Texas

by James A. Michener

  LARKIN

  BEST LITTLE TOWN IN TEXAS

  WATCH US GROW

  If the Klan avoided violence against blacks or Jews or Catholics, who were its targets? An event in the spring of 1921 best illustrates its preoccupations, for then it confronted a rather worthless man of fifty who had been working in the town’s livery stable when Larkin still had horses. He now served as janitor and polishing man at the Chevrolet garage, but he had also been living for many years with a shiftless woman named Nora as his housekeeper; few titles in town were less deserved than hers, for she was totally incapable of keeping even a dog kennel, let alone a house. Jake and Nora lived in chaos and in sin, and the upright men of the Klan felt it was high time this ungodly conduct be stopped.

  In orderly fashion, which marked all their actions, they appeared at Jake’s cabin one Tuesday night carrying a lighted torch, which all could see, and in their clean white robes, their faces hidden by masks, they handed down the law: ‘All this immoral sort of thing is gonna stop in Larkin. Marry this woman by Friday sundown or suffer the consequences.’

  Jake and Nora had no need of marriage or any understanding of how to participate in one had they wanted to. By hit-and-miss they had worked out a pattern of living which suited them and which produced far fewer family brawls than some of the more traditional arrangements in town. The Klansmen were right that no one would want a lot of such establishments in a community, but Jake felt there ought to be leeway for the accommodation of one or two, especially if they worked well and produced neither scandal nor a horde of unruly children.

  On Wednesday the Klansmen who had handed Jake and Nora their ultimatum watched to see what corrective steps the couple proposed taking, and when nothing seemed to have been done, two of the more responsible Klansmen decided to visit the couple again on Thursday night, and this they did in friendly fashion: ‘Jake, you don’t seem to understand. If you don’t marry this woman …’

  ‘Who are y’all? Behind them masks? What right …?’

  ‘We’re the conscience of this community. We’re determined to wipe out immoral behavior.’

  ‘Leave us alone. What about Mr. Henderson and his secretary?’

  The boldness of this question stunned the two Klansmen, each of whom knew about Mr. Henderson and his secretary. But it was not people like Henderson whom the Klan policed, and for someone like Jake to bring such a name into discussion was abhorrent. Now the tenor of the conversation grew more ominous: ‘Jake, Nora, you get married by tomorrow night or suffer the consequences.’

  Jake was prepared to brazen the thing out, but Nora asked in real confusion: ‘How could we get married?’ and the two hooded visitors turned their attention to her: ‘We’ll take you to the justice of the peace tomorrow morning, or if you prefer a church wedding, Reverend Hislop has said he’d do it for us.’

  ‘Get out of here!’ Jake shouted, and the two men withdrew.

  The next day passed, with Jake sweeping at the Chevrolet garage and showing no sign of remorse for his immoral persistence. Those Klansmen in the know watched his house—or was it Nora’s house?—and saw that nothing was happening there, either, so at eight that Friday evening seven Ku Kluxers met with the salesman from Indiana, and after praying that they might act with justice, charity and restraint, marched with a burning cross to Jake’s place. Planting the cross before the front door, they summoned the two miscreants.

  As soon as Jake appeared he was grabbed, not hurtfully, and stripped of his shirt. Tar was applied liberally across his back, and then a Klansman with a bag of feathers slapped handfuls onto the tar. He was then hoisted onto a stout beam, which four other Klansmen carried, and there he was held, feet tied together beneath the beam, while the moral custodians tended to the slut Nora.

  Around the world, in all times and in all places, whenever men go on an ethical rampage they feel that they must discipline women: ‘Your dresses are too short.’ ‘You tempt men.’ ‘Your behavior is salacious.’ ‘You must be put in your proper place.’ This stems, of course, from the inherent mystery of women, their capacity to survive, their ability to bear children, the universal suspicion that they possess some arcane knowledge not available to men. Women are dangerous, and men pass laws to keep them under restraint. All religions, which also deal in mysteries, know this, and that is why the Muslim, the Jewish, the Catholic and the Mormon faiths proscribed women so severely and why other churches ran into trouble when they tried belatedly to ordain women as ministers.

  The men of the Ku Klux Klan were as bewildered by sex as any of their reforming predecessors, and on this dark night they had to look upon Nora-with-three-teeth-missing-in-front as a temptress who had seduced Jake into his immoral life. But what to do with her? There was no inclination at all to strip her, but there was a burning desire to punish her, so two men dragged her out beside the flaming cross and tarred her whole dress, fore and aft, scattering feathers liberally upon her.

  She then was lifted onto the rail, behind her man, whereupon two additional men supported it, and in this formation the hooded Klansmen paraded through the streets of Larkin behind a sign which proclaimed:

  EMORALITY IN LARKIN WILL STOP

  Jake and Nora did not respond as the Klansmen had hoped. They did not marry, and when the long parade was over they returned home, scraped off the tar, and said ‘nothin’ to nobody.’ Early Saturday morning Jake was at the garage, sweeping as usual and saying hello to any who passed. He had no idea who had disciplined him, and at noon he walked home as usual for his lunch. Nora went to the store late Saturday for her weekend supplies, and on Sunday, Jake fished as always, up at the tank, which contained some good-sized bass, while Nora sat on her front lawn where scars from the burned cross still showed.

  Such behavior infuriated the Klansmen, who convened after church on Sunday a special meeting at which it was discussed with some heat as to whether the two should be flogged. The Indiana man was all for a public whipping in the courthouse square, but the Georgia man argued against it: ‘We found it does no good. Creates sympathy. And it scares the womenfolk.’

  Instead, the men found an old wagon and a worthless horse, and these they drove to Jake’s place on Monday evening. Throwing the two adulterers into the back, they piled the wagon with as many of their household goods as possible, then drove west of town till they were beyond sight of the beautiful courthouse tower which bespoke order and justice for this part of Texas. There the Klansmen plopped Jake onto the driver’s bench and gave him the reins: ‘Straight down this road is Fort Griffin. They’ll accept anybody.’

  The hooded posse returned to Larkin after sunset, and two hours later Jake and Nora, driving the old horse that Jake had often tended in the livery stable, came back to town. With no fanfare they rode down familiar streets to their home, unpacked their belongings, and went to bed.

  That was Monday. On Wednesday night Jake was found behind the garage, shot to death.

  No charges were ever filed against the Klansmen, and for the very good reason that no one knew for sure who they were, or even if they had done it. At least, that was the legal contention. Of course, everyone knew that Floyd Rusk—who could not hide his size even under a bedsheet—was one of the leaders, perhaps the leader, because he was obvious at all the marches and the cross burnings, but no one could be found who could swear that yes, he had seen Floyd Rusk tarring Jake.

  It was also known that Clyde Weatherby was an active member, as were the hardware merchant, the doctor, the schoolteacher and the druggist. Some four dozen other men, the best in the community, joined later. With an equal mix of patriotism and religion, these men of good intention began to inspect all aspects of life in Larkin, for they were determined to keep their little town in the mainstream of American life as they perceived it.

  They forced six men to marry their housekeepers. They lectured, in an almost fatherly manner, two teen-aged girls who seemed likely to become promiscuous, and they positively shut down a grocer against whom several h
ousewives had complained. They did not tar-and-feather him, nor did they horsewhip him; those punishments were reserved for sexual infractions, but they did ride him out of town, telling him to transfer his shop to Fort Griffin, where honesty of trade was not so severely supervised.

  By the beginning of 1922 these men had Larkin in the shape they wanted; even some of the Catholics, fearing that reprisals would next be directed at them, had moved away, making the town about as homogeneous as one could have found in all of Texas. It was a community of Protestant Christians in which the rules were understood and in which infractions were severely punished. Almost none of the excesses connected with the Klan in other parts of the nation were condoned here, and after two years of intense effort the Klansmen, when they met at night, could justifiably claim that they had cleaned up Larkin. With this victory under their belt, they intended moving against Texas as a whole, and then, all of the United States.

  In 1922 they got well started by electing their man, Earle B. Mayfield, a Tyler grocer, to the United States Senate, but this triumph had a bitter aftermath, because for two years that august body refused to seat a man accused of Klan membership, and when it did finally accept him, he was denied reelection. The Larkin members assuaged their disappointment by achieving a notorious victory in the local high school, where the principal, an enthusiastic Klansman, inserted in the school yearbook a well-drawn full-page depiction of a nightrider in his regalia of bedsheet, mask and pointed hat astride a white stallion under a halo composed of the words GOD, COUNTRY, PROTESTANTISM, SUPREMACY. At the bottom of the page, in a neatly lettered panel, stood the exhortation LIKE THE KLAN, LARKIN HIGH WILL TRIUMPH IN FOOTBALL.

  In the growing town, however, the Klan suffered other frustrations. The editor of the Defender, an effeminate young man from Arkansas, had the temerity to editorialize against them, and in a series of articles he explained why he opposed what he called ‘midnight terrorism.’ This unlucky phrase infuriated the Klansmen: ‘We have to guard the morals of Larkin at night because during the day we have to run our businesses. Terrorism is shooting innocent people, and no man can claim we ever done that, and live.’

  They handled the newspaper with restraint. First they approached the editor, in masks, and explained their lofty motives, pointing out the many good things they had done for Larkin, like eliminating vice and increasing church membership, but they made little impression on the young man.

  Next they threatened him. Three Klansmen, including one of enormous bulk, visited him at his home at two in the morning, warning him that he must halt all comment on the Klan ‘or our next visit is gonna be more serious.’

  The young editor, despite his appearance, was apparently cut from a robust Arkansas stock, because he ignored the threats, whereupon the governing committee of the Klan met to discuss what next to try. The meeting was held in the bank, after hours and without masks. Nine men, clean-shaven, well-dressed, giving every evidence of prosperity and right living, met solemnly to discuss their options: ‘We can tar-and-feather him. We can whip him publicly. Or we can shoot him. But one way or another, we are going to silence that bastard.’

  There was support for each of these choices, but after additional discussion, the majority seemed to settle upon a good horsewhipping on the courthouse steps, but then Floyd Rusk, huffing and puffing, introduced a note of reason: ‘Men, in this country you learn never to bust the nose of the press. If you flog that editor publicly, or even privately, the entire press of Texas and the United States is goin’ to descend upon this town. And if you shoot him, the federal government will have the marshals in here.’

  ‘What can we do?’ the banker asked.

  ‘You have the solution,’ Rusk said.

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘Buy the paper. Throw him out.’ When this evoked discussion, Rusk listened, judged the weight of various opinions, and said: ‘It’s quick, it’s effective, and it’s legal.’

  So without even donning their hooded costumes, the leading members of the Klan accumulated a fund and bought the paper, then, avoiding scandal, quietly drove the young editor out of town. That source of criticism was silenced, because before hiring a new editor, also a young man but this time from Dallas, the leading Klansmen satisfied themselves that he was a supporter of their movement and had been a member in the larger city.

  The second problem was not so easily handled. Reverend Hislop was no irritating liberal like the editor from Arkansas, for he was against everything the Klan was against—immorality, adultery, drunkenness, shady business practice, the excesses of youth, such as blatant dancing—but he taught that these evils could best be opposed through an orderly church; he suspected that Jesus would not have approved of nightriders or flaming crosses, for the latter symbol was too precious to be so abused. Hislop was not a social hero; he kept his suspicions to himself, but as in all such situations wherein a man of good intention tries to hide, the facts had a tendency to uncover him, and that is what happened.

  The Klansmen, eager to adopt a procedure which had proved effective in many small towns across the state, initiated the policy of having a committee of six members dress in full regalia each Sunday morning and march as a unit to either the Baptist or Methodist church, timing their arrival to coincide with the collection. Silently, and with impressive dignity, they entered at the rear, strode up the middle aisle in formation, and placed upon the altar an envelope containing a substantial cash contribution. ‘For God’s work,’ the leader would cry in a loud voice, whereupon the six would turn on their heels and march out.

  Such pageantry impressed the citizens, gaining the Klan much popular support, especially when the amount of the contribution was magnified in the telling: ‘They give two hunnerd big ones for the poor and needy of this community.’ Many believed that God had selected them as His right arm, and the moral intention of most of their public acts supported this view. Some thoughtful men came to believe that soon the Klan would assume responsibility for all of Texas, and that when that happened, a new day of justice and honest living would result.

  Reverend Hislop did not see it this way. As a devout Southerner and a strong defender of the Confederacy, he understood the emotions which had called forth the original Klan back in the dark days after 1865, and supposed that had he lived then, he would have been a Klansman, because, as he said, ‘some kind of corrective action was needed.’ But he was not so sure about the motives of this revived Klan of the 1920s: ‘They stand for all that’s good, that I must confess. And they also support the programs of the church. They’re against sin, and that puts them on my side. But decisions of punishment should be made by courts of law. In the long range of human history, there is no alternative to that. When the church dispensed justice in Spain and New England, it did a bad job. When these good men dispense their midnight justice at the country crossroads, they do an equally imperfect job. Martha, I cannot accept their Sunday contributions any longer.’

  The decision had been reached painfully, but it was set in rock. However, Hislop was not the kind of man to create a public scandal; that would have been most repugnant. So on Sunday, when the six hooded Klansmen marched into his church, their polished boots clicking, he accepted their offering, but that very afternoon he summoned Floyd Rusk and the Indiana salesman to his parsonage, where he told them: ‘It is improper for you to invade the House of the Lord. It’s improper for you to assume the duties of the church.’

  ‘Why do you tell me this?’ Rusk asked, and Reverend Hislop pointed a finger at the rancher’s enormous belly: ‘Do you think you can hide that behind a costume?’

  ‘But why do you oppose the Klan?’ Rusk asked. ‘Surely it supports God’s will.’

  ‘I am sometimes confused as to what God’s will really is.’

  ‘Are you talkin’ atheism?’ Rusk demanded.

  ‘I’m saying that I’m not sure what is accomplished by tarring a silly woman like Nora.’

  ‘Surely she was an evil influence.’


  ‘They thought that in Salem, when old women muttered. They hanged them. What are you going to do to Nora now?’

  ‘Nora has nothing to do with this. We’re turning Larkin into a Christian town.’

  ‘In some things, yes. Mr. Rusk, don’t you realize that for every wayward person you correct, there are six others in our town who cheat their customers, who misappropriate funds … Life goes on here much as it does in Chicago or Atlanta, but you focus only on the little sinners.’

  ‘You do talk atheism, Reverend Hislop. You better be careful.’

  ‘I am being careful, Mr. Rusk, and I’m asking you politely, as a fellow Christian who approves of much that you do, not to enter my church any more with your offerings. The money I need, and it can be delivered in the plate like the other offerings, but the display I do not need.’

  On Sunday the six Klansmen in full regalia entered the church as usual. Led by a portly figure, they marched to the altar, where the large one said in a loud voice: ‘For God’s work.’

  Before they could click their heels and retreat, Reverend Hislop said quietly: ‘Gentlemen, God thanks you for your offering. His work needs all the support it can get. But you must not enter His church in disguise. You must not associate God with your endeavors, worthy though they sometimes are. Please take your offering out with you.’

  No Klansman spoke. At the big man’s signal they tramped down the aisle and out the door, leaving their money where they had placed it.

  On previous Sundays the deacons who passed the collection plates and then marched to the altar, where the offerings were blessed, had rather grandiloquently lifted the Klan donation and placed it atop the lesser offerings, but on this day Reverend Hislop asked them not to do this. To his astonishment, one of the deacons who was a member of the Klan ostentatiously took the envelope from where Rusk had left it and placed it once more atop all the offerings, as if it took precedence because of the Klan’s power in that town and in that church.