American Follies

by Norman Lock

  Grand Cyclops Dorn returned to his theme; his words came faster and more trenchantly. He was inflaming the mob as the Klan’s fallen idol Nathan Bedford Forrest had done when he incited the men of Fort Pillow to massacre five hundred surrendering black Union soldiers. “Behind me, you see the charred likenesses of two of the North’s most repulsive women. They promote the amalgamation of the races. They would corrupt the purity of our offspring with the tainted blood of Jews, coons, Polacks, papists, and dagoes.”

  The mob sang lustily:

  We’re busy working for our race,

  Our families, and our homes;

  We keep the niggers in their place

  And the dago pope in Rome.

  “I can tell you all with absolute certainty that we are doing the Lord’s work,” said Dorn.

  The multitude answered its high priest in a single unmusical voice:

  Oh, I’d rather be a Klansman

  In a robe of snowy white

  Than be a Roman Catholic priest

  In a robe as dark as night.

  “Do you think God would have allowed Africans to become enslaved if he had the least regard for them?”

  “No, God be praised!”

  “Do you think the Almighty has the least little bit of love for the negro race?”

  “None at all!”

  “Do you think He intended that there be a place called Orange Mound in the State of Tennessee, where negroes can live on land only white men know how to work?”

  “No, suh, He most surely did not!” The infernal congregation had fallen into the call-and-response patter—the shouts of praise and indignation—heard in a black church.

  “Do you think He’s pleased with His white children for allowing such a travesty?”

  “Stick ’em in the ground and leave ’em to rot!”

  His forearms resting on the altar, Dorn went on in a confidential tone: “Now if anyone from up North was to hear me …” Elizabeth went rigid inside her sheet and, I imagined, turned as white as it. “They would think me full up with braggadocio, which is what we country folk call ‘bullshit,’ having no use for dago words, French ones, or the palabras of the darkies who live on the wrong side of the Río Grande.”

  “Burn the greasers!” screamed the crowd. “Turn them into human torches!”

  “I would love to send the Twelve Terrors and a wrecking crew to lay waste to the nigger Mexicans who have the temerity to live smack up against our southern border!”

  “Build a wall! Build a wall to keep them out!”

  “I would personally set fire to anybody living within the sacred Realm of Tennessee who has the gall to talk spiggoty or any other ignorant lingo!” shouted Dorn. The mob’s thundering applause could have pulverized gallstones. “But we are here tonight to set another fire—”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “A fire of purgation that will show the Lord God that His chosen race won’t stand for miscegenation, won’t sit quietly by while the sacred blood of the white race is polluted by the black blood of the negro or negress, and will never tolerate bastardy!”

  “Lord, show no mercy!”

  He took the ceremonial knife and pointed it at Elizabeth’s burnt effigy. “If I had this perversity of nature in front of me, I would gut her and fill all the lamps in Memphis with her lard and have enough left over to waterproof a revival tent.” I could almost see Elizabeth’s hackles rise. “Elizabeth—Cady—Stanton!” He spat out her name like something vile on the tongue. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the author of all women’s mischief in this country. She is a godless, unwholesome demagogue who preaches a woman’s rights: her right to have an opinion and speak it publicly no matter how ridiculous, the right to vote for a president or a governor when her only experience with a ballot is casting it at the county fair for the best apple pie or homemade hat, the right to leave her husband on a whim and take his money, his property, and his children with her, and the right to sleep with negroes anytime she feels her loins itch!”

  “God pour His holy fire on the whore!”

  He pointed his knife at Susan’s effigy. “Now this person—I do not dare call her a woman—Miss Susan B. Anthony—the B stands for bitch!—is Stanton’s battleax, who graduated from loving negroes to women.” He spat again. (Southern men must get dry as sticks by the end of the day.)

  “Please, God, throw her into the lake of everlasting fire!”

  “Of the two, Susan [spit] B. [spit] Anthony [spit] is far worse because—all you ghouls, goblins, furies, dragons, and genii—she is unnatural.”

  “Oh, Lord of Heaven and Hell, skin her, tan her, and turn her into leather pouches to keep our chaw in!”

  “Susan B. Anthony is worse than any fallen lily, soiled dove, strumpet, or succubus. I can forgive the wayward girl who lets herself become some man’s creature; I could, like Jesus, forgive a woman taken in adultery so long as she is not my wife, but I will never countenance sodomy!”

  “Burn the witch! Burn the witch! Burn the witch!”

  “Unfortunately, these two abominations are far away from the pure hands of the righteous who would tear them limb from limb. They are living in the infamous American Babylon of the Hebrews and the Irish—New York City! But tonight we have the rotten fruit of their philosophy: the mulatto bastard of a woman who serves the high priestesses of the cult of emasculation, the woman who typewrites their obscene blasphemies and who learned her unfeminine skill at the so-called Young Women’s Christian Association, which is a coven for modern-day witches.”

  My tongue tasted like a sour pickle, and I bit it to keep from crying out in indignation. One word—one syllable of disapproval—and I’d have been ripped apart by the ravening beast that is a mob. I’d have been catawamptiously eaten.

  “Burn the bastard!” it chanted. “Burn the nigger brat!” “Grand Guard, it is time. Bring forth the sacrifice!” commanded Grand Cyclops Dorn in the voice of doom. “Burn, baby, burn!”

  Six men dressed like the rest marched out the back door of a nearby house. Behind them, a Klanswoman carried Martin in her arms. He appeared to be asleep. She must have given him laudanum or gin, I told myself, for him to sleep through such a commotion. She and her escort brought my baby to the altar as the zealots sang:

  Rally round the sacred altar

  Purged of sin and baseless fear;

  Ne’er shall Knights in armor falter,

  Nor shall Craven enter in.

  The Grand Cyclops put the child on the rough-hewn altar and, with a finger dipped in pine tar, drew the sign of the cross on his small brow. Next, he sprinkled feathers over him, and around his neck, he tied a noose fashioned from butcher’s twine instead of the hemp reserved for the fully grown. The ritual at an end, Dorn held the baby on high for the people to see. They roared their disapproval and shrieked their enmity. By the infernal blaze of their torches, they stamped their feet as one. Thunder rolled across the river into Arkansas. Joshua’s army of forty thousand Israelites had made such a noise on the Plain of Jericho. The ground shook as it had in 1812, when the earth buckled at the New Madrid fault line in Missouri and people trembled as far north as Cairo and as far south as Memphis—cities of the New World, visited by the ruthless gods of the old. Yes, hyperbole is necessary! How else am I to capture an experience that was out of all proportion to ordinary life?

  Mark Twain would have said, “By exaggeration!”

  Gallagher would have sneered, “By prevarication!”

  Henry James would have asserted, “By convolution!”

  Barnum would have boasted, “By mystification!”

  Dorn raised his hand, and the crowd grew silent. “I now call upon the Imperial Wizard to make his presence known!” The crowd parted, and a large man astride an enormous white horse decked with flowers ambled toward the platform. His conical hat was twice as tall as any other, and his robes were scarlet. The ghouls and other lesser folk fell back at his approach, many of them trembling in awe. “Bow down to the Imperial Wizard!”
shouted Dorn, who made his obeisance to the leader of the Klan.

  Sitting his horse lightly, the Imperial Wizard nodded his noble head to his worshipful followers, from whom not a peep was heard. Not even the little Klan boys and girls dared to make a sound, for fear of incurring the Wizard’s high displeasure.

  Dorn turned to the five dignitaries on the platform. “Light the sacred fire!”

  They rose from their chairs and went to the central cross, which was also painted black with tar. No sooner had their torches touched the wood than it caught fire. The flames spread upward in a whoosh until the cross was engulfed. People as far away as Fulton could’ve seen the ghastly light in the sky and would have wondered at its meaning. The shrouded assembly kept a religious silence as the Imperial Wizard on his horse drew as near to the fiery cross as he could without scorching his canonicals.

  “The Grand Council of Yahoos has tried this abomination,” blustered Dorn. “And it has found him guilty of the grievous sin of having been born black. Accordingly, the Grand Council sentenced Martin Finch, by the ‘one-drop rule’ of blood, to be given to the fires of retribution and be consumed therein. If his mother were here, she would be put to death, as well, for conceiving him in her white woman’s belly.”

  Dorn took my darling babe from the altar and carried him to the cross, where a manger packed with straw awaited him. Meanwhile, the five potentates had assembled into a tableau in mockery of the shepherds who, in Bible times, had left their flocks and gone to glorify the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

  “Before you all and in the name of the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire and of the white race, which God made in His image, I sacrifice this creature! Non Silba Sed Anthar: Not for Self, but for Others.”

  “Not for self, but for others!”

  Fists clenched, I rushed toward the monstrous Nativity. Elizabeth gasped, Susan moaned, and Margaret’s voice caught in her throat. Entranced by the flames, no one else saw me. Dorn was about to toss the child, like a stick of firewood, into the burning manger. I took the shears from underneath my robe and would have plunged them into his wicked heart had a Voice (the common noun is too paltry for so uncommon an utterance) not cracked the awful silence into splinters, like a window shattered by a stone.

  “Let My Son Go!”

  I don’t know how to convey the quality of that voice, which seemed to have no source other than the sky. It was loud—what a feeble word to say how it boomed and resounded round about us! In such a voice, God had called into being the firmaments, Earth, and all living things. With it, He had plundered Adam of a rib and made Eve, whose moist earth would bring forth all the generations of our kind, which must end in the cold earth of the grave. In such a voice, God had sent plagues against the stiff-backed Egyptians and charged the angel of death to visit them in their houses to break them of stubbornness. At its dread command, the Red Sea had parted, the tablets of the law cracked, and fire poured onto the heads of the Sodomites. In a voice like that which thundered above Memphis at the frightful hour of the dreadful day, in the weeping week of the furious month, Ahab had shouted his defiance at Moby Dick.

  The stentorian Voice continued: “If Any Harm Befalls Him, I Will Destroy Your Houses, Slay Your Children, Sow Your Bodies with Corruption and Your Fields with Salt, Turn Your Wits with Fevers, and Damn Your Souls to Everlasting Pain!”

  Dorn dropped the baby in the grass and ran. The white horse decked with flowers reared and threw the Imperial Wizard to the ground, which opened to receive him. The grand army of the Invisible Empire skedaddled into the forest.

  I was about to scoop Martin up in my arms, when the Klanswoman who’d carried him from the house and given him to Dorn knocked me to the ground. Tearing off my hood, she cried out in recognition, “You!” I knew the voice and the eyes behind the mask; they belonged to Alma Bridwell White. She took the child and ran toward the burning cross, the tar snapping and the scorched wood swelling in the heat. She’d have given him to the fire had Margaret not snatched him from her grasp. White turned in fury; as she did, a fountain of sparks fell onto her robe, setting it alight. She spun crazily, as though a swarm of bees had settled on her; she swatted the flames and screamed. In a moment, she’d exchanged her white robe for one of fire, like the golden one Medea gave Jason. As Margaret, Susan, Elizabeth, and I watched, White ran to the bluff and jumped into the Mississippi. Once, I’d watched as boys poured coal oil on a crow and lighted it. White reminded me of that terrible sight, though I didn’t pity her as I had the blazing bird plummeting from the bridge into New-town Creek.

  “Let’s go before they come back!” urged Susan.

  We hurried along the heights and didn’t stop until we reached French Fort, lower down the river.

  By the wall of the deserted garrison, we caught our breath and collected our wits like scattered parcels. Martin fretted in a sleep nourished by a potent distillation while we marveled at events and, in particular, the Voice, which had delivered us from evil.

  “It could only have been God’s, for none other could have routed a multitude of hardened men and scarcely less hardened women,” reasoned Susan. “Only He is capable of so mighty an effect.”

  Although Elizabeth was loath to surrender her religious skepticism, she couldn’t explain the “effect” by adducing either natural or mechanical causes to anyone’s satisfaction, including her own.

  “I’ve heard it before, though not so hugely amplified,” said Margaret.

  We looked at her dubiously.

  “When?” asked Susan.

  “From whose mouth?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Mr. Barnum’s speaking through a megaphone when he addressed spectators in the seats farthest from the center ring; in barrel-vaulted train sheds amid the thunderous noise of departure when he bid farewell to onlookers; and in Gotham, Chicago, San Francisco, and London when he shouted greetings to passersby above the din of traffic, circus screamers, and excited elephants.”

  Elizabeth and Susan were not convinced. They could believe in a god who can crack the foundations of the universe with a shout, but a mere man or woman—no. True, some can shatter glass with a long-held operatic note, but a party trick is hardly comparable to an admonition that can disperse a thousand fools.

  I accepted Margaret’s explanation because it solved the mystery surrounding the person Susan had glimpsed and I had heard softly breathing inside the caboose. Human beings can’t tolerate a mystery and, in trying to solve it, will many times beget a greater one. Just so do we move from question to question while the world becomes more complicated instead of less, and we ourselves grow more puzzled and alone.

  Little Martin opened his eyes and looked into mine with an intelligence and a frankness I had not seen there before. I thought I saw him wink, as if he knew a secret I did not, such as the mystery of his birth. There was no doubt about it: He was a negro boy.

  Minstrelsy

  A MILE OR SO BELOW FRENCH FORT, we came upon the ramshackle abode of Mr. Brister Warwick, a former slave. He greeted us with a shotgun aimed unequivocally at Elizabeth, who appeared to be our leader and was the surer target.

  “Get your hands up!” he said with the meanness you sometimes find in people who’ve had all they can stand of cruelty and terror.

  You see, we’d neglected to take off our improvised goblin suits.

  “We’re not Klanswomen!” spluttered Elizabeth. With a gun barrel poking at her ribs, she could be forgiven her petulance. “We are northern suffragists traveling incognito.”

  The man appeared suspicious. Who could blame him? In Shelby County, a night visit from folks dressed like ghosts did not bode well for a negro. To be fair, Shelby was not the only county in America where black people could be dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Some folks think lynching is more fun than a circus, and admission is free.

  “The Klan is after us,” said Susan, calmly disrobing. The rest of us quickly followed suit.

  Facing two old women, a “slip of
a girl,” as Franklin liked to say of me, a tiny woman, and a baby, Brister relaxed his grip on the rifle’s business end. “This have something to do with the ruckus I heard from upriver?”

  “It does indeed,” said Elizabeth, who related the story of our anabasis and explained the reason we had come—a story that would have been smoother in the telling had it not been for Susan’s interjections. Margaret and I forbore to contribute to the babel. Little by little, Brister became convinced of our innocence. Whether he believed in the Voice is another matter. He offered to help us get out of Tennessee.

  “Just before first light, I’ll row you across to Arkansas. Not that Arkansas is friendlier to northern busybodies than Tennessee, but any dogs they’ve set on you will lose your scent in the river.”

  “We’re grateful to you, Mr. Warwick,” we said in our several ways, all of them sincere.

  “You folks hungry?” We were. “I have salt meat and bread and some goat’s milk for the child.” He went into his kitchen shed and returned with our meager supper. Before we ate, he blessed it and commended us into God’s safekeeping.

  “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll give you some blankets to sleep on.”

  “We brought our own bedsheets!” quipped Elizabeth, whose native cheerfulness supper had restored.

  I made a nest for Martin in an empty apple crate and watched as he tumbled back into sleep. You’re better there, I told him in my thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, or maybe I did. Sleep or wakefulness, Tennessee or Arkansas were one and the same to me then. That night, I clung to certain facts: the child, the sour smell of goat’s milk on his breath, a blister on my thumb raised in cutting bedsheets, Elizabeth’s snores, Susan’s slumberous harrumphs, the glint of light on the barrel of the old negro’s gun, which he held in his arms as he dozed by the iron stove, and my memory of the Sholes & Glidden, which was fading.