Brad Land’s memoir, “Goat,” published in 2004 by Random House, is a coming-of-age tale made extraordinary not by the fact that it is a story of a young man growing up, but rather by the culture of violence in which growing occurs. Land’s first brush with this violence comes when he is kidnapped and savagely beaten during a college party in his hometown of Florence, South Carolina. A year later, still suffering the psychological trauma of the attack, Land follows his younger brother, Brett, to Clemson College, where Brett has already pledged the fraternity Kappa Sigma. Anxious to leave the incident in Florence behind, Land also pledges the fraternity, only to find himself struggling with the same cruelty and callous disregard he’d faced during the attack.
Land’s writing follows a rhythm that runs the gamut from pure poetry to stylized schizophrenia, many of his passages haunting for their willingness to tap into the rawness of the scenes he describes. Of the first attack and the two men responsible, to whom Land refers only as the smile and the breath, the author writes, “The smile bobs, looks as if he loves me and there is no sound, the locusts have stopped, the street lamps have quit humming. But there is this: my ears ringing, air trying to enter me and the breath behind me, lips wet against my ear, he’s saying this over and over: go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep.”
At the heart of “Goat” is a story of not one man, but two-Land and his brother-who must reconcile themselves to a culture in which violence and cruelty are inextricably bound to the myth of belonging. In that reconciliation comes a new appreciation of life and the strength of blood. As the story comes to a close, Land writes: “I squint my eyes hard and Brett’s looking at me looking at him and he knows it too he knows it won’t come to this. We will grow old and gnarled together…We’ve seen too much. We know how the world tears people open. But we hold the thought between us for a moment, let it live and breathe because it makes us like we were before, kids who knew the world could not exist without them.”
“Goat” is available at fine bookstores and libraries near you.