Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

So Jason went—and made it a point not to find a nurse until he located Annie Rowe, seeing to a couple of new mothers in the maternity ward on the first floor. They made an appointment to meet in the operating theatre an hour later.

Now, Nurse Rowe listened hungrily as Jason told the story of Andrew’s escape. He told her everything, except how he found out that Andrew might be in trouble. “That’s a promise I made,” said Jason, “and I keep my word.”

“I won’t make you break your word,” she said, and cut a square of gauze. “I just pray he’s safe.”

“Safer than here,” said Jason. “Everybody keeps talking about this place as Utopia. I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t like it here?”

Jason laughed. “Oh it’s fine,” he said.

He’d spent the previous day out of the hospital, wandering the town while Aunt Germaine did her eugenics work. He could see how someone had set down a plan for it. The workers all lived in fine little houses in three roads, not one bigger than another, with space in back for a garden and some livestock. The roads were muddy, but they were wide—wide enough for little gardens in the middle. What he’d first thought was a church was a town hall, with space inside for big meetings and that motto—Compassion. Community. Hygiene.—repeated again and again where the walls met the ceilings.

The fellow who seemed to run the place told Jason they ran lessons for the young people two days out of the week from there. When the children of Eliada got a little bit older there’d be a proper school for them. In the meantime: would Jason like to stop by and learn some things?

Jason got out of there as fast as he could. He spent a little more time inside the sawmill. He would have stayed longer, watching the men run logs across the great whirling saw-blades, thinking how this was a kind of family he could join, something he could be. But a foreman spotted him and ushered him out into the road and Jason put thoughts of being a lumberman aside for another day.

In the end, he had wandered the town like he had wandered the train from Butte—hoping to catch a glimpse of pretty Ruth Harper, and finding other things instead.

“It’s a fine town,” said Jason. “Yet look what happened.”

Nurse Rowe gave a wry smile. “There’s no such a thing as Utopia, really. Not on earth. And for a Negro, that’s doubly true.”

“If that’s right,” said Jason, “I have to wonder why he’d come here. Why you’d come here, come to think of it. Seems like a long way to go to live a life as hard as you’d find anywhere else.”

“Wise boy,” said Annie.

Jason shrugged, and she laughed.

“Just because this place isn’t Utopia now, doesn’t mean it can’t be,” said Nurse Rowe. “There are ideals at work.”

Jason looked at Nurse Rowe sidelong. “Ideals. Like eugenical ideals?”

“Eugenical? Did you make that word up?”

“Maybe I did,” said Jason. “Eugenics is how I heard it. You know about eugenics.”

“I do. Mr. Harper speaks of it sometimes, as one of the pillars of Community. It’s all tied up with Hygiene.” She pointed to the door they’d come in. There were those words again, hung over the frame: Community. Compassion. And Hygiene.

“Mr. Harper?” Jason held out his hand so Nurse Rowe could wrap bandage over the gauze. “Haven’t met him yet. I met his daughter. Not him. I suppose I will at that picnic on Sunday. You two talk a lot?”

The bandage wrapped quickly, and Nurse Rowe cut it with a pair of scissors. “Oh no,” she said. “But I listen to him speak. He’s an inspiring fellow, is Mr. Garrison Harper.” She sat back on her stool, smoothed down her skirts. “It weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

Jason flexed his fingers and looked at the bandage. This one was better than the one Dr. Waggoner had put on him. That first bandage had started to peel back almost immediately. Nurse Rowe knew her bandaging.

“My aunt says she got inspired by a fellow like that,” he said. “Dr. Davenport was his name. He was lecturing at nurse school.”

“Well Dr. Davenport never came to lecture at my ‘nurse school.’ I heard Mr. Harper speaking in Chicago, in… the summer of 1907, I believe.”

“Didn’t know he went around making speeches. Did he have a tent like a preacher?”

“He might have in some of the other places he visited,” said Nurse Rowe. “He could get worked up as any evangelist. This one was in a hall. At the old World’s Fair grounds. I was accompanying my father, who had thought he might like to invest some money in Mr. Harper’s project.”

“Your pa was a rich man?”