Words Worth Remembering: Tessie’s Fate and Ours
The morning was sunny and clear in a fictional New England village “with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day.” Flowers blossomed, and the grass was green. At ten o’clock, villagers gathered in the local square, participating in a horrid yet accepted annual tradition that, by noon, would be over in time for lunch.
As it was called, the lottery was considered part of the village’s “civic activities,” a critical vein in the biological workings of the body politic. The villagers each placed folded pieces of paper in a worn, black box. The head of each family was required to draw from the box, keep it folded, and return to the crowd, Mr. Summers, who led the tradition, instructed. The townsfolk “had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions.”
After all the family heads drew their slips, custom required that each open the folded pieces and whoever opened the marked slip was chosen—not for a reward but death by stoning. Bill Hutchinson, an upright local man, husband to Tessie, and father to three children, opened his slip—he was chosen.
But because he drew for his household, the lottery was narrowed down to all the family members; one had to be selected from the five in a second, final drawing. The children, fortunately, opened blank slips, as did Bill. Tessie, however, opened the marked slip. “All right, folks,” Mr. Summers said, “let’s finish this quickly.”
The rush of barbarism filled the townsfolk as Tessie ran for her life. A thrall chased after her with stones. “It isn’t fair,” Tessie sobbed, but no one cared. “Come on, come on, everyone,” Old Man Warner said, who had participated in the tradition seventy-seven times.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Tessie pleaded. Within moments, Shirley Jackson wrote, “they were upon her.” Once richly green grass now flowed with the blood of a wife and mother. It was nothing short of murder, committed in the name of tradition.
Some, to be sure, had earlier questioned whether the lottery should continue. “Pack of crazy fools,” Old Man Warner said. “There’s always been a lottery.” Although most townsfolk could not recall the origin or purpose of the stonings, they religiously observed it every year.
The English tradition comes from the Latin traditio, meaning “handing over” or “delivering.” Noah Webster defined it as “the delivery of opinions, doctrines, practices, rites and customs from… ancestors to posterity.” The townsfolk, it seems, had been told, as Paul had written the Thessalonians, to “stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.”
Shirley Jackson’s short story teaches us the dangers of blindly following tradition and that tradition is not always consistent with any basic sense of right and wrong; it is trusted and accepted mainly because it has been handed down over the ages.
Although fictional, Jackson’s story has played out countless times throughout history. In America, especially, the struggle to realize our country’s founding ideals has stalled on innumerable occasions because of the very resistance to change that tradition breeds.
“We like things the way they are,” the local Montgomery police force told the Reverend Robert Graetz, the only white minister in Alabama’s capital city to support the bus boycott in 1955-56. Those things were white supremacy and segregation.
The resistance to the civil rights movement was rooted in racism, but that racism was rooted in a tradition of ideas whose origins and validity of which even the most fervent champions could scarcely explain. It simply had become customary to resist freedom for others of darker skin, just as it was customary to defend slavery and the subjugation of freed people in the Civil War era.
While the present is marked, tragically, by a fixation on abandoning the past to the point where even the image of Abraham Lincoln is defaced, torn down, and placed in storage (an action more demonstrative of poor education than a righteous zeal for social justice), there is still wisdom in the move to want to root out and reject bad tradition. When Barack Obama called on Americans “to choose our better history” in his first inaugural address, he predicted, intentionally or not, that our worst history could rise again, even persist, in the name of tradition. And he was right.
In June 2015, Obama eulogized a Charleston minister murdered, along with several others, at a church Bible study by a white supremacist. Two years later, Charlottesville, Virginia, played host to the visible resurrection of support for various strands of ideology associated with the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, realizing all too well the prophecy of Jefferson Davis, who wrote at the Civil War’s end that “the principle for which we contended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.”
Tradition can be noble and needed, instructive and inspiring, but it can also be the repetition of the cruel, ignorant, and shameful.
We would be wise to ponder—and be vigilant of—the traditions that may one day physically or spiritually bring about our ruin. For we could suffer a fate like Tessie’s—slain by what we had once viewed as the innocent expression of is considered normal and right. It would be just as tragic if we found ourselves one day holding the stone.