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Bloody history
>>John Bentley Mays remembers the South,fears for Quebec by JULIET WATERS I'm afraid to ask John Bentley Mays if he was thinking about Quebec when he wrote Power in the Blood. A few years ago I interviewed his wife, Margaret Cannon, about her book on racism in Canada and somehow we meandered into constitutional territory. Like her husband, Canon was born and raised in the deep south of the U.S. She moved to Toronto in the '60s. She's a charming, judicious and passionate moderate on any topic you want to bring up--except Quebec.
But I know I'm going to have to bring up Quebec eventually. Power in the Blood is Mays's personal exploration of the 250-year history of his family in the Deep South. He never mentions Quebec but I'm sure this book is haunted by the ghosts of comparison. Eventually I feel ready to risk negotiating my own ambivalence with the book. So I grip my chair and ask the dreaded Quebec question. "Let me tell you a story," replies Mays. "Once upon a time there was a region in a large country and it decided that it wasn't really part of that country, it was more of a distinct society. So it got into constitutional negotiations. After many years of talking back and forth and back and forth, it became very clear that it was not going to get that constitutional guarantee. So that particular society decided that the only thing to do was secede. It did so and signed a resolution to form a friendly relationship with that other country. Except that about six months later one young man fired a bullet. And that's all it took. Four years later 500,000 people were dead. After I wrote the chapters on the Civil War, I came to two conclusions. The first is that the situation in Canada is dangerously close to the situation in the antebellum South. The second is that Canadians are incredibly self-righteous if they don't think that the same thing can happen here." This is where I discover that there are moments in your life when you want to confront the difficult questions about your history and there are moments in your life where you're just as happy to offer silent prayers of thanks to that ancestor who invented the question: "Café ou dessert?" Power in the Blood, Viking, hc, $32, 286 pp
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Mays is best known for his brilliant bestseller about his struggles with depression, In the Jaws of the Black Dog. In person Mays turns out to be as physically intimidating as he is intellectually. He tells me that a few years ago he wrote a full libretto for an opera, and I've heard that every Sunday he gets on his motorcycle and acts as a roving minister for rural Christian communities.