Oedipus Revisited

Barrie Rousseault was seventeen when he looked upon his mother’s nakedness. That was the tragic climax of a drama which began with a love affair between the boy’s father, Doctor Claude Rousseault and Jessica Witherspoon, the beautiful daughter of the prominent Baptist minister, the Reverend Thomas Witherspoon. It began and ended in the little town of Ocmulgee.

Ocmulgee is not a very little town by Southern standards. The population is close to two hundred thousand, counting the suburbs where many of Ocmulgee’s finest live, away from the industrial and commercial areas. The town is surrounded by a productive farming region comprising four counties, none of them able to boast a town to challenge the cultural, educational and medical facilities of Ocmulgee. Proud boosters of Ocmulgee had been heard to say "If you can’t find it in our little town, just drive up the road a hundred miles to Atlanta."

Nobody in Ocmulgee, with the possible exception of Chaplain McAlistair, ever expected that what happened in the Rousseault home could happen in Ocmulgee. The town had faced up to the racial issue, tardily, and even had one black woman on the city council. There was no reason why a prosperous Jewish family should run into difficulties. Doctor Rousseault was invited to join the Idlewild Country Club, although God knows he had little time for golf. "And little time for his son Barrie" the chaplain might have said, if he had wanted to lay the blame for what happened at the doctor’s feet. But Chaplain McAlistair was too caught up in the tragedy to lay blame.

Actually, there was not a great deal of speculation about young Barrie, for professional men do not concern themselves much with the future of boys growing up, except their own, and it must be said that Doctor Rousseault was concerned from the very beginning, although his concern did not take the form of whether the boy would become a medical doctor. There were other, greater concerns which, if Doctor Rousseault had mentioned to his medical associates on the staff at Baptist Memorial Hospital, might have caused them to be more concerned for the doctor’s future than for the boy’s.

There was the usual speculation about a Jewish/Gentile marriage. To be more specific, a marriage of the only son of a wealthy Jewish family and the only daughter of a prominent Baptist leader, but nobody expected that marriage to produce a boy who would reawaken the fears of the most ancient of myths right in the medical community of Ocmulgee. And at the very end, the most common expression about what did happen was "Who would have expected anything like this to happen right here in Ocmulgee Georgia?!"