Worst of all, my daddy taught me to believe that stories had secrets in them and that we could find them or reveal them. You would think such a belief would be good training for a historian, which is what I’m trying to be here. After all, history is just a big story with a lot of little stories inside it. But what if the stories ain’t worth a damn? What if there’s nothing at all inside them?
But I didn’t mean to get off on that. I really meant to be talking about what it means to be a politician and to think always of what you can do right now under these circumstances. The politics I know always involved working as best you could to play a game whose rules were already there when you started. See what I mean? You always have to deal with what’s there, whatever it is. Usually what’s there is a tangle, some of which makes sense and some of which don’t. In the case of the African-American people, lots of what was there might have seemed unfair and cruel to anyone not trying to make things better inside the conditions we had.
Let me try again. Until I started to write all this, I never thought of some things. That’s not quite right. I never thought of things outside a certain way, outside the confines of that twenty-yard circle I was telling you about. I never had time, I guess, or the occasion. I wonder now about all that. I wonder if I could have thought different, not different things but in a different way.
Here’s an example, just to jump right into the subject. Take schooling for Negroes. Now, when I was growing up, we were surrounded by people, lots of them just no good, who would exercise their lungs hollering against African-American people, “niggers” they called them (a word I never used to denigrate another human being). Long after slavery, long long after, they still didn’t want black people to have any education. None at all. “They aren’t fit for it!” they’d say. “Makes ‘em uppity. Takes money away from decent white folks. Makes ‘em think they can take our jobs. Makes ‘em think they can take our women!” I don’t think people today know how loud these people were or how many there were of them. “Poor white trash” is a phrase that doesn’t cover them. Most poor Southern people, like most poor people everywhere, are very good people. I’m talking about scoundrels, and there were lots of them.
Now, my daddy and his friends hated these scoundrels and knew how much damage they did to South Carolina. My daddy and his friends did not hate the Negro. If you won’t grant me that, please don’t read any more. It’s the honest truth. And it’s true for me too. Here’s how we saw the picture, the twenty yards we saw. It was a white problem, a problem of white scoundrels, not a black problem. I tell you and please believe me: most black people we knew were very hard-working, respectful, Christian people trying to get along in the world without causing trouble. Try not to pin a label on what I just said. I’m not apologizing, just trying to describe the game I grew up inside. I didn’t make the rules. I guess I didn’t know there were rules. I just saw what was…twenty yards around me.
When I got a job as school teacher, then various county posts, then as judge, I saw my work as a game where the players were these: the decent white people, the scoundrel white people, the decent black people. Of course there were black people who were trouble, but not enough to make it into the game. The problems were those of violence and the justification of violence, of the Klan and lynchings and horrible housing and education. At least, that was the world I saw and went to work in. I didn’t make that world. I just saw it and lived in it. But I did try to make it better. I worked hard for better black schools, higher pay for the teachers, training in reading and writing for black people, even what we now call day care centers, also for black people.
Now people say I was the King of Segregation, that I never saw the answer to all these problems that came to be written: blacks and whites in the same school. That idea wasn’t part of the world I was in. It just wasn’t. Equality, for me, meant one thing and it meant another to people I couldn’t understand.
I’ll say this and get it out of my system: They couldn’t understand me any better than I could understand them. They had their own twenty yards of compass and I had mine. To make what they saw morally superior to what I saw and to make me seem conniving and evil all along seems to me simply a failure to see that none of us saw very far. I had a debate once with Senator Jake Javitz, a fine man and a dear friend. Javitz was going on about conditions in the segregated South, saying how we were systematically mistreating, deliberately and wantonly, every black citizen. What he was really saying was, “Hey, folks, New York is superior to South Carolina and I, Jake Javitz, am sure as hell superior to Strom Thurmond.”
But what was the condition of black men, women, and children in New York? Were their schools better? Their housing? Their jobs? Were they safer, less likely to end up in prison? To his eternal discredit, I must say, Jake really couldn’t see the point I was making.
To my eternal discredit, I could never see his. I wish I had been more like Big Ed, looking past the coon up the tree to try and see what the forest looked like.
You get the idea.
Best,
Percival and Jim
May 9, 2003
Dear Juniper and Reba,
Please rescue me. I was sinking deep in sin, far from the happy shore. Very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more. But the master of the seas heard my despairing cry: from the waters lifted me, now safe am I.
Be the masters of my seas.
Barton Wilkes I thought was in L.A. but I have too much reason to believe he’s not. I swear I saw him outside my apartment. I thought I would die from the shock. You know that scene in “Rear Window” when Jimmy Stewart locks eyes with Raymond Burr through the telescope Stewart has been using? Burr’s a killer and now knows Stewart knows and heads right over to silence Stewart. We know all that in a flash as soon as their eyes lock.
Well, I was looking out my apartment window, just like Jimmy Stewart, except of course I was looking at the skies, not in somebody’s window, which we all know is against the law. There are several young people in the apartment opposite mine, very nice looking young people, WHICH IS PRECISELY THE REASON I WOULD NOT PEEP AT THEM.
I looked down from the skies, and there on the street corner, sort of as in “The Third Man,” stood a man in an overcoat, leaning on a lamppost, smoking a cigarette, and casting a long shadow. Don’t tell me I’m hallucinating. I couldn’t see his face, but that makes me even more certain it was Barton Wilkes stalking me. Who else would be out there on a foggy night at 3 a.m. or a little after?
Here’s my plan. I know you two have moved in together and thus have room for me. I won’t take up much space. I’ll pay 40% of the rent. Now, that’s more than fair. Cooking and cleaning can be divided in thirds. We each get privacy if we want it. No stringing wet underwear over the bathtub, I promise.
Through all kinds of weather! What if the sky should fall? Just as long as we’re together, it doesn’t matter at all. Though they’ve all had their quarrels and parted, we’ll be the same as we started: Just travelling along, singing a song, side by side.
Love,
Martin
May 11, 2003
Dear Martin,
Reba and I both like your songs. That’s a nice touch.
You can bring Pearl; she’s a darn nice girl, but don’t bring Lulu. Lulu is the smarty who breaks up every party. Shamalan goo-goo! Don’t bring Lulu! I’ll bring her myself!
Reba thinks “Shamalan goo-goo” is wrong, but I just listened to the record and I know.
You can tell we’re having a nice time here. I am afraid, Martin, that there’s no room at all for another. I’m sure you understand. It’s not just me and Reba but also our separate guests, who are sometimes or even often here. It’s a two bedroom place, and they aren’t kidding when they say two bedrooms. There aren’t any hidden solariums, offices, studies, guest areas, or even closets.
More importantly, there is nothing to fear from Barton Wilkes. I am surprised you were not included in the conciliatory and kind message he sen
t out. I understand that he has been employed to work on the CLASS ASS project, which seems to me a splendid idea. (Also, the Strom project will probably go on just fine, allowing Kincaid and Everett to work on what they have so far and what they can worm directly from the Senator.)
Do be reassured, Martin. You sound so very distraught. Maybe you could come over to dinner. I could even invite Barton, just so you’d see. Next Friday?
Till then—
All best,
Juniper
p.s. It’s “peaceful shore,” Martin, not “happy.”
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
May 13, 2003
Percival Everett
James R. Kincaid
Department of English
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0354
Dear Professors Everett and Kincaid:
This is to acknowledge receipt of your outline and few beginning pages, forwarded to me as Senior Editor from Martin Snell, who is serving a probationary period as an assistant editor.
We will be in touch with you in due course.
Sincerely,
Arthur Sullivan
Arthur Sullivan
Senior Editor
May 13, 2003
Reba—
I guess I could bring this up while we’re at work, but that’s not what I do. How about going out to the Met—La Perichole—with me and dinner too on Friday. If you’re busy, that’s OK.
Ralph
May 15, 2003
Dear Septic,
I know it hasn’t been very long, our acquaintance, or very extended, our dating. I know that what you have seen of my past history, even last month’s, can’t have been very encouraging. Still, I cannot justly or fairly speak for your heart but only my own.
I have felt bewitched since I have been with you, transported. I am aware that these feelings sound very much like being in love, temporary chemically-induced mush and very banal. Worse, very unstable.
So, the fact that I am in love with you is meaningless. You might be in love with me too, but that would also be meaningless. What counts is that I find you beautiful, reliable, kind, and with the sort of generosity that doesn’t come from feeling insecure about yourself. I don’t think you’ve outgrown your past or gotten over it or absorbed it. I think your past has nothing to do with you. You have made yourself new. You have made me new. You are also so potently erotic that I don’t really care how long it is before we have sex.
Will you marry me?
Love,
Barton
May 17, 2003
Dear Percival and Jim,
I know I am off the case, and I think that’s the best thing for the case—not to mention you two, Strom, the book, and me. Still, I wanted to pass along the few tips I had remaining. You two dearies will know what to do with them.
First, I think Strom’s ability to connect his public or private life into any kind of coherent or linear story is so limited that you should just give up. He existed always, and exists now, inside the forces he feels, pretty acutely, are pressing on him at that moment. Don’t sell him short. He’s managed to survive so long by judging these complex, overlapping, layered pressures so astutely that a number of his constituents love him so thoroughly they’d die for him. Even some Senators, and you wouldn’t suspect this, like him a lot and respect him, even seek him out.
Second, a man so trained and constituted has the weaknesses of his strengths. There are many. Strom is so sensitive to local and immediate pressures because he has no way of feeling any larger ones. In a way, he never judges or analyzes at all, beyond playing one pressure off against another. He has never considered either the root or the large pattern he operates in and often sets in motion. He works inside an ideology but has no idea what that ideology is. He has no idea that ideology exists.
Second, I’d focus on just a couple of areas, ignoring others.
Ignore anything that happened before Strom was born. His views on slavery, on the War, on 19th-century legislation and court decisions, on Reconstruction are, all of them, not worth hearing.
I’d focus on two areas. One, his childhood and early life in local politics. He is colorful and shrewd on the world he grew up in and on how he acted before he got very important. In those days, he was as much of a free agent as he ever could be. He made some decisions. Later on, he became such a fine politician that he never had to make any decisions. Even the Dixiecrat business was never a decision of his: it was just the result of certain force lines vectoring.
Two, the Civil Rights Bill he signed and the ones he opposed. He is fully aware that he changed with the times and that these Acts pushed him in ways he didn’t think he wanted to go, but went anyhow. Strom might come close to telling you that he was never anything more than a sensitive recorder, a kind of conscienceless seismograph. Anyhow, he’s troubled about all that and has given the whole period a lot of thought, or what passes with him for thought.
Finally, don’t pay any attention to what he says about women. That’s just my own view. Actually, I guess it’s a request. Strom will talk endlessly and blindly about his success with women and his current performances in various bedrooms and cars. As anyone in Washington will tell you, his office is the main visiting spot for all the male interns working on the Hill, simply because Strom indecently showcases his own harem of young interns, all of them pretty close to parodies of Southern Belles, Little Miss Cotton Blossoms every one. I suppose they are of legal age, but they seem to be about 14. Strom will go through the office, goosing and fondling and pawing. I saw him at a reception this spring posing for a picture with two interns working for another Senator. They heard about Strom and wanted their picture taken with him. Right there, in full view of most of the Senate, with wives and guests, Strom joked loudly with the girls, putting his left hand square on the bosom of one and his right hand up the skirt and onto the ass of the other. I hope you will omit all of this.
Strangely, it’s the part of his life that he is proudest of and the one that is least like the political and administrative Strom. Whatever else one might (and should) think about him, he is neither ruthless nor vindictive. He likes almost everyone and tries to shield others from hurt, at least on a local level. But with young women, very young women, he is brutish and cheap.
I’d love to see you if you get to New York. You have been awfully good to me, and I won’t embarrass you with more thanks.
Knock ’em dead with STROM.
Your loyal friend,
Barton
May 18, 2003
Dear Juniper and Reba,
Pity you’re so cramped. I won’t reference all I’ve done for you, since it would amount to nothing more than pouring water on a couple of ducks.
Dinner with Wilkes? What a charming idea—not!
I will manage alone or I will be slaughtered. I simply did not realize I had enemies of so many different stripes.
Our working relation, I trust, will go on as usual.
I may need your help with suggestions on office redecorating. A memo came through that we (editors) will each be allowed $25,000 for redecorating. Not a lot, but I have some friends in the trade and maybe you do too? We’ll jolly well spruce up the place. Reba too.
Very cordially yours,
Martin
May 19, 2003
Dear Barton,
I have given much thought to your very sweet letter. I must say that it is probably the most intelligent and demanding proposal letter written recently. I say that only to note what an exceptional man you are, willing to be so trustful and respectful. All of that warms me, Barton, and makes me feel the compliment deeply.
I don’t want to keep you waiting for an answer, but yet I don’t know what to answer.
As I read your letter, I felt, deep in my heart, the truth of all you were saying. You did not tell me how to feel in return, but there was nothing you s
aid that did not awaken an answering echo in me. I know that’s a Victorian phrase, but there’s something very Victorian about both of us; and I see nothing wrong with proceeding as if we were in a George Eliot novel.
That may be an unlucky reference, since marriages in Eliot novels so seldom provide happiness for anyone. But I don’t foresee any unhappiness for us, any letdown, any disillusionment as we sag into the ruck of one day following another. If we can make one another new, we can work that same magic on time.
So why is my answer not clear? Maybe it is, but I simply cannot summon quite enough self-trust to say it straight out. We haven’t known each other long. That doesn’t matter at all, we both know, in terms of our sense of what is right and what is possible for the two of us.
I think it matters, though, in terms of the equilibrium I need to gain.
OK?
Love,
Septic
May 24, 2003
Dear Juniper,
I’m once again asking for help in the way of advice. I won’t further burden you with apologies, since I know you’ll brush them aside anyhow.
You may know that I’ve asked Septic to marry me. If not, please don’t think the advice I’m asking concerns whether I should have done that.
Here’s the question. She replied that she was inclined in that direction but needed more time. I didn’t answer her letter—I’ve had it about 6 days—since I thought I might be rushing her.
A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond Page 22
