Nathan Dixon’s “Fat Cat” is a novel excerpt that will make you want to read the whole thing. In a place ringing with eeriness, an inmate reveals to a journalist a plot of Indigenous genocide by a corrupt businessman. The closeness of the speakers, the oddness of the interviewer’s fidgeting, and the calm, measured telling of the inmate’s story create a haunting atmosphere and compelling narrative.
The Suit and the Orange Man
The yowling began in the spring. Shrieking down from the mountains north of here during that blackberry winter.
The bare bulb in the wire cage overhead made a bright halo on the stainless steel table. The clock ticked in place on the wall. When the inmate leaned into the light, the tangled mass of his dark hair appeared as if on fire. His right eyelid flickered uncontrollably. Then stopped.
Blackberry winter? the interviewer asked. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a three-piece suit, a Rolex on his wrist.
A cold snap, the inmate answered. They lost the strawberry crop and figured the tourist season would be a bust. Strange times here—and everywhere else, I guess. Each winter warmer than the last. He waved his hands, and the chain that ran between his wrists slid back and forth through the chrome eyebolt screwed into the table.
Violent storms, he said. Drought and flood and famine—oh my!—yet the conservative conspiracy theorists remain conspicuously silent about the weather.
He turned his head sharply, as if he heard something behind him.
We fall in line with the TV anchors and the radiomen, he said, singing the nightly news tautologies. The so-called documentarians yammer on about the deep state—rigged elections, false moon landings, staged genocides, et cetera—but for some reason, they can’t fathom the idea of special interests fighting global warming to pad their pockets. He held his shackled hands in front of his face and rubbed his thumbs against his fingertips. Money, he said. This town was founded atop the bones of mineral extraction. Yet the townspeople can’t see the very real conspiracy operating before their eyes.
He banged his hands on the table. We’ve become reified! His smile was unsettling. His face was a mask. We’re cogs in the machine! he shouted.
The interviewer seemed frazzled by the inmate’s theatrics. He flinched and leaned back in his chair, raised his hands to protect himself, his wristwatch rattling expensively. He was an odd fit for a radical publication like Honey Wagon, his hair styled in an undercut, the sides buzzed very close.
I’m sorry, the inmate laughed. I haven’t talked to anyone in a while. He rubbed his eyes. The townsfolk were already on edge when the cold swept down, he continued. Old Money Baggs had gone missing on Easter morning. Ascended up and out of this world, the newscasters said, like Jesus Christ to heaven.
Again, his eyelid fluttered. Every local news channel in this state is owned by a national conglomerate, he said. Which Baggs himself owns. The mayor owns stock. You know how it goes.
The interviewer put the butt of his silver pen into his mouth and nodded solemnly.
When the millionaire went missing, the inmate continued, there was plenty of chatter among the more gullible townsfolk of murder. Their soap operas and reality TV shows give them plenty of models for gossip. But there was no motive. Nothing was stolen from his estate. Hell! They only knew he was gone because Baggs wanted them to know. He banged the table again. The media is in cahoots, he said. It’s clear as day, isn’t it?
Instead, there were rumors about black boys loping up and down the railroad tracks. The local newspaper did a story. Citizens saw dark figures in hoodies with no faces. Apparitions out for a wilding. The police invaded New Baggtown across tracks, beat people indiscriminately, held others without trials. The sons and daughters of the confederacy trotted out their lost cause rhetoric, gun sales increased, et cetera.
He took a deep breath. I had high hopes they would find his body. At least then we would know we were rid of him. I thought there might be something in his will about making a museum of his house. Or a school, or a library. Folks like him love to put their name on things. His grandfather—the old robber baron—preached the gospel of wealth toward the end of his life, and his father and uncle became famous in the roaring twenties for their philanthropy.
Again, the interviewer nodded.
There’s a botanical garden up there with tropical plants from every corner of the globe, a living ode to the long reach of empire. The inmate spread his hands as far apart as the chain would allow. A hilltop where the sun never sets. He smiled at his joke. The townsfolk told me it’s an ancient burial mound, so you can imagine their chin-wagging about Indian spirits.
The clock ticked on the wall. The inmate seemed to have lost his train of thought.
That rumor, he said, started with a grain of truth. But the townspeople have it all wrong. He smiled. The original structure up there was built by a Cherokee man named Swimmer. The house, not the hill, was constructed by Natives. Baggs’s grandfather added a façade in the 1830s after he took over Swimmer’s plantation, and old man Money moved the mansion up there in the 1980s after he closed the mountaintop removal mine.
The inmate seemed to watch the past unfold upon the stainless steel table. He’s added onto it every year since, he said. A real hodgepodge of utter decadence, a monument to the colossal wreck of so-called progress. He sighed. Millions of pounds of explosives were used to flatten the land beneath it. There’s environmental disaster all around us, you know. And there was never much coal to begin with. It would be funny if the consequences weren’t dire.
To fulfill the federal reclamation requirement, Baggs built the commuter town and the sprawling golf course, blanketed everything in Kentucky Bluegrass, and began defrauding the government of so-called social housing money.
The inmate closed his eyes. There’s no time, he said, for me to explain the history of this town. But that’s the real story you should be writing about. Not me. Not even the mantis.
Across the table, the interviewer tapped his silver pen against the stainless steel. We might have more time than you think, he said.
The inmate looked like he hadn’t slept in months. He moved in little jerks. There were bags under his eyes. He squinted, as if trying to remember what they’d been talking about.
When the yowling started, he said, the leaves of all the berry bushes were black and wrinkled from two weeks’ worth of frost. There had been ice and hail and something wrong with the water. The townspeople said it tasted of blood. Swarms of insects swept down and ate their lawns. Some folks still swear that frogs fell from the sky. But nothing could have prepared them for the sound that followed. No one had ever heard anything like it.
The interviewer hunched over the bright table, his pen between his teeth.
It came in the dead of night, the inmate said. Tumbling down from the pine woods, an unseen suffering assaulting their windows. He shook his head. I can’t describe it. It sounded like children crying. Like children being eaten alive.
What was it? the interviewer asked.
In those first days, the people said it was the black boy. The ghost of a slave, the grandchild of a lynched man. Whatever demonic power had stolen away old man Money was coming for them as well. They had lots of stories, you know? They were always complaining about being blamed for their ancestors’ sins. Always the victims of a changing culture. Reverse racism. They think they’re always being cancelled, and they love to explain—the inmate winked—how they don’t see, and have never seen, color. Even though their town is the most explicit manifestation I’ve ever seen of white flight and railroad redlining.
He raised his eyebrows. The media drummed up fear, and the town militiamen—dressed in fatigues—marched off in the mornings to investigate, their assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Of course, by now, they’re all old men. Which made their whooping and hollering at daybreak all the more absurd. They held their crotches and thumped their chests like boys when they set off. But they always returned empty-handed in the evenings, their faces drawn and pale.
That ain’t no black boy, they said, slipping their flak jackets from their shoulders. Ain’t no earthly thing at all.
I would see them down at the bars slamming back their boilermakers. The Elephant, the Hidebound, Rebel Red’s, the G.O.P. Among the clack of billiard balls and televised baseball games, they talked about a glow in the woods. A green light, they said, from between the trees. They felt they were being watched.
By whom? the interviewer asked, chewing on his pen.
The inmate kept his eyes down and winced at the sound of teeth on metal.
They didn’t know, he answered. They talked about ghosts and Indian spirits. About witches who held councils in the woods and gypsies who ate children on the railroad tracks. In the end, their wild projections only amounted to a fistful of stereotypes. In trotting out their bogeymen, they revealed their own boring prejudices.
Meanwhile, the yowling got louder and louder at night as the moon fattened toward summer. It didn’t seem to rise as high anymore. Just skated along the horizon, looking like the egg of some interstellar insect perched orange and horrible out there.
He looked at the concrete ceiling as if he might see the moon beyond it. Have you ever heard the sound that someone makes while being burned alive? he asked.
The interviewer shook his head. He had crushed the butt of his silver pen in his mouth, and there was ink all over his lips.
It’s hard to imagine the grief in that noise if you’ve never heard it, the inmate said. It sounded like that. Like something tearing apart. It made you feel like you were falling through space.
The interviewer coughed, and ink spilled from his mouth. But the inmate didn’t notice. He had closed his eyes. He was trying to remember.
One night in April, he said, it seemed to come from the streets themselves. It startled the townsfolk from sleep. They rolled back and forth in their sheets, afraid. Holding their ears, covering their eyes. The bravest among them slid silently from their beds and crept to their windows for a peek. But all they saw was the strange green light oozing over everything. Even those that hid beneath their covers reported a harlequin feeling, a green giddiness in their gut that grew night by night as the yowling swam chartreuse through the dark.
The moon cast weird citric shadows as it dipped down from the sky and drank from the alien light, and preachers came out to the streetcorners to prophesy the apocalypse.
Eventually, though, the inmate said, they learned to sleep through it. The townsfolk bought earplugs and eye masks and dropped dead tired to their beds in the evenings. The sound that had brought them to tears in the beginning became commonplace, and the greasy light—the muggy tornado air—made no difference inside the air-conditioned strip malls where they had come to make their homes.
He shook his head and took a deep breath. Which is itself another can of worms.
The interviewer nodded. Go on, he said.
A decade back, the inmate explained, throwing his thumb over his shoulder, after the foreclosures, they moved into the shells of the so-called Village Greens, and the ruins of the retail sector became their collective domicile.
The interviewer had chewed his pen to pieces. Blood and ink dripped onto the table.
Everything maroon and gray, the inmate said, like a dystopian storybook. The stone façades discolored where the letters of the shop names had been pried loose.
When the yowling started, they leaned from their windows, poked their heads from the entryways, but they never saw what was making the noise. Never discovered the source of the light. Something big, they said. It must be huge.
But summer was on the way, and soon the questions faded. The people pulled down their blinds to block out the luminescence. All the better to see the news anchors and radiomen, the televangelists on their flatscreen TVs.
The interviewer wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. From his three-piece suit to his horn-rimmed glasses, everything screamed of a merciless efficiency. A compulsive cleanliness. He spat metal splinters onto the floor, checked his Rolex, yawned a black-mouthed yawn.
Won’t some folks think, he asked, that your observations are a bit biased?
The inmate shrugged. Does that matter to Honey Wagon?
The interviewer shrugged, in turn. I think readers will want to know why you’re here. He tapped his finger on the table.
The red second hand ticked in place on the wall. Obviously, the inmate said, I’m here because I was arrested.
The interviewer smiled and nodded. We’ll get to that, he said, pulling another pen from his pocket. But I want to go back even further. I want to know who brought you to this town.
Who brought me? the inmate asked. I don’t know what you mean.
Was it an individual? the interviewer asked. An organization?
The inmate squinted at him. What are you? A fucking cop? His eyelid flickered again. He studied the man. No one brought me, he said. I came to research the town.
The interviewer’s smile looked forced. Everyone calls you an agitator, he said. Violent. Deranged. I know why you’re in here. He spread his arms to indicate the room in which they were sitting. I’ve seen the newsreel.
The inmate smiled and shook his head. Why am I in here, then? he asked.
You incited violence, the interviewer answered. Attempted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
No transfer, the inmate interrupted. No transfer. Everything is as it was. Who do you think produced that newsreel? I didn’t incite any violence. Trumped up charges invented by authorities, repeated by the media. If you work for Honey Wagon, you should know not to believe everything you hear.
Someone must have enticed you, the interviewer said.
I’m a student, the inmate answered. An ethnographer. An historian. I would say a documentarian, but I don’t know what it means anymore.
The interviewer shrugged.
After reading about this place’s past, the inmate continued, I was excited about further research. I applied for funding and got it. I didn’t know what I was stepping into. Obviously, I pissed someone off. He shook the chains between his wrists. I’m a political prisoner, he said. He looked the interviewer in the eye. I want you to get me out of here.
The interviewer nodded. That’s why I’ve come, he said. He tapped his pen against the table again. But for this story, I need to know who brought you. Why this town? Why you? Why here?
Historical (Con)Text
The inmate talked about studying anthropology as an undergraduate. The work, he said, forced him into other people’s shoes. He tried to lose his ego in his research but—as he began doing fieldwork—he became increasingly concerned with the discipline’s treatment of subjects as objects and went looking for better methodologies. He took graduate courses in psychology, sociology, history, media studies, folklore, literature. He talked about close reading and thick description. About being inspired by the Federal Writers’ Project and the FSA’s photographic documentation of rural poverty in the South. Of course, there were elements of paternalism, he said. But the researchers were really trying. He talked about social documentary and investigative poetry. About the socially constructed, media-saturated, celebrity-centered milieu in which American society languished. He described his work on myriad discourse communities that self-segregated along political lines. The trenches in which we find ourselves, he said, were dug a long time ago. As a famous man once said, the only political parties that matter anymore are those of data and no data. And though the talking heads on television seem to be playing the same spectator sport, only one side continues to deploy investigators. At least, for right now. Which, I suppose, is why you’re here talking to me.
The inmate smiled, showing off a missing incisor.
Yet the analysis of any social world, he continued, depends on an appreciation of the perspectives of the individuals who experience it. History is not the victory march of progress through a homogeneous and empty time. The micro stories under the macro umbrella matter. Monads of time standing still. An era blasted from the course of history, a life from an era, a moment from a life. That’s what I came here for. The voices of the data points. Do you understand what I’m saying?
The man in the suit looked bored. I just want to know who brought you here, he said.
The inmate shook his head. His eye began ticking again. It was Money Baggs in the beginning, he said. One of the richest men in the world. A media magnate, an energy giant, a kingmaker in the capitalist tradition. His industries and his influence span the globe. Yet he makes his home in the town of Freedom in Southern Appalachia. Why?
The interviewer shrugged.
It doesn’t strike you as odd? the inmate asked.
I don’t feign to understand the proclivities of the rich.
The inmate laughed. I’ve heard it said, he said, that a man is rich in proportion to the things which he can afford to let alone. He paused. What do you think about that?
The interviewer shrugged.
This town was a pet project of his, the inmate said. Aren’t you interested in that at all?
I guess, the interviewer answered.
The inmate took a deep breath. The Baggs family has owned this land for generations, he explained. Money’s grandfather—Lucre Baggs—was a robber baron who bought massive tracks of Cherokee land from Georgia Land Lottery winners in the 1830s and began mining coal and iron in the Southern Blue Ridge. In addition to his railroad and land investments, his massive extractive companies, and his banking and insurance schemes, he laid the foundations for the media company that his sons—and especially his grandson—would make famous. Old Lucre choked out the competition, maintained high prices, kept wages low, and jockeyed for massive government subsidies. He was shrewd and efficient, and the industries that he dominated were among the first beneficiaries of the so-called welfare state.
Of course, the inmate said, it’s been big businesses that have always benefitted from government subsidies. Not the people. You know that as a loyal Honey Wagoner. And also know how the American public holds up Baggs and his fellow robber barons as honorary founders of this nation. The men who made America into what it is today. Businessmen on the money frontier.
The interviewer nodded. His notebook was open, but instead of writing down what the inmate was saying, he was drawing abstract shapes in the margins.
His twin sons, the inmate continued, Lucre Jr. and Buck Sterling, were born at the height of the gilded age. Old Lucre was already ancient and died while they were still young. But when they came of age, they publicly embraced their father’s late-in-life devotion to the so-called gospel of wealth and became much-loved celebrities and patrons of the arts. The schools they funded trained the middlemen in the American system—the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians, et cetera. They helped to establish the so-called professional managerial class—the men and women that society pays to keep the system going. The ones, that is, who serve as loyal buffers against class trouble from below.
The inmate paused. Where did you go to school? he asked.
Harvard, the interviewer replied, glancing up from his notebook.
Goddamn, the inmate said. Is that where you learned to dress? He smiled. The interviewer looked down at his suit. Harvard, the inmate said. Then you must know something about the proclivities of the rich.
The interviewer shook his head.
I myself can’t claim an Ivy League pedigree, the inmate continued. But I can tell you that in the state schools that I’ve attended, obedience to authority has always been paramount. That’s the way it’s designed. If you want to get ahead, you must stay in line. The system defangs its radicals.
You consider yourself a radical? the interviewer asked.
I consider myself a prisoner, the inmate answered. They stared at one another.
Anyways—the inmate smiled—while Lucre Jr. and Buck Sterling’s newspapers and magazines ran stories about their personal playboy exploits, overseers ran their factories, managers directed their railroads, and agents sold their water, power, and real estate. They were absentee landlords in the most profound sense, insulated in their cosmopolitan lap of luxury from the rampant poverty, squalid living standards, disease, depression, and death that had always characterized life in the factory towns their father built.
The abstract shapes in the interviewer’s notebooks had become the heads of wild animals. Trophies without bodies. Mounted to the white wall of the page.
When one brother killed the other, the inmate continued, on the eve of the Great Depression, it was a Cain and Abel story for the ages. There were rumors about knowledge of the forthcoming crash. There were books and motion pictures, and Lucre III—whom everybody called Little Money—was just a baby when his father committed suicide the night before his sentencing. Money would famously claim after he came of age that the only reason the country ever fell into the Great Depression was the absence of a Bagg man at the helm. Yet the companies that he inherited after World War II had been protected in his youth by the National Recovery Act—which his custodians, in his father’s absence, had helped to write. What’s more, he profited wildly from the war effort itself. His corporations performed so well, in fact, that when he inherited them, he began working toward a continuing alliance between big business and the military for a permanent war economy. Thus, he and the heads of the other emerging multinational corporations aligned themselves with conservative war hawks and together manufactured the Cold War. He already owned a media outlet that could sell it to the nation. And he grew this business exponentially as his businesses flourished.
The inmate stared at the interviewer who didn’t seem to be paying attention.
While I could go on, he said, about Little Money’s rise to power during the Golden Age of American Capitalism, what concerns us is the town of Freedom. Am I right?
The interviewer looked up and nodded. Right, he said.
It was clear, the inmate continued, even before Lucre Sr. died at the turn of the century, that coal production in this region was lackluster at best. The old man had only managed to turn a profit because of advantages particular to himself and his time:
- his ability to purchase—or should we say steal—cheap land;
- his use of enslaved people, and later, state-leased convicts, as his labor supply; and
- his total control of the regional railroads.
As the inmate counted, the interviewer noticed the man’s long yellow fingernails. He had never thought about the lack of basic grooming that must attend a stint in jail.
Even with these advantages, however, the inmate continued, he eventually abandoned most of his local mining operations. They simply didn’t produce. But nobody explained this to Little Money. His devotion to his grandfather—whom he had heard stories about throughout his childhood—led him to see in the region an untapped potential. He embarked on a disastrous mining campaign through the 1960s in which he pioneered the method of so-called mountaintop removal.
The inmate made a motion with his hands as if he was slicing off a mountaintop. The chain between his wrists rasped through the eyebolt.
Although he wasn’t successful in turning a profit in the Blue Ridge, he put the technology to work in Central Appalachia—and later in China and Australia—and made his fortune back many times over. With enough money, it seems, any failure can be spun into success, and the local project—a failure by any measure and an environmental travesty—is now painted as a successful trial. An experiment that led to what he has always claimed is cheaper energy.
The interviewer was examining his own fingernails. He tried to rub the ink from his hands.
Now, however, we’re beginning to feel the real costs, the inmate said. Teetering as we are on the brink of environmental apocalypse. And while federal law eventually required mountaintop removal sites to be reclaimed after mining, a company is exempted from reforestation if it can show that a flattened mountain will generate a higher commercial value as something other than a forest.
The inmate paused. Are you following? he asked.
The interviewer nodded. I am. But I don’t understand how this relates—
I came here, the inmate interrupted, because this town furnishes a very specific example of a community consciously—and explicitly—self-segregating along the lines of our modern political parties. The 1970s boasted much higher unemployment rates than the 60s, and after Lucre Baggs III shuttered his mine, he was able to hire unskilled workers from the surrounding cities, bus them up to the flattened mountain, assign them specific skills, and thus create a sort of human assembly line to build 20,000 near-identical houses. He began advertising the town as a conservative haven—a commuter village—that would provide safety and security for baby-booming patriots who were nostalgic for their own suburban childhoods. These houses were bigger—and thus better, Baggs advertised—than those in the famous Levittown of New York. They were surrounded by the majesty of the Southern Blue Ridge to boot, and each home looked a little different than its neighbors because Baggs hired designers to manipulate each façade, adding protrusions, garages, and gables for style. These enormous houses were constructed with the cheapest material available to keep costs down and profits up. Thus, every man could be the king of his own unique castle, and the concept of the McMansion was born.
Even the strip mall shopping centers—which were called Village Greens, just like the ones in Levittown—resembled the houses in their design. Which was all thoroughly planned. You see, if the places where we buy things are as comfortable as our homes, then perhaps we will stay a little longer. Spend a little more. And although this design concept has since been employed across the country, it started right here in Freedom.
The inmate laughed. It worked so well, he said, that when they lost their homes, the townspeople came to live in the strip malls. But of course, that doesn’t matter anymore. The profiteers have since achieved their apotheosis online, the big box stores eclipsed by the cloud.
On the other side of the table, the trophy heads in the interviewer’s notebook had sprouted bodies. The interviewer sketched exotic human-animal hybrids—satyrs and centaurs, sphinxes and minotaurs, an enormous harpy with a naked man in her talons.
But it wasn’t just the architecture, the inmate continued, that marked the inception of the town as innovative. Baggs wanted to capitalize politically on the emerging quasi-cult of the far right which was by then calling itself the Moral Majority. His media outlets gave abundant airtime to the most militant wing of this movement, which was essentially advocating for a kind of late-stage McCarthyism. The only real Americans were conservative Christians, they argued, and they were falling victim to the cultural pluralism running rampant in America’s cities. The town of Freedom provided not only an answer for individuals seeking solace from what was painted by Baggs’s media outlets as a terrifying urban hellscape, but also a very tangible—and crucially, reproducible—method of gerrymandering voting districts.
The inmate leaned forward into the light.
This was not a great migration, he said, of puritans fleeing religious oppression or southern Blacks fleeing Jim Crow. The project employed the municipal practices of redlining, blockbusting, and gentrification on a regional scale and codified implicit biases into explicit rules that operated as de-facto laws. Nativist conservatives—mostly young white men, many of them Vietnam veterans without families—were recruited to move into the town of Freedom and vet all potential homebuyers. They were taught how to systematically skirt the regulations of the Fair Housing Act and how to strongarm buyers into signing loyalty oaths before they received their deeds.
For the most part, however, no strongarming was necessary. Their outright discrimination left no room for dissent when it came to certain—shall we say—values. And everyone who applied was already connected not only through the mass media Baggs produced, but through the pamphlets, newsletters, and phone banks of the many organizations he sponsored as part of his libertarian lobbying activities.
The interviewer had flipped the page of his notebook and was now drawing the head of a mythic hero, complete with a Corinthian helmet and curls of hair spilling from beneath it.
It was through these discourse communities, the inmate continued, that he advertised the town, so there was a degree of self-selection among everyone who wanted to live here. The town of Freedom was an experiment in consolidating a disparate group of self-identifying militant conservatives into a specific physical location. And it worked. At least for a little while.
The interviewer nodded as if he was listening. His hero was bedecked in leather armor and bulged with muscles.
Upon their arrival in town, the men quickly enlisted in the voluntary militia and marched through the streets on parade days to demonstrate their might. Of course, it’s paradoxical that they came together as a community at all. The deity overarching the founding of this town was always the almighty individual. Freedom à la objectivism, trickle down, laissez-faire, absolutely American from the get-go. The townspeople bought into this rhetoric wholesale despite the glaring paradox. Each militiaman believed himself a rags-to-riches good-ol’-boy, though of course they all had to have money to move up here in the first place. There were franchise operators and business managers, lawyers, brokers, realtors, accountants, publishers, and advertising men. Every one of them, a member of the professional managerial class. They arrived in droves from the city.
In the interviewer’s notebook, the hero held in one hand an enormous sword dripping with blood. In the other was Medusa’s head, the snakes of her hair still writhing and wrapped around the hero’s arm.
Perhaps the most important point, though, the inmate continued, before we get too far into it, is that people had lived here—people had called this place home—long before these new residents came flocking from the conservative corners of the country. In addition to the migrant workers who physically built the town, there were the miners who had blasted the mountain apart. Neither one of these groups were paid adequately for their work, and many of them couldn’t leave once the work was done. Before the miners, there were multiple Baggtowns in this vicinity, connected by various draw roads overlaying the old Native American trails that had been here for thousands of years. The Natives, we tend to forget, were of course the original inhabitants of this land—and all the other land on this continent.
The interviewer looked up from his notebook. So, the stories about the burial mounds are true? he asked.
The inmate stared at him with a confused look on his face. No, he said, shaking his head. Of course not. We’ve already covered this, haven’t we?
The interviewer shrugged. Maybe, he said. It’s hard to keep up. You were talking about New Baggtown.
The inmate shook his head again. No, he said. I was talking about the many Baggtowns in this region, which I originally thought was a colloquial term for the more common Hooverville. But the term predates the Great Depression by more than half a century.
Listen, he said, laying his hands flat on the table. Lucre Baggs Sr. established the Siqua Mining and Manufacture Company—a vast mining plantation—in the 1830s and expanded it after the Civil War into a holding company that controlled the stock of many other companies—most of them concentrated in the extractive industries, textiles, banking, and railroads. Any company town owned by Siqua was commonly known as a Baggtown. Each was based on a model that Lucre Sr. perfected at his textile mills in Massachusetts in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. These—and this is important—were reproducible, much like his grandson’s commuter town a century and a half later.
Before Lucre Sr. moved south to snatch up Native land, the biggest landholder in the area was a Cherokee man named Swimmer who operated a plantation and a ferry on the Equoni River. Swimmer’s land bordered—and was in some cases a part of—the vast Cherokee Territory that was systematically stolen and auctioned off illegally before the Natives were forcefully removed west. That particular leg of the country’s drawn-out Indigenous genocide started right here where we’re sitting.
The interviewer looked around at the walls of the cell. He sighed. It’s sad what happened to them, he said. His lips were black with ink.
Yes, the inmate answered, annoyed. It was sad. There were, however, plenty of Natives who avoided this forced migration by slipping away into the mountains. Some became the founders of the modern-day Eastern Band, while others created or joined maroon communities in the secret bogs of Appalachia. They made a new life alongside escaped slaves and poor whites, and there’s evidence, he said, that at least one of these maroon communities continues to exist. But that’s a story for another time.
The inmate seemed to be tracing letters on the table with his finger.
What are you doing? the interviewer asked.
Nothing, the inmate answered, squeezing his hands together as if to prevent them from moving.
The clock ticked in place on the wall.
Anyway, he said, many of the mountain people—white, black, Native—eventually went to work for Lucre Sr. as his industries came to dominate the region. Some of their descendants now live on the other side of the railroad tracks alongside the more recent miners and townbuilders in a neighborhood that everyone calls—as you pointed out—New Baggtown. Of course, old man Money built a few houses over there as well, which allowed him to bill Freedom as a type of enormous social housing project. He used the poor locals as a lever to garner government subsidies on behalf of the wealthier residents, arguing that he was creating an integrated social mix, teaching the poor how to be middle class by allowing them to live alongside people better off than them. The whole project, though, was subsidized through-and-through. The people with money received the same long-term benefits as those without money, and they were simultaneously able to bully the poorer tenants on the other side of the tracks. Lots of the New Baggtown residents didn’t have anywhere else to go. Some of them, as I said, had been here for generations. And others came as migrant workers. But they couldn’t leave. Desperate times and surplus labor forced many of them into horrendous living conditions. The ones who have hardly anything always have the most to lose.
The whole scheme was planned from the beginning, and although the sprawling suburbs of Freedom are now mostly empty and overgrown, folks still live across the tracks in New Baggtown.
The interviewer looked down at his drawing. His hero looked rather like the inmate, he thought. He wondered what that meant. The eyes in the almond-shaped sockets of the helmet stared out at him accusingly. He turned the page and started again, beginning this time with the hero’s underwear, in which he outlined an enormous bulge.
All the middleclass baby boomers, the inmate continued—the ones who had grown old during the nineties and the aughts—defaulted on their mortgages when the market crashed. Those that couldn’t move away were forced into the Village Green strip malls, which had long since been abandoned. It was an odd turn of events, but for Baggs, it became another reproducible model. The shopping complexes looked almost exactly like the suburban McMansions, so the move was relatively seamless. Baggs graciously offered to help the townsfolk move with fleets of his shipping trucks. He made a martyr of himself in the eyes of the people even though his banks—which invariably owned the mortgages on the people’s houses—were bailed out by the government and managed to turn a profit during the recession. He himself made another fortune in federal and state subsidies by selling the refurbished strip malls as another social housing project. All hail the welfare state.
Thus, the baby-booming oath takers, could still smoke their cigarettes under the gables of their strip-mall houses, still sit comfortably in their air conditioning and shout at their television screens, still stare blankly from their Palladian windows at the empty streets of a world that had changed so much that it managed—miraculously—to stay the same.
The inmate took a deep breath. Which is why, he said, there was such chaos when the mantis came dancing into town.
Wait. The interviewer held up his hand. This is a lot of information.
Like I said, the inmate answered, I’ve been researching this place for years.
The interviewer nodded. I understand, he said. And I think this would make an excellent dissertation. Or book. Or whatever you’re working on. But it’s too much for a magazine article. Even if what you’re saying is true.
If? the inmate asked.
The interviewer shrugged. Some of this feels a little farfetched.
The inmate smiled and nodded. I know it does, he said.
The gap where his incisor should have been made an enormous hole in his mouth. But the evidence is out there, he continued. You just have to know where it’s hiding.
The interviewer put a new pen into his mouth.
A chapel perched upon a hill, the inmate sang, almost to himself. White-walled and silver-tongued. He stared past the interviewer’s shoulder and shook his chains rhythmically against the table. Brought sinners thin on holy days. When—bright—the bells were rung. He looked very tired. His eyelid was twitching again.
Nathan Dixon is author of Radical Red (BOA Editions, 2025), which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize. His creative work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fence, Tin House, and elsewhere. His critical/academic work has appeared in MELUS Journal, South Atlantic Review, 3:AM Magazine, Book XI, and elsewhere. He lives in Durham, NC, with his family. He is assistant professor of American literature at North Carolina Central University.