American Follies

by Norman Lock

  “Can you help her?” I asked, sensing that he could. He saw the trust in my eyes, which Shelby Ross had once called “pretty,” and smiled warmly.

  “I came a long way for just that reason,” he said. He lifted the rattling lid from the pot, brought his face close to the potion—for such I knew it to be—and sniffed. “Almost done,” he said, covering the boiling mixture. “You ladies are crazy to have started on this undertaking.” He fingered the loose flesh at his throat. I noticed a scar that could only have been left by a rope. “You see plain enough I am old, but if I was to tell you that I’m the same age as Abraham was when he died, you would think I was crazy. It’s one thing to read about the old begetters in the Book of Genesis, but to sit next to a hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old black man waiting for a pot to boil has got to be dumbfounding.”

  Elizabeth giggled—nervously, I thought.

  The negro examined the contents of the pot, spooned some, blew on it, and, having tasted it, declared it done. He stirred the pot, filled a tin cup, and handed it to me. “Now you get this medicine down her before she dies of spite, for you all have come to the land of the spiteful, who are waiting at the end of the tracks to do the Devil’s work.”

  “What is it?” I asked curiously. It smelled like something I—well, I could not have said what exactly, but it brought to mind an afternoon when I was a girl no taller than Margaret. My mother had taken me to visit an old woman living at Carroll Gardens, beside Gowanus Creek. An ancient negro, his trouser legs rolled up, was tonging for oysters. Sniffing the liquid in the tin cup, I smelled the creek, the mud bank, and the man when he came out of the brackish water and showed me the oysters in his sack, their rough shells the size of supper plates.

  “It’s a remedy for an evil juju,” replied the healer and herbalist. “Slaves made their own medicines: red oak bark tea for purging, bloodroot for croup, foxglove for dropsy, chokeberry for bloody flux, jimsonweed for rheumatism, chestnut leaf for the lungs, rosemary for the blues, sassafras for bad blood, snakeroot for snakebite, boneset for fevers. There is a root can turn a black man white, though I never saw it done. A cup of this will get rid of the vapors that got into your friend’s heart. They sicken childlike folk whose hearts are gay.”

  “How did you know Margaret would be here?”

  “I know lots of things I have no reason knowing.”

  “Do you know anything about locomotives?” asked Elizabeth, changing the subject from arcane matters to pragmatic ones.

  “What in particular?”

  “Why one would stop and refuse to go any farther?”

  “Might not have been a real locomotive.”

  “Nonsense!” said Susan waspishly.

  “Might have been the idea of one. Somebody might have gotten tired of lugging it around in his head and just stopped thinking about it. Even an imaginary locomotive’s a heavy load. Did it disappear?”

  “It rode off out of sight.”

  “Yessir, it was a weight got off somebody’s mind. Now get the potion in her before it loses its goodness.”

  I rested Margaret’s head in my lap and fed her a spoonful. Since she was fast asleep, the reddish liquid drained from between her lips. “Margaret, wake up!” I shook her, but she would not wake. Susan slapped her hard, leaving a red mark on her cheek. Stung into consciousness, Margaret swallowed most of the liquid before she closed her eyes again.

  “She’ll sleep while the vapors come out.” The black man pointed a gnarled finger at Margaret’s breast. He covered her with a piece of sacking, felt her forehead tenderly, and said, “In a little while, she’ll be right again. But you ladies take care. You are walking into the lion’s den, like Daniel, and I have no root to brew to keep you safe from the hatred of men. Unless the Lord sees fit to close the lion’s mouth, I fear for you.”

  Elizabeth laid her hand on the black man’s sleeve. “You’ve done a good deed today, my friend, and we’re beholden to you. I hope you, too, will be well and go well.”

  “I go where I need to go,” he replied cryptically. He smiled and, having gathered up his few belongings, walked into the forest, until he disappeared from view. In my fanciful state of mind, it was a ghost I saw growing pale among the watchful trees.

  Catawamptious

  WE SAW NO ONE ELSE UNTIL we came to a field of okra, indigenous to West Africa, like the blacks who were picking it, watched by an overseer who glared at us as at a quartet of freaks. After an hour’s trudge, we reached the outskirts of Spottswood.

  To have read one of Ned Buntline’s dime novels is to know Spottswood, since one half-dead hard-luck town is like another. Spottswood was dirt streets planted with a scraggle of “concerns,” few of which looked likely to take root. The men favored the saloon, the barber’s, the stable, and the hardware store. The women patronized Gould’s Emporium and the Baptist church, whose steeple had been blasted by lightning. Inside, someone was picking at a hymn tune as at a worrying scab. We went into a lunchroom next to the hotel, where strips of fly-beaded sticky paper hung from the ceiling. We were arrested while eating strawberry buckle. Susan and Elizabeth would not go quietly; they tongue-lashed the sheriff, who “took off the kid gloves—women be damned!” If Lilian Heigold had been there, she’d have split the dullard’s skull with her stick.

  “I won’t be interfered with!” protested Elizabeth through the bars of our cell.

  Susan, on the other hand, having had previous experience as a jailbird, was outwardly calm. “What charges do you have to bring against us?”

  The sheriff took off his dented Stetson and mopped the sweatband and his bald head with an unsavory handkerchief. Having satisfied the demands of frontier hygiene, he put his hat back on and squinted down the barrel of his gun at four wanted posters that its butt end had tacked to the jailhouse wall. We saw our faces reflected in four crudely engraved portraits.

  “We’ve no use for your kind in Shelby County!” he growled. “They may tolerate your shenanigans back east, but in Tennessee women know their place.” He sat in a chair and spun his spur with menace.

  “I suppose you object to a woman’s right to vote,” said Susan with a prideful sniff.

  “And of her right to a fair wage!” declaimed Elizabeth, as if she were in Philadelphia at the Athenaeum, instead of in the land of lynching.

  “And to be protected from a husband who bullies and dishonors her!”

  “And to divorce him!”

  “And should she divorce him, to keep her property and her children!”

  “And to marry whom she pleases, even if the man happens to be a negro!” A skillful orator, Elizabeth saved the most inflammatory issue for last.

  Infuriated, the sheriff spat tobacco juice through the bars. Margaret had to jump to save her shoes. “We won’t put up with any of your New York City horseshit!”

  “What do you intend to do with us?” asked Susan, giving another sniff of disdain, which her pinched nose amplified.

  “Keep you here till the circuit judge gets around to visiting. In the meantime, I hope the good citizens of this town will overpower me tonight and drag you four to the nearest tree. I would pay to see it properly done.”

  “Why have you arrested them?” asked Elizabeth, indicating Margaret and me.

  He raised his fist to me and snarled, “This bitch whelped a black bastard, and in Shelby County, fornication and miscegenation are against the law.” He jabbed a finger rudely toward Margaret. “And that one there ran away from the Arkansas Asylum for Wayward Girls, where she was locked up on account of immorality and arson.”

  “I am not a girl, nor am I immoral!” said Margaret grandly. “And I am certainly not an arsonist! I’m an attraction of P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome. Having lost nearly everything five times to fire, he wouldn’t have hired me had I shown the least tendency toward pyromania.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t mention that trickster’s name in Shelby County. We don’t take kindly to fli
mflam and bunkum.” The brute spat again. “For your information, midget, an agent of the Confederate Secret Service set fire to the American Museum to punish Barnum for being a bigmouthed nigger-lover and a Jew.” The sheriff put his face against the bars and hissed, “Let me tell you something: I believe in Hell, and you four bitches have stumbled into a place seven times hotter. So keep your puke holes shut while I go home and stuff mine with pork chops and hominy. And if I get a bellyache ’cause of you, I’ll personally see that you’re catawamptiously chewed up, as we say in Shelby County!” He grimaced, as though he’d taken a bite of Susan, whose sour face promised indigestion. He turned and went to his supper, locking the jailhouse door behind him.

  The sheriff’s talk of Hell brought to mind the story of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The king commanded that they be bound and thrown into a fiery furnace, which was stoked for their cremation to burn seven times hotter than usual. When he looked inside it, he saw the three Hebrews walking unbound amid the flames and, with them, a fourth man who resembled the son of God. Which of us, I wondered, would be the most likely child of the Almighty? Margaret, I guessed, because it would be just like Him to embody Himself in the most unlikely piece of creation, the better to astonish. (Try as I may, I can’t imagine any other god but Barnum.)

  “The sheriff would make a dramatic illustration for the lecture platform,” said Elizabeth. “We could call him ‘Man at His Most Evolved.’”

  “I’d rather see the so-and-so stuffed in a taxidermist’s window,” countered Susan acidly.

  “What now?” asked Margaret.

  “Time will tell,” replied Susan.

  “If we can escape, should we go back or press on?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Let’s put it to a vote.” Not even the threat of being chewed catawamptiously could weaken Susan’s devotion to woman’s suffrage. We were a democracy of four and would respect the wishes of the majority. Trembling, I awaited the result that would determine Martin’s fate.

  We voted by acclamation: “On to Memphis!”

  “Thank you, dear friends!” I cried. “And should it be the case that my son is a negro—”

  “He could be a Tartar, for all I care,” said Elizabeth grandly.

  Like a special envoy of the Omnipotent, the sheriff’s wife entered. Seeing bedclothes in her arms, we thought she had come to make up our cots. “Hurry!” she said, unlocking the cell door. “You might not get another chance!”

  We were astounded by this turn of events.

  “Why are you helping us?”

  “I’m a suffragist—or I would be if I lived up north and weren’t married to a lout.”

  “Does he beat you?” asked Elizabeth, who habitually canvassed women on their treatment by men.

  “Yes, but there’s no time to show you my bruises. You must hurry, before he whistles for his pie.”

  “He’ll suspect you,” said Susan worriedly.

  “He’ll blame your escape on the negroes.”

  “Come with us!” urged Elizabeth, taking the sheriff’s wife by the hand.

  “I can’t leave my children. Now you really must go!”

  We followed her out the back door. “Take these.” She gave us each a bedsheet and a pillowcase. “When you get to Memphis, put these on.” She gave me a pair of shears and said, “Tonight, they intend to sacrifice your son to the Imperial Wizard. Everyone will be dressed in Klan costumes. You’ll be able to pass unnoticed among the crowd. Look!” She pointed west, where night had begun to fall. The sky seemed on fire, as if the remnant light of Krakatoa shone. The evening sky had looked like this when Barnum’s museum, his Hippotheatron, and Iranistan, his mogul palace in Connecticut, were consumed. On such a night an age and more ago, Caesar’s centurions had set alight the Great Library of Alexandria, where catawamptious did not appear on the scrolls and codices written in all the languages of the literate world.

  “Godspeed!” said Susan.

  “We’re grateful!” said Elizabeth.

  “Thank you, you dear good woman!” cried Margaret, close to tears.

  I threw my arms around the sheriff’s wife and let my eyes rain. She shook herself free and pushed me toward the burning sky.

  The Invisible Empire

  I’LL NEVER FORGET THE FLOURY CHEEK of our jailor’s wife, who was, I suppose, making a pie as she struggled with her conscience. That courage can rise like dough in a bowl is heartening. I’m glad whenever I recall an atom of kindness from the oblivion that swathes our little lives as a bandage does tender flesh. I would not thank God to be reborn if His grant meant that I must relive that painful time. One does not care to be mauled twice by a tiger—not even in exchange for immortality.

  On the outskirts of Memphis, we came upon a disused railroad shed. We went inside and, with the shears, cut eyeholes in the pillowslips and roughly tailored the sheets to fit our different forms. Margaret needed half a sheet; Elizabeth had to make do with one, an accommodation that exposed her lower extremities.

  “Praise God you didn’t wear your bloomers!” remarked Susan, casting a critical eye on her friend encased in a linen shroud.

  “You look like a malnourished ghost!” retorted Elizabeth, stung by the affront.

  “This is not a beauty contest!” objected Susan, rearranging her sheet.

  To hear them fuss, you would have thought we were in Mrs. Crockett’s boardinghouse and not in a tar-paper shack stinking of oil and creosote, surrounded by Klansmen awaiting the Holy Terrors to put an innocent mulatto child to the stake.

  I accepted Susan’s idea that little Martin had been begotten by God’s special agent, an angel of color that the prophet Ezekiel had glimpsed in a dream, “whose appearance [was] like the appearance of brass.” But I struggled to answer the question, If I had the fabulous root that could turn black to white, would I brew a potion and give it to my child to drink, or would I let him be as God or accident had made him? To save the skin of one we love, what principle will we not betray, what treason not commit?

  Disguised, we walked toward the heights overlooking the Mississippi River, where the city had fallen to Union gunboats during the War of the Rebellion. No sooner had it ended than Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Memphis man, founded the Invisible Empire. (Too late, he would repudiate it.) On the bluffs stood three tall crosses slathered with tar to make them flammable. The flanking pair had been set alight; flames rose into that region of the air where night birds fly. On one, Elizabeth’s straw-filled effigy hung; on the other, Susan’s. I could hear them crackle. The central cross had not yet been lighted. I knew that it was intended for my child. Holding flaming torches aloft, a satanic host of robed and hooded men waited expectantly for the appointed hour.

  “They’ve made my effigy three times larger than yours!” complained Elizabeth.

  Susan snorted and said, “Keep your mind on the business at hand, Lizzie.”

  We passed fearfully through the mob, in spite of the anonymity conferred by our costume. Their eyes fixed on the crosses, none noticed Elizabeth’s shins. Not even Margaret stood out in the crowd, since the Klansmen had dressed their children as smaller versions of themselves. For all her fortitude, however, Margaret began to whimper. A Klanswoman stopped and spoke to her, “There’s no reason to cry, child. You’re among the chosen people. No harm can come to you.” She patted Margaret’s covered head and walked away, pulling a miniature Klansman sucking his thumb after her. I wished I had a gun, so that I could deflate her smugness with a bullet. Thus does hatred beget hatred, from age to everlasting age.

  Night was falling fast, and the mob moved restlessly toward the hill. As we drew near, we saw that a platform had been raised in front of the central cross. With its row of chairs and a potted plant, it was like any other stage from which a harangue or a homily would be delivered (except that the plant was the highly toxic Heart of Jesus). At the center of the platform squatted a bulky object covered by a sheet. (The sheet was ensanguined—a word mean
ing “bloody,” I’d learned from Mr. James.)

  Six men climbed the wooden stairs; five sat and the sixth, Ethan Dorn, the Grand Cyclops of the Memphis Klan, tore off the bloody sheet to reveal an altar. Arranged before him lay the symbolic instruments of his priesthood: a bucket of tar, a sack of feathers, a knife, and a noose.

  “The frightful hour of the dreadful day, in the weeping week of the furious month, has come,” he intoned solemnly. “Goblins and ghouls from all over the realm—its dominions and provinces—have assembled tonight on this shining hill where Nathan Bedford Forrest laid the foundation for the Invisible Empire. He later fell into error, as prophets sometimes will, but we honor him as the founder of our holy order.

  “Along with Grand Turk Butterfield, Grand Sentinel Wallace, Grand Ensign Rollins, Grand Magi Ford, and the venerable Grand Giant Collins, Grand Cyclops emeritus, I welcome you to this special wrecking, in which the gross product of an intermarriage—detestable in the sight of God and His Klan—will be cleansed at the foot of the fiery cross.”

  A thousand ghouls and goblins began to sing the hymn whose refrain I’d first heard from Alma Bridwell White’s pukehole in Zarephath:

  To the Bright Fiery Cross, I will ever be true;

  All blame and reproach gladly bear,

  And friendship will show to each Klansman I know;

  Its glory forever we’ll share.

  So, I’ll cherish the Bright Fiery Cross

  Till from my duties at last I lay down;

  Then burn for me a Bright Fiery Cross;

  The day I am laid in the ground.

  So mighty was the voice that rose from a thousand blasted hearts, it could have raised the dead negroes who’d been lynched, burned, or beaten from the shallow graves into which they’d been shoveled. The ghouls, hydras, furies, and terrors were in ecstasy, because there’s no sport like a blood sport and no living creature—not a fox or a wolf, a lion or an elephant—is more gratifying to slaughter than a man, preferably a black, yellow, or red one. With each new stanza, the hymn grew louder; each time the refrain was bellowed, the frenzy of the mob increased, and so did our terror. Shivers ran through us like electric shocks, but they were identical to the fits of rapture of the beings around us—I cannot call them “human.”