Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  His addresses everywhere were extended monologues rather than speeches, a hectic one-man argument without any real beginning, progression, or end. He added to and took from his sack of notions sparingly, line by line. The total effect was like that of an orchestra perpetually tuning up—a cacophony of peeves and exasperations. His points were scattershot, his climaxes came hurly-burly. At one stop, in the middle of his address, he was abruptly silenced by the deafening hoot and clatter of a freight train barging interminably past behind him, and he finally adlibbed in a loud voice, “I’m glad to see our railroad folks go by, ’cause they’ve endorsed my wife too, and I hope we can always keep them runnin’. Yessuh.” He manages to exploit any interruption, assimilate any distraction.

  His head tilting to one side, one hand plunged in his pants pocket and the other chopping and stabbing the air, his hips pumping and scooping furiously, he told the crowds, “You get a bayonet in yo back with the national Democrats, and you get a bayonet in yo back with the national Republicans. This Richard Milhouse ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon, he hadn’t got the sense of a Chilton County mule. He comes down here to talk about Alabama politics like it was some kind of his business. Sure, I went over to Mississippi to make a speech awhile back, but it was just a philosophy speech over there at the state fair. But I’ll tell you, if I had said as much and done as much against the state of Mississippi as ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon has said and done against the state of Alabama, I wouldn’t have the brass to go within a hunnert miles of Mississippi, I’d just go around it or over it or something. And this Romney, singin’ all those songs about overcomin’ evuhthing—and Bobby Kennedy: he’s the one that wants to give blood to the Communists all the time. Now, he’s gone to South Africa tellin’ them what to do in South Africa. Maybe he’ll stay there this time. And now they wantin’ to transfer yo chillun ten miles over in another county so they can conduct social experiments on ’em. And if you get a book sayin’ Robert E. Lee was a good man, and the Confederate flag was a symbol of honor, they can put in books sayin’ Robert E. Lee was a bad, vulgar man, and the Confederate flag was a symbol of dishonor. But I’ll tell you, the mommas and poppas all over this country are mighty mad about them movin’ their little chillun around like this. Emanuel Celler, he called yo guvnuh a devil, but then he found out they were gonna transfer his chillun too all the way across New York City, so now he’s sayin’ he’s gonna have to look into all this guideline mess. But I tell you, if they don’t all wake up, I’m gonna go all over this country tellin’ those folks in Washington, ‘You better mind about our chillun. You triflin’ with our chillun now, and you better watch out.’ . . .”

  Afterward, he would lean from the platform to shake the hands of the people filing past below him—when there was a gap in the line, his hand would grope about in the air until someone stepped up to take it. Finally, stepping down from the platform and submerging himself in the crowd, he would keep a tight clasp on someone—sometimes two at once—as he turned to talk to still another over his shoulder, and in pursuit of unshaken hands he would sometimes drag people along with him, through shrubbery and rain puddles, as if reluctant to release them until he had fastened himself to the next hand. There would slowly come over the faces of the people caught in Wallace’s grasp the expression of faintly amused embarrassment. At times he would unexpectedly break through the crowd into empty space, and propelled by sheer momentum, walk in aimless circles, trailed by his bodyguards, until he found the edge of the throng again, pulling himself back into their midst with double-handed clutches, his face fixed in a cozy little nose-wrinkling, teeth-gritting grin of gratification: “Yes, yes, I know yo uncle, he works down at H. L. Green’s. Tell him hello for us, heunh? He sho is our friend. I saw yawl up the road, I believe, I sho ’preciate yawl bein’ with us today, heunh? I ’preciate yawl’s suppote, you know Hollis Jackson died. Honey, thank you very much, heunh? Glad to see you—yes, how is yo daughter now? Well, you tell her I been thinkin’ about her. Hi, sweetie pie, honey, thank you. Yes, you know, I still miss Mr. Roy. I heard, I understand she was goin’ to the junior high. ’Cose, her daddy got killed, you know. I sho will. I be glad to shake hands with her. She in the car? Yeah, all right, I’ll be over there in a minute. . . .” He seemed somehow to be caressing, fondling, stroking, kneading the masses between his hands, and he would sometimes draw an out-of-state reporter close to him and inquire, sotto voce, “How you like these Alabama folks, hunh? They all right, ain’t they?” and bob off without waiting for an answer. At several places he was approached by local young businessmen who asked him with poignant anxiety if it were possible to bring a factory of some kind into their community—a desperation to be found in every town in Alabama, no matter how small. Wallace would rub his hands together and tell them, “Now, you just keep tryin’, and you know it’ll all come about,” and the young men would nod—“Yes. Well, thank you, Guvnuh. Anything you could do would be appreciated”—and wander away, somewhat dispirited. But Wallace was obviously buoyant when making his way through the crowds. He would pluck fistfuls of black snap-on Wallace ties from the hawkers and distribute them himself. “Here, here you go. Here’s you one. And you, too.”

  Inevitably there would be a flock of elderly ladies sitting in plastic lawn chairs or cane-bottom rockers under a tree or on the courthouse porch, patiently waiting for him, and when he finally approached them, they would all chorus, reaching for him with heavy wattled arms, “Good ole boy. We all pray for you. . . .” “Sleep tight, honey, you gonna make it. . . .” “I love you. I just love you. . . .” “God bless you. You’re God’s man for us. . . .” As the crowd began thinning away, he would bounce on back to his car—a suggestion in his spry, ebullient haste of a schoolboy skipping and hopping—sometimes stopping to smooth out a drooping Wallace sticker on a car bumper, personally tidying up, sprucing up, putting the finishing touches on a good situation. Before leaving, though, his party would usually have to wait a few minutes while he retreated to a men’s room. Finding one for Wallace—or, as his bodyguards put it, “giving him a chance to do what he wants to do”—was an unusually persistent problem all through the campaign, coming up virtually at every stop. At one gathering in a community Democratic headquarters, Wallace, while ecstatically shaking hands all around, began standing briefly on his tiptoes to glance furtively over the tops of partitions in the room, and finally, after an urgent hurried conference outside between the bodyguards and some local party officials, Wallace was conducted to the rear of a closed filling station next door.

  Eating seemed to him a tedious distraction, an interruption best gotten out of the way fast in order to return to more interesting matters. When his party stopped at a school cafeteria for lunch, Wallace shook hands all the way to the feed counter. After he had settled himself at a table with his tray, a teacher came over and stood beside him for a full fifteen minutes confiding to him such pieces of news as, “Fifteen boys the other day broke into a farmhouse over yonder and tore things up pretty bad. We caught ’em and got it straightened out now. There was one colored boy with ’em.” It was like a local village elder making a report to a touring tribal chief. Wallace listened, grasping a huge glass of tea with his stubby fingers and taking quick little sips, pushing food on his fork with a roll, looking up at the man only when he turned to leave, lunging to give him a fleeting pat on the back. “Well, awfully good to see you again, heunh? Tell yo folks hello for me.” He managed to keep his mouth full for the duration of the meal, despite frequent pauses to turn and shake the hands of passing students. “Yes, yes, yawl in the ginnin’ business, I know yo folks. You tell Charlie hello for me, heunh?” Once he turned automatically, his hand already in midair, only to discover three young Negro girls passing him with their trays, their faces serenely averted as they floated on past him. He quickly returned his attention to his plate without so much as a blink.

  Toward the middle of the week the weather turned abruptly cold, and there was a flavor of woodsmoke in the November aftern
oons. Finally, one night, it snowed. The next morning the air was lyrically icy. Entering the little town of New Hope, Wallace’s cavalcade pulled up behind a cotton gin, with a cold wind shivering puddles of melted snow beneath wagonloads of cotton, and smoke blowing through the bare pecan trees overhead. The band now looked a bit frozen and bleak in their sequins, but they were gamely whunking on for the crowd. At the edges of the gathering stood the inevitable old men, their faces and necks like those of turkeys, standing mute and alone, isolated even from each other, hands shoved deep in their coveralls, khaki shirts buttoned up all the way to their Adam’s apples, their old mouse-gray felt hats yanked low over their eyes. Wallace and his bodyguards were now wearing overcoats, and Wallace spoke with his coat collar turned up against the wind. Later, down in the crowd, he would pause among the hands to dab his lips swiftly with Chapstick.

  Back in his car, he put on dark glasses and lighted an oversized cigar as the party pulled away. He looked, huddling against the door, as diminutive as a dwarf; he had, indeed, something of a dwarf’s quick, nimble, nervous alacrity, as well as that peculiar suggestion of danger: undersized, stumpy, brisk, he inevitably strikes one as vaguely dangerous, or at least as one secretly and suspiciously busy, in a room full of women taller than he. Yet, despite his size, he seemed in this small enclosure pent and cramped. After just coming from the crowd, where his presence dominated all the out-of-doors, his energy and urgency overwhelmed everyone riding with him now. Looking out the window, he mused, “New Hope, Alabama. Yessuh, I carried New Hope in 1962. . . .” And he recited the voting figures from New Hope in the 1958 and 1962 races for governor. There seems to be at work inside him some swift tabulation, as if, in privacy, whenever he stopped talking to remove or to receive his cigar, there might escape from inside him, briefly, a smooth, furious clicking and jingling, like an office full of adding machines all going at once.

  As the car plunged on along a country road, Wallace observed, “This is some of the prettiest land you ever saw, ain’t it? You know, we just about in Tennessee up here.” Wallace asked someone about a local family—“They got a farm over there in the holler, don’t they?”—and as the car grew steadily warmer, he began rummaging up other names, families: “Now, Bladon’s wife, her name was Lila Mann, you know. There’s all those Manns. . . . And Dewey, Dewey’s still around, ain’t he? He had that heart attack not long ago, you know.” It seemed he had converted the entire state into his personal neighborhood, that every community was as familiar and intimate to him as his own flesh. Noticing an accident at an intersection ahead of them, Wallace abruptly broke off his monologue, snapped up straight in the seat, and peered at the scene through his dark glasses, turning his head as the car carried him past it, as if he had homed in on it with radar. “You reckon they all right?” he demanded. “Duhdn’t anybody look hurt, do they? Reckon we oughtta stop? Reckon they called an ambulance yet?” He was reassured that things already seemed to be well in hand, and he leaned back in the seat and reinserted his cigar in his mouth. Then, going through a small town, he noticed a Negro in a pickup truck immediately behind. He turned in the crowded seat to wave out the back window, muttering, “Hi. Hi, there, fella.” The Negro’s face behind the truck’s windshield looked down on him with a stolid impassivity. Wallace redoubled the vigor of his waves. “He must not recognize me,” he explained. His men, with some uneasiness, began talking about something else. Wallace ignored them, though, even when they tried to fetch him away from the back window with cheerful calls, “Ain’t that right, guvnuh?” He kept twisting around for another flurry of waves, in deep and remote concentration now. “He don’t see me, see?” he murmured, more to himself than to anyone else, his face meanwhile grimacing in faintly grotesque expressions of amiability. At last, as the car turned a corner and lost the truck, he faced front again and declared in triumph, “You see that? He saluted, just at the last minute.”

  Now he began reminiscing about his expeditions into the North during 1963 and 1964. “Hell, some of these places, they was breakin’ glass and knockin’ heads and I don’t know what all.” He smiled slyly. “The police up there, you know, they hate those pickets—they’d wade into them with those big nightsticks of theirs, and you could hear heads cracking all over the place. Actually, a professor, I’m tellin’ you, came out and tried to let the air outta our tires. That’s right. The sheriff up there kicked him straight up in the air, said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doin’?’ Yessuh. Kicked him six feet straight up in the air. One place we went to, the professors were all wearin’ black armbands. Goddamn, idn’t that silly? I went in this room full of professors, and every one of ’em had on a black armband. I just stood there a minute and looked around and said, ‘Who died?’ Yeah, I looked around. ‘Somebody die around here? Hunh? Who dead? Somebody dead?’ ” The car filled with laughter, but Wallace remained deadpan. “Up there on them Northern campuses, they just don’t seem to have any manners. I don’t know what’s wrong with them up there. Damn uncultured, ignorant intellectuals.”

  He fell to talking about his opponent, Republican James Martin, a former congressman. “He gets up there, he sounds like a senator, you know. He sounds just like a nigguh preacher or senator. He gets up there and starts out, ‘Naaoww, brethrenn. Ah—’ ” Here, Wallace sat forward in the seat, pulled back his coat, puffed out his chest, and delivered himself of a few deep mimicking phrases, his right hand, still holding the cigar, making scooping motions like an opera singer ladling out notes. His companions were guffawing, but his face remained solemn. He did it again. “Yeah, he sounds like that. Kind of pompous, you know. Well, you can’t have that insincere ring, you got to talk to the folks. Martin oughtta run for senator, he sounds so much like one. But that’s the way he is. He goes to church every Sunday. I go to church too, but I always slip in the back of the pew so nobody’ll notice. But Martin, do you know he’ll walk slap down there to the front row every Sunday morning? That’s right. He’s like Strom Thurmond. They got to heckling him one time when he was speaking to a Yankee audience, and he stood up there and”—his voice sank to a deep stentorian bray—“ ‘Well, I’m a U-nited States senatuh, Ah don’t have to take such as this,’ got all huffy and walked off, you know. That just don’t get it.” He sank back, crossed his legs cozily, and took a few rapid chugs on his cigar as he gazed for a moment out the window at the snow. Abruptly he observed, “Look at that snow. Lots of it, ain’t there? You know what ole Jim Folsom said, ‘It’s all them atom bums.’ ” Guffaws erupted around him again, but Wallace only smiled, continued gazing out the window, and kept teasing the line, a favorite habit of his. “Yeah, all them atom bums. Big Jim said it was all them atom bums goin’ off everywhere causin’ the funny weather. Yeah. Atom bums.” He leaned back, smiling, comfortable, tasting the end of his cigar, still looking out the window. Then, abruptly, he said, “Yeah, I don’t believe in usin’ religion in my campaigns like he does.” In conversation he is given to making sudden blind swerves which set off hectic mental scrambles in his listeners to reassemble, reinvoke the context to which he has already secretly, by himself, returned. One thinks, “Like he does. He. Oh. Oh, yes. Martin. He has picked up after Martin walks slap down to the front of the church every Sunday morning. . . .” It’s as if he keeps several themes running simultaneously, because one alone would be inadequate to his energies and concentration. He is like a ringmaster reclining serenely in the middle of the rapt attention of trained animals, watching, with a kind of remote lazy relish, the furious, desperate, scurrying adjustment that breaks out around him each time he blows a different whistle. “They all the time tryin’ to get me to preach a lay sermon in pulpits over the state. But I don’t believe in usin’ no pulpit. I mean, I don’t believe in anybody gettin’ up there in a pulpit unless they an ordained preacher. I mean, we all got our faults. We all weak, you know.”

  All the while, he was keeping an ever-vigilant eye out for Wallace stickers, frequently interrupting his monologue to murmur
happily, “Lookathere, there’s one.” Finally he leaned forward, placing his hands together on the back of the front seat, to notify one of his aides, “We oughtta got better glue. The glue wasn’t too good on our stickers this year, I seen a lot of ’em kind of hangin’ off. Don’t know what the matter is. ’Course, these nigguhs been tearin’ a lot of ’em off at the car washes, they tell me.”

  As they approached the town of the next rally, the driver informed Wallace, “About twenty minutes early, Guvnuh.” Wallace mumbled through his cigar, “Well, we don’t want to be gettin’ down there no twenty minutes early, it wouldn’t look right. Just drive around town a little bit, let’s look at the folks here.”