Re-reading The Lottery

The three assignments I remember most from high school English are the classic short stories by two famous authors you know—The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe and The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain—and a third one written in 1948 by 31-year-old Shirley Jackson, The Lottery.

I must have been 14 or 15 when I first read The Lottery, the story itself just four years younger than me and a major literary sensation originally published in The New Yorker.

I shivered at the last line describing the actions of the villagers—and then they were upon her—the author’s tone intentionally biblical, creating a foreboding sense that this was not only where we came from, but where we were, still.

Re-reading the story sixty years later, the same chill overcame me.

In my own town of Linden, young families began moving into Sunnyside in 1949, the huge tract transforming into suburbia, the template of the future. Bull-dozers leveled pastures and dairy farms established in Colonial times into uniform quarter-acre lots.

My mother sometimes gave me fifty cents to buy a dozen fresh eggs from the one small farm surviving between the new subdivisions, a responsibility that eight year old me took seriously. And in the early fall, the field of cornstalks grew right up to the street.

Walking home from school one afternoon, I could not believe what I saw—the barn, the white clapboard house, and all the beautiful shade trees near the house we’re gone. I brought the egg money home and cried when I gave it back to my mom. She said she was sorry about what happened and told me to keep the quarters for my coin bank.

A developer built a road with four houses on each side, displacing the heavy-set twelve-year-old boy and his hard-working mother trying to earn a living from the property. The boy seemed different from us, maybe because he lived on a farm instead of in a regular house, with a mangy black dog barking in the yard. I think his dad had died, and that made the boy even more different—not part of a “real family” anymore.

Butch and his mom must have moved to another town because I didn’t see him in school after that. I didn’t really know him but felt sad that he had to leave. Linden was home to me, but not anymore for him.

The houses in the new section of town, Sunnyside (an intentionally happy name to lure new buyers), were brand new, no history, no ghosts. The new homeowners aspired to fit into split-level social life. They threw parties with canapes and Chianti and regularly traded in their cars for next year’s redesigned models. The mothers played canasta and mahjong or did volunteer work for the new temple while the dads took the family car to the office or to manage the store. My own dad didn’t drive but took the #44 bus on Wood Avenue to the factory for his job as a machinist at Purolator Filters.

Families followed the path laid out by the design of the new community, with its one-family homes, one-car garages, fenced-in backyards, an occasional in-ground swimming pool. Growing prosperity defined them as the returning veterans from World War II and the Korean War started businesses or began their climb up the corporate ladder. Housing developments, schools, playgrounds, golf courses and shopping centers quickly appeared to accommodate their needs. Doctors and dentists built larger custom-designed homes with offices attached.

On the older side of town, across St. George’s Avenue and towards Route One, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins lived together in two-family houses or around the block from each other. In suburbia, the grownups played house on their own, always with an eye on what “everyone else” was doing.

Our town had no armies of rampaging citizens to keep the emerging social order in line. But people like Butch and his mom didn’t belong there. They were summarily exiled, not by rocks in a barbaric purification rite as in Shirley Jackson’s macabre allegory, but by the forces of social and economic change—and the promise of the good life that the incoming upwardly-mobile residents embraced.

Instead of shopping in the family-owned variety stores downtown or going to the farm stand, we went to the new Food Fair supermarket in Roselle to load all the groceries we needed into the shiny carts on wheels—milk, eggs, produce, lamb chops, Heinz ketchup, Breakstone’s sour cream, Rice Crispies—then on to W.T. Grant’s, the five-and-ten next door, for modern household goods and appliances.

That was more than enough to crush the neighborhood farm, and a way of life.

And the boy and his mother. Gone baby, gone.

[all photos courtesy of unsplash.com]