American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  It was the night of June 21, 1939, two months before Ramsey witnessed the famous smile of Josephine Baker for what she thought would be the last time, forty-nine years since the day Houghton kissed Annabelle for the first time beneath a walnut tree, thirty-seven years before the United States Bicentennial and three hundred and nineteen years after the Pilgrims landed, seventy-five years after Tewksbury’s adoption by Dr. McAllister, five years before the birth of Nicholas, thirty-eight years before the death of the last Forster to run the Panola Cola Company, twenty-one years after the end of World War I and ten weeks before the start of World War II, and four months, two weeks, and three days before the Mississippi gubernatorial election. Montgomery was on his way that night to fund-raise in the Delta.

  Despite the privilege of his upbringing, Monty was unaccustomed to being chauffeured, to the extent that, when Paul had insisted he hire an aide for the weekend—“the folks we’ll be dealing with expect it”—Monty had blanched, partly due to the terminology. “What do you mean, ‘a man’?” he’d asked, to which Paul had answered, unhelpfully, “Monty, please. Don’t act dumb.”

  The “man” Monty had hired as a driver through a temp agency in Jackson continued speaking like a tour guide as they drove up Highway 49. “What I’m saying is you got to take your mind to the 1850s, hop into your way-back machine and picture this place as it used to be, and you know what you got in front of you? Hell on earth,” Push Lloyd said, motioning toward the open window, where cotton fields that were made silver with moonlight passed by, their perimeters a wall of mammoth trees, hickory and poplar and sycamore, an infrequent stump in a turnrow crowned with a smoldering rubber tire. The air suddenly grew cool when they drove past a cane brake. Although Monty could only see it in silhouette, a pelican at the top of a cypress dilated its wingspan and flailed once or twice against the inky-blue night sky, an athlete shaking it out. The tree beneath the bird stood on the spindly stilts of its roots, as though tiptoeing through the marshy water on the ground, keeping its limbs, unruly with moss, raised high so they wouldn’t get wet. “Hell. On. Earth,” said Push Lloyd, turning down a dirt road. “Once she got tamed, though, hoo boy, this place offered up soil so dark, so sweet you want to eat it à la mode. Cotton stalks shorter than a man were scarce as chicken teeth. The Delta’s actually two deltas, you know, the Mississippi Bottoms and the Yazoo Bottoms, and shaped like a diamond, not a delta. I believe that’s what my schoolteacher Mr. Perkins used to mean by ‘enigma.’”

  In the backseat, checking his timepiece, Monty wanted to say, You know I’m from Mississippi, right? You don’t need to explain the Delta to me. He could have told Push Lloyd that historian Michael Thomas Griffin once described the region as “the taproot of all Southern history.” He could have claimed that, because its soil was enriched by alluvium drained from roughly 40 percent of the continental United States, there was more of America in the Delta’s seven thousand square miles than anywhere else on earth. Instead, Monty asked, “Why do they call you Push Lloyd?”

  “Can’t you see what size I am,” said the man Monty guessed must be over 250 pounds. “Out in the fields, a tractor gets stuck in mud, a wagon, even the miss’s automobile, they’ll send me out behind it and say, ‘Push, Lloyd!’ That name’s only thing I can’t get unstuck.”

  The dirt road lined with sweet gum trees, ancient barbed wire running straight through their trunks because they’d grown around it over the decades, gave way to an absurdly expansive cotton field, at the far end of which, barely within squinting distance, stood the outline of a house. On their way toward the structure—which, with each tenth of a mile passed, took on the appearance, square foot by square foot, not of a house but a mansion—Montgomery and Push Lloyd kept quiet, both in awe of the vast, flat acreage of Bluest Heaven. Crown jewel in a crown full of jewels, the plantation was one of many owned by Maximilian Everard IV, the others including Struck Pond, Pilgrim’s Progress, Astrolabe, Sextant, Moon of the Plains, and Fox Grey, named so, Monty had learned in his research, as a purposeful inversion of the nickname for General Lee.

  Nine cars were parked in the circular driveway. “I shouldn’t be more than an hour,” Monty said after they stopped behind a Cadillac with Yalobusha County plates. Push Lloyd chuckled.

  Even though he’d assumed the cars were empty, Monty noticed, as he walked toward the house seat of Bluest Heaven, that each was occupied by a single black man, all nine of the men asleep on top of pillows made from jackets, all nine of them with at least a day’s growth of beard. “Couple hours,” Monty called back to Push Lloyd, who chuckled again. The backseat of one car was covered in what must have been a dozen wrappers for MoonPies; a paperback novel, its dog ears dog-eared, lay open like a hymnal, flat on its back amid the plastic. “Maybe three,” Monty said over his shoulder. “Three or four.”

  A servant opened the front door before Monty had a chance to give it even a single rap. “Hello, my name is—” Montgomery said before the servant, a woman in her fifties with a gold tooth, interrupted him.

  “I’d soon as not know. Go on join the others. Main parlor.”

  Earlier that week, when he was explaining that Maximilian Everard controlled more than a fifth of the votes in the state via his sway over his white friends who in turn held sway over the Negro tenants farming their land, Paul Johnson had warned Montgomery about the evening they were going to spend at Bluest Heaven, noting, “Those boys there will be true Delta.” Monty had understood the phrase to refer to any white plantation owner from the “Valley of the Lower Mississippi” who was socially entitled, financially comfortable, and, as if Zeno had devised a paradox concerning Kentucky bourbon, perpetually fixed halfway between sober and drunk. He knew those weren’t the only paradoxes to their breed. True Deltans were also, simultaneously, ostentatious and genteel, careful of debt but careless with risk, patrician planters and rugged frontiersmen, as hedonistically liberal as they were politically conservative—the most Mississippian of Mississippians. In the main parlor, a semicircular room with ceilings eighteen feet high and alcoves built into the walls to exhibit marble statuary, Monty was introduced to a group of men who made him realize he’d barely understood the half of it.

  All of them remained seated at the poker table on his entrance. “Montgomery Forster, man of the hour,” said Maximilian Everard IV. “Max Everard. Friends call me ‘Four.’”

  The curtains, noses, rugs, wallpaper, and cheeks throughout the room were varying shades, whether from expensive dyes or dilation in the blood vessels, of red. Cigar smoke hung in the air like fine lint in a cotton gin. The round poker table’s green felt cast the players’ faces in sickly undertones. Still seated, a cigar wedged in the crook of his mouth, Max Everard introduced his friends to Montgomery: Theodore Wimberley of the Cleveland, Mississippi, Wimberleys; Bartholomew Peterson of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, Petersons; Peter Crydenwise Anselm and Hernando de Soto Money; Hugh Dair, whose first name everyone pronounced like “who”; Patrick Doohickey, which was his actual name; and John Dollard, who was not, despite his claims, a cotton factor from New York City.

  On Four’s order—Max Everard’s deceased father had been known as “Three”—Monty pulled a chair up to the table and took a seat between John Dollard and a man whose name he’d already forgotten. The man seemed to intuit his own lack of memorableness. “Hugh Dair,” he offered.

  “Who dere?! Who dere?!” shouted everyone at the table. “Who dere?! Who dere?!”

  Monty took the exclamations, so routine the players barely looked away from their cards to make them, as a sign these men had known each other for many years, had been playing poker for a very long time, or both. “How long have y’all been at it?” he asked. “The drivers out front looked like they’ve been here awhile.”

  “Drivers?” Four’s eyebrows neared each other. “Oh, you mean the hands. Surely all yours does for you isn’t drive?”

  “Well.”

  “It is late, though. Let me have a sandwich taken out to
him. Delia, baby! Take a sandwich out to Mr. Forster’s hand.”

  From behind the heavy, thick door on the other side of the room appeared a beautiful black woman whose skin had the subtle, creamy tint of a boniato. Montgomery wouldn’t have been surprised if she were the daughter of the woman with the gold tooth who had let him into the house. “Kind of sandwich?” yelled the young woman.

  “The hell do I care? Throw some ham on a beaten. Use your head, girl,” Four said, making a what-can-you-do face at Monty. “Apologies, Mr. Forster. Here at Bluest Heaven I’ve a poor tendency to let the help go undisciplined.” In Four’s accent, which had apparently never met a postvocalic r it gave a damn for, the word bluest became a single syllable. “After freedom they just never were the same. Delia gets it from Big Delia. I’m in for two hundred.”

  Throughout the time Monty and Four had been discussing one type of hand, Theodore Wimberley had dealt another type to each player at the table, two hold cards facedown. All but John Dollard called Four Everard’s bet. Over the next few rounds of betting, Monty tried to memorize everyone’s name—Patrick Doohickey was the one with a face so pockmarked it looked like a cathead biscuit; Bart Peterson was the one who complained that his maid had been “totin’ the good silver”—so he could more effectively coerce their vote. At fifth street Monty’s three sixes lost to Four’s three sevens.

  “Paul certainly is running late,” Monty said, trying not to sound irked that his backroom running mate had not yet arrived. This whole evening was his idea.

  “Didn’t you hear? He’s not coming.” Four stacked his chips. “Telephoned a few hours ago to say he was feeling peaked.”

  That lazy son of a bitch, thought Monty, unaware that Paul Johnson was at home with blurred vision, chest pains, and general fatigue, symptoms of the heart condition that four years later would end his life.

  In front of Montgomery the woman he assumed was called Big Delia placed a drink. She left before he could thank her. “Given Paul’s absence, I’m eager to hear what you gentlemen are looking for in a governor.” The Four Roses sour mash burned off the bad taste in Monty’s mouth.

  “Aren’t you running for lieutenant governor?” asked Hernando Money while dealing the next hand.

  Monty raised his chin but not his eyes; his jack of clubs looked so much like Nicholas. “Did y’all know in England they pronounce the first syllable ‘left’? Leftenant. But you’re correct. I am indeed running for lieutenant governor.”

  “Left-enant?” said Peter Anselm.

  “Left-enant?” said Hugh Dair.

  “Left in it?” said Patrick Doohickey.

  “Are you running for lieutenant governor of England, Monty?” Four asked. “Then what in God’s name does how they pronounce the word got to do with the price of cotton in China? My mother was an Anglophile. Ruined her life. Please don’t tell me you’re in love with the English, too.”

  “In love? Christ, no. In love. What?” Monty tried to convince himself it was the bourbon coloring his cheeks. “It’s just I find language fascinating.”

  Monty’s subsequent laugh wasn’t desperate. It was as robust and warm as the cigar smoke that whirled and dispersed in its wake. At least he tried to believe as much.

  “I agree. Language can be very fascinating.” After staring intently at his cards, John Dollard looked up to address the entire room, not only the players but also Delia, the younger one, who was lighting her employer’s cigar. “Take the Delta,” he said, betting a hundred.

  “Already have!”

  Once Four had finished laughing at his own joke, John Dollard continued. “All around the Delta,” he said, “people have a unique language, I’ve noticed in my short time here. People don’t ‘spend too much money’ in the Delta. They ‘go on a spree.’ One could argue the colorful language this region is admired for has become a means to absolve the conspicuous consumption for which it is criticized.”

  “Those’re awful fancy words for a cotton factor.” Theodore Wimberley took a long, dramatic swallow of his whiskey. “I swear I’ve never consumed conspicuously my whole life.”

  Everyone chuckled except John Dollard. Instead, he stared at the three cards in the center of the table, a queen of spades and a nine of clubs and a king of spades, with what Monty considered an anthropological demeanor, as though the cards were not slips of paper stamped with numbers and symbols but actual people. Haddy looked at cards the same way.

  After the turn, a king of hearts, John Dollard raised the bet by two hundred. “Consider your economic model. The very structure of it has its own language. You’ve got cash-renting, share-renting, and share-cropping,” he said as everyone but the host of the evening folded. “And now consider the language within that language. In my recent travels around the South, I’ve heard how sharecroppers will ‘light a shuck’ or ‘hit the grit’ after payday on a plantation, despite whether they ‘came out ahead,’ ‘just lived,’ or ‘went in the hole,’” he said as the river was revealed to be a nine of spades. “And that brings me to the Negro Question.”

  “Do you have it?”

  John Dollard slowly lifted his head, as though nudged from a dream, to stare droop-eyed at Four Everard. “Have what?” he said, oblivious to the heap of chips at the center of the table, red discs intermingled with white discs, green discs intermingled with blue discs, leftovers of a disintegrated, grass-stained American flag.

  “‘Have what?’ he says,” said Four. “Monty, is that your ear on the table? I imagine the fellow sitting next to you must’ve talked it off by now, with his ‘economic models’ and ‘conspicuous consumptions.’”

  “I’m sorry to have offended you with my vocabulary.”

  “Just answer my question.” If a cigar, burned down to the length of a big toe, weren’t stuck in the corner of his mouth, Four’s teeth would have been clenched. “Do you have anything better than kings over nines?”

  “Oh.” Despite his obvious talent for poking up a fire in his host, John Dollard, looking at the cards in his hands as if they had appeared there by magic, showed no signs of possessing any innate skill at poker. Luck was a different story. “My, it seems that I do have something better,” he said, laying down a ten of spades and a jack of spades at the two junctures between the king, queen, and nine of spades on the table.

  “What do you have, Four?” asked Bart Peterson.

  “I was playing the board. Goddamn it.” Four threw his cards facedown at the community cards. “Should’ve known better than to try and bluff a fool.”

  Ever since he was young, Monty had not taken kindly to what his grandfather Tewksbury used to describe as people who “did not uphold the chivalry.” Landowners and managers who mistreated hoe hands and plowmen, kickers of dogs, hitters of women, rich whites who looked down on poor whites, poor whites who looked down on rich blacks, scalawags, scamps, scoundrels, and anyone who ate all the cashews from a jar of mixed nuts: Monty had trouble letting trash be trash. As such, in spite of his goal of winning votes that night, he chose to jeopardize his political career by saying, after Four Everard had called John Dollard a fool, “Says the man who just got taken for one.”

  Silence is often thought of as the absence of sound, just as white is thought of as the absence of color. Monty understood neither to be true. White is the combination of all colors, and silence is the presence of one emotion. Although that one emotion varies among situations—library-quiet is full of anxiety, bookstore-quiet is full of pride—the silence that followed Monty’s remark at the poker table consisted, unequivocally, of pure, authentic, utter joy.

  “Oysters!” yelled Four, a grin chiseled into his face. “What say we take a half hour and get something in our stomachs? Delia, bring out seven dozen! We’re famished!”

  Their yawns muffled by invisible, broken microphones in their fists, the players stood from the table, stretched their arms, tucked their shirts, and began to stroll about the room. Four gestured his drink toward Monty.

  “Mr. Forster, l
ooks as though we’re both on empty. Let’s refill our cocktails.”

  Here we go, thought Monty. Four’s joyful smile must have just been a ruse, something to distract everyone from his anger. Monty wouldn’t have been shocked if he took one of the servants aside and whispered, “Fetch my knife.”

  At the bar, however, Four remained cheerful as he tipped bourbon from a crystal decanter into Monty’s cocktail glass. “You showed me something just now.” He filled his own glass. “Did you know not a single parcel of my family’s estate ever once appeared in Debow’s Review. Everards acquire, Mr. Forster. We don’t sell.” Four rotated his cocktail glass on the rosewood counter. “Three things allowed us and our fellow Delta gentry to prosper: the crop-lien law, Illinois Central’s acquisition of the LNO&T, and the blessed Mississippi constitution of 1890.” He finished his drink in one gulp. “All those combined made me perhaps the greatest cotton planter in creation, only possible exception being the Khedive of Egypt.”

  Montgomery, who knew the crop-lien law guaranteed a lien on crops to landowners but not to laborers, who knew the formation of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad had modernized the farming economy, who knew the 1890 constitution instituted poll taxes that deprived the vote from black citizens, said, “What is it again I showed you just now?”

  “That you’ve got a pair.”

  “Not sure I follow.”

  Whiskey sloshed on the bar as Four refilled each of the cocktails. “Past forty years it’s been difficult for a Deltan to win the governorship. But that’s where the 1890 constitution is the gift keeps on giving. We’ve got the legislature. Ways and Means? Ours. Appropriations? Ours. Tell me something, Mr. Forster. How do you feel about the sales tax?”

  Monty believed it was abhorrently regressive taxation. “I love it,” he said.