Nature, Nurture, And Identity–Felicia Cabot’s Troubled Journey From Appalachia To Park Avenue

Felicia Cabot (nee Loretta Fowler) was born to a poor, hungry family in a West Virginia holler until she was ‘found’.  A wealthy Washingtonian who summered in a cabin on the top of the mountain in the hollow of which Sandra was born and grew up saw her, bought her, adopted her, and gave her privilege, taste, and access to the best that his world had to offer.

His was an act of charity and compassion, but as the girl grew up, he developed an intimate attachment to her.  How could he ignore the fact that she had become one of the most beautiful girls of the Junior League, the most beautiful ever to have come out at the Chevy Chase Cotillion?  He would part with her with difficulty and regret once the time came for her marriage.

She knew little of her heritage.  It was not that her adoptive father wanted to keep anything from her; it was only that her adopted world was so far from the dark, wet, porches of her parentage that he saw no point.  Whenever they went to Bannockburn, the name that Arthur Cabot had given to their elaborate Falling Water-style natural ‘cabin’ retreat in the mountains, he never mentioned that she had been born not twenty miles away, down in Ridder’s Hollow, and that her parents were quite happy to give up their tenth child for ‘adoption’, a sale for $10,000 to the Cabots.

It was not exactly regulation, this transfer, but suitable and acceptable to both parties.  The Fowlers, Loretta’s biological parents, had reached their tolerable end – photos of them resembled the worst Depression portraits of barefoot and poor Okies and Hillbillies – and they were quite happy that Mr. Cabot had offered such a generous price and an unparalleled opportunity for their daughter.

Arthur was unsure how to break the news to her of her adoption, especially since their summer home was so near that of her parents.  “It’s so gloomy down here”, Felicia once said as they walked the trails of Dolly Sods Wilderness, a wet, dark, morose place visited by few. 

 “Let’s leave”, she said, and leave they did for the highlands of their summer cabin overlooking the Wilderness and the hollers to the west.  As she and her Cabot family wound their way up and down the hills, valleys, and hollows of West Virginia to get to their mountaintop retreat and as she looked out at the loose-boarded cabins, falling-down porches, old chassis and refrigerators, chickens, and overalls, she asked her father, “Why?”

“They have no other place to go”, he said, and feeling it was time to reveal his daughter’s past, told her everything.

Of course the young girl, grown to be dismissive of the poor shacks and lives of the hollers they passed through on their way to Bannockburn, was nonplussed.  “I am from here?”, she asked querulously.  “From here?” .

Nature-Nurture has been an item of intellectual interest since Darwin.  In this age of easy genetic testing and open DNA records, Nature has gained currency.  “What have I inherited from my real parents?”,  Felicia/Loretta wondered; and what have I acquired from my adoptive ones?

She obsessively read volumes of West Virginia history, Depression era economics, and Robber Baron era laissez-faire capitalism.  She was the biological heir of the holler and the adoptive heir to privilege and prosperity but as she moved up in society, through cotillions, teas, and charity events; as she summered on the Vineyard and skied at Gstaad, she felt a grainy dissatisfaction, a feeling of personal incoherence.  This all might have been part of the zeitgeist – an era of revelation and identity, DNA, parentage, and family history – one which, in its determination to unearth the truth valued it a priori but she couldn’t be sure.

A recent Harvard professor set out to determine the genetic origins of well-known black athletes and entertainers, and in a televised series recorded their reactions to his findings.  While most were pleased to learn of their Ibo, Wolof, or Lingala heritage, most were not at all happy to learn how much white blood they had.  

Not only had one Simon Legree taken advantage of their slave forbears, but many had over many generations.  In fact in the case of one movie star, despite his dark skin, he should have called himself white.  

The point was that race trumped all; and that the generations of blacks, whites, and Indians who contributed talent, character, physical and mental ability to the double helix of their descendants meant little.  The environment in which they prospered, that particular configuration of political freedom, economic opportunity, and market forces - Nurture- was valued even less.  Men who considered themselves black and had identified with black culture, image, and victimhood now had to face the reality that they weren’t so black after all, that the white man whom they had vilified may have given them many of his European genes, the genes of high culture and empire.  

Rather than take their genetic potpourri as a given – a randomly assembled but essential part of their nature and one which should have put race, racial identity, and racial politics aside – they ignored it.  They had chosen the facile and unfortunate monicker of racial simplicity.

The professor’s findings should have been an important step in the promotion of racial understanding; but it did just the opposite.  His subjects cherry-picked.  They chose the few drops of Ibo royalty over the many of English cavaliers.  They were black and proud, and nothing would change that.

Felicia needed no DNA testing to identify her origins.  She  knew she was holler born and could not rid herself of the depressing images of her West Virginia lineage.  As much as she had become the child of her adoptive parents – wealthy, progressive, tolerant, and charitable – she could not help thinking that the bitter vengefulness, spite, and murderous feuds of the hollers and mountains were what defined her.  

At every sign of her own callousness, intemperance, or thoughtless criticism, she felt Fallow blood not Cabot.  She was like the black men in Professor Charmain’s cohort group who made what they wanted of the results, not what the results themselves indicated.  

Because of the historical prejudice leveled at hillbillies, crackers, and mountain men, she focused on them and the worst aspects of a marginalized, inbred, and isolated clan.  She was neither interested in their Scots Irish origins, their European and Roman ancient past, nor the influences of her adoptive parents.  She was holler by nature.

As a result she came to resent her Cabot parents – her illegitimate parents she believed – and rebelled against everything they stood for.  She dressed down, ate poorly, affected an Appalachian accent, and became a caricature of her biological parents.  

The Fowlers, who insisted by contract and law that they should remain anonymous and never discovered by their daughter – were nothing of the kind.  While they were poor, destitute, and hopeless, they were strong, spiritual, correct, and good.  Ignorance, lack of education, and social contact were not their choice, but their fate.  Barton Fowler was a highly intelligent man whose intelligence – his nature – was a poor match for the overwhelming circumstance of his environment, nurture.  

He was certainly more intelligent than Arthur Cabot.  He was perhaps not a Ramanujan, the Tamil genius who solved historically complex mathematical problems on instinct and insight alone; but scraps of his brilliant mathematical abstractions were found in a moldy box in the tool shed.  Felicia could not have known this, but susceptible to the pernicious identity politics of the time, she never even supposed it could be true.  And rather than be proud of her biological inheritance – as identity politics required of her – she was dismissive, petulant, and scornful of it.

She had indeed inherited her father’s intelligence and her mother’s steadfastness and spiritual courage, and like it or not had become a sophisticated women of culture and breeding thanks to the Cabots.  It took her years to sort all of this out, to accept herself for what and who she was regardless of origin or influence, to be neither poor white nor wealthy, Park Avenue sophisticate. 

She was often ragged and disconsolate because answers did not come easily.  The holler was hard to ignore and the solicitous, loving involvement of her adoptive parents was comforting. Unfortunately Felicia was coming of age during the corrosive identity politics of the time and it was hard for a young person to ignore its dismissiveness of personal integrity and worth and contrary insistence on racial and ethnic markers.

Happily, nature and nurture both engaged at the right time.  Her intelligence, native confidence, and rationality – wherever these traits came from – saw her through.  She prospered and lived well.  She summered on Nantucket, skied in Aspen, shied away from the Cabot family retreat in the mountains, but was not shy about visiting; and all in all was her own woman.  A success story by any definition.

COVID And Unexpected Consequences–From Online Sex To Bad Home Cooking, Everything Has Changed

Most Americans remember the early days of COVID when shelves were empty.  Stores looked like they had been looted.   Empty, ripped boxes littered the aisles, only a few tired cabbages remained in the produce department; spotted, brown, and small bananas remained on the hooks; sugar, flour, rice, and baking powder were gone; and so were canned tomatoes, peas, beans, fish, and meat.  

Amazon was deluged with orders and shipped only in bulk – 100 gross rolls of toilet paper, light bulbs, disinfectants, and hand soap. 

After the panic subsided, and people began to adjust to stay-at-home orders and mandatory quarantine, the economy began to adjust.  The reason for toilet paper shortages was because there were two separate production streams – one for commercial establishments and the other for home consumption.  It took time for the commercial producers of lower quality toilet tissue to retool for the softer home bathroom market.

Similarly, the supply chains for Italian canned tomatoes and pasta had to be streamlined and production and delivery accelerated to accommodate more cooking at home.  Suppliers of standard spices like basil and oregano could not keep up with the demand, and although stores looked to Southern Hemisphere producers to fill the gap, they were unable to do so; and it was months before these spices were once again available.  

The entire gasoline chain had to be reconfigured.  People were now working at home and using their cars less, so the price of gasoline plummeted, which meant shutting down oil rigs in the Gulf, closing refineries, and cancelling contracts with pipeline managers, trains, and truck companies.  Travel to work, for vacation, and to see relatives was down; so fewer new cars were sold, hotels shut down or closed off entire wings, airlines eliminated non-stop flights; and Amtrak, always flirting with bankruptcy was near demise.

Many businesses suffered and went under, and even medical services saw a dramatic decrease in appointments – a good thing in many ways because the pandemic cleared out the ‘frivolous’ appointments and made way for only the more serious.  Online chats with health providers became routine, until the demand rose to such a degree that Medicare considered withdrawing payment. The frivolous complaints had simply transferred from doctors’ offices to the computer.

Professional services – consulting firms, architectural design companies, law offices, and physical therapy among others – went entirely virtual; and providers and consumers both realized that a personal visit was really not necessary since the advances in information technology, imaging, and recognition software made them almost obsolete.

The price of lumber skyrocketed and supplies were scarce as high-earning residents in well-off neighborhoods who still had their remunerative jobs, decided that this was the time to expand, renovate, and refinish.  Caterpillar saw its best and most profitable year ever.  Architects, builders, and developers had a halcyon year.  Home prices in center cities tapered off while those in the suburbs and exurbs skyrocketed, and the supply of availability large single family dwellings in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington dwindled to almost nothing.  If people had to work from home and were restricted in their ability to eat out and socialize publicly, then a move to the country made sense.

In other words, COVID was not only responsible for an economic downturn, but a reconfiguration of the economy; and once restructured, would never return to ‘normal’.  Businesses quickly realized that brick and mortar was totally irrelevant when high-tech, innovative platforms for group work were available.  

Restaurants realized that take-out, home-delivery items were just as attractive as dining out.  People, now accustomed to either home-preparation or take out, and more and more used to congenial patio or open-door in-home dining would not return in the droves that restaurateurs hoped. 

Of course, many people would still want to belly up to the bar, eat oysters at the counter, and enjoy the attention of sommeliers and maître d’s at high-end restaurants; but most people came to realize that they were spending a lot for very little.  

Let’s face it, once you took the ‘getting out of the house’ from the restaurant equation, the quality of the food never made up for the high prices. Better order take out and invite friends and neighbors for a no-sweat, easy-to-clean-up, tasty meal, than struggle with parking, long waits for service, and a big tab.

Many families realized that they could actually cook a creative meal at home – a gourmet meal in fact, for earlier hard-to-find ingredients were now available online from Amazon and delivered in a day.  YouTube offered detailed, user-friendly tutorials on how to prepare Italian, Chinese, Thai, and French dishes; and pots and pans never used were brought into service.

The result of this transformation was bad food.  As every seasoned chef knows, no matter how explicit the recipe, execution is everything.  Food sites on the Internet proliferated with ideas and suggestions for innovative or renewed traditional dishes, but most came out soggy, over- or under-spiced, wilted, colorless, and no better than a can-of-this-can-of-that American home cooking.  

A panoply of ingredients might now be available, but the ability to put them together could never keep up.  It was like in the first days of food processors when women bought them to save time and to facilitate the preparation of new recipes; but little did they know that the medium is the message.  Old methods meant old foods, and new methods meant learning the calculus of the new cuisine.  Thousands of food processors went unused. New Northern Italian dishes – light, innovative, creative in combination, texture, and taste – were after a few tries, smothered in the usual garlic, olive oil, and breading of Southern Italian American cooking.

A little-known and obviously little-publicized consequence of COVID – at least in its early days – was online sex.  Young men and women, forced into celibate lockdown, had recourse only to virtual reality which, given the ineluctable laws of supply and demand and the rapid advances of virtual personalized technology, became almost as appealing as ‘the real thing’.

If you wanted to have sex with Marilyn Monroe, Scarlett Johansson, or any other Hollywood diva, you could subscribe to programs which would make it real. Virtual reality today is but one step away from complete computer-mind interface where there is no difference between the virtual and the real; but for the time being it is as real as you can get.  Self-pleasuring in the age of COVID came out of the closet, and established itself as a legitimate response to a changing sexual world.

Not only that, but COVID, virtual reality, and the gender spectrum coincided perfectly.  Now men and women could pick and choose from the almost limitless variety of sexual options.  Any sexual fantasy could be satisfied at no risk.  Deviancy would no longer be an operational term in a world where everything goes. 

Why wait, said the ad for virtual ‘alternative’ sex, when you can have the woman/man of your dreams now in a world indistinguishable from the one you know (and are bored with).  COVID had finally and once and for all brought ‘deviancy’ into the mainstream far quicker than any transgender or gender-neutral movement on campus.  Virtual reality had become so ‘real’ and so ‘lifelike’ that elfin dwarves, Moroccan prostitutes, Indian hijras, and Bulgarian bull dykes were within a click.  

Not only that, but sexual fantasy could be personalized – more frilly, more butch, taller, darker, more zaftig.  Any permutation of an original was possible.  Sexual fantasy is, after all, a driving force in sexual pleasure and always has been. While enamored love for a new partner starts in reality, it quickly is transformed into fantasy.  It is not your wife of twenty years beneath you but Alma from Palestine, the gorgeous woman of insatiable desire from Ramallah.  

Even for those in a physical relationship, the virtual, mediated one surprisingly opened new doors.  Both partners were willing to do things online they never would have done in the bedroom.

it 

It is possible that a year of lockdowns, shortages, boredom, and insularity will make the old America even more appealing; but the laws of inertia apply to markets and society as well as physics.  Once structural changes have been effected and once new algorithms have been put into place, it is hard to go back – especially if the changes make economic and personal sense.  

America was already on the verge of a virtual, online, cybernetic world before COVID, and the pandemic only facilitated its establishment and full integration into society.  Just as no one wants to go back to library cards, the stacks, dry, airless carrels, and books; and everyone now prefers the world’s knowledge at a click; few people want to return to a solid world.  Why is an imagined, fantasy, virtually mediated world any less real or satisfying as the ‘real’ one?

America is the great zero sum country.  A free market economy beholden only to the laws of supply and demand takes advantage of downturns and turns them into upturns, declines to increases, disaffection into preference.  Our economy and our society is best suited to survive and emerge positively changed from COVID.  Other countries may go back to the way it was – perfunctory sex and all it stands for – but not here.