“Yes, that’s true.”
“I just wanted you to know what’s going on…”
“I appreciate you telling me, Mr. Randolph, and I know my father will too.”
“We pressured him as much as we could,” Randolph said.
“I know you did,” Delphine said. “And I appreciate that. We’ll take it from here.”
“Whatever you do, you know you have our support.”
“Yes, and we thank you for that.”
Delphine hung up and turned toward her father, who was steaming.
“That som-bitch is so slippery he’d hold his own in a pond fulla eels,” Bourque said. “But he’s overwound his watch, and I’m gonna call him on it. Gimme the damn phone.” He was almost shouting.
“Now, Daddy…”
“Best not to get riled up, Boss,” Pickett said.
Bourque took a deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. Both of you.” He popped a Tum and chewed it. When he was finished, he looked at Delphine. “Now, could I please have the phone?”
“What do you think?” Delphine asked Pickett.
“Your call.”
Delphine handed the receiver to her father. “Sophie, get me Andrew Carrington,” he said. He pushed the speaker button, so all could hear.
“Coming right up, Mr. President.”
It took several minutes, but eventually, Governor Carrington came on the line. “Buddy? I’m a bit surprised to hear from you. I told you I’d call when I had news, and we haven’t voted yet.”
“Yes, I know,” Bourque said. “But I hear you’re working hard to get yourself into the history books.”
“Really? Howzat?”
“Well, from what I understand, you want to be the man who prevented reunion and squashed the South’s last chance to avoid poverty and invasion.”
Carrington was silent for a moment, then he spoke. “I don’t know where you got that idea, Buddy. I’m doing all I can to get us the votes we need. I’m keeping my promise.”
“You’re saying the right things, Andrew, but you’re whispering and winking.”
“I don’t know where you got that idea,” Carrington protested. “I’m doing my best. But we’ve got some fierce opposition here, Buddy, people who don’t want to give up their traditions, people who value their history. I’m not sure I can overcome them.”
“Hell, Andrew, you can make that whole legislature dance the Hornpipe if you’ve a mind to and we both know it.”
“Not this time, Buddy.”
“So who’s against you?” Bourque said. He caught Delphine’s eye as he asked the question.
“It’s the plantation owners, Buddy. The old-timers. They still have a lot of political power and they’re dead set against this. You know how it is, they feel entitled.”
“Andrew, all I can figure is that you think my roof ain’t nailed on tight.”
“That’s not true, Buddy, and I’m surprised you’d say so.” Carrington said, sounding wounded. “You know how much I respect you. Always have, always will.”
“Then why are you pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining?”
“Honestly, Buddy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t said a bad word about reunion. Not one.”
“That supposed to reassure me?”
“Well, maybe I could have made a public statement…”
“Andrew, you think I don’t know how the plantation owners feel about reunion?”
Carrington was silent now, but the wheels were turning. “Buddy, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I think you’re misinformed.”
“I see,” Bourque suggested, “you think someone’s been pulling the wool over my eyes.”
“No. Well, not exactly, but people do lie. They’ve convinced themselves they have good reasons.”
This time it was Bourque who took a few seconds to respond. “Good reasons, eh?” He finally said. “What are your good reasons, Andrew?”
“Are you calling me a liar?” Carrington asked very quietly.
“What I’m saying, Andrew, is if the Virginia legislature doesn’t pass the reunion bill, I’m going to assume you sabotaged it. And that’s the story I’m gonna tell the newspapers and the TV boys. I’m going to say all the other governors had the guts, but not you. I’m going to say they all understood what was at stake, except you. I’m going to say I’ve heard rumors that you’ve been negotiating with Garcia…”
“Jesus, Buddy, they’ll get out the tar and feathers…”
“On the other hand,” Bourque continued, “if, by the end of the day, I hear that Virginia has passed the reunion bill, and by a fair margin, then I’m gonna round up those reporters and brag on you. I’m gonna tell ‘em what a great statesman you are. I’m going to tell them that you’re a man of courage and vision and that I’m proud to call you my friend.”
Carrington went silent again, and Bourque let him stew for awhile. “So what’s it going to be, Andrew? Friend or foe?”
“You play hardball, don’t you, Buddy?”
“Andrew, this ain’t hardball. This is batting practice.”
“The margin isn’t going to be very big, Buddy. Five votes, possibly ten—that’s the very best I can do.”
“That would fill my heart with joy, Andrew.”
“You’ll hear from me by 5 o’clock, Buddy. But you can consider it a done deal.”
“Thank you, Andrew.”
Bourque handed the receiver to Delphine and lay back in the bed, pale and exhausted. She took a pill from one of the bottles, handed him the water glass and made sure he swallowed it down. He did so looking up at the portrait of his wife hanging on the wall, a handsome woman with Delphine’s red hair and blue eyes, but pretty in a different way.
“You’re a hard man to say ‘no’ to,” Pickett observed.
Bourque nodded weakly. “I’ve done all I could. Now it’s up to Callaway.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings began the next morning at 10 a.m. at 419 Dirksen Senate Office Building, one of the Senate’s largest and most impressive hearing rooms, a chamber with thirty-foot ceilings and a visitor’s gallery.
Seated around the giant u-shaped committee rostrum, which was covered with blue cloth, were seventeen senators: nine Democrats and eight Republicans, all of them either conferring with assistants, fiddling with their laptops, or gossiping about each other. The rostrum microphones had not yet been turned on.
At the center, facing the witness table, were Sen. Tom Poulos, the committee chairman, and Sen. Oliver Wendell, the ranking Republican. Poulos and slipped on his eyeglasses and was hopping around the Web, checking out the political sites.
At that moment, the hearing room’s main doors were flung open and a mob of reporters, photographers and other assorted media folk, followed soon after by a good-sized serving of the general public. The journalists spread out in front of the rostrum, the better to keep an eye on both the committee members and the witnesses.
Wendell punched numbers into a cell phone, listened, swore, then slipped the thing back into his pocket. “Damn kid doesn’t answer,” he told Poulos, who smiled and shrugged.
A Senator to Poulos’s left—in more ways than one—one Alexander “Sandy” Salkin, a self-proclaimed Socialist and Independent who caucused with the Democrats, a wild-haired man in his 60s with a reputation as an orator, bent forward so he could see Wendell. “I see you’re taking a turn as Nostradamus, Oliver.”
“What do you mean?” Wendell said, puzzled and ready to be offended.
“Well, I gather you’re predicting the end of our President’s tenure. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“No, no. That’s a misquote. That’s not what I meant,” Wendell insisted. “I was talking about his momentum. He’s been living a charmed life, riding a wave, what with the election and all. But this absurd, Quixotic reunion idea will put all that to an end.”
“I don’t see it that way, Oliver,
” Salkin said.
“Oh? And how do you see it?”
“I think it’s the greatest idea I’ve heard in my lifetime from any American President.”
“Says here,” Poulos said, pointing to his computer screen, “that our friend plans to filibuster the bill, if necessary.”
Salkin shook his head sadly. “I should have guessed,” he said. “Whenever progress threatens, Oliver Wendell will be standing at the barricades, ready to thwart it.”
“Your idea of progress is not the same as mine, Sandy,” Wendell said.
The committee hearing began a few minutes later, first witness called by the minority, Dr. Dexter P. Kimball, Jack Sullivan’s favorite Confederacy expert. And in his wheezy and unpleasant treble, he repeated his contentions that Bourque was after money and power and nothing else.
The next witness, called by the majority, Dr. Madeline Corin, professor of Southern Studies at Brandeis, contradicted everything Dr. Kimball had said, asserting that reunion would bring prosperity to the Confederacy and strengthen the North.
And so it went, for almost two days. It was like a murder trial, the prosecution putting up experts of one persuasion, the defense finding their opposite numbers, thirteen of them in all—economists, sociologists, political scientists, bankers, clergy. In the end, neither side was able to make a dent in the other.
In general, the Liberals favored reunion and the Conservatives were against it. However, the largest group of Senators couldn’t make up their minds, or weren’t willing to tell anyone how they planned to vote.
Toward the end of the second day of the hearings, Senator Wendell raised a troublesome question, which, leaning into his mike, he addressed to Senator Poulos. “Tom, something has been puzzling me. You’ve called quite a few witnesses, but not one from the Confederacy, someone who can tell us how the people of the South feel about reunion. Why is that?”
The question, the first Wendell had directly asked Poulos, attracted the attention of several members of the media, who’d been bored silly sitting through the hours of tedious and inconclusive testimony. They hoped it might provide an answer to the only remaining mystery of the day, the identity of the person identified on the meeting scheduled only as “final witness.”
“As a matter of fact,” Sen. Poulos said, rather pleased with himself, “We do have one more witness and I think you’ll find he fits your description perfectly. The committee calls LeRoy Pickett to the witness table.”
One of the room’s side doors opened and Roy Pickett walked out, unaccompanied, wearing a suit, looking quite self-possessed. He stood at the witness table, facing the senators of the Foreign Relations Committee and looked expectantly at the young, dark-haired lawyer who was administering oaths.
“Please raise your right hand.”
Pickett did so.
“I solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Pickett repeated the oath.
“State your name, occupation and place of residence.”
“I am LeRoy Pickett, assistant to the President of the Confederacy, Virgil Bourque, and I reside at The Plantation, also known as Arcadia, President Bourque’s residence, just outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
Pickett’s arrival caught the spectators’ gallery by surprise, inspiring an outbreak of hushed conjecture. Even the committee members seemed taken aback, several of them consulting their agendas, trying to satisfy their curiosity.
Pickett waited until the buzz faded a bit. “Chairman Poulos, Senator Wendell, members of the Foreign Relations Committee,” he said. “I would like to make a statement. I’ll be happy to answer your questions afterward.”
“Please go ahead,” Sen. Wendell said. The spectators finally ceased chattering.
Pickett spread out his written statement on the witness table. “To begin with,” he began, talking slowly and deliberately, “I speak for myself, not the government or the people. But I was born in the Confederacy. I was raised in the South and I have lived there all of my life. I know the hearts of these people, leaders and commoners alike. I know their customs, their beliefs, their attitudes, their fears and their hopes.”
Pickett stopped and gazed at the committee members, to make sure he was being taken seriously. They were paying close attention.
“As you know,” he continued, running a finger along his typescript, determined not to lose his place, “the leaders of our country, beginning with the President, but including every single governor and the clear majority of our legislators and our greatest religious leader have decided to forever abandon nationhood and to reaffirm our allegiance to the Constitution, its amendments and the Federal laws of the North American Union. We have petitioned you for reunion.”
In the back of the spectators’ gallery, two young men in dark blue hoodies suddenly rose and spread out a painted banner that read “Say No to Bourque!” and started shouting “Go home, you’re not wanted here!” Guards quickly converged on them and hustled them out of the room, but everyone present had heard their message.
Pickett waited until the room was quiet, then resumed as though he had not been interrupted. “You may ask, you have every right to ask, are we sincere in our request? My answer is that we are more sincere even that we Southerners know or realize. In a superficial sense, we have come to you because of circumstances, specifically the fact that our country is bankrupt and that we face a dire military threat from Mexico.”
He paused for breath and the silence was immediately filled by audience buzz—his two blunt statements had inspired an outbreak of surprised whispers. When they died down, cowed by his silence, he resumed without elaborating.
“But there are far deeper, far more profound reasons for our request to rejoin you. The Confederacy is exhausted, economically, physically, psychologically and perhaps most important, morally. Even the blindest of us can no longer deny that we have been living an illusion. The reality, the colossal errors of our ways, are as obvious to the oppressors as to the oppressed.
“What was our folly? We tried to freeze our society as it was, pulling up the drawbridge to change. Our border fence was a kind of moat, which change could not penetrate. And so we lived our lives as time went by, and as the world revolved, and evolved. The Confederacy wanted no part of whatever the rest of the world had to offer.”
Pickett looked at the Senators on the rostrum one by one, hoping he was having an impact. They seemed riveted to his words, but he couldn’t tell what they were thinking.
“Why did my country do this? It did this for the comfort and stature of the rich and the powerful, and for the poor and downtrodden as well—so long as they were not Black. It did this out of fear. The dominant elements of society—the whites—were not willing to give up a way of life that provided economic security for many, and confirmed feelings of superiority for all, every day, in ways both large and small. Why would anyone want to give that up?
“And what about the others, the Blacks? We were largely compliant, for our own safety. We had no responsibilities, except to our masters, and for some, this was an easy way of life.
“As the years passed, our society continued in its frozen ways. And it worked. It succeeded, more or less, when we had the cotton and the Texas oil. They allowed us to keep living in the past, in relative comfort, adopting some of the outside world’s technologies, while rejecting its social progress. But it is clear to all of us, Black and white, that this no longer works. We cannot be a independent country any longer.”
Pickett stopped, sat back and took a deep breath. Then he realized he’d lost his place. It took him a few moments to find it. The hearing room waited silently as he searched.
Then, there is was. “Whether or not you approve the petition of our ten states and grant us reunion,” he read aloud, “our country is at an end. It is ready either to be conquered and picked apart by our enemies, or joined to the people from whom we sprang, so that we would both be stronger.
“It is tr
ue that we need help. Quite a bit of it. We need your generosity and understanding. But it is also true that we have much to contribute—not just people willing and able to work, but also unique cultural riches, beautiful lands, pristine beaches, natural wonders, natural resources, navigable waterways, ports on the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. We will enrich each other.”
Another pause…a change of subject and tone of voice. “And what of white and Black? It will take time for the old habits to die. They are habits, after all. We might have to wait until the next generation before we’re substantially free of them. But it’s already started, and if you agree to reunion, we will change even more quickly and even more profoundly. Our children will live in a different world.”
Pickett let that sink in for a moment, then began speaking again, almost pleading. “We are family, Senators. We have been estranged these last 150 years, and the fault is entirely ours. But we have learned our lesson the hard way, the very hard way. We have paid the price of arrogance and pride, and it has been a high price. Now the prodigal states return, asking for your understanding and your generosity, pledging to add their hands to yours, to stand beside you and among you in good times and bad.
“What would reunion mean to me, as a Black man and as a citizen of the Confederacy? Freedom…Opportunity...Dignity...Recognition of my worth as a human being. You have it in your power to imbue millions of people with those feelings, to raise up an entire race. It would be one of the greatest contributions to the advancement of civilization in human history, an act of unprecedented magnanimity.”
Now Pickett came to a dead stop. He’d made his case. He’d poured out his heart. It was time to make the request. “And so I ask you to vote yes, “he said, “I ask you to pass this measure on to the Senate, so that our separation might finally come to an end and that we might once more be one nation, indivisible.”
For a moment, there was no reaction in the hearing room. Then a spectator in the gallery rose and began to applaud, slowly. He was soon joined by a visitor on the other side of the chamber, then by several more and before long, the entire room—all but the Senators on the rostrum and the media mob—were standing and applauding quietly but in earnest.
ReUNION: What if the Civil War had never happened? Page 43