Photo of Anne Stone by Wayde Compton
Photo of Wayde Compton by Anne Stone
In anticipation of the release of our FIGURES issue (58.1), we’re thrilled to share an excerpt from “Antiquing in Vermont” by Anne Stone and Wayde Compton. Much of the work in this exciting issue tackles and complicates the power of figures to define us—in shaping the stories we tell, our relationships to each other, and how we move through the world. Here, Compton and Stone talk about how they collaborated on the piece, and the fascinating story that inspired it. You can read “Antiquing in Vermont” in its entirety in our FIGURES issue.
Stone: First, collaborating with Wayde was fun. Like a character in Neuromancer, I uploaded a distillation of Wayde’s brilliance! The story we wrote was, I think, a long time coming. I’d probably trace “Antiquing in Vermont” back to the conversations we had years ago about Betty and Barney Hill, the classic abduction tale. What I didn’t realize, until talking with Wayde, was that the Hills were an interracial couple.
Compton: So the whole cultural phenomenon of the alien abduction narrative—the trope of the car on a lonely road, and the concept of missing time, all that—started with a black man and white woman in the middle of the Civil Rights era. Terry Matheson, an author on UFO narratives, points out how, in the tapes of the Hills under hypnosis, they describe the aliens as more human-looking than we’ve come to expect from later abduction stories. In fact, Barney originally said that one of their abductors looked like “a red-headed Irishman” and another “like a German Nazi.” Perhaps whatever happened to them on that highway was so traumatic that aliens became, for them, a better thing to recall.
Stone: So, Betty and Barney Hill might have encountered more ‘ordinary’ monsters. Similarly, in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the radio broadcaster describes zombies as “ordinary-looking people.” Reading a transcription of Romero’s film, it’s striking how easily one could replace the zombies with hordes of racists. There were monsters in that fictive small-town before any ‘radioactive contamination’ came back on a space probe—as we see at the end of the film. Larger sociological forces are at play—and cost the racialized main character his life.
For me, these elements come together in the diner scene. I remember thinking about the swivelling of gazes in a suddenly quiet rural café when queer friends walked in; how I felt when, dating a woman, holding her hand—strangers’ gazes turned on us in the street; stories told by Wayde’s folks, an older interracial couple who travelled together in pre– and post-Civil Rights eras—moving through a series of ever-shifting and at times outright dangerous contexts. As Wayde put it in his 2015 keynote address to the BC Library Conference, “Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, each black person is unstuck in time, yanked from one era to another suddenly and without warning, irregularly and unpredictably”—which, maybe, brings us to the Thule Society?
Compton: Well, we’ve talked about how the Hills faced more earthly foes than their UFO story suggests, but in our story both the social and the fantastical combine. It’s also interesting that the UFO narratives that precede the Hills often come from the right-wing fringe of the early 20th century theosophical movement. Those are beginnings of New Age culture, and we have largely forgotten how deeply racist its roots actually were. What we eventually came to know as Nazi-style occultism was in the air in Europe in the 1920s and earlier, in groups like the Thule Society and so on. When they imagined extraterrestrials, their presence tended to confirm racist hierarchical myths. In our story, this allowed us to link that original fascist tendency to today’s alt-right, making a kind of circle. But, of course, there’s a twist to our ending that reconstitutes everything.
An excerpt from “Antiquing in Vermont” (58.1 FIGURES)
Alain’s old shed has all but collapsed. But there, half hidden by a sheet of corrugated tin, I see the 1959 Karmann Ghia convertible. Robin egg blue. The original paint. And the car is mine, gratis, no strings attached, free. And so are we, even if Euclid isn’t half so excited by the idea.
“He gave you a car,” Euclid repeats, pulling aside the tin roofing.
“Gratis. Free. No strings attached,” I say.
Euclid frowns. “Nobody gives away a car,” he says. “Nobody gives away a car for free.”
“I told you, my ex isn’t … materialistic.” I try to explain Alain, the way he thinks when it comes to objects, things, how Alain doesn’t really get yours or mine or the lines between, but Euclid frowns deeper.
“For all I know,” I say, “he’ll take it back in a few days, so let’s enjoy it while we can. We’ll go antiquing in Vermont.”
“Antiquing. On Halloween.” Euclid shakes his head.
“We can drive south to the ocean. See the wild ponies at Chincoteague,” I say. “There are barns all over, and they’re just filled with old stuff, and books, thousands of old books.”
Euclid’s got the look of a person who’s being sold a three-dollar bill, but at the mention of books, that look softens a bit, and I know he’s in. Together, we push the car out of the ruins of Alain’s shed.
I brush off the driver’s seat and hop in. When Euclid climbs in next to me, I lean over and give him a kiss. There’s something I want to tell Euclid, but not here, not in this place. Maybe in Vermont or the Carolinas. Somewhere on the coast, I’ll find the perfect spot.
“You look good in the car,” Euclid says quietly, and I grin.
That night, on the Southern edge of Vermont, we pull up at the address of the B&B I booked us into. This house shares an outline with the one I saw on the internet, but it’s a lot shabbier, more like a working farmhouse than any B&B.
As I’m pulling up the long drive, the Ghia’s high beams come to rest on a little ceramic figure by the front walk. The lawn ornament is wearing white pants and a white long sleeve shirt, and over that, a bright red vest. But that’s not the problem.
His face and hands are painted jet black, and his lips are ruby red.
But that’s not the problem.
The problem isn’t the figure’s blackness, but who placed him on this lawn and why. The problem is in how all of this signifies.
The problem is that I am a twenty-two-year-old white woman and Euclid is a twenty-five-year-old black man and we are in Southern Vermont, in the dark of night, in the middle of the goddamned countryside, and in the twelve hours since we left Montreal, we haven’t seen another face remotely like Euclid’s, aside from this one—and that is arguable. This problem is not small, and I don’t know if there is a solution.
Euclid isn’t saying anything right now.
His breathing has gone quiet, and his eyes are focused on that figure in white pants. I’m surprised that the thing hasn’t crumbled to dust under the pressure of his gaze.
“We can’t stay here,” I say under my breath.
Euclid turns, looks at me, and raises an eyebrow in a “you don’t say” kind of expression.
I blow out a breath of air. Two. Then I start, laboriously, to back out of the gravel drive, but halfway through the three-point turn something hits me.
An inspiration.
“Hold on a sec,” I tell Euclid and smile. Slipping the car into park, I pull the cable and pop the front trunk.
Wayde Compton’s YA graphic novel The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration, illustrated by April dela Noche Milne, was just released from Arsenal Pulp Press. He’s the author of several works of poetry (49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond), non-fiction (After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region) and editor of the anthology Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. His collection of short stories, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award (Silver) for Fiction in 2011. Compton currently teaches in the faculty of Creative Writing at Douglas College.
Check out these upcoming launches of The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration, a graphic novel (words by Wayde Compton, illustrations by April dela Noche Milne):
Toronto: Sunday, 6 October 2019, 3 p.m. Koffler Centre of the Arts (720 Bathurst Street), tickets $10-20 through Eventbrite.
Vancouver: Saturday, 19 October 2019, 6 p.m. Massy Books (229 E. Georgia Street) Free.
Anne Stone’s latest novel, Girl Minus X (about trauma, memory, and an apocalypse of forgetting) is forthcoming from Buckrider Books in 2020. Stone is also the author of Delible, which tells the story of Melora Sprague, a fifteen-year-old girl whose sister has gone missing. Chosen as a book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the novel offers a glimpse into a sustained experience of uncertainty and explores how our identities exist in those traces we leave behind. She is currently at work on a collection of slipstream fiction and teaches English and Creative Writing at Capilano University.
Info about the launch of Girl Minus X (a novel) to come closer to the date of release (April 2020). Be sure to check Anne Stone’s website for updates.