On the night of the birthday itself, Johanna told them, Lobster Tales would be coming to make a clambake on the beach.
Harrison immediately claimed some crucial work project and retreated to his and Lewyn’s room. He might possibly have been hoping that someone, perhaps Salo （whom he still had some interest in impressing）， would ask him more—or indeed anything—about where he had been all summer, and what he had done there, but Lewyn was the only one who seemed at all curious about his time in Virginia. Lewyn （naturally） had never heard of Friedrich Hayek, but he did seem capable of lucid questions. What was the retreat and who went there? What kind of activities went on and who paid for it all? （Harrison did not answer this last. He wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, and besides, it wasn’t any of Lewyn’s business.） He said more than he’d expected to say about Eli, managing to convey that Eli was （a） their own age and yet （b） supremely accomplished and （c） fated for great achievements and positions of deep influence and, most surprising of all, （d） someone Harrison actually admired.
“Where’s he from?” said Lewyn.
“Virginia. Well, West Virginia. I mean, western Virginia. Right on the border, actually.”
He said this as if his brother cared about the specifics.
“Okay,” said Lewyn.
“I mean, down there, the state and county lines are much less important than the geography. People identify by the valleys and ridges. They’ve been populated since the eighteenth century.”
“By whites,” said Lewyn.
“What?”
“Populated by whites since the eighteenth century. I imagine they were populated long before the eighteenth century, by people who were not white.”
This was a very Walden thing to say.
“Well, of course. Also by Blacks, if it comes to that. Eli thinks his family migrated from Georgia. Before the Emancipation Proclamation there were Black families hiding in Appalachia. People left them alone.”
Lewyn frowned. He had never heard of escaped slaves being “left alone” anywhere in the Antebellum South, but for merely the thousandth time in his life, he decided Harrison must know better.
“So Eli is Black?”
“I can’t believe you even asked that,” said Harrison unkindly. “Race is irrelevant.” He picked up his book and pretended to read it, but Lewyn could tell that he was too irritated to actually read.
“Well,” Lewyn said, “I couldn’t care less if your friend is Black or white or green, but it’s relevant to him, surely. A Black person growing up in Virginia or West Virginia has de facto had his life impacted by hundreds of years of endemic racism.”
“Oh?” Harrison sneered. “So basically, whatever Eli has accomplished, and everything he’s going to accomplish, is irrelevant in the face of his eternal victim status. My ancestor was enslaved! My ancestor was killed in a pogrom! So what? At some point, we get to stop holding a grudge, Lewyn.”
A grudge? Lewyn thought.
“Well, our ancestor was killed in a pogrom, as a matter of fact,” he said. “A pogrom for one. I mean, throttled, gibbeted, corpse displayed for six years. That’s pretty bad, I think even you can agree. Hard not to hold a grudge, if you ask me.”
“Throttled! Gibbeted!” Harrison grinned. “Big words, Lewyn!”
Lewyn, annoyingly, only shrugged. “I mean, you have to feel for the guy. I feel for the guy. If Joseph Oppenheimer had agreed to convert to Christianity he’d have been home by dinnertime.”
“I doubt that. Our great-great-whatever was done for the minute his boss dropped dead. In any case, as usual, you fail to see the bigger picture. Yes, this very unfortunate thing happened to our ancestor, but as a direct result of this same unfortunate thing, his descendants left Germany and ended up in America. So, good for us! If he hadn’t been killed, he’d probably have stayed right where he was, and also his kids, and their kids, and on down the line till Dad’s father ended up guess where in 1939? And you and I wouldn’t be sitting in this nice house on Martha’s Vineyard having this conversation.”