TWO
By a gentleman just from Arkansas, by way of White river, we learn that the earthquake was violent in that quarter that in upwards of 500 places he observed coal and sand thrown up from fissures in the earth, that the waters raised in a swamp near the Cherokee village, so as to drown a Mr. Carrin who was travelling with his brother, the latter saved himself on a log. — In other places the water fell, and in one instant it rose in a swamp near the St. Francis 25 or 30 feet; Strawberry a branch of Black river, an eminence about 1-1/2 acres sunk down and formed a pond.
St. Louis, February 22,1812
The ringing signal purred in Nick Ruford’s ear. He felt adrenaline shimmer through his body, kick his heart into a higher gear. He felt like a teenager calling a girl for the first time.
It was Manon who answered. His nerves gave a little leap at the sound of her voice.
Stupid, he thought. The divorce was two years ago. But he couldn’t help it. She still did that to him.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”
“Hey, yourself,” she said. There was always that sly smile in her contralto voice, and he could tell from her intonation, the warmth in her tone, exactly the expression on her face, the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes, the broad smile that exposed her white teeth and a little bit of pink upper gum. With the gum exposed like that it should not be an attractive smile, but somehow it was.
“You finished with the move?” Manon asked.
Nick looked around the room with its neatly stacked boxes under the eye of Nick’s father, who gazed in steely splendor from his portrait on the wall, and for whose spirit no stack of boxes would ever be neat enough. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m moved in. I just don’t have a place for everything yet.”
Don’t have a place for myself yet, he thought. That’s the trouble.
“Is it a nice apartment?”
Nick looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk, the people hanging out on the streets. The windows were closed, and the air-conditioning unit in the window turned up high, so that Manon couldn’t hear the boom box rattling away from the front porch. “Well,” he said, “it’s urban, you know, but it isn’t squalid. And my building is nice.”
And would be nicer. Once he finished wallpapering Arlette’s room, he could move her furniture in there, the mattress and frame that were now occupying most of the living room.
“It was Viondi found it, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I can just imagine.”
Sudden resentment sizzled along Nick’s nerves. Manon always knew how to get to him. I can just imagine. His friends weren’t good enough, his apartment wasn’t good enough, his job wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t good enough.
And it wasn’t like she even meant to put him down, not really. Her damn spooky family had been royalty so long in their little part of Arkansas that it was natural for her to judge other people, judge them without even thinking about it. There wasn’t any malice in it, not really.
“Can I talk to Arlette?” he asked.
“She’s in her room. I’ll get her.”
Over the phone he heard Manon’s heels clacking on the polished cypress floor of their old house. Nick paced up and down next to the dinette set, working off his aggravation. Was it his fault he’d been laid off at McDonnell? Or that a weapons systems engineer was a useless occupation in the aftermath of the Cold War?
He looked at the portrait of his father: Brigadier General Jon C. Ruford, U.S. Army, winner of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in Vietnam and the Soldier’s Medal for service out of it. Author of Sun Tzu and the Military Mind (1985), and one of the first dozen or so black men to rise in the Army to the rank of general officer, clearly destined for higher rank until forced to resign by the multiple sclerosis that finally killed him, four years later, in the V.A. hospital here in St. Louis.
You didn’t tell me, Nick silently told the portrait, that I was going to be made obsolete. That I was going to be as much a dinosaur as you are.
Arlette’s young voice brightened his thoughts. “Allo, papa! J’ai des nouvelles merveilleux! Une situation vai a devenu libre!”
Nick tried to find his way through this torrent of half-understood words. His last real exposure to French had been years ago, when his father was stationed at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “Good news?” he said. “Uhhh ... bien.”
“Je vais a l’école d’été apres tout! Je vais passer l’été a Toulouse!”
Nick’s heart sank as he deciphered Arlette’s phrases. He glanced into the room he was preparing for her, at the stack of wallpaper and the gilt-edged mirror . .. his hand automatically touched the pocket where he carried the gift he’d bought her today, and which he really couldn’t afford. A gold necklace in the shape of a lily, sprinkled with diamonds and rubies, and matching earrings. A real grown-up gift.
He had imagined her eyes lighting up as she opened the gift-wrapped box. He had imagined the way she’d gasp in delight and wrap her arms around his neck and breathe her warm thanks against his neck.
And now he’d never see it. Now he’d just have to give the package to Federal Express and experience his daughter’s joy only in his imagination.
“That’s great, baby,” Nick said. “That’s wonderful.” He tried hard to keep the disappointment from his voice. “When does summer school start?”
“Right after school ends here,” Arlette said, switching— Nick was grateful—to English. “The school in Toulouse doesn’t open right away, but Mrs. Rigby said she’d take some of us to France for ten days of travel beforehand.”
“That’s wonderful, honey,” Nick said. His hand clenched into a fist, and he wanted to drive it through the newly papered wall.
It wasn’t that he didn’t think his daughter shouldn’t spend the summer in France. It was a wonderful opportunity, and she would be staying with a French family and getting a lot of exposure to a world she hadn’t seen, which could only do her good after Manon decided their daughter was going to grow up as African-American royalty in some little half-assed village in Arkansas.
Manon’s family, the Davids, had been royalty for generations. Back before the Civil War they’d been Free Men of Color in New Orleans, and they’d spoken French at home, pronounced their name “Dah-veed,” and sent their sons to France to be educated. After the war the Freedmans’ Bureau had created a Utopian colony of freed slaves in Arkansas, and the Davids had condescended to be put in charge of it.
Unlike most of the colonies the Freedmans’ Bureau planted, the one in Toussaint, Arkansas, had prospered. Partly because of its isolation— none of their white neighbors really wanted the land— and partly because of the Davids. In Toussaint the Davids owned the hardware store, and the grocery, and the pharmacy. And the lumber yard, the feed store, and the town’s one office building. And probably the traffic light, too.
And they still gave their kids French names, and sometimes sent their kids to France for an education. Even if, as in Arlette’s case, it was summer school in Toulouse.
But Nick wanted her here. He craved her presence. He yearned for her. He needed his daughter in his life, not as just a tantalizing, infuriating ghost he could only hear on the telephone.
And besides, he didn’t have a job now. He could spend time with her, not like before, when he was working and barely saw his family at all.
He had rented a two-bedroom apartment, more than he could afford, so that she could have a nice room when she spent the summer with him. Along with the bed with the graceful rococo scalloped headboard, the chest of drawers, the gilt-edged mirror with the decals of roses along the borders.
All money he could not afford to spend. And now he would be expected to pay for half of the cost of Arlette’s trip to France.
“How did things go with Lockheed-Martin?” Arlette asked, almost as if she was reading his mind.
“Same story in Colorado as everywhere else.” Nick tried to keep his voice cheerful. “Over two hundred applicants for the same job, and the ones already laid off from Lockheed get priority over the ones that got laid off from Boeing, McDonnell and Hughes.”
If only, he thought, we could get a nice juicy war started. Not a bad war, he immediately corrected, not with a lot of casualties or anything. Just some murdering old dictator that needs removing. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty to go around. One lousy dictator, and the defense dollars would start flowing again.
“You’ll find a place, Daddy,” Arlette said.
“Oh yeah,” Nick said. “Sooner or later, baby, somebody’s gonna want an engineer.”
I hear Burger King is hiring, he thought.
And with unemployment running out along with his bank account, it would probably come to that soon.
*
Omar Paxton chose to take the oath under the statue of the Mourning Confederate in front of the courthouse. It was just as well he did it outdoors: there were so many reporters clustered around that they would never have fit inside Judge Moseley’s office. Some of the boys turned up with rebel flags to provide a colorful and ideologically significant background, and Wilona was there to stand beside him, wearing white gloves, a corsage, and the pearls that her great-aunt Clover had left her in her will.
The constant whirring and buzzing of the cameras were louder than the cicadas in the surrounding blackjack oaks. Trying to ignore the sound, Omar put his hand on the judge’s well-worn Bible and swore to uphold the laws of the State of Louisiana and Spottswood Parish, and added a “So help me God!” for the benefit of his friends and of the media. Rebel yells rang out from the crowd. Confederate flags waved in the air, the sunshine turning their color a brilliant red. Judge Moseley held out his hand.
“Good luck there, Omar,” he said.
Omar shook the hand. “Thank you kindly, Mo,” he said. Moseley’s little waxed white mustache gave a twitch. Only certain people in the parish were high enough in caste to call the judge by his nickname, and Omar had just announced that he considered himself among them.
Omar put on his hat and turned to face the crowd of people. He waved to Hutch and Jedthus and a few of the others, and then turned to kiss Wilona on the cheek. People in the crowd cheered. He beamed down at the crowd, and waved some more, and encouraged Wilona to wave with a white-gloved hand. He looked into the lens of a network cameraman.
Got you all, you bastards, he thought.
After the media storm and the court challenge and the recount, after the governor had called him a reptile and the Party had disavowed his very existence, Omar Bradley Paxton had finally taken the oath of office and was ready to begin his term as sheriff of Spottswood Parish.
“Do you plan to make any changes in the department?” a reporter shouted up.
Omar smiled down at him. Little weevil, he thought. “I don’t anticipate any major changes,” he said. “Maybe we’ll save the people some tax dollars by putting regular gas in the patrol cars, ’stead of premium.”
The locals laughed at this. Omar’s predecessor had been prosecuted, though not convicted, for taking kickbacks for keeping Pure Premium in all the county’s cars.
The next question was shouted up by a little red-haired lady reporter with a voice like a trumpet. “Will there be any change in the style of law enforcement here in Spottswood Parish?”
“Well, ma’am,” tipping his hat to the lady, “we do plan to continue giving tickets to speeders and arresting drunks.”
More laughter. “What I meant,” the woman shouted up, “was whether the department will change its racial policy?” Omar’s ears rang with her shrill tones.
“Ma’am,” Omar said, and tried not to clench his teeth, “the racial policies of the department and the parish are determined by law. You have just heard me swear to uphold and enforce that law. I would be in violation of my oath were I to make any changes upholding illegal discrimination.”
Take that, you little red-haired dyke, he thought.
“Do you plan,” shouted a foreign-accented voice, “to resign your position as King Kleagle of Louisiana?”
Omar recognized a German reporter, one of the many foreigners who were putting their pfennigs into the local economy as they covered his story. He couldn’t help but smile.
“The voters of Spottswood Parish knew I belonged to the Klan when they elected me,” he said. “Obviously they decided that my membership in the world’s oldest civil rights organization was not an important issue. I can think of no reason why I should resign at this point, not after the voters and the courts have validated my candidacy. My family has lived in this parish for seven generations, and people knew what they were getting when they elected me.”
Rebel yells whooped up from the crowd. Confederate flags waved at the election of the first admitted Klan leader of modern times.
Up your ass, you kraut-eating Dutchman, Omar thought, and smiled.
*
“God damn,” Judge Chivington muttered. “Where did all these good-looking Klansmen come from? Back when I grew up in Texas, none of ’em had chins, and they all had puzzel-guts and weighed three hunnerd pounds. And that was just the women.”
The President cast a professional eye over Omar Paxton’s chiseled features.
“David Duke’s good looks came from a plastic surgeon,” he said. “He looked like a little weasel before Dr. Scalpel and Mr. Bleach made him a blond Aryan god. But this gent,” nodding at the evening news, “I believe he just has good genes.”
“The man was made for television,” sighed Stan Burdett, the President’s press secretary, and who, with his bald head, thin lips, and thick spectacles, was not.
“He was made for givin’ us shit,” the judge proclaimed. “That fucking weevil could cost us Louisiana in the next election.”
“We kicked him out of the Party,” the President offered.
“We’ll be lucky if he don’t take half the Party with ’im.”
The President sat with his two closest friends in one of the private drawing rooms in the second floor of the White House. He had never been comfortable with the formal displays of antiques and old paintings so carefully arranged in much of the public White House— he felt uneasy living in a museum, and privately cursed Jacqueline Kennedy, who had found most of the antiques and furniture in storage and spread them throughout the house, so that every time he turned around he was in danger of knocking over a vase once owned by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, or a pot that James Monroe might have pissed in.
So he had filled his own apartments with far less distinguished furniture, comfortable pieces which, even if they might date from the Eisenhower Administration, were scarcely refined. Even Jacqueline Kennedy couldn’t reproach him for putting his feet up on this couch.
The President settled comfortably into his sofa and reached for his Pilsner Urquell. “So,” he said, “how do you stop Party members from bolting to Omar Paxton?”
“Discredit him,” Stan said.
The judge cocked an eye at the younger man. “Son,” he said, “we’re talkin’ ’bout Louisiana. Nothing makes the Louisiana voter happier than casting a ballot for someone he knows is a felon. If Jack the Ripper had been born in Plaquemines Parish, they’d have a statue to the son of a bitch in the statehouse in Baton Rouge.”
Stan was insistent. “There’s got to be something that’ll turn his people against him.”
“Maybe if you get a photo of Omar there in bed with Michael Jackson,” the judge said, then winked. “But I don’t guess he’s Michael’s type.”
“What part of Louisiana is he from, anyway?” Stan asked.
The President smiled. “The part where they name their children ‘Omar,’” he said.
It was one of the President’s rare free nights. Congress was in recess. Nobody in the world seemed to be dropping bombs on anybody else. There was little on the President’s schedule for the rest of the week other than a visit to an arts festival at the Kennedy Center. The First Lady was in Indiana making speeches against drunk drivers, a cause with which she had become identified— and a politically safe issue, as Stan had remarked, as there were very few voters who were actually in favor of drunk driving, and most of those were too inebriated to find a polling place on election day.
Since everything could change in an instant, the President reckoned he should take advantage of the opportunity to relax while it was offered.
It was characteristic of him, though, that his idea of relaxation consisted of spending an evening watching CNN, drinking Bohemian beer, and talking politics with two of his cronies.
The President removed a briefing book on economics that sat on his couch— the G8 economic summit in London was coming up in a few weeks— and then he put his feet up and raised his beer to his lips. “We can hope that Omar over there is just a fifteen-minute wonder,” he said. “He’s just some deputy lawman from the sticks, you know— he’s not used to this kind of scrutiny. He could self-destruct all on his own.”
Stan’s spectacles glittered. “So I suppose you won’t be discussing Sheriff Paxton when you have that meeting at Justice next week.”
“I don’t believe I said that.” The President smiled.
“Oh God, you’re not gonna investigate the boy, are you?” the judge interrupted. “You’ve already halfway made him a martyr.” He waved one arm. “What you want to do, hoss, is buy the next election for his opponent, even if the man belongs to the other party. Then Omar there will be a loser. That’ll tarnish his damn badge for him.”
The President looked at the Judge and smiled. Chivington was one of his oldest allies, the heir to an old Texas political family that had once controlled fifty thousand votes in the lower Rio Grande Valley— a hundred thousand, if you counted the voters in the cemeteries. He had spent ten terms in the House of Representatives, and then, having lost his seat in one of those vast political sea-changes that swept the country every dozen years or so— that in his case swept even the graveyards— he’d been a federal judge known for outspokenness on the bench, extravagant behavior off it, and the highest number of calls for impeachment since the glory days of Earl Warren. Since his retirement he’d joined a law firm in D.C. and become an advisor to the powerful—including the young telegenic fellow he’d helped to win the White House.
“I am keeping all my options open in regard to Sheriff Paxton,” the President said.
“That’s fine for now.” The judge nodded. “But you’ve got to take care of that problem before the next election. Trust me.”
The President nodded. “He’s on the agenda.”
Stan looked at the television again, at the picture of Omar Paxton taking the oath. “Made for television,” he said, and his voice was wistful.
*
“There’s a thousand reporters here,” Omar said later, addressing his deputies in the little high-ceilinged lounge the parish pretended was something called a “squad room.”
“Most of them are going to go home before long, but there’s still going to be a lot of attention placed on this parish.”
“So,” Merle said as he stood by the machine and poured himself coffee. “No incidents.”
“Particularly no incidents that could be described as racially motivated,” Omar said.
“We don’t get to have no fun at all?” Jedthus asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the air conditioner that rattled in the window. “We don’t even get to knock the heads of the niggers we’re used to knocking?”
“We live in a video world,” Omar said. “Let’s remember that half the people in this state have camcorders, and they’d just love a chance to earn ten grand selling the tabloids pictures of one of us whacking some coon upside the head. And then you’d be on network news, and we’d all be so surrounded by federal agents and judges and lawsuits we wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
“Damn.” Merle grinned. “For ten grand, I’d sell pictures of y’all.”
Merle settled with his coffee onto the cheap sofa. Cracks in its orange plastic had been repaired with duct tape.
“Just take it easy for now,” Omar said.
“By the way,” said Merle, “I heard from D.R. at the Commissary. He was afraid that the election might scare all the little niggers away from the camp meetings this summer.”
“Awww.” Jedthus moaned with mock sympathy.
“Well,” Merle said defensively, “they bring a lot of money into this parish. And a lot of it gets spent at the Commissary. It ain’t like D.R.’s got that much money to spare.”
The Commissary was the general store in Shelburne City, and had retained its name from the time when it was the company store of the Shelburne Plantation, which had once occupied much of the parish. Now it was owned and run by D.R. Thompson, who had married Merle’s sister Cordelia. D.R. was all right, Omar figured. He had slipped Omar some under-the-table contributions during Omar’s campaign and was a prominent business leader, for all that his business was just a general store. So he deserved some reassurance.
Omar nodded. “Tell D.R. we’re not fixing to do anything to the tourists. In fact,” he added, “I’ll talk to him myself.”
“But Omar.” Jedthus looked pained. “When are we going to get to do something, you know, special?”
Omar fixed Jedthus with a steely eye. “Wait for the word,” he said. “We’ve got to get these bloodsucking reporters out of here first.”
“Churches and meeting halls burn up real nice,” Jedthus said.
“One damn church,” Omar scowled, “and we’d have the FBI moving in with us for the next five years.” It was one of his nightmares that someone— possibly someone he hardly knew— was going to get overenthusiastic and create what would literally be a federal case.
The whole point of the Klan, he knew, was violence. The Klan often gave itself the airs of a civic organization, interested in charities and betterment— but the truth was that if people wanted civic betterment, they’d join the Rotary.
You joined the Klan because you wanted to be a part of an organization that stomped its enemies into the black alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta. And what Omar had to do now was restrain his followers from doing just that.
“Concentrate on lawbreakers,” Merle advised. “Just do your regular job.”
Jedthus scowled. Omar looked at his deputy and sucked his teeth in thought.
The problem was, he had been elected by people looking for change. And change wasn’t exactly in his power. He couldn’t change the last fifty years of history, he couldn’t repair the local economy, he couldn’t alter the power of the liberal media or the Jews or the federal government. He couldn’t change Supreme Court rulings, he couldn’t deny black people the welfare that guaranteed their independence from white control. Least of all, he couldn’t alter the situation by cracking heads. Cracking heads would only make the situation worse. Getting himself or one of his deputies thrown in jail wasn’t going to help anybody.
“Jedthus,” Omar said, “don’t do anything you don’t want to see on the six o’clock news. Remember Rodney King, for God’s sake. That’s all I’m saying.” He winked. “Things’ll change. Our time will come. You know that.”
“Reckon I do,” said Jedthus, still scowling. He cracked his big knuckles.
Omar looked at Merle with a look that said You’ll speak to Jedthus about this little matter, won’t you?, and Merle gave an assuring nod.
“I’ve got an interview with somebody from the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “Guess I’ve kept the little prick waiting long enough.”
He left the squad room with a wave. “See you-all at the shrimp boil,” he said.
Omar lived in Hardee, twelve miles from Shelburne City, just north of the Bayou Bridge. The house he shared with Wilona was of the type called a “double shotgun,” two long, narrow shiplap homes that shared a single peaked roof. Early in his marriage, when Wilona had first got pregnant, he’d borrowed some money from his father and his in-laws, bought both halves of the house, knocked down some of the walls separating the two units, and created a spacious family home. They’d raised their son David here, and saved enough money to send him to LSU.
Though he and Wilona— chiefly Wilona— had created a pleasant little oasis on their property, with a lawn and garden and a pair of huge magnolias to shade it all in summertime, the rest of the neighborhood was less impressive. The asphalt roads were pitted and badly patched, with grass and weeds springing up here and there. The houses were a mixture of old shotgun homes and newer house trailers, with an occasional clapboard church. Cars and trucks stood on blocks in front yards. Some of the vehicles had been there so long they were covered by vines, and fire ants had piled conical mounds around the deflated tires. Cur dogs lolled in the shade, dozens of them. Laundry hung slack on lines. Old signs were still pegged on front lawns: Omar Paxton for Law and Decency. Confederate flags hung limp in the still air.
Omar waved to everyone as he drove slowly through the neighborhood in his chief’s cruiser. People waved back, shouted out congratulations.
These were the people who had turned out in droves to see him elected, who had overturned the local establishment and put him in office.
Maybe now, he thought, we can get the roads resurfaced.
He pulled into his carport and stepped from its air-conditioned interior into the Louisiana heat. The air was so sultry, and hung so listlessly in the still afternoon, that Omar thought he could absolutely feel the creases wilt on his uniform. He sagged.
People used to work in this heat, he thought. He himself had spent one whole day chopping cotton when he was a teenager, and by the end of the day, when he’d quit, he knew he’d better finish high school and get a job fit for a white man.
Sweat prickled his forehead as he walked the few paces from the carport to his front door. Inside, chill refrigerated air enveloped him, smelling of chopped onion and green pepper. He stopped inside the door and breathed it in.
“Is that potato salad I smell?” he said cheerfully. He took off his gun belt— damned heavy thing— and crossed the room to hang it from the rack that held his .30-’06, his shotgun, his Kalashnikov, and the Enfield his multi-great grandfather had carried in the War Between the States.
Wilona— who pronounced her name “Why-lona”— came from the kitchen, an apron over her housecoat. “Enough potato salad for twenty people,” she said. “There aren’t going to be more, are they?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t do the invitations.” He kissed her.
Wilona’s expression brightened. “Look!” She almost danced to the coffee table, where she picked up a cream-colored envelope. “Look what else we got!”
Omar saw the address engraved on the envelope and smiled. “I was wondering when this was going to come.”
“Mrs. Ashenden invited me to tea on Wednesday!” Wilona’s eyes sparkled. She was happy as a child at Christmas.
Omar took the envelope from her, slipped the card out of the envelope, opened it. Looked at the elegant handwriting. “Very nice,” he said. “Guess we’re among the quality now.”
“It’s so exciting!” Wilona said. “We finally got an invitation to Miz LaGrande’s! It’s just what we’ve wanted!”
What Omar wanted, actually, was for Mrs. LaGrande Davis Rildia Shelburne Ashenden to die, choke on one of her little color-coordinated petit fours maybe, and for her big white house, Clarendon, to burn to the ground. She was the last of the Shelburne family, and they’d been in charge of Spottswood Parish for too long.
“I’ll have to find a new frock,” Wilona said. “Thank God I have Aunt Clover’s pearls.”
“Your frocks are fine.” Omar put the invitation back into its envelope and frowned. “You’ll buy a new frock for old Miz LaGrande and you didn’t buy one for my swearing-in?”
She snatched the invitation from his hand. “But I’ll be going to Clarendon! Clarendon is different!”
“I wouldn’t buy a new frock for some old biddy who will never give us the vote,” Omar said. “Is there beer in the icebox?”
“I bought a case yesterday. There was a sale at the Super-B.”
Omar found some Coors Light in the icebox, twisted off the tops of two bottles, and returned to the living room to hand one to Wilona. She was sitting on the couch, paging through a copy of Southern Accents that she’d probably bought the second she’d received Miz LaGrande’s invitation.
Wilona took the beer she handed him and sighed. He had neglected to bring her a glass.
Wilona had always harbored ambitions above her station, probably inherited from her mother, who was a Windridge but who had done something disgraceful at LSU and ended up living with her shirttail relatives in Shelburne and had to marry a filling station owner.
Wilona longed for the lost world of mythic Windridge privilege. She longed to have tea at Clarendon and join the Junior League and wear crinolines at Garden Club functions. She wanted to be Queen of the Cotton Carnival and every so often invite a select group of friends to a pink tea, where everything, including the food, was color-coordinated, and even the waiter wore a pink tie.
Omar knew that none of this was ever going to happen.
Even Windridge pretentions had never extended that far. Instead of the pink teas, there would be shrimp boils, and fish fries, attendance at Caesarea Baptist, and meetings where people wore hoods of white satin and burned crosses. This was Wilona’s destiny, and his. This was the fate to which their birth had condemned them.
And it was the quality, the people like Miz LaGrande, who did the condemning. Whose gracious lives were made possible by the sweat of others, and who somehow, along with their white houses and cotton fields, had inherited the right to tell everyone else how to run their lives.
It was traditional, in Spottswood Parish, for anyone running for office to have tea at Clarendon, explain what they hoped to accomplish, and ask for Miz LaGrande’s blessing on their candidacy.
Omar had not gone to tea at Clarendon. He had just announced he was running, and then he ran hard. He beat the Party, and then the official candidate, and then the courts. And all the opposition ever managed to do was make him more popular and more famous.
And he did it all without asking Miz LaGrande for anything. And he never would ask her for anything. Not a damn thing. Not ever.
But now Miz LaGrande was fixing to have that tea, after all. And not with Omar, but with his wife.
The old lady still had a few brain cells left, that was clear.
“Miz LaGrande has never been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “No Yankee reporter is ever going to ask her for her opinion, I bet. I reckon German television isn’t gonna send a camera crew to Clarendon.”
“Of course not.” Wilona paged through her magazine, sipped on her beer.
“What’s so great about the Shelburnes?” Omar asked. “They come out here from Virginia, they ship in a couple hundred niggers from Africa to do their work for them, and they build a Greek temple to live in. Would you call that normal?”
Wilona looked up from her magazine, her eyebrows tucked in a frown. “Don’t be tacky,” she said.
“She’s trying to get at you because she can’t get at me. She’s trying to get you on her side.”
“Oh, darlin’, it’s just tea. And I’m always on your side, you know that.” She turned the page, and then showed Omar a picture. “Look at that kitchen! Isn’t that precious?”
Omar looked at the polished cabinets and the cooking implements, some of them pretty strange-looking, that hung from brass hooks. “It’s nice,” he said.
“It’s precious,” She looked wistfully at the picture, then looked up at Omar. “Can’t we have a kitchen like this? Can’t we have a new house?”
“Nothing wrong with the house we live in now,” Omar said.
“Of course there’s nothing wrong with it,” Wilona said. “I just think we deserve something better after all these years. You’ve got a much better salary now, and—”
“People voted the way they did for a reason,” Omar said. “They voted for us because they thought we were just like them. Because we lived in their neighborhood, because they saw us in their church, because they knew we were born here, because we didn’t pretend to be anything we weren’t. Because we live in a double shotgun that we fixed up, okay?”
Wilona cast a wistful look at her copy of Southern Accents. “I just want some things in my life to be lovely,” she said.
He fixed her with a look. “Wilona,” he said, “it’s too late to pledge Chi Omega now.”
She looked away. “That was a mean thing to say, Omar.”
“It’s true, ain’t it?”
“You should shower and change your clothes. We’ll be late for the shrimp boil.”
The phone rang. Omar took a pull from his long-neck, then rose from the couch to answer. It was his son David.
“Congratulations, Dad!” he said. “I’m popping a few brews to celebrate!”
“Thanks.” Omar felt a glow kindle in his heart. David was finishing his junior year at LSU and would be the first Paxton ever to graduate from college. Omar had got David through some rocky years in his teens— the boy was hot-tempered and had traveled with a rough crowd— but now David was safe in Baton Rouge and well on his way to escaping the shabby, tiny world of Spottswood Parish.
A place that Omar himself planned to escape, rising from his double shotgun home on the wings of a Kleagle. Once you get the people behind you, he thought, who knew how far you could go?
*
The concussions of the earthquake still continue, the shock on the 23rd ult. was more severe and larger than that of the 16th Dec. and the shock of the 7th inst. was still more violent than any preceding, and lasted longer than -perhaps any on record, (from 10 to 15 minutes, the earth was not at rest for one hour.) the ravages of this dreadful convulsion have nearly depopulated the district of New Madrid, but few remain to tell the sad tale, the inhabitants have fled in every direction ... Some have been driven from their houses, and a number are yet in tents. No doubt volcanoes in the mountains of the west, which have been extinguished for ages, are now opened.
Cape Girardeau, Feb. 15th, 1812
“This is delicious, Rhoda,” Omar said. He had some more of the casserole, then held up his plastic fork. “What’s in it?”
Rhoda, a plump woman whose shoulders, toughened to leather by the sun, were revealed by an incongruous, frilly fiesta dress, simpered and smiled.
“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “Green beans with cream of mushroom soup, fried onion rings, and Velveeta.”
“It’s delicious,” Omar repeated. He leaned a little closer to speak above the sound of the band. “You wouldn’t mind sending the recipe to Wilona, would you?”
“Oh no, not at all.”
“This casserole is purely wonderful. I’d love it if Wilona knew how to make it.”
Another vote guaranteed for yours truly, he thought as he left a pleased-looking constituent in his wake.
He wasn’t planning on staying sheriff forever. He had his machine together. He had his people. The state house beckoned. Maybe even Congress.
How long had it been since a Klan leader was in Congress? A real Klan leader, too, not someone like that wimp David Duke, who claimed he wasn’t Klan anymore.
Omar waved at D.R. Thompson, the owner of the Commissary, who was talking earnestly with Merle in the corner by the door to the men’s room. D.R. nodded back at him.
Ozie’s was jammed. The tin-roofed, clapboard bar past the Shelburne City corp limit had been hired for Omar’s victory party, and it looked as if half the parish had turned out for the shrimp boil and dance.
The white half, Omar thought.
Omar sidled up to the bar. Ozie Welks, the owner, passed him a fresh beer without even pausing in his conversation with Sorrel Ellen, who was the editor and publisher of the Spottswood Chronicle, the local weekly newspaper.
“So this Yankee reporter started asking me about all this race stuff,” Ozie said. “I mean it was Klan this and militia that and slavery this other thing. And I told him straight out, listen, you’ve got it wrong, the South isn’t about race. The South has its own culture, its own way of life. All everybody outside the South knows is the race issue, and the South is about a lot more than that.”
“Like what, for instance?” Sorrel asked.
“Well,” Ozie said, a bit defensive now that he had to think about it. “There’s football.”
Sorrel giggled. For a grown man, he had a strange, high-pitched giggle, a sound that cut the air like a knife. Being too close to Sorrel Ellen when he giggled could make your ears hurt.
“That’s right,” he said. “You got it right there, Ozie.” He turned to gaze at Omar with his watery blue eyes. “I think Ozie has a point, don’t you?”
“I think so,” Omar agreed. He turned to Ozie and said, “Hey, I just wanted to say thanks. This is a great party, and I just wanted to thank you for your help, and for your support during the election. Everybody around here knows that there’s nothing like an Ozie Welks shrimp boil.”
“I just want you to do right by us now you’ve got yourself elected,” Ozie said. He was a powerful man, with a lumberjack’s arms and shoulders, and the USMC eagle-and-globe tattooed on one bicep and “Semper Fidelis” on the other. His customers cut up rough sometimes— pretty often, to tell the truth— but he never needed to employ a man at the door. He could fling a man out of his bar so efficiently that the drunk was usually bouncing in the parking lot before the other customers even had time to blink.
“I’ll do as much as I can,” Omar said. “But you know, with all these damn Jew reporters in town, it’s going to be hard.”
“I hear you,” Ozie said.
Sorrel touched Omar’s arm. “I’m going to be running an editorial this Saturday on welfare dependency,” he said. “It should please you.”
Omar looked at the newspaperman. “Welfare dependency, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. You know, how we’ve been subsidizing bad behaviors all these years.”
“Uh-huh.” Omar nodded. “You mean like if we stop giving money to niggers, they’ll go someplace else? Something like that?”
“Well, not in so many words.” Sorrel winked as if he were confiding a state secret. “You’re going to like it.”
“So I’m going to like it, as opposed to all the editorials you’ve been running which I didn’t like.”
Sorrel made a face. “Sorry, Omar. But you know a paper’s gotta please its advertisers. And the folks who pay my bills weren’t betting on you winning the election.”
Omar looked at the publisher. “You betting on me now, Sorrel?”
Sorrel gave his high-pitched giggle. “I reckon I know a winner when I see one,” he said.
“Well,” Omar said. “God bless the press.”
He tipped his beer toward Ozie in salute, then made his way toward the back of the crowded bar. Sorrel, he had discovered, was not untypical. People who had despised him, or spoken against him, were now clustering around pretending they’d been his secret friends all along. A couple of the sheriff’s deputies, and one of the jailers, standoffish till now, had asked him for information about joining the Klan. Miz LaGrande was more discreet about it, with her hand-written invitation on her special stationery, but Omar could tell what she was up to. People were beginning to realize that the old centers of power in the parish were just about played out, and that there was a new force in the parish. They were beginning to cluster around the new power, partly because they smelled advantage, partly because everyone liked a winner.
Omar was perfectly willing to use these people, but he figured he knew just how far to trust them.
He stepped out the back door into the dusk. People had spilled out of the crowded bar and onto the grass behind, clustered into the circle of light cast by a yard light set high on a power pole. Wild shadows flickered over the crowd as bats dove again and again at the insects clustered around the light. The day’s heat was still powerful, but with the setting of the sun it had lost its anger.
Omar paused on the grass to sip his beer, and Merle caught up to him, “I spoke to D.R. about that camp meeting matter,” he said. “I squared it.”
“Thanks,” Omar said. “I don’t want people scared of losing their incomes just ’cause I got elected.”
“Not our people, anyway.”
“No.”
“And I think I calmed Jedthus down. Though it’s hard to tell with Jedthus.”
Omar frowned. “I know.”
Merle grinned. “Hey, wasn’t it nice of the Grand Wizard to turn up?”
“Yep.” Omar tipped his beer back, let the cool drink slide down his throat.
“He said he wanted to speak with you privately, if you can get away.”
“Yeah, sure.” Omar wiped his mouth. “Do you know where he is?”
“Talking to some folks over in the parking lot.”
“Right.” He put a hand on Merle’s shoulder and grinned. “We’re doin’ good, ain’t we?”
Merle grinned back. “You bet, boss.”
Omar crossed to the gravel parking lot and found the Grand Wizard perched on the tailgate of his camper pickup, talking to some of the locals. He was a small man, balding, who dressed neatly and wore rimless spectacles. He was not much of a public speaker, and even the white satins he wore on formal occasions did little more than make him look like a grocery clerk decked out for Halloween. He had risen to his position as head of the Klan— this particular Klan anyhow— by virtue of being a tireless organizer. He ran things because it was clear that nobody else would do it as well, or as energetically.
In his civilian life, he ran a bail bond agency in Meridian, Mississippi.
“Hi, Earl,” Omar said.
The Grand Wizard looked up and smiled. “Damn if it ain’t a fine day,” he said. “I was tellin’ the boys here how good you looked on television.”
“Knowing how to use the media,” Omar said, “that’s half the battle right there.”
“That’s right.” The Grand Wizard looked down at the ice in his plastic go-cup and gave it a meditative shake. “That’s where the Klan’s always been strong, you know. The uniforms. The burning crosses. The flags. They strike the eye and the heart. They makes you feel something.”
“That’s why I took the oath in front of the statue,” Omar said.
The Grand Wizard gave a sage nod. “That’s right,” he said. “Give everyone something to see and think about. The Mourning Confederate. The Cause that our people fought and died for. The Cause that still lives in our hearts. It speaks to everyone here.”
“Amen,” one of the boys said.
“We send signals to our people,” Omar said. “The media and the others read it however they like, but our people know the message we’re sending.”
“That’s right.” The Grand Wizard nodded.
“Merle said you wanted to talk to me or something?” Omar said.
“Oh, yeah.” The Grand Wizard slid off his tailgate to the ground. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse us .. .”
Omar and the Grand Wizard walked off to the side of the parking lot, where rusty barb wire drooped under the glossy weight of Virginia creeper. The sound of “Diggy Diggy Low” grated up from Ozie’s, where the fiddler was kicking up a storm.
“I was wondering if you could address our big Klanvention on Labor Day,” the Grand Wizard began.
“Sure,” Omar said.
For years, white supremacists had a big Labor Day meeting in Stone Mountain, Georgia. But the Grand Wizard had quarreled with the Stone Mountain organizers, and he’d started his own Labor Day meeting in Mississippi. He was always working hard to get more of the troops to turn out to his Klanvention than to the other meeting.
The Grand Wizard did not march to anyone else’s drum. He was the leader, and that was that. And if other people didn’t like it, they could just go to Stone Mountain.
Which brought to mind another problem, Omar thought. Whenever anyone in the Klan had challenged the Grand Wizard’s authority, the Grand Wizard had succeeded in cutting them off or driving them out of the organization.
Omar was now a good deal more famous than the Grand Wizard would ever be. If he wanted to take control of the entire Klan, Omar could probably do it.
But he didn’t want to become the new Grand Wizard. King Kleagle of Louisiana, as far as Omar was concerned, was quite enough work. Earl could stay in his office in Meridian and organize and speechify and push papers forever, and with Omar’s blessing.
Omar wondered if the Grand Wizard understood this. He should find the moment, he told himself, and reassure the man.
“You come to the Klanvention,” the Grand Wizard was saying, “we’ll get our message on TV. And every time we get media attention, we get more members.” The Grand Wizard grinned out into the night. His teeth were small, like a child’s, and perfectly formed. “The liberal media do us a favor every time they run a story on us. It’s only when they ignore us that people lose interest.”
Omar nodded. “I noticed that there were a lot of people in this parish that didn’t care to know me till I got on television. It’s like being on TV makes you more real somehow.”
“It’s that symbol thing, like I said earlier. They see you standing up for something.”
Omar suspected there was more to it than that, that maybe television had changed people’s ideas of what was real, but he was more interested in what the Grand Wizard was getting to. There wasn’t any reason to take Omar aside just to be talking about speaking engagements.
“I’ve got some other requests for you to speak, but they’re not from our people, so I can’t judge.”
“Just forward ’em to me,” Omar said.
“I’ll do that.”
The Grand Wizard paused, hands in his pockets, and glanced around.
“I met a fella the other day you might want to talk to,” he said. “His name’s Knox. Micah Knox. You ever heard of him?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
The Grand Wizard’s foot toyed with the butt-end of an old brown beer bottle half hidden in the creeper. “He belongs to a group called the Crusaders National of the Tabernacle of Christ. He’s got some interesting views about, you know, the situation. Very well informed. He’s on a sort of tour of the country, and you might want to have him give a talk to your boys here.”
Omar vaguely remembered hearing about the Tabernacle of Christ— they were some kind of Western group, he thought— but there were so many little groups on his end of the political spectrum that he had trouble sorting one out from another. It was hard enough just keeping track of the sixty-odd groups that called themselves the Klan.
“He doesn’t charge or anything,” the Grand Wizard added, misinterpreting Omar’s hesitation. “He’s just trying to make contacts.”
“He can come by if he wants, I guess,” Omar said.
“This isn’t a matter for an open meeting or anything,” the Grand Wizard said. “No cameras, no reporters. Just you and Knox and Merle and a few of the boys you best trust.”
Omar gave him a sharp look. “Earl, is there a reason this Knox is under cover?”
The Grand Wizard gave a little shake of his head as he rolled the old beer bottle under his sole. “No, no. What I’m saying is that this boy is radical. People who haven’t already given their lives completely to the Cause might misunderstand his message. We wouldn’t want that. That’s all.”
“Okay, then,” Omar said. “He can say whatever he likes, as long as he’s not planning on doing anything radical while he’s here.”
The Grand Wizard kicked the beer bottle. Restrained by the creeper, it hopped about three inches, then came to a stop, edge-side up. The Grand Wizard sighed, then began to amble back toward Ozie’s. “I’ll be in touch about him,” he said. “I don’t know what his schedule is, exactly.”
“Fine.”
“By the way,” the Grand Wizard said, “I saw that new sign— Hess-Meier Plantation Farm.”
“Inc.,” Omar added. Then, “Jews. Swiss Jews.”
“They buy the gin, too?”
“Of course,” Omar said. “If they took their cotton to someone else’s gin, they wouldn’t make so many sheckels.” Omar shrugged. “Well, at least there’s another gin in the parish, down to Hardee, and that one’s American.”
The Grand Wizard shook his head. “Wrightson couldn’t at least sell out to Americans?”
“Hess-Meier was top bidder. Now half the agricultural land in the parish is owned by the fuckin’ Swiss.”
“It isn’t our country anymore.” The Grand Wizard sighed.
It never was, Omar wanted to tell him. It’s always been owned by the wrong people, who traded land and money back and forth within their circle, and the people who lived on the land and worked it never figured in their calculations.
Omar and the Grand Wizard walked up to Ozie’s back door. Wilona was there, a plate in her hand. She was talking to Deb Drury, whose husband ran the towing service. “This fruit salad is so special,” she said. “I can taste something different in it.”
“Black cherry Jell-O,” Deb said. “Fruit and pecans, and Co-Cola.”
Wilona leaned close to Deb and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to impose,” she said, “but could you send me the recipe?”
Omar looked at his wife and gave her a wink.
Just treat the people like they actually exist, he thought, and next thing you know, they put you in charge.