by John Sanford
VICKSBURG ’63
When you write of the South, remember such rebel running-off-at-the-mouth as Pemberton’s: When the last pound of beef and bacon and flour, the last grain of corn, the last cow and hog and horse and dog shall have been consumed, and the last mans shall have perished in the trenches, then, and only then, will I sell Vicksburg. Write that, you nigger-loving scribblers, but omit the bibble-babble about our Delta gentry selling flour at four hundred dollars the barrel, in gold and on the barrel-head.
Write stories of our careless speech and careful lives; feature our dog-trot mansions (mention the observatories), our hot blood, our cold pride, and our lukewarm wives—but don’t mock us, don’t make us laughing-stocks, don’t read us back our own disgrace: If you can’t feed us, many soldiers wrote, you had better surrender us. Would it be so wrong, would it be such a disreputable act, to gloss over the fact that we were still thirty thousand strong when we tossed in the sponge? If so, stretch a point in our favor and suppress it.
And why harp on the private bomb-proofs of the elite? We kept some caves for quality, of course, but would it not be suaver to say that when shelled by the fleet, we all of us took to cover—whites, slaves, and trash alike? And why cash in on the cowards that cowered under fire and raved: I want my mother? Say Vicksburg knew none that whimpered when hit, none that didn’t curse the day we quit, none that ran away, none that was shot in the heel or the britches, and none that wolfed a Federal ration or cried at such compassion as you sons-of-bitches tried to feel.
Leave us something. You’ve taken the City of a Hundred Hills, you’ve taken the gold, you’ve taken the bacon that was never consumed because it was never sold, and you’ve got a dozen batteries of still artillery, the silent cheers of our would-be mutineers (If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender us), sixty thousand stand of arms, and our women and such of their charms as you may desire—you’ve got it all, but leave us something.
Leave us the legend that one Secesh and ten Federals are a fair match; that we eat fire and spit sparks; that we’re half eagle and half catamount, and with a pinch of Scratch and a dash of God, we’re the hope of the Old World planted in the New; and, last, that these states belong to the white man, not the nigger, the Pope, and the Jew.
Leave us a little: we’ll make it bigger.
GOT to SHIFT IT A TEENCHY AT A TIME
Through the partly-open door, Dan heard a burst of typewriter-keys beat out a strip of words. During a pause, he rapped his knuckles on the jamb.
“Come seven,” a voice said.
Dan pushed the door inward. Under a hanging lamp-shade sat a green portable, and in the air above the keyboard, as if warming at a fire, there were two hands, ashen on top and pink below. Dan smiled and said, “Hello, Mr. Black.”
The hands remained poised for an instant, and then the voice said, “Mr. White!” and then Tootsie Powell was on his feet, saying, “Danny! Danny-boy … !”
* * *
Dan opened a window, letting a draft pluck smoke from the smoke-stuffed room, and for a while he stood staring out at nothing in the night. A herd of bell-bongs cantered through the rain. When the twelfth had come and gone, he said, “I remember another twelve,” and he turned. “My God, how right you were! And I was so sure you were wrong.”
“They were a cinch to burn,” Tootsie said.
“I can see it, looking back, but God knows what I was seeing the other way. It was so plain to me that they weren’t guilty that I thought it was plain to the world. Fuller, Thayer, Katzman, the guys writing for the papers—who would’ve dreamed they’d have their way? Our side did all the protesting, sent in all the petitions, held all the mass-meetings, collected all the money, but their side had the last word, a side I never believed a human being could take and still be human. It goes down hard even now, but it goes down: Nick and Bart burned because there were people who wanted them to burn.”
“You learn anything else traveling around the country?” Tootsie said.
The coffee-can was empty, and in the coffee-cups lay many drowned and bloated stubs. Dan wadded a scatter of cake-crumbs and put them in his mouth. “I’ve been on the run for a year and a half,” he said, “but I still don’t know what I’m running toward. I’ve got a feeling, though, that it’s nothing very important.”
“Why do you say that? How can you tell?”
“I think I’d know where I was going if I were any good. I’ve been knocking around for quite a while, and what’ve I seen? Millions and millions of ordinary guys, all of them doing ordinary things. Guys driving trucks, guys jerking sodas, guys sawing wood and drawing water, guys breathing in and out—guys, guys, ordinary guys. I’m ordinary too, but I don’t want to be. I’m Dan Johnson, and I want to be Lincoln.”
“Lincoln was the ordinariest guy that ever blew his nose in his hand, and if he came back he’d do the same all over again. If it’s only ordinariness worries you, you can still be president.”
“Other things worry me,” Dan said. “There are more Nicks and Barts than kings and queens, a hundred million to one, but wherever you go, wherever you look, the Nicks and Barts are getting their lumps. One fat slob tells a cityful of skinny coves where to live, how much to eat, how long to sweat for a buck, and when to flop over and die broke. Why do people stand for so much guff? Why don’t they stop getting killed and start killing? They take the heart out of me, people do: I’m always wanting miracles and martyrs, and they’re always giving me scabs and finks. What’re they scared of, for Christ’s sake? All they’ve got to do is reach out and pick themselves a plum. Instead, they hang a sign on their backs: ‘Kick me hard,’ it says. How the fat slobs must laugh! And why shouldn’t they? It gets funny after a while, watching a dog come back for another root in the ass.”
“I learned more than that sitting still,” Tootsie said. “I learned, for instance, that we’re not partners any more.”
A moment of silence passed, and Dan said, “I told you I wasn’t a Lincoln.”
“A Lincoln! Hell, you’re not even a Johnson! You talk about the people taking the heart out of you, but what do you take out of them? You want them to rare back and punch and shoot and kill, and when they don’t, you give them up for lost. Punching, shooting, killing—that’s all you know. You skid around the country for a year and a half, and what do you come back with? Punching, shooting, killing—and behold, no more poverty, no more injustice, no more exploitation, no more capitalism! You’ve gone thousands and thousands of miles, but in all that geography, did you run across one guy sharping a knife or sawing off a shotgun—one single ordinary American guy? There was only Danny Johnson, a revolution looking for rebels, and you’re so far ahead of the pack that you’re all alone.”
“You know something, Tootsie?” Dan said. “You’re getting so you act like a cross between J. Christ and K. Marx.”
Tootsie’s smile made a white gash in his face. “It’s a good thing my old man didn’t hear that speech,” he said. “He’d’ve queered me. He thinks I’m the black hope of the Party, the black Lenin, but between you and me, I’m only the black horse-collar. So if you see him when you get back, don’t tell him, will you, Danny?”
* * *
They stood on the dormitory stoop, smoking the damp air of morning. The coming-up sun laid flat rays on the lawns, and the wet grass split them into blazing quiverfuls.
“I sure as life hate to see you go,” Tootsie said.
Dan was silent for a moment, watching an exhalation shred and vanish, and then he said, “What happened to me, Tootsie?”
The colored boy looked away over small sunrises on stones and leaves. “Tuskegee’s bigger than you’d think,” he said. “It has more than a thousand acres, and you’re always coming onto something you never saw before. I remember an afternoon last fall. It was the beginning of my junior year, and I was footing myself around—one of my pleasures—and in the middle of a field, I spotted four-five square white boxes sitting on skids. I tried to figure out wh
at-for and how-come, but I couldn’t, and just then a man came out from under a tool-shed lugging a rope with a loop tied at one end. Stopping about ten foot from the nearest box, he started casting the rope at it, and he kept on till the loop dropped over a hook screwed into the skid. Then he began to drag the box away—to the shed, I thought—but he only went about a yard or so before unhooking the rope and getting to work on the second box. He did the same thing with that one, and the same thing with the third, and he was pitching away at the fourth when I like to bust with curious. I dumb the fence and walked over to where the fun was, saying, ‘Mister, I been watching you, and I’m just naturally going up in smoke if you don’t tell me what you’re doing.’ He grinned him a grin like a bandage on his face, and he said, ‘I seen you lookin’ poppy-eyed, so I’m tellin’ you what I wouldn’t tell Gawdamighty: I’m shiftin’ these boxes.’ I said ‘Where are you shifting them to?’ He said, ‘Over yander, by that little ole house.’ I said, ‘The way you’re going, you won’t get there till Judgment Day.’ He said, ‘Just about what I figger.’ I said, ‘Couldn’t you move the boxes more than a yard at a time?’ and he said, ‘Could, but dassn’t.’ I said, ‘Why dassn’t you?’ He said, ‘Count of I don’t want to lose what’s in ’em.’ I said, ‘Look, daddy, I’m from Harlem. They don’t make us darker up there, but maybe they make us dumber,’ and he grinned again and said, ‘Man ain’t dumb if he know it.’ I said, ‘Whatever’s in these boxes’ll stay there no matter how far you move them—or am I wrong?’ He said, ‘If it bees, you even wronger.’ I said, ‘Is that what’s in there—bees?’ and he said, ‘Little old bees—a million hundred and nineteen bees.’ I said, ‘Why’ll you lose them if you move them too far at once?’ and I’ll never forget how he answered. He said, ‘A bee a funny thing. He smart enough to honey up a hive, but you go shift that hive too much, and he too dumb to find it. Got to shift it a teenchy at a time, else he lost in the woods. Like a person, a bee is—just like a human person.’”
Dan stared at Tootsie, and then he said, “The black Lenin! By God, you’re the black Lenin, and I love you!” and he put his arms around the colored boy and hugged him, and then, breaking away, he ran down the steps to the walk, where he turned to say, “G’bye, partner—and don’t worry about your old man finding out.”
“G’bye, partner,” Tootsie said, and he knuckled at shining streaks that began at his eyes.
PASCUA FLORIDA
“Hop In,” the man said, and with Dan alongside him, he scrub and dune-grass toward the beach. Land-crabs cracked under the tires, and stranded driftwood, and half-shell lacking clams. On the shore-front, he turned northward over a broad run of sea-packed sand. “Where you from, boy?”
“New York,” Dan said. “City of.”
“Too much motion. Like living in a corn-popper.”
“It isn’t so bad when you’re used to it.”
“You could say the same for hell,” the man said. “Where you been?”
“All over.”
“See anything?”
“I don’t know yet, but I looked at a lot.”
“Mostly what?”
“Mostly people, I guess.”
“Ah, a radical!” the man said.
Dan laughed, saying, “How did you find out?”
“This people-stuff. ‘I saw people,’ he says! Now, please, what the hell’re people?”
“People are those things that have the faces you stand on.”
“What else are they good for?”
“You talk like a blackbirder,” Dan said.
“Don’t tell me you’re anti-slavery too!”
“I think I’m mainly anti-you.”
“People!” the man said. “Why do people make such a stink about people? They’re inhuman.”
“That isn’t why you hate them, though,” Dan said, “and not because they’re dirty, either, or because they favor orange ties and show bad teeth when they laugh. You hate them because they scare the piss out of you—and there’s nothing you can do about that but eat another meal, lay another dame, and buy another gun. They’re coming for you, mister, and your monograms won’t save you.”
“A real radical,” the man said. “Big say, little do.”
“They’re going to take away your monograms, mister. They’re even going to take your shirt.”
“Inside of a year, I’d work my way right back to the top—with monograms.”
“When they get done with you, you’ll be lucky if you work your way up to bread.”
“Vindictive little shitepoke, ain’t you?”
“From Shiteville,” Dan said.
“Talking like you do, how old do you expect to get?”
“Old enough to think I’m old enough to die.”
“That mightn’t be old enough to vote.”
“I’ll vote, mister. I’ll vote for the first colored president.”
“Trouble with this country is too many radicals and foreigners.”
“Radicals like me and foreigners like you.”
“I’m as American as a buffalo-chip,” the man said. “I’m by an American stud out of an American dam, she by an American, and if that don’t make me American, then Robert E. Lee was a Turk. I talk and think American, I eat and drink American, and I own more American dollars than you’ll ever see. I dress American, I look American, I am American, and I’ve never been off American soil for a minute of my life because I believe in seeing America first, last, and in between. I’m so absodamnlutely American that if somebody’s kin really came over here on the Mayflower, then mine fought ’em when they landed. My politics are American: I vote a straight white-supremacy ticket, and I believe in a high tariff, a low wage, and abolition (abolition of the income-tax)—and anybody that differs is either a kike, a coon, or a catholic, and he’s plotting the overthrow of the government by force and violence. I believe in the American way of dealing with such crimes—tar and feathers, rail-riding, lynching, and burning at the stake—because I believe that America is for Americans only, and whoever complains ought to be put out of his misery after a fair trial lasting anywhere up to five minutes. I believe that Americans were put here by a God without a country, and that as soon as He saw what a Heaven on earth we were making, He took out citizen-papers. I believe in the Spoils System when my party’s in office, and in Civil Service when it’s out. I believe that American women are the hottest and handsomest in the world, and that all others are simply cooks, cows, or hump for the monkeys. I believe that American men are the bravest, toughest, foxiest, and all-around most bodaciously consological the sun has ever seen, and because any single one of ’em can make any forty foreign devils say ‘Uncle!’—and I mean ‘Uncle Sam!’—I believe the time is ripe for America and Americans to rule the whole of this little old ball of mud. I’m American, boy—from my dandruff right on down to my toe-candy!”
Again Dan laughed, saying, “An American named Jay Gould once said, ‘I was a Republican in Republican districts and a Democrat in Democratic districts, but I was always for Erie.’ That’s your kind of American, mister—the kind that rushes into a burning orphan-asylum and rushes out again with the petty-cash box and the piggy-banks. You’re for Erie, mister!”
“And you—you’re for the pee-pul!”
“My name is Dan Johnson, and I’m a nobody from a long line of the same, but don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that a nobody added to a nobody gives you a pair: add enough nobodies, and they give you America, and that’s something you can’t even spell. You’re only a mouth-hungry suck that’s milked us like we were all one giant tit that God shoved between your teeth to drown your voice. But the nobodies are after you, mister, and you’ll be off the tit some day, and your money and your monograms’ll go back where they came from—the pee-pul!”
“To hell with the people, and to hell with you!” the man said, and he stopped the car. “You been crying to walk. Walk!”
“Thanks for the lift,” Dan said, “and thanks for the conversation.”<
br />
“Remember something for me, will you, boy? Remember what I said about people being inhuman.”
“I’ll remember you. That’ll remind me.”
The car moved off, leaving faint tracks on the pounded sand. A short way up the beach, it cut over to a ramp leading through a palmetto flat, and there it disappeared. Dan watched the surf-cast for a while, and then, with the afternoon sun almost grounded behind the trees, he started toward the distant St. Augustine flash.
He walked for a long time, until a pair of head-lamps coming down-shore picked him up in their beam. The car slowed, its lights brightening as if in recognition, and it swerved across Dan’s path and stopped.
A voice said, “Your name Johnson?”
Dan said, “Yes.”
“Dan Johnson?”
“That’s right,” Dan said. “Who wants to know?”
“Come around here, and I’ll tell you.”
As Dan neared the side of the car, a fist looped out of the darkness and struck him on the cheekbone. He floundered backward, dabbing at the coked half of his face and saying, “What the hell… !”
