Three Days Before the Shooting ... (211 page)

Or the trains running wild and threatening to jump the track and crash into
the white sections below, with smoke and steam threatening to scald the air and bring hell fire to those trapped there in their favored seats—screaming as fireman and engineer battled to the death with the Devil now become a Dalton boy or a James or a Younger, and whose horses of devil flesh outran again and again the iron horses of the trains, upgrade and down, and with their bullets flying to burst ever against the sacred sanctuary of Uncle Sam’s mail cars, where the gold was stored and the hero waited; killing multitudes of clerks and passengers, armed and unarmed alike, in joy and in anger, in fear and in fun. And bushwhacking the Sheriff and his deputies again and again, dropping them over cliffs and into cascading waterfalls, until like the sun the Hero loomed and doomed the arch-villain to join his victims, tossed too from a cliff, shot in the belly with the blood flowing dark; or hung blackhooded with his men, three in a row, to drop from a common scaffold to swing like sawdust filled dolls in lonely winds.

All whirled through my mind as filtered through Body’s and the other’s eyes and made concrete in their shouting pantomime of conflict, their accurately aimed pistol and rifle blasts, their dying falls with faces fixed in death’s most dramatic agony as their imaginary sixshooters blazed one last poetic bullet of banging justice to bring their murderers down down down to hell, now heaving heaven high in wonder beneath our feet….

So I wanted to leave the place unentered, even if it had a steeple higher than any church in the world, leave it, pass it ever by, rather than see it once, then never to enter it again—with all the countless unseen episodes to remain a mystery and like my mother flown forever.

But I could not say it, nor could I refuse; for no language existed between child and man. So I, Bliss the preacher, ascended, climbed, holding reluctantly Daddy Hickman’s huge hand, climbed up the steep, narrow stairs crackling with peanut hulls and discarded candy wrappers—up into the hot, breathing darkness, up, until the roof seemed to rest upon the crowns of old heads…. And as we come into the pink-tinted light with its tiered, hierarchical order of seats, I pull back upon his hand, frightened by what I do not know. And he says, Come along, Bliss boy—deep and comforting in the dark. It’s all right, he says, I’m going with you. You just hold my hand.

And I ascended, holding on.

IT ALWAYS BREAKS OUT

PARTISAN REVIEW
30 (SPRING 1963): 13–28

What a country, what a world! I don’t know which was the more outrageous, the more scandalous—the burning of the Cadillac on the senator’s beautiful lawn, the wild speech made by the arsonist while the beautiful machine smoked and glowed in flames, or the crowd’s hysterical reaction to the weird, flamboyant sacrifice.

I know only that I have neither the power nor the will to convey the incident to Monsieur Vannec. How can I, when I’ve been unable to frame it for myself? To hell with the inquisitive Frenchman, there is simply too much unexpected chaos involved, too many unsettling contradictions have appeared. Besides, I refuse to reveal to him that I’m so much without presence before a phenomenon of my own country. It is a matter of pride: personal, intellectual, national. And especially is this true when I consider Vannec’s passionate need to define all phenomena—whether social, political or cultural—and codify them and reduce them to formulae—intricate ones—that can be displayed in the hard sparkling center of a crystal paperweight.

And speaking of paper, how should I explain the manner in which the car burning was handled by the press? How the newspapers reduced the event to a small item which stated simply that a deranged jazz musician had set fire to his flashy automobile on the senator’s lawn—with all references to his wild speech and the crowd’s reaction omitted? And here is the shameful part requiring an unwilling confession: I would have to tell Vannec that we, the newspapermen, members of the working press, champions of the reported fact who insist upon the absolute accessibility of the news, that we ourselves suppressed it, reduced it to insignificance by reflex and with no editorial urging whatsoever!

Or at least we tried; but despite what we did the event has had, is having, its effect. It spreads by word of mouth, it imposes itself like a bad smell carried by the wind into private homes and into private conversations. Yes, and into our private thoughts. It balloons, it changes its shape, it grows. Worse, it seeps back into consciousness despite all we do to forget it. And we, remember, are tough-minded newspapermen.

Get this: a group of us met that evening to eat and drink and chat—just as we’ve done once a week for quite some time. Sometimes we exchange information and discuss that part of the news which, for one reason or another, is considered untimely or unfit to print. Often, as on this occasion, we enjoy our private jokes at the expense of some public figure or incident which, in reporting, we find expedient to treat with formal propriety. But tonight our mood was light, almost gay. Or at least it seemed so at the beginning. We were delighted that at last one of the senator’s butts had succeeded in answering him, if only briefly and at outrageous expense. But beneath our banter we were somewhat uneasy. The wildman Negro jazzman had made us so. Certainly there was no other reason for it—unless it was the intimate knowledge which each of us possessed of our filed accounts. Otherwise why the uneasy undertone as we relaxed there in the brightly lighted dining room with its sparkle of silver and crystal, its sheen of rich woods, its tinkle of iced glasses and buzz of friendly talk? The very paintings on the wall, scenes of early life on the then remote frontier, moody, misty scenes of peaceful life in great forest clearings, formal portraits of the nineteenth-century founders of the club—all made for a sense of security. Even Sam, our inscrutable but familiar Negro waiter, was part of a ritual. And while I
don’t mean to imply that the club is a great place, it is a good place indeed, and its food and drink are excellent; its atmosphere, resonant with historical associations and warmly civilized values, most relaxing.

But tonight, as I say, something was working within each of us and it was just after Sam’s dark hands had served the second round of after-dinner drinks, placed clean ashtrays before us and withdrawn, that Wiggins, the economics expert, released it.

“What,” he said, “do you think of the new style in conspicuous consumption?”

And there it was, right out in the open, wearing a comic disguise. We laughed explosively, not so much at his remark but at ourselves, at the quick summoning up of what lay beneath our calm.

“It was a lulu,” Thompson said, “a real lulu.”

“Where on earth did that fellow come from?” Wilson said.

“From Chattanooga. He rose up like a wave of heat from the Jeff Davis highway,” Wilkins said. “Didn’t you hear him say it?”

“I wasn’t there,” Wiggins said, “but when I heard of it I thought,
Thorstein Veblen, your theory has been carried to the tenth power!”

“And in horse power,” I said. “Wiggins, you always said that Veblen was the comedian of economics. Now I’m beginning to understand.”

“That’s right, he was an ironist, a humorist of economic theory,” Wiggins said, “and all he needed to make that clear was to have had that black boy illustrate his books.”

“The learned doctor would have flipped,” Larkin said.

“Did you ever see anything like it, a man burning his own car before an audience?”

“He’s as wild as those rich Oklahoma Indians who preferred to travel in hook-and-ladder fire trucks or brand new hearses instead of limousines,” Wiggins said.

“Yes,” I said, “but that was a cultural preference. The Indians were really living in a different world, but this fellow today must have been mad. Off his rocker.”

“Just leave it to the senator,” Wilson said. “If there’s something outrageous to be brought out in people he’s the man to do it.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what this will bring out of the insurance people,” Larkin said.

“They’ll be wild.”

“Man, they’re already rewriting their policies!”

“Well, I’ll bet no one is as wild as the senator,” Thompson said. “He’s probably searching for laws to rewrite.”

“Can you blame him, that boy tried to tie a knot in his tail.”

“Yeah,” McGowan said, “ole senator was up there cooking up a barbecue for his v.i.p. guests and here comes a Nigra straight out of nowhere to prepare the hot sauce!”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about how the senator is taking it,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t sitting in his study right this minute laughing his head off.”

“He’s baited those people so often that he shouldn’t mind when one answers back.”

“The senator is an actor,” I said, “nothing seems to touch him.”

“He’s a thick-skinned scoundrel,” said Larkin, “a thick-skinned, brilliant scoundrel and a joker.”

“Well, that colored fellow really tried to cap his joke. What is this country coming to? A United States senator stands on the floor of the senate and allows himself the license of saying that so many Negro citizens are driving Cadillac cars that he suggests that the name, the trade mark, be changed to the
Coon Cage Eight—
imagine! And as though that weren’t scandalous enough, hardly before the news is on the air, a Negro drives an expensive Cadillac onto the senator’s grounds and in rebuttal sets it afire! What on earth are we coming to?”

“The senator’s a joker, the Negro is a joker, this is a nation of jokers. We aren’t coming, we’ve arrived. Welcome to the United States of Jokeocracy.”

“Hell, that was no joke, not the car. That fellow was dead serious.”

“The point that interests me,” Wilson said, “is that a fellow like that was willing to pay for it. He probably decided that he’d do anything to get back at the senator and this was the damndest way he could find. If I were the senator I’d reflect on that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it’s possible that someone else might decide to call him, and in a more personal way. In fact, I’m surprised that he hasn’t provoked someone long before today …”

Wilson’s voice faded into his thinking and then just as the swift, barely-formed idea flashed into my own mind, Wilson looked around the table, frowning.

“Say,” he said, “have we ever had a Negro assassin?”

I looked at him, open-mouthed. It was as though the words had been transferred from my mind to his. I held my breath. Past Wilson’s shoulder and far across the room I could see Sam, standing with folded arms. Several pitchers of iced water and a large white crock piled high with iced squares of butter rested on the stand beside him while he glanced casually down the long sweep of the room to where a girl moved gracefully through the door. Her red hair flowed in waves to the shoulders of her white suit and she carried a large blue bag and I thought,
Hail Columbia, long may she wave…
. Then I heard Thompson saying,

“You mean in the
United States?”

“That’s right,” Wilson said, “have we?”

“Now why on earth would you think of that,” I said.

“It just struck me. I don’t know. But after today maybe it’s time we started thinking about such possibilities …”

McGowan made a cage of his fat fingers and lowered them around his drink. “What Wilson means, gentlemen, is that a Nigra who’d burn a Cadillac car would do just about anything. He means that a Nigra like that’ll burn good United States currency.”

We smiled. McGowan could be amusing about Negroes but we would have liked it better had he not been a Southerner. Somehow they obsessed him and he was constantly sounding off over something they did to disturb his notion of a well-ordered society. And now that I could feel him working up a disquisition on the nature and foibles of the Negro I was glad that Sam was far across the room. McGowan took a drink, sighed and smiled.

“Well, Wilson, I have to agree: that was
quite
a Nigra. But you all don’t have to go into any brainstorm to analyze what that Nigra was doing. I’m here to tell you that what the Nigra was doing was running a-muck! His brain snapped, that’s what happened; and far as he was concerned he was back up a tree throwing coconuts.”

Across from me Wilson was still frowning, looking like a man remembering a bad dream. McGowan’s humor wasn’t reaching me either.

“I’m serious,” Wilson said. “Has there ever been one?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Larkin said. “There were McKinley, Roosevelt—Cermac that is, Huey Long—but none of the assassins were colored.”

“A Nigra
assassin,”
McGowan said. “Are y’all getting drunk already?”

“There might have been a few local killings with a political motive,” Thompson said. “Here and there over the years some small town Southern politician might have been shot or knifed. Like that fellow down in Louisiana who made the mistake of getting into a colored man’s bed and allowed himself to get caught. But you wouldn’t call that political. That was sheer bad judgment and I’d have shot the bastard myself …”

“I say, are y’all getting drunk?” McGowan said.

“Come to think about it though,” Thompson went on, “how can you tell when those people are doing something politically significant? Down home not enough of them vote and here in the North so few take a part in civic affairs that it’s hard to tell what they’re up to. We just don’t know enough about them for all the statistics we have. We don’t have, or
they
don’t have, enough social forms through which we can see them with any clarity.”

“Forms?”
McGowan said, “What forms? We don’t need any cotton-picking forms! Don’t you Yankees recognize that everything the Nigra
does
is political? Thompson, you amaze me. You are Southern born and bred and there are three things we Southerners are supposed to know about and they’re history, politics—and Nigras. And especially do we know about the political significance of the Nigra.”

“Oh drop it, McGowan,” Thompson said, “I’m being serious.”