I Am Abraham (19 page)

There was no point contradicting him, not in that sea of red faces, where I was a notch lower than a dog—but I did try. “Douglas has set about seriously trying to make the impression that when we meet at different places I am literally in his clutches—that I am a poor, helpless, decrepit mouse, and that I can do nothing at all.”

“But you are a mouse,” someone roared.

Another farmer interrupted him. “That’s a hog up there on the platform,” and he commenced to snuffle and snort.

I had to scream above that storm. “I don’t want to quarrel with Douglas—to call him a liar—but when I come square up to him I don’t know what else to call him, if I must tell the truth out.”

There wasn’t much truth to be had, not in Jonesboro, where folks hunkered around the platform with mischief in their tiny, blinking eyes. I was lucky to slink out of Little Egypt with the skin on my back.

I
WAS
DISHEARTENED
as I sat in my seat, with prairie dust on the windows and a sinister sun burning right through the glass, as if the canvass had become my own little Sahara, and I was riding the cars from one crucifixion to the next. It was like
wrassling
with a mirage. I couldn’t seem to get my engine running at Charleston, which was Abraham Lincoln Country and the site of our fourth debate. Dug was the same ol’ rooster. He attacked and attacked while I hemmed and hawed like a man in front of a gigantic spittoon. He had a smoothness I’d never have, a fiendish sulfur, with his broad forehead, his deep baritone, and the liquid moves of an impresario courting his public on a platform that was his private dance floor. He had what Billy called a kind of
magnetism
. I couldn’t dazzle the way he could, with gold on his cuffs, the finest toilet water, and I was like a scarecrow with rust all over, and flakes falling out of my hair. But I wouldn’t let him have his own sway
. I won’t surrender
, I said, won’t let Dug and his cohorts plant slavery over all the Union, regard it as a common matter of property
, and speak of
negroes as we do of
our horses and cattle
.

I didn’t gain much ground on Dug. His partisans could smell the kill—I was ripe for it. He arrived with his company of tubas for the fifth debate, at Galesburg, near the Iowa border, swaggered on the platform, but he stalled in the middle of his attack. “Where is
this
Abraham Lincoln? Where . . .” His eyes seemed to startle inside his own head. His tongue thickened. He kept coughing into a silk handkerchief. The Little Giant had commenced to lose his voice. That black pompadour of his didn’t have the same assurance. The canvass was wearying him and his wife. They wanted the fine cutlery of a private railroad car, and not the heat and dust and bonfires of a campaign, as Billy liked to say.

But I thrived in the heat and dust—wind and rain had always been my companions on the circuit. I could live out of saddlebags. Dug could not. The Little Giant had come to a halt. Dug had desecrated the Founding Fathers, I said, trying to impose the footprint of slavery wherever he could and denying that all men were created equal—this was the electric cord that linked us together. I wiped my brow with my flaming red silk handkerchief, my one bit of pomp. I watched Dug. His voice was too hoarse to reveal very much. For the first time I had Dug and Adèle on the run.

I thought he would give up the
juggle
, collect his brass band, and ride away in his private railroad car with Adèle, who looked almost as pale as he did, as if the prairie had melted her down a little, removed all her shellac. I felt sorry for that royal couple, with their ruffles and silk parasols and velvet hats, and I wondered if I would have to climb onto the platform with Dug’s ghost.

I should have realized that the Little Giant had too much at stake. He couldn’t disappear from this rumpus just like that. He’d have lost his standing in the nation, so he rallied a little, came to Quincy, a river town right on the Mississip, with all his regalia—a brass band that filled up a railroad car, sentinels and marchers, and a float of sixteen maidens in the buckskin garb of prairie huntresses. This regalia made so much noise it covered up the arrival of Dug and Adèle at the meeting hall. Dug wore a winter cloak in October and a scarf around his neck that couldn’t mask his viscous, yellow eyes. A pair of his own marshals had to escort him to the platform, for our sixth debate, else he would have toppled into the crowd. He swayed while he was up there, like a man caught in a dizzy spell. But I wasn’t watching him or his wife. I was watching
our
live raccoon that crouched on top of a pole—the raccoon was a symbol of the old Whig Party, and we were hoping for a
resurrection
in Quincy, that all the “raccoons” in the audience would remain alive and vote Republican. But the Democrats had brought their own raccoon, a dead one, with its tail bound with strips of wire to a boatman’s oar, so that the dead coon swung like a pendulum with pointy ears and prickly gray fur with a lone streak of red.

While Dug stumbled across the platform, our live raccoon kept staring at that streak of red fur. Dug had a pendulum of his own, as he kept saying over and over again that our Republic could exist
forever
divided into free and slave States. He saw a path to the Presidency and he took it—never mind that it was also a formula for a broken Union, an invitation to civil strife. Oh, he would cure
every
ill once he rode to the White House in the President’s barouche.

I didn’t even have the time to answer Dug. That live raccoon let out an electric wail that
pierced
the hall—it was somewhere between a growl and a long, relentless hiss—and he leapt off his perch on the pole, sailed over our heads like a furry ball with magnetic teeth and decapitated the dead raccoon with one rip of his jaws.

Several ladies in the Republican part of the arena swooned. Dug himself wandered in a daze, as if he’d been driven off a battlefield. And I wasn’t immune to that wild leap. I shivered some, and wondered how a single raccoon could overwhelm our rumpus . . .

We stayed in Quincy overnight, but I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t Dug’s
palliations
—
and lullabies
—all the untruths he told—that kept me awake. I expected that, and even more, from him. I remembered Dug from the old days in Springfield, that essential swagger he had along with his fine linen, how he discovered the latest dance steps and scrutinized all the belles on Quality Hill, and considered every other
beau
in the room unworthy of him. His arrogance and self-aggrandizement had boosted his fortune and near crippled him blind. And it didn’t seem to matter much that the nation would plunge into the ether, like that maddened raccoon on the pole.

We boarded the
City of Louisiana
, Dug, Adèle, and I, and sailed down the Mississip a hundred and fifteen miles to Alton, presiding over a panorama of cliffs. Not a word passed between us. Dug had to guard whatever little was left of his voice, but Adèle did invite me to dinner. We sat in the captain’s cabin. The river had a yellow gleam. We hadn’t come near Alton, and it felt as if we’d stumbled upon a landless universe—I squinted hard, but I couldn’t uncover the shoreline. I was lonely all of a sudden. I missed my wife. Mother had
remade
me, even if I still had a hard time manipulating a proper knife and fork. Adèle pretended not to notice, while Dug pulled me right out of my reverie.

“Lincoln, we are moving toward an abyss. And the negro will not help us climb out. But I’d disappoint Illinois if I canceled the seventh debate.”

Dug, you’re the abyss
. That’s what I wanted to say. But I juggled with him.

“Well, if you’re too ill, Senator. I wouldn’t want to chase you.”

He coughed, and poor Adèle had to wipe the spittle from his chin.

“This canvass has turned into a pugilistic contest,” he suddenly said, gulping on all that spittle. And he left the captain’s table, muttering to himself. I sat there with his wife. We ate in silence. She wouldn’t utter a sound until she finished her compote. And then Adèle said how much her husband admired me—
admired me with a knife in his hand
. He was mortally tired, she said. “Every gesture he makes, every move, is
a little run
for the Presidency.”

We’d have another Buchanan, a President who
compromised
with every spoon he took into his mouth . . .

And Adèle, too, left the table, with the bustle of her gown wandering like a deep ripple in the water. I sat there a spell, watching the implacable pull of the Mississip.

T
HE
SUN
SAT
in my eyes when we arrived at the piers—could have been a half-blind beggar coming from the holy wars. And then there was the dazzle of Molly’s own blue eyes, as if I’d come out of the deep, and had never once sighted land or sky and a red-brown crop of hair. I’d been bound up with other men’s needs too long, and had shut in my own desires.

Molly wore a cape like some marine; I still had a rainbow in my eyes. I didn’t give a hoot that Bob was with her on the pier, in the blue coat and white pants of a Springfield cadet. I picked her up in my arms and whirled her over the edge of the water until her dress flared out and her crinoline seemed to crash in the wind like soft glass.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said with a breathy growl, “I’m not a sailboat—I’m only your wife.” But she laughed as I waltzed her across the pier. I forgot the canvass. I forgot Illinois.

She didn’t gloat at Dug when he came down the gangplank with Adèle, a huge handkerchief wrapped around his throat. She curtsied to the Senator and took Adèle’s hand—the wives of the two warriors. Adèle couldn’t linger. She had to get Dug away from all the wind off the river. He looked saturnine at the beginning of the debate. His silver buttons weren’t so clean. In a voice that trembled and could hardly be heard a few feet away, he went on the attack. “I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race.”

His legions had arrived with their banners and floats, but Alton didn’t belong to Dug—the Sangamon–Alton railroad had brought Molly and Bob at a special half-price
Republican
fare. Even with all our own bustle, I still had a bitter taste in my mouth. The crowds had dwindled; most of the stenographers were gone; this match couldn’t have been much news in Manhattan—or London—or Philadelphia. A world-renowned Senator waging war against a local man for the privilege of his own seat, a seat I’d never win. But I couldn’t let Dug go on lying—and lying—and lying, even if my words went into the wind.

We were at the courthouse square right on the river. Dug did his usual prowling, preened in pure silk.

And so I dueled with him for the seventh time. All the dust of the canvass had come to an end, with the fizzle-gigs and fireworks. Still, I wasn’t finished, wasn’t finished at all. It wasn’t about Lincoln vs. Douglas—it was Lincoln vs. himself, the storming in my own heart. I had to unravel his lies, for my own sake, a stitch at a time. And the greatest lie of all was that the colored man was not included in the Declaration of Independence.

I told that audience of diehards and stragglers, the last remnants of our debate, that I had to combat this damn lie. “I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man. I combat it as being one of the thousand things constantly done in these days to prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the negro in all the States of the Union.”

There were only two stripes, I said. “The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. . . . It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. . . .”