Old Glory (55 page)

“ ‘Judge’ Otis Higgs.” He gave a humorless little laugh, a dry rattle in his throat.

“Well, why don’t you vote for
him?
”

“
Higgs?
Me vote for Higgs? You got to be joking. He’s a nigger.”

The stones of the wide, sloping wharf were cracked and soapy with age. I climbed up them into Memphis, and saw immediately what the man
had meant by the loneliness of the place. No one could expect to come across a friend here. The freight yards around the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad had been given over to parking lots, empty now even of cars. On Front Street, the cotton warehouses had bats and pigeons as their current proprietors. The painted names of their previous owners had been bleached out beyond recognition; but because it was repeated on every warehouse, the word
COTTON
itself could just be pieced together still. The C’s and O’s and T’s and N’s had survived in ones and twos. Reading along the line, you could make a long sad noise, like an owl’s call or the whistle of a train:
NOONTCCTNTCOOON
.

A few of the warehouses had been pulled like bad teeth from the row. The quality of the dentistry was rough: it had left an injured gum of muddy holes and broken bricks. The reach and height of this general dereliction were so great that it took a little time to notice the few patches of light and life: the fake gas lamp, the rustic timber shingle on its new chains, the sound of someone coaxing an old tune out of an electronic Moog Synthesizer. The bar/restaurants, dotting the ruined waterfront, were working hard to restore a touch of forced glitter to the old man’s abandoned city.

They had taken on a job that was out of all proportion to their powers. They were quarried out of the bottom stories of Victorian monsters, and their picture windows and pine boarding gave the impression that people had been storing little ranch-style bungalows in the warehouses for safekeeping. When their electric gas mantles were switched on, they lit up the ferns and grasses that were growing out of the brick and through the floors all round them. The effect was to make one feel anxious about the moral welfare of the bungalows: what on earth were pretty, inexperienced things like these doing in a place like this? I wanted to escort them to somewhere safer, like the lockers at the Greyhound bus terminal.

One could see exactly how the waterfront should have been. There was the sweep of the open river, then steamboats at the landing, then the wharf, the rail yards, the cotton bales and, finally, as raw and steep as the Chickasaw bluffs, the warehouses; all in scale with each other, on a very grand scale indeed. The trouble with the bar/restaurants was that by these measurements they were toys. Even the biggest and bravest of them, One Beale Street, couldn’t reach nearly high or far enough. It couldn’t extend its sphere of influence even to the railroad tracks, when what it needed was to be able to square up to the river. Sitting in its bar waiting for a cab, I felt dwarfed. It was Happy Hour, and the place was busy. The saxophonist, his body crouched, his knees bent, joined to his instrument in a looping omega, was doing his best to
raise the roof. As well he might. We had all the weight of the nineteenth century piled up over our heads, and I saw no particular reason why it should not come down through the ceiling and bury us in its rubble.

The election was everywhere. The city looked like a heavy parcel, stuck all over with postage stamps; red ones for Mayor Chandler, blue ones for Otis Higgs. I had rented a car and was trying to count the blues and reds among the bumper stickers down Union Avenue.
CHANDLER, CHANDLER, HIGGS, HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS, HIGGS, CHANDLER, CHANDLER, HIGGS, BE KIND TO MICE—EAT PUSSY TONITE. CHANDLER
.

I happened on the Higgs headquarters by accident: a decrepit house on Union whose graying paint had been almost completely papered over in blue. A flapping banner hung from the wooden balcony. It said:
YES, WE CAN
! I drove on three blocks, wondering vaguely if there was another half to the slogan, then turned back. The Memphis mayoral election was the only eddy on my trip into which I drifted carelessly and got sucked in.

The house was a dizzying swirl of people running in circles with clipboards, people talking into banks of telephones, people folding handbills and people imitating other people being busy. I joined the imitators. Within a minute, I had been mistaken for someone else and handed a Coke. I drank it with what I hoped was the appearance of a man who hadn’t a moment too long for this sort of trifle.

“Hey, where the hell’s
Rozelle?
”

“I haven’t seen her. Sorry,” I said.

“It’s a goddamn street, man—”

“Sorry. Of course.”

In a momentary island of quiet, I found myself with one of the candidate’s personal aides. She was white; and although her voice had the slow, dipping rhythm of Tennessee, it had clearly been to prep school and college on the East Coast. I asked her how far Mr. Higgs was going to be able to count on a white liberal vote in Memphis.

“There are no white liberals in Memphis. They’re a foreign breed. Otis needs—some say twelve, some say fourteen percent of the white vote to win, and they’ll be voting with passion, with anger, with all kinds of feelings, but they won’t be voting for him because they’re liberals. Liberalisms something that only people in the North can afford; it’s a luxury. Don’t mistake me because of my color—I’m no liberal. Why don’t you talk with Otis?”

“Isn’t he too busy?”

“He’ll make time for you.”

He did. I was shown into his office, where the candidate was drinking milk and having difficulty in eating a carry-out hamburger from its toilet-tissue wrapping. It was, too, the package in which he himself was wrapped that one saw first: the serious eyeglasses, the trim crescent of mustache, the funereal three-piece suit, the thick gold bracelet. He was encased from top to toe in a uniform which looked as if it had been chosen by a committee. Intelligence must be represented—give him glasses. Tasteful modesty—the suit. Prosperity, a discreet hint of worldly success—the bracelet. Decisiveness—the mustache. His hair had been barbered to eliminate any suggestion of the ebullient Afro high jinks for which it had obvious aptitude. The committee seemed to have done everything it could with him short of giving him a coat of pale peach distemper.

He talked in a rolling bass of such resonance that he put the length of an imaginary aisle between us. He was up at the altar end; I was away in the back pews. This was disconcerting, since we were sitting about seven feet apart.

“I’m a very humble man. I believe in Humility. I never forget that I’m a man. There’s an old story from the Roman times, about the centurion and the slave. Whenever the centurion’s standing high in his chariot at the races, he always has the slave riding beside him. Why is the slave there? To whisper in the ear of the centurion: ‘You’re only a man. You’re only a man.’ I hear the voice of the whispering slave. ‘You’re only a man. You’re only a man.’ ”

He stared into the middle distance beyond my left ear.

“I tell that story many times.”

“Yes.”

There was something in his face that was a good deal more complicated than his uniform or his clockwork oratory. There was a lot of tiredness there, a flash of wistful self-irony, even a glimmer of amusement at my own fate of being made to sit down and listen to this stuff about centurions and slaves.

“Next week, when I’m elected, I’m going to become an instant national figure.” He was listening to himself as if someone else had been speaking. “That makes me feel very humble.”

“You’re looking tired. How long has the campaign been running?”

“Since January.”

“Can you live off the adrenaline of it?”

“Yes, I guess that’s what keeps me going. You know, I’ll be talking to meetings all evening; then I’ll come home and just pace around and around. I can feel the energy still fizzing in my veins—I got to let it leak
out before I can sleep, so some nights I’ll be going to bed at three, maybe four. I get to hear the cocks crow.”

“How much sleep do you need?”

“I can get by on five hours now.”

The distance between us had shortened by thirty yards. We began to talk about Memphis. Higgs said that the city had broken into as many different pieces as a shattered plate. The tension between blacks and whites was only the biggest and most obvious of these ruptures: there was no common feeling between business and the unions, between the universities and the rest of the city, between the old Southern gentry and the new industrial middle class.

“I believe we can heal these wounds. In a small way we’re doing just that in this house. You’ve been through, you’ve seen it. Out there are blacks and whites, there are businessmen, lawyers, civil rights workers, guys from the fire service union … Go over to Chandler’s H.Q. You won’t see that there. In this house we’ve got a complete cross-section of Memphis society. I don’t think you’ll find another house in the city where you can see that. This campaign has really started to bring Memphis together, and that’s what it’s all about.”

The Reverend Judge Otis Higgs himself contained several disparate characters in his own person. He had taught in the public school system; he was an ordained minister of the Baptist Church; he had gone to law school and worked as an attorney; he had been a judge in the Shelby County courts. When he talked at his best he was part teacher, part lawyer, part preacher. At his worst, just one of these characters would seem to gain a totalitarian grip on his personality, and he would suddenly shrink, reduced to a single dimension.

“I have traveled in this country,” he was saying, “and I know what people think when they hear the word ‘Memphis.’ This is Death City. It’s remembered for two things. Martin Luther King was shot here. Elvis Presley died here. That’s what Memphis is famous for, for death. But I have a vision. I see the death of Elvis Presley as a catalyst for the rebirth of Memphis—”

He was a church-length away from me again.

“What on earth do you mean?”

He talked of the two million tourists a year who went to visit Presley’s grave at Graceland. He was going to attract them to the downtown area with an Elvis museum, an Elvis statue, steamboat rides, restaurants. If only he could turn downtown into an Elvis shrine, he could rebuild it on tourist money.

“I think that’s a very frightening idea.”

“I am listening to you,” Higgs said.

I told him about what I had seen of St. Louis and what I thought were the disastrous consequences of its attempt to renew itself on tourists, conventioneers and visiting football crowds.

“You can’t make a city out of temporary people. Front Street looked sick to me, but it didn’t look dead the way St. Louis is dead.”

“They got the balance wrong there,” Higgs said. “You need a base of condominiums downtown. We need to persuade local people to move back to the river. If we could only get folks to think that living in a riverside apartment was the smart thing to do … But without the revenue from the tourists, our hands are tied, I know what you mean about St. Louis. I can see the danger.…”

He sucked at his milk through a straw.

“The river is this city’s greatest natural resource, and we’ve turned our backs on it. I think the river is a key. We have to return to the river. The big problem is that if you’re black in Memphis the river has always meant one thing. Cotton. And cotton means ‘Haul that barge, boy! Tote that bale!’ So the Mississippi has been hated in the black community. If we can have blacks and whites together, living by the river as a matter of choice, then we’ll know that the wounds of this city are healing over.”

I left with a Higgs bumper sticker and a
YES, WE CAN
lapel button. I wanted to lose myself in someone else’s journey for a change; I wanted to stay long enough in Memphis to see Otis Higgs reach City Hall.

Higgs’s trail led north, into the black suburbs of Hollywood and Chelsea. For me, the journey kept on being broken by short, sidewise trips eastward. In the evenings a number of people kindly opened their doors for me to dinner, and I went out to big Victorian greystone houses with oak-paneled walls and high ceilings of sculpted plaster, to the country club, to white Grecian mansions in the woods with long floodlit colonnades.

We were drinking wine from silver goblets. A line of candles flickered down the dining table. My hostess put her hand on my forearm and said, “It’s difficult for you to understand, I know. But integration is as new to us as it is to the South
Af
ricans—”

I had been to black ghettos before. In Watts, Roxbury, Harlem, South St. Louis, I’d felt the angriness in their air, as if it were thick with iron filings. I had been ordered out; I was a white tourist, and I had no business on these streets. In Roxbury, my car had been jumped at a stoplight:

“Honky! Hey, Honky! What you think you doing here, Honky?”

It wasn’t so in Hollywood and Chelsea. They were poor places. They looked crushed and scabby: streets of paintless frame bungalows, uncollected garbage, Salvation Army free stores and housing projects that might reasonably have been mistaken for prisons. They must have been angry; they had every excuse for anger. Yet it was an anger which hadn’t yet crystallized into that automatic hatred of the white stranger which I had met in the ghettos of the North; or at least, the hatred was elaborately masked. I received the odd curious glance, accompanied by a faint smile, as if I’d lost my way and needed street directions to get me home. Several times people went out of their way to make me welcome.
Stay and talk. Stay and see
.

The political campaign went from church to church, and the churches were proud islands of well-being in a landscape where the sun seemed to take a perverse pleasure in lighting up everything that peeled, rotted or collapsed. Their electronic organs were new; the robes of the choirs had been laundered to the improbably dazzling whites and blues of a soap-powder ad; the air-conditioning systems were new; the pale pine floors and pews were slippery with scented wax; the microphones and loudspeakers had the expensive mint look of equipment in a store window. The churches were an extravagant proof that the black community, poor as it was, could come together to create something just as fine as any white country club. They had been built from dimes, quarters, one-dollar bills, collected over years from the dismal tangle of surrounding streets. You might live in a two-room shack with a gaping veranda, but you could have a shareholder’s stake in a real brick palace.