American Pop Read online

  Dedication

  For my grandfather

  Fred Snowden

  Epigraph

  Families are always rising and falling in America. But, I believe, we ought to examine more closely the how and why of it, which in the end revolves around life and how you live it.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Southerners need carbonation.

  —Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Family Tree

  Part 1 1.1: The Famous Panola Cola Dynasty—Piece of Time, Piece of Ass—Will H. Hays Rolls Over in His Grave—Cold Duck—The Prey of a Cola Hunter—All Happy Families

  1.2: The Original Sweetest Thing—An Indian Named Branchwater—A Bumper Crop of Drinking Straws—The Annabelle Constellation

  1.3: A Soda by Any Other Name

  Part 2 2.1: The National Centennial—Sweets for the Sweet—The Malediction—Betsy Ross’s Legacy

  2.2: The Littlest General—Soda Walkabout—The Pride of Quito—“Spare a Fag?”—A German Sniper Takes a Deep Breath—The Candy Wrapper Solution

  2.3: Tree Bear! Tree Bear!—Rocket the Miracle Horse—A Serenade in the Moonglade—Storyville Stories—Historical Secrets

  2.4: Secret Ingredients, Public Biographies—Public Biographies, Secret Ingredients

  2.5: June 10, 1923, Weekend Edition—Anything Goes—Everything Goes—Contrite and Lonesome in Greenwich Village

  2.6: Fortuneless Son—Now a Word from Our Sponsors—The Horns of a Dilemma—No More Fizz

  Part 3 3.1: Histor in the Greek—Breakfast of Champions

  3.2: On This Day in History—The Butterfly Effect—“Who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of men?”—As Goes General Motors So Goes the Nation—From Newton’s Cradle to the Grave—Chaos Theory—Secret Ingredient?

  3.3: The Contents of an Urn—Owl Says What?—Next Stop, Italian Harlem—The Mineola Club

  3.4: The History of Narrative—The Soap Opera Diatribe

  3.5: Reflections of the Soda Business—Penelope the Friendly Ghost—The Magnolia Flower of Cambridge—Meditations in an Emergency

  3.6: The Magnolia and the Mayflower—Return of the Academic Punk

  3.7: Significant Monkey—Les Colporteurs—Ash Wednesday—Sick [sic] Transit—Belle de Jour—Easter Sunday—Photo Finish

  3.8: True Delta—A Phonetic Reminder of an Old Friend—Struck Pond—Caste and Class in a Southern Town—Three-Card Monty

  3.9: Highway 16 Revisited—Turtle Soup Surprise

  Part 4 4.1: Prairie Burial—A Noise That Would Never Come—Arabian Sand

  4.2: Heir to a Dynasty That Was—A Mythic Trinket Finds Its Way Home—The Linchpin of a Downfall

  4.3: Can’t Never Could—News from Connor Rolph Is Seldom Good News—A Secret Proposition—The Cola Wars Begin

  4.4: The Harrington Limit—Like Brother, Like Sister—Candy’s Dandy—Pre-Post-Imperialism

  4.5: Robert in the Library with the Wrench—The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

  4.6: The Member(s) of the Wedding—How to Catch a Doodlebug—The Un-Cola—Cotton’s a Good Boy—Die Freizeit-Klasse in Amerika—Royal Teague’s Funeral—(A Not Quite the) Delta Wedding

  4.7: The Malediction Returns—“See Rock City”—An Unexpected Package

  Part 5 5.1: A Death in the Family—Nyva Adanvdo, Part One—The Lion, the Witch, and the Cotton Gin—Nyva Adanvdo, Part Two—Molly Carmichael’s Will to Narrative

  5.2: Thesis—Antithesis—Synthesis

  5.3: Long Way Down, One Last Thing—Caesar’s Harem—The Lemurian Confederated Militia—Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

  5.4: Ecclesiastes 1:4—A Sudden Downpour of Men’s Apparel—Rosebud

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Snowden Wright

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Family Tree

  Part 1

  1.1

  The Famous Panola Cola Dynasty—Piece of Time, Piece of Ass—Will H. Hays Rolls Over in His Grave—Cold Duck—The Prey of a Cola Hunter—All Happy Families

  How far would he go? Montgomery Forster asked himself that question as he stood on top of the Peabody Hotel. The answer was obvious to everyone but him. Recently elected lieutenant governor of Mississippi, a graduate of Princeton University with honors, and a decorated corporal in the First World War, Montgomery’s prospects were considered limitless, especially in light of his relationship to the Panola Cola Company. Political columnists said he would someday take up residence at the White House. Corporate insiders said he would expand the family business all the way to Timbuktu. On the roof of the Peabody Hotel an hour from midnight, however, the heir to the Forster dynasty was not thinking in such terms. He was calculating the number of stories and windows he would pass, the distance in yards, feet, and inches he would fall, if he took a step off the ledge.

  Not far enough, Monty told himself. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he walked to the other side of the roof. Shortly after he rang for the elevator it arrived. The operator, Edward Pembroke, a former circus trainer who later that year would be named “Duckmaster,” a position he was to hold until his retirement decades later, welcomed his new passenger. At the start of their descent Pembroke turned to Montgomery and said, “Getting some of our Memphis fresh air?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Nothing like our Memphis fresh air.”

  “Superb.”

  The air in northern France had been different. There it had been the literal humanity rather than the figurative inhumanity that shocked Monty. When he first arrived at the Front, he expected to be overwhelmed by the cordite smoke he’d read about in novels, the mustard gas he’d learned about during basic, and the kerosene vapors he’d heard about from veterans, but what he noticed more than anything were the excretions, some overflowing latrines and others staining armpits, from thousands of men living in such proximity to one another. So many bodies suffocated the scent of war. Less than a month after arriving on the Continent, though, he met a British officer, a man he would come to know, care for, and even love, whose features proved a welcome distraction: the glistening sight of the brilliantine he combed into his mustache, the exotic sound of his accent refined in public school, the smooth feel of his cheeks from the sandalwood oil he used as aftershave, the sugary taste of the hard candies he kept stuffed in his pockets. Monty managed to focus only on those sensations even when the smell coming from the bodies of his fellow soldiers was that of their decomposition as they lay scattered on the ground throughout No Man’s Land.

  “Lobby floor, sir,” Pembroke said to Montgomery. “Watch your step.”

  For a moment, the tableau of the New Year’s Eve party in the lobby—the drumfire of champagne corks and the salvo of foil horns, the report of toy ratchets and the detonation of confetti poppers—sent a tremor down Montgomery’s forearm that he quickly dispelled by clenching his fist. goodbye, 1939, read a banner hanging from the mezzanine promenade, hello, 1940. At the center of the eighteenth-century South Italian decorative scheme of the lobby, five ducks swam in a fountain carved from black travertine marble, oblivious to the frequent explosions of flashbulbs. Floral arrangements scattered throughout the lobby lent it the atmosphere of a greenhouse.

  Monty brushed against tropical orchids as he went looking for a cocktail. He advanced through the hundreds of guests his family had invited to their gala. It was held every year in honor of whoever happened to be president of the United States at the time, and though the honoree had yet to attend, each year the other guests agreed he’d missed out.

  In his book God Shakes Creation, David Lewis Cohn writes, “The Mississipp
i Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepheard’s, the London Savoy of this section. If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the lobby, where ducks waddle and turtles drowse, ultimately you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta.” This evening was no exception. Lucien Sparks Jr., heir to the fifth largest parcel of farmland in Mississippi, sat on the shoulders of Lucien Sparks Sr., owner of the fifth largest parcel of farmland in Mississippi. Sequins on the dress worn by Florine Holt, Miss Birmingham, Alabama, of 1939, reflected polka dots of light onto the face of Delmore “Hotcakes” Johnson. Delmore’s wife, Wilhelmina, stood in silent agony while listening to the four Knapp brothers, founders of Knapp Family Snacks, expound on the virtues of cheese combined with peanut butter in their most successful product, Cheese Crackers and Peanut Butter. Perhaps most notable of all, on a cabriole sofa near the front desk lounged two of the evening’s hosts, Lance and Ramsey Forster, both younger than Monty by nine years, fraternal twins whom people from their hometown of Batesville, Mississippi, referred to as the infernal twins.

  Lance, the ends of his black bow tie hanging loose against the bib front of his tuxedo shirt, rattled the cubes in his lowball glass of Four Roses, and Ramsey, whose silk lamé evening gown coruscated whenever she moved, corked an opera-length holder with a Gauloise. Each of them held their favorite accessory, a glass of bourbon and a cigarette, in the opposing hand, such that, both yellow-haired and fine-featured but Lance a few inches taller than Ramsey and with a complexion one shade darker, they seemed fun house mirror images of one another. The siblings had always been a striking pair. Both possessed an elegant ranginess that a gossip columnist once described as making them look like feral cats with monocles.

  Once he finished his drink, Lance turned to his sister and, breaking their silence of the past ten minutes, said, “Define expatriate.”

  “What?”

  “Okay, I will. An expatriate is someone disappointed by the American dream because she tries too hard to buy into it. She might, for example, marry a Hollywood mogul, a man who both exemplifies and sells that dream. A man who is also, I might add, a complete dullard. So she flees the country she thinks failed her. Maybe goes to France. Ribbit, ribbit. Then the Krauts march their little Kraut boots into Poland. Oh, my. The expatriate has to scamper home for safety. Suppose that’s how America and family are alike. We always welcome back our own. Don’t you agree?”

  “You’re such a shit.”

  Despite her brother’s claim, Ramsey did not consider herself an expatriate during her time in Paris. The term seemed better suited for intellectuals and artists, those more deserving of its cachet. Nonetheless she had to admit Lance was half right in his assessment. Throughout her courtship with and engagement to Arthur Landau, president of Vantage Pictures and the man her brother had called a “complete dullard,” Ramsey had harbored fantasies of a glamorous life in Los Angeles, ordering a round of desserts at the Brown Derby after a party that went late, gossiping with starlets, hobnobbing with directors, whispering into the ear of Clark Gable that he had a little something on his chin. Those fantasies, for the most part, became reality. prince of celluloid weds princess of soda ran the headline in Variety, followed weeks later by mulholland drive welcomes mississippi delta. Tallulah took her shopping on Rodeo. Zukor took her sailing to Catalina. Marlene took her dancing at the Troc.

  In his assessment Lance had misunderstood the reason for Ramsey’s departure. She had not been failed by America but rather by her own body. Four miscarriages in half as many years had left her in a depression no amount of phenobarbital could fix. Every night before bed she tried and failed to stop dwelling on a litany of her favorite names. Each day after waking she reached for but could not find the gibbous curve of her belly. Worst of all was that the last had been twins. She forbade those around her, out of pride or a lack thereof, to send word to her family. Although her husband meant well with his various efforts to help—a medical pamphlet he once brought home, “Not Being Gravid Is No Reason to Be Grave,” evoked her first genuine laugh in months—Ramsey refused his suggestion of a long stay at their house in Palm Springs. Being in a new city didn’t make a difference. She needed a whole new continent. One thing she most certainly did not need, Ramsey thought while sitting in the lobby of the Peabody three months after her return from Europe, was to be picked at by her very own brother.

  “Don’t you mean, ‘You’re such a merde’? I thought life out west would have cleaned up your language. What with the Hays Code and all.” Lance held up his empty glass and tapped it with his signet ring until a nearby waiter got the message. “But tell me something. It’s a question been on my mind lately. Was your Creole in France tastier than our Creole cuisine back here at home?”

  At those words, casual but venomous, Ramsey exhaled a stream of smoke over the cocktail table, clouding an untouched bowl of black olives. How did he know? In 1937, during her first few months abroad, Ramsey had met the star of the Folies-Bergère, Miss Josephine Baker, who at the time was often called the Creole Goddess. The two of them began what Parisian sophisticates labeled a friendship. Every moment of those years she spent with Josephine, their elbows in a daisy chain as they walked home in the early morning, their hangovers on the mend as they drank coffee in the late afternoon, helped Ramsey forget her reasons for being in a new country. Soon enough she no longer felt as though her insides had been shucked.

  In Tennessee at a quarter after eleven, thousands of miles away from France, Ramsey could still remember the smell of Jo on her fingertips. She looked at her brother, sussing out his question, the implications of it. If he was privy to her secret, then who else might know? Ever since Ramsey’s return a few months back, Arthur had not once visited her at their pied-à-terre in New York, making her acclimation to the States a solitary one. His secretary called each week to say, between snaps of chewing gum, that he regretfully could not make the trip. “Trouble with the dailies.” Ramsey knew enough about her husband to understand the power structure at Vantage. He considered dailies beneath him.

  With a congenial tone Ramsey said, “The cuisine was excellent over there. Bit too refined for your taste,” thinking that ought to shut Lance up.

  It did. Lance sat in silence, seething at his sister. He despised being even fractionally outwitted by her. Over the years, from their childhood in Batesville running barefoot through cotton fields to their young adulthood in New York appearing as blind items on the society page, Lance had been jealous of Ramsey. She had always been the more attractive of them. He just knew it. The lovely Miss Forster performing a perfect St. James Bow at her cotillion. The stunning Mrs. Landau entertaining guests in her Beverly Hills manor. Often Lance thought of himself as the Forster runt. That his whole family was known for its looks did not help. Monty was the kind of handsome that people had taken to calling all-American. Their mother, Annabelle, possessed a nearly flawless beauty guaranteed by the expensive diet and limited sun exposure of an aristocratic lineage dating back to the Louisiana Purchase. Their father, Houghton, gave off the accurate impression of someone whose rugged exterior had been buffed by hard-won professional success in the way so often described by Horatio Alger. From the moment of his conception, Lance figured, he was destined for relative inferiority. Even Haddy the half-wit, his older brother, had a lantern jaw, broad shoulders, a cleft chin, and incongruently bright green eyes.

  Despite Lance’s self-doubt, which morphed his nose, ears, and mouth into grotesques, such disfigurement was visible only to himself, as though a smudge of sleep constantly blurred his vision. Photographs from throughout his life reveal him to be just as attractive if not more so than the rest of his family. Nonetheless he compensated for his supposed ugliness by flaunting his intelligence. Ramsey’s zygote may have gotten all the beauty, but Lance would be damned if his hadn’t gotten the brains. He considered the point of life not to be clever but for other people to know he was. That bel
ief influenced most of his interactions with other people, including a cigarette girl in the hotel lobby, whom he flagged over to regain, subconsciously, the advantage he had lost to his sister.

  “Good evening to you,” the girl said. “Filtered or unfiltered?”

  Lance chose the former. On taking payment the cigarette girl offered him a light. “Thank you, sweetness,” he said, pocketing the pack, “but I don’t smoke.”

  “Then why’d you buy them?”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you later.”

  Because of the natural arch to Lance’s eyebrows, a trait he shared with his sister, people often wondered if his comments were intended to be wry. The answer was almost always yes. With a slight curl etched into the corner of her mouth, the cigarette girl, turning to walk away, showed absolutely no confusion at his tone.

  Lance admired how her shoulder blades flexed from the cigarette tray’s weight as she walked through the crowd. He rested the ankle of one leg on the thigh of the other, finding a perch for his wrist on top of the raised knee. His new watch, a Rolex Oyster with Feuille hands, caught the light. To his sister Lance said, “How does she look to you?” He nodded in the direction of the girl.

  “Expensive.”

  He turned to Ramsey. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Lance’s cheeks bloomed red.

  “Your timepiece. Looks like it cost a lot. What’d you think I was talking about?”

  The last few swallows of Lance’s bourbon went down in one. His sister knew damn well what he had thought she was talking about. He could see it in her face. Ramsey had expressed that same lack of affect, judgmental by not evincing judgment, the night in New York when she’d spotted him leaving a sporting house on Christopher Street. It was the first time he’d paid for it. Lance would have sworn that to her if only she did not immediately get into a taxicab. Just one time, God’s honest! Ever since that night almost five years ago Lance and Ramsey had barely spoken to each other. He had to find out from their parents that she’d gotten engaged. He had to find out from her husband that she’d left the country.