Tapper said, “He published a book when he was very young, still a teenager. And he famously opted not to include an author photo for that book. Why was that if the point was to create an assumption about his ethnicity?”
“Well, first,” said Ephraim, “it’s true that he was young when he wrote Against Youth, though as our research has established, not quite as young as he said he was. I think deflecting interest in his racial identity was a strategic decision to emphasize his ethnicity even as it made the point, publicly, that ethnicity was irrelevant. We were meant to see him as an intelligent person with a work ethic and a passionate belief in pure meritocracy. But we were also meant to be inspired by his story: a poor boy of color who grows up in a shack, in an underserved southern, rural community, who is orphaned as a teenager, who never goes to school, who self-educates, and who goes on to Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship and becomes a respected author and conservative figure and informal advisor to the president. All without accepting any form of what he considers unearned preferential treatment. That’s a brutal repudiation of identity politics.”
“But of course it wasn’t based on fact,” said Jake Tapper.
“No. None of it was fact.”
Eli Absalom Stone had indeed been born in West Virginia (not, as Harrison had once insisted to his brother Lewyn, western Virginia), but the only shack in his early life had been the one his father kept the lawnmowers and Weedwackers in. The family had not been wealthy, except, perhaps, by West Virginia standards; Eli’s father was a contractor working mainly in St. Albans, a suburb of Charleston, and his mother had been a homemaker. She’d died in 2006, while Eli was at Oxford, but he hadn’t seen her since the day he left home, years before that. Neither had he seen his father, who was alive and unwell and still in St. Albans, and who wouldn’t have recognized his son if the two of them passed on the street. Or his older sister, who might have, if—big if—she’d ever felt it necessary to look twice at a Black person.
Also, his name wasn’t Eli Absalom Stone.
His name was Rowan Lavery, and a perfect Scotch-Irish reflection of his genetic, philosophical, temperamental (and, incidentally, dermatological presentation) that was, too. Lavery had been educated in St. Albans public schools which were entirely inadequate to his needs, at least as far as he, himself, was concerned. He was too smart for his classmates, his childhood friends, his teachers, his parents, and his older sister (who was still in St. Albans, caring for their father), and much, much too smart for his pastor at the Lutheran church his family attended, who once told him that, with a great mind like his, he ought to consider becoming a high school teacher.
But he was not too smart for Oren Gregories.
The summer before his final year of high school, Lavery had driven to UVA and presented himself to Professor Gregories, a person whose book on cultural identity and cultural displacement he had very much admired. He went back a couple of times that fall. Then he stopped going home.
There had once been an actual person named Eli A. Stone: an African American boy whose very short life had begun and ended in Elkins, West Virginia, two years after Rowan Lavery’s own birth. The Absalom got added later: maybe a biblical allusion, maybe a nod to Faulkner. (Maybe it just sounded so good.) Eli, who was brilliant and also a good writer—two things that did not always go together—would spend that year at work on Against Youth, and yes it was every bit as eloquent and persuasive as Harrison Oppenheimer would discover in due course. But while the freshly minted Eli Absalom Stone was certainly capable of writing the book on his own, he did have a very involved mentor in Dr. Gregories, and a bit of assistance in finding a publisher. By the time the book came out, pointedly without an author photograph, he would also have been physically unrecognizable to anyone who’d known him before.
Ephraim had found Rowan Lavery’s high school history teacher, and his poor pastor at St. Alban’s Lutheran. He’d found a former editorial assistant at Eli’s publisher who recalled the arrival of the manuscript of Against Youth, and the discussions around it, and also the UVA professor who had sent it. He’d even tracked down the author of an old Facebook post proclaiming Stone a fraud and found a very irascible person in Deerfield, Virginia. Deerfield, Virginia, being not so highly populated—143 people had been living there in 1999—it was far from likely that a definitely not local young man living alone in a cabin off Guy Hollow Road would be either unnoticed or forgotten. And so he was not. The irascible person owned the only grocery store within twelve miles, and that year he had watched this definitely not local young man change color and change—as far as he was concerned—race. Being an informed libertarian, this man had read Against Youth when it was published that year, and in fact had recommended it to many friends, but the book had no photograph of the author, so he didn’t connect the name Eli Absalom Stone with the changing face of the definitely not local young man; that would have to wait for the rise of Fox News, and even then the libertarian—being a libertarian—believed it was none of his business. He said what he had to say on the Coalition of Libertarian Thinkers Facebook page and he went along his way, and that was it for the only known witness to the physiological transformation of the person formerly known as Rowan Lavery. Until Ephraim Western turned up in his email in-box.
Ephraim had also found every publicly available bit of information about the Hayek Institute of Monticello, Virginia, whose membership had long included the wunderkind Eli Absalom Stone along with his mentor, Professor Oren Gregories, and Roger Fount, who was one of those people the president liked to phone late at night. Among the other members, it took him no time at all to discover, was his own half brother, Harrison Oppenheimer.
On CNN and MSNBC, and in the remaining vessels of high-standard print journalism, people wanted to talk about why, but on Twitter and Facebook all anybody seemed to care about was how. The world had watched Michael Jackson’s skin tone lighten for years, but moving in the other direction seemed to defy understanding. Ephraim had no definitive answer of his own, but it hardly mattered; the topic was quickly handed off to dermatologists and pharmacologists who hashed it out on everyone’s behalf, and consensus began to center around Ammi majus, or bishop’s weed, a psoralen-containing annual plant (possibly in conjunction with ultraviolet light). Don Lemon fielded a panel of experts in facial comparison, and sat them before a split screen of Rowan Lavery’s high school graduation photo and a photo of Eli Absalom Stone at CPAC. Nobody dissented. And Alice Lavery, Rowan’s sister, came tearing out of West Virginia, screaming bloody murder on CNN. “I know who you are!” she said, pointing menacingly into the camera. “I see you.” She wanted a DNA test and she wanted her brother to come back to St. Albans, not just because she intended to beat him to a pulp, but because their father didn’t have much time left. (Seeing his only son in permanent blackface would not be conducive to his health, either.)
Fox, which for years had delighted in Eli’s quiet and incisive analysis, dealt with the revelations by reasserting the cultural significance of Against Youth and bemoaning the ways in which the Black community targeted its own role models.
“You have to hand it to this guy,” said Rachel Maddow to Ephraim Western on the eighth day of his media phalanx. (Ephraim was notably more relaxed on camera than he’d been when the story broke. He wore a Yale Daily News T-shirt and looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed.) “I mean, the commitment! To make a decision like that, that you’ll have to live with, your whole life.”
“I don’t disagree,” Ephraim told her. “I’m only a couple of years older than he was then, and I can’t see staking my whole life on a single decision right now. He must have felt it was worth it.”