May 5, 2009
Site Performance
Reenactment and Selected Readings from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing.”
I sent my professor a text message before the performance, scheduled for that afternoon, telling her that the sky would be beatiful by 3:30. It had been been raining regulary that week and earlier in the day there were dark clouds above and rain was calmly misting.
Once it was time, I had prepared my camp with a stump of cut Cedar for my seat and an assortment of blankets for whatever vistors arrived. When some did arrive, I greeted them eagerly and served them coffee from a blue enamel percolator that I had filled at “the coffee place,” how I referred to the Jittery Joe’s Roastery on East Broad Street in Athens Georgia, behind which was the location for my performance.
I told them a bit of my own history, saying that my name was Layet Johnson and that I was from Arkansas and that I was on my way to “the other ocean” (not the Pacific.) They asked where I had been and I told them, and they asked why I was headed towards the ocean and I told them that because the weather was hot and I’d bet the water would feel good on my feet.
Once everyone was settled and with their own cup of coffee, I began to introduce to them my intentions and to read some of a story that I found to be a very wise one. I told them that it was a story about two boys who had had horses stolen from their family and were traveling from New Mexico into Mexico to retrieve them. I told them that during the length of the story the boys had grown up fast and even got into some trouble. Once I had built up somewhat of a context for the specific portion of the story which I was most interested in, I began to read almost verbatim from the book while they lounged on the grass like elementary school students on a field trip.
I offered them hard boiled eggs and tortillas then, which I had prepared as sort of a simple feast for the plains, and as they ate I read to them about a veteran of the Mexican Revolution who, upon his capture at the city of Durango, had been blinded by an enemy commander named Wirtz, a German, who sucked both of the man’s eyes out when he refused to swear an oath to the new command.
In McCarthy’s version, the wife of the blind man is telling these events to Billy, the main character of the novel, and the character which my part is inspired. By reenacting a part based loosely on the image of Billy, a brave young man and a wanderer, I was not only passing along the blind man’s story, and in doing so commenting largely on notions of “sight,” or “vision,” I was also comparing my own audience to the Billy of the story, the hungry and dreary guerito who had just come off the plain from a gun battle in which his brother could have been mortally wounded.
By leaving out portions of the story and forcing my audience to question whether or not they in fact were experiencing the story firsthand rather than only hearing a second rendition, I was able to tread the line between reader, actor, and performing artist. In this way I was able to also fully face my own intentions which, in the beginning, were just to feed and read to my friends and to hopefully make them want to read themselves.
I finished my performance with a few lines including Billy calling for his dog as he set off on the road again the next morning. I sat on the Cedar stump, closed my book, and looked at my audience. With the story fresh in their mind, they could see what had happened, but they were not blind, and at that moment in the fair field of wild flowers and with a cool breeze their senses were as alive as McCarthy’s vision, for they had the taste of hard-boiled eggs still in their mouths and the smell of the woods and the sound of the rustling field and they touched the tall grass and the dirt.
