalgamation Polka" owes something to the absurd odyssey, and levelheaded protagonist, of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"; I would add that the combination of irony, melodrama and boy's adventure yarn is reminiscent of "Great Expectations."
Despite its elements of parody or self-parody, "The Amalgamation Polka" isn't a joke, or at least not a cheap one. (It may be a joke in some grand existential or cosmic sense, but then so may all efforts at human expression.) Wright loads up the book with antique vocabulary-busters -- I can't tell you what "gallinipers" or "shecoonery" or "buckra" are, although I can guess at the meaning of "slantindicular" and "ramstuginous" -- but his comedy is always laced with mania and sadness.
About two-thirds of the way through his journey to Carolina, Liberty spends the night with a Southern woman who hasn't seen her husband in two years. Presumably a widow, she is raising her children alone on a half-abandoned Georgia plantation. They don't have sex, although she asks to see him naked and he obliges. At one point, she looks at him with "the bleakest expression he had ever seen.
"'This war,'" she says to him, "'this horrible evil war, it's never going to end. You do understand that, don't you? Even after it's over it will continue to go on without the flags and the trumpets and the armies, do you understand?'" It's an idea often repeated in this book, one that runs through all the dreams of liberty and freedom shared in some form by Liberty Fish and all other Americans. Some may cherish the unrealizable vision of an amalgamation polka and others may fear it; all find themselves in a country endlessly at war with itself.
About the writer
Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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