Riding Shotgun

By Rita Mae Brown
Bantam, $22.95

ISBN 0-553-09605-2

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Interview by Ellen Kanner

The present has not been kind to Cig Blackwood. Her philandering husband is dead, the money is tight, her two teenagers are, well, teenagers, and her beloved sister turns out to be a traitor to make Benedict Arnold blush. Cig isn't going to cave in, though. How could she when her creator is the vibrant Rita Mae Brown? Instead, Cig, Master of the Foxhunt in her small Virginia town, leads a foxhunt only to find herself spiralling backward in time to 1699. If Brown's Riding Shotgun sounds frothy, the ideas lying beneath it are a shot of pure espresso, a wakeup call to a stagnating country.

The author of the explosive Rubyfruit Jungle has studied our nation's progress over the past 300 years, and she's not favorably impressed. If we could go back in time to our forebears the way Cig does, Brown thinks we'd find "we have nothing to teach them. They have everything to teach us. People had richer emotional relationships then, and there were fewer whiners. Our ancestors knew life could be capricious and cruel. Now people want fulfillment, they want answers, they want to know they're safe. You're never safe," she says, "and there are no answers."

Like Cig, Brown lives on a farm in Virginia and is Master of the Foxhunt for her town fox hunt club. Foxhunting, popular in Virginia a century ago, fizzled after World War I. Brown brought it back eight years ago, with a little help from her neighbors, farmers in their eighties and nineties who remember the hunt from the beginning of the century. Brown used their stories to recreate the hunt both in life and on the page in Riding Shotgun. Her favorite parts of the book are where Cig hurtles across the Virginia countryside in pursuit of a brazen fox named Fattail. "I've hunted for years," she says. "My mother hunted. It's a total passion."

Brown's other passion is history, which is one reason she loves Virginia. "This is a great place to live if you care about the beginnings of Africans and Europeans in the new world. When you think about it, it all started here. I would go back to what the first Virginian, John Smith, saidÑif you don't work, you don't eat. You give exception to the disabled and elderly, but I don't think anyone else in America has an excuse, and I don't want to hear it."

The author pauses and laughs. "All my friends say I was born to be queen of America. I'm sort of a put up or shut up soul, but I'm not without compassion. I just have no tolerance for whiners who say, 'You fix it, it's not my fault, make the government do it.' It's pretty funny in a sick way. I grew up on a farm. That shapes the way you look at the world. If I said, 'My mother doesn't love me, I don't think I'll cut hay today,' I'd starve, and eventually so would you."

Brown believes she would be more at home in the Virginia of three centuries ago than she is today. Cig certainly is, discovering many of the things she thought were important really aren't when compared to the genuine relationships forged back then. To most of us, family and friends is no more than the name of a long distance service. Cig returns to 1699 armed with a cell phone, but the gadget she thought she couldn't live without is useless in another age. The 1990s have given us technology, but Brown wonders what the point of all the computer wizardry is when we have nothing left to communicate. As she writes in Riding Shotgun, Brown and Cig "come from another time, a cacophony of facts and little truth, an orgy of comfort yet no peace, a glut of pleasure yet no joy."

About 150 years ago, another author got us to look and laugh at the way we live by juxtaposing it with the past. Brown, too, thought of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court when starting Riding Shotgun. "I was struck by the optimism of it. His vision is very different from my own." Not entirely. Both believe we must remember and learn from the past. It's only by knowing who she might have been in another time that Cig, wiser and surer of herself, can return to the present.

"I don't know what the old man would think," says Brown, referring to Twain, whom she considers the first indigenous American author. "Actually, I think he and I would have a great time together. I just love him. Twain said if you cross a man with a cat, you'll improve man but not do an awful lot for the cat."

Here, Brown and Twain are in total agreement. Although she probably wouldn't get along with him as well as she would with Twain, often Brown sounds like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preached self-reliance. Brown is asking a lot. She knows it. "I expect much more from people than I did when I was youngerÑusually it's the reverse. Every person you pass on the street has been given gifts. So shut up and use them," she urges.

She expects no less from herself. "I try to make each book I write more difficult than the one before it. My goals are technical, to write bigger stories with more character, more subplot. I've been given this chance, and I want to make the most of it. That doesn't mean you're going to like every book I write." Twenty-five years after writing Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown hasn't lost her edge, her desire to try, to risk, possibly to fail.

"We've lost that wonderful sense of adventure that our ancestors had. They had real courage, or else we wouldn't be here, considering what they faced. I think that's one of the reasons I foxhunt. If you're flying along at top speed, and a stone wall comes right up, it calls for a little bit of bravery to get you up and over. I need that kind of element of danger to keep me awake."

©1996, ProMotion, inc.

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