Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  When they finally began heading for the rally, Wallace, as usual, started fretting about what the size of the crowd was likely to be, inventing an exhaustive and ingenious variety of reasons why it wouldn’t be large. He worried about the cold—to him, the deadliest enemy of political rallies, North or South. When someone in the car offered, “A lot of people came out here to hear you last spring in the rain,” he snapped, “That don’t mean anything. It was warm, a warm rain. A little summer rain on their shirtsleeves, that’s all right. But folks don’t like much to come out in cold like this.” When the site came into view—a spot on the edge of town, along the highway—Wallace lunged forward, thrusting his head alongside that of his aide in the front seat, his forehead actually bumping the window. “Yeah, there’s some folks,” he declared. “I see some folks.” And leaving his wetly chewed cigar in the ashtray, he scrambled out into music, excitement, extended hands.

  When the last rally of the day was finished, there would emerge among the Wallace party, Lurleen excepted, a private holiday air, a festival or party exuberance, a spirit of happy release, with jubilant calls and the energetic slamming of car doors filling the dusk. Wallace would usually take aside whatever reporter happened still to be on hand and inquire one last time, his voice low and almost conspiratorial, “Well, what you think? We gonna get any votes up here?”

  Among the last to leave all of Wallace’s rallies were two women—a young girl, dowdily dressed, with pale skin and bad teeth and a cringing twangy voice and moist mournful woebegone eyes, and her mother, a smaller and more sprightly woman who nevertheless had the same air of besieged endurance. The two of them were entertainers of a sort. In summers, they packed their belongings into an ancient black Cadillac and journeyed down to Miami Beach, where they played a succession of dumpy little hotels, the daughter manning an organ and the mother briskly accompanying her on a set of drums. “We play “Dixie” real good and loud and clear for those Yank-kees down there,” the daughter likes to declare, with the shy brave pride of a Salvation Army maid reporting on her missionary efforts with a cornet outside a corner saloon. Now free-lance members of Wallace’s entourage, they peddled campaign records on the fringe of the crowd at each stop, holding samples high in the air and soundlessly waggling them to catch people’s attention—having not a lot of success, since most people were facing the other way. But they showed up at each rally, that shattered expression in their eyes, smiling abjectly, with an air of having gamely and even gaily borne unspeakable suffering, which they could never for a moment be able to describe or forget, but which they would not allow to get them down, either—that embattled but plucky air which women have when left, the last functioning survivors of their family, with nothing in this world to rely on but each other. At the end of each rally, Wallace would call to them before he got into his car, as if it were the first time he had noticed they had joined him, “Mighty glad to see yawl out here with us today, heunh?”

  Toward the close of the campaign, a day was spent in the state’s largest city, Birmingham. It is, in Alabama, the closest thing to alien turf for Wallace, not only because of its relative sophistication, but because the Republican party is particularly robust there. “You know, I ain’t really their type here,” Wallace remarked, driving into town. “They got a lot of genteel folks here.” But the first rallies that morning were held in a fairly congenial section of the city: the mill villages, with their close streets of little brick and frame houses ranked endlessly under pecan and chinaberry trees, where one passes 1949 Dodge coupes with rubber buzzards dangling from the rear-view mirrors or plastic figurines of Jesus set on the dashboards. At each stop that morning there were unusually large delegations of minor politicians on hand, and they collected around Wallace like a cloud of pilot fish.

  Around noon, driving to a Birmingham hotel, Wallace declared as the car passed a bank, “We stopped in there for a minute this morning, and all the girls in there were for us. Real genteel girls. You could tell they was college girls, you know. You have to have a college education to work in a bank. Yeah, they were for us.” He then mused, “My grandmother lives here, gonna be celebrating her ninety-ninth birthday tomorrow.” Someone in the car suggested he visit her with photographers for the occasion, but he dismissed that: “It’d look like I was using her politically, to campaign with. A fella just can’t use his ninety-nine-year-old grandmother. . . .” He paused. “Can he?”

  At the hotel he led a charge down winding marble steps to the men’s room, his cigar in his hand, and then went back upstairs, pausing only a moment to refire his cigar, to the sunny dining room, where a waitress greeted him cordially with one quick grind of the twist, which Wallace, just barely, just perceptibly under his suit coat, reciprocated. When he was seated, the waitress told him he could quit his newspaper ads, he was already too far ahead for anything to happen to him. Tickled, he grabbed her hand by the fingertips and gave it a fond little shake. “Honey, you say we don’t need to run ’em anymore?” He looked at the other people at the table expectantly, in delight. “Say we don’t need any more ads, hunh? Say we already got it?” He finally released her hand when she began to take the order. She recommended tapioca pudding for dessert, and Wallace inquired, “Tapioca—now what would that be like?” She told him what was in it, and he said, “Well, honey, I think I’ll just have me a little bowl of banana pudding.” When she left, Wallace informed the people at his table, “You know, her daughter was in an automobile accident not long ago up on the mountain. It killed her dead.” Toward the end of the meal, a crony came over and sat at the table, a heavy pie-faced fellow whose name, caught fleetingly, seemed to be Jimmie Moon. Moon began telling Wallace about the recent misfortunes of a local patriarch. “Yeah, he’s got cancer of the rectum, all his garbage is coming out here—” Moon demonstrated, his hands forming a large circle in the vicinity of his watch pocket. “Twelve months is gonna get him, but he don’t know it yet.” Wallace meditated a moment over his banana pudding. “Well, send a telegram, ‘Sorry to hear you’re under the weather, but glad to hear you’re feeling better.’ ”

  He then fell to chatting about the rally to be held that afternoon in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia. “This here’s gonna be a silk-stocking district. I don’t really know why I’m going out there. They got one of the most elegant clubs in the United States up there on the side of that mountain, with the most beautiful view you ever saw. They call it The Club.” One arm hitched over the back of his chair, his legs crossed, he dislodged a speck of food with his toothpick and chewed it ruminatively for a moment. “ ’Cose, I ain’t no The Club type myself. These folks where we goin’, they got it all, they don’t want to give it to nobody. You go put a nigguh in their school, it ain’t like it is with a poor workin’ man over there on the other side of town—the rich folks can send their chillun to a private school. They ain’t the ones gettin’ run over and trampled, it’s the steelworkers and metalworkers here.”

  With some relish he recalled the time Birmingham had been dropped from the itinerary of the touring New York Metropolitan Opera because all the local hotels refused to accommodate the integrated company. “There was some soprano couldn’t stand not to stay with the nigguhs in the bunch. So I told ’em to take their fa-sal-las and re-ti-does somewhere else. We could do without ’em. Only opera anybody around here cares about anyway is the Grand Ole Opry. The folks down home in Barbour County got real upset with me when they heard the opera wasn’t coming to Birmingham—they thought it was gonna be the Grand Ole Opry. There’s more real culture in that anyway, than in all this European singin’. Those are real folk songs right from the earth, right from life. Those are real people in the Grand Ole Opry.”

  But driving to Vestavia, he continued to fret: “This here’s gonna be Martin country, now. Got-rocks country—that’s what ole Jim Folsom used to say. These the got-rocks folks.” He sat forward once and declared, “There’s a fella in a big car got a Wallace sticker. We got a few doctors with us, I g
uess.” Sitting back again, he murmured, “I’m gonna give ’em a speech out here, anyway.”

  But it was listless, distracted, and vaguely pathetic. The shopping center was filled, in the gathering dusk, with women in slacks and knit sweaters holding poodles, small boys with John-John haircuts, and small girls in Winnie-the-Pooh dresses, an expensive and well-preened assembly of suburbanites who were chattering as much to each other as they were listening to Wallace’s voice blaring electronically from the amplifiers on the flatbed trailer. A good many of them simply sat in their cars waiting for someone to come back from one of the stores. Wallace’s monologue, his repertoire of phrases, was plainly unsuited to them. He seemed aware of it, and peculiarly deferential and eager to be friendly anyway. Referring to a recount of votes during the Maryland primary race he entered, he said, “What they did was recapitulate on us—you folks may know what that means, but I don’t,” and changed one of his references to “all these folks in their air-conditioned country clubs” to “some people in their air-conditioned offices, they may not understand. . . .”

  The party returned to the hotel before going on to the last rally, at Roebuck, a somewhat homier section of Birmingham. Wallace, after Vestavia, was eager to be back on more familiar ground. On the way to Roebuck, Wallace suddenly demanded of a local politician in the car, “I don’t spose we gonna carry Vestavia, are we?” The politician made the mistake of agreeing that things indeed did not look sunny in Vestavia, and Wallace quickly barked, “Well, you say that, but you know we didn’t do too bad out there in the spring, I recall. . . .” The politician rode the rest of the way in chastened silence.

  There was a huge crowd waiting in the shopping-center parking lot where the rally was scheduled. The wind was black and sharp and wicked now, and as Wallace passed through the crowd, platform-bound, there were frequent whiffs of bourbon. He was welcomed lustily. One small snugly bundled lady tugged at the sleeve of a Wallace bodyguard and told him, “Now, you take good care of that boy, you hear?” After his speech, back down in the crowd, he was heartily hugged and bussed. “God bless you, Guvnuh Wallace. . . . I believe we got the most Christian guvnuh in the United States. . . .” As they pressed about him, he chattered jubilantly, “Yawl get cold out here? Hope we didn’t keep yawl too long. Watch out there, don’t mash the baby. . . .” He was engulfed for a full twenty minutes. A Negro, a young schoolteacher, surfaced briefly and announced, with only the slightest flutter of his eyelashes, “I pledge to you my support,” and then promptly sank back out of sight. Finally, before Wallace returned to his car, there was one last picture for a group of college students. “I hope that turns out good, heunh?” Wallace said. “Yawl want to take another one just to make sure?” Back in his car at last, he declared, after lighting up a fresh cigar, “Now, that’s the way I like to end the day.” Vestavia had been more than neutralized.

  With the rallies of the last day, he drifted closer and closer to Barbour County, his home, so that now it seemed as if he had been circling the whole week, drawing nearer and nearer to his origins. When he arrived in Abbeville, a little town some forty miles from the Barbour County seat of Clayton, he was in another clime, warmer, mellower, easier—southeastern Alabama’s flat peanut country. A large crowd was already gathered under the pecan trees on the town square. Drugstore and dime-store neons glimmered around them in the blue twilight, and in the air there was the faint smell of fresh soap. When Wallace finished his address and stepped down into the crowd, he seemed to pull the people close around him, like a bird finally folding and preening his wings. There was only one more rally left, in Clayton. By now Lurleen looked weary and strangely frightened, as if it had come to her at last that the next day she was going to be elected the governor of a state. At moments through the campaign, she had seemed almost to crumple. Wallace, after he had finished shaking hands and started back to his car, would see her sitting in the car behind his, and, his door opened and one foot already inside, he would gesture irritably to her, arching his hand as if he were flinging seed over the town at large, and mutter, so that she could not possibly have heard him, “C’mon, honey, you got to go into the stores and things, you got to see ’em, you got to speak to ’em now. . . .” And there had been brief furtive arguments. Once, at the end of a day’s campaigning in central Alabama, the two of them talked for a moment while the rest of the party stood aside waiting, Wallace leaning in the door of her car and she sitting across the seat from him against the other door, listening to him with a faint frown of harried, hopeless exasperation. A light rain began falling, ending the argument, Wallace abruptly shutting her door and getting into his own car, and as the caravan pulled away, she sat with her chin still in her hand, gazing out into the dusk.

  The car now carried him the final miles to Clayton. It was only seventeen miles from Clio, the village where he had grown up and to which he had returned after the war to commence his political life. Not long after that, he had moved on up to Clayton, and since then, it has served as what home he could be said to have. He huddled in the back seat against the door, as small and self-absorbed as a twelve-year-old boy, abstractedly fingering the door lever and window latch as he peered out at the night.

  At last, he said, his voice low now and a little thick and hoarse, “I like to touch people. It does something good to you, to see how people like you. A lot of places, people have passed little children up to me, saying, ‘Let him touch them!’ ” He demonstrated, raising his short arms. “There even been folks standing out there in the rain lots of places. It really makes you feel humble.” For a while he was quiet again, looking out the window. As the car approached a small litter of weakly lit stores, he leaned forward. “This here’s Blue Springs, where we used to go swimming all the time. It’s got a natural spring comes out of the ground. Old Confederate veterans used to like to have their reunions here back during the teens and the twenties. It used to be a real popular resort community, but you can see it’s pretty run down now. But we’re fixin’ it up with a big picnic area, gonna turn it into a place like all them other resort areas with natural springs.” He said to his driver, “Jemison, reckon we could stop and take a look at it? Ain’t we got a little time yet?” Jemison wheeled off the highway and charged down into a grassy area, followed by the caravan. “This here’s good, you can stop,” said Wallace. “Keep your lights on it, now, so I can see it.” He scrambled out and walked in the glare of the car’s lights toward a black shine of water ahead of him, stepping a little high in the wet grass, his bodyguards and the rest of his party trailing after him. The night was cool, hushed, sweet with dew, filled with the myriad stitch of crickets. Wallace stopped abruptly and gestured with his cigar over the vague dark expanse of water. “We used to take running jumps off the bank here when we were boys. We gonna brick all this in here, see, where there’s just mud now. We got picnic and camping areas over yonder. It’s gonna be a real nice park.” He tromped on around the water, eager, aimless, as if trying to find some spot where he would be able to see it all and enclose its shape once more in his mind, all the while talking and flourishing his cigar, his entourage tumbling after him and the waiting headlights of the other cars flaring in the night. “Yeah,” he said, “you can’t see it so good now, but all this has been built on during my administration. We fixin’ it up real nice.” (But in daylight the recreation area has a scraped and denuded look. Ancient trees once shaded the water, but they have vanished, bulled down and replaced with scraggly knee-high seedlings spaced with arithmetic regularity around concrete tables and benches, geometrically abstract picnic shelters painted in pastels, and blacktop driveways with raw new concrete gullies. There is even, beside the swimming hole with its natural spring, a wire-fenced pool with diving boards. The place is usually absolutely deserted. A native of Blue Springs once protested to Wallace, “It just don’t seem to look like it used to.” Wallace assured him, “Well, now, we still got lots of work to do out there. We gonna get it back lookin’ the same. You can tell a
ll the folks out there not to worry, we gonna fix it.” But he seemed to sense that something had gone grievously wrong with this project. It made him profoundly uncomfortable.)

  Back on the highway to Clayton, Wallace became increasingly chatty. The car whined over a short bridge, and he said, “Sikes Creek. Ole Sikes Creek. We used to go swimming there some—fish, set out hooks, catch catfish—kill snakes. Used to go out in the river hunting moccasins that’d be hanging around in the trees.” He leaned forward, close to the ear of Oscar Harper, one of his aides in the front seat. “You ever do that, Oscar? Go out looking for them moccasins hanging up in them trees?” Before Harper could answer, Wallace leaned back again and mused, “You know, I haven’t seen a snake on this road this whole year, I don’t believe. Used to see them all the time. Back when I was driving this road a lot by myself, I used to run over them all the time—hit ’em, and then back up over ’em, and then get out and whup ’em with a stick. But you just don’t see ’em anymore. I don’t know what the matter is. . . .”

  The nostalgic sites were coming to him thicker and faster out of the night, surfacing for a moment in the fleeting glare of the car lights and then sucked back into the sightless dark. “That’s Bonny Smith’s, where we used to shell oysters. . . . And there’s Ben Bell’s house. He’s had a Wallace for Governor sign in his yard there since 1958, said he was gonna keep that sign nailed to that tree until I was elected governor. Now, he says he’s gonna keep it up there until I’m elected President. And there’s that old cotton gin, and the church I used to go to.”

  Clio was only a brief flicker of feeble street lights outside the windows, and then the car was on the Billy Watson Highway—a skinny graveled road that Wallace had named for the old Barbour County political impresario who had been one of his original patrons. Watson, in fact, had been probably the single most important person in Wallace’s life, the relation between them like that between manager and fighter. Now seventy, Watson was spending his declining diabetic years in Clayton watching with a private high amusement the progress of the protégé he had helped loose on the public. Oscar Harper—a thin, quick man with a sharp face and pale eyes and almost white hair, and a mouth always adorned with a cigar just like Wallace’s—chuckled from the front seat, “Billy says not enough signs on his highway tellin’ folks who it belongs to. He says he wants one at least every fifteen miles.” Wallace gave a hint of a snicker. “Yeah? Well, I don’t know how many votes this thing’s lost for us already. You know, I got a letter the other day sayin’ this road was in pretty bad shape, full of chuckholes and things. Why can’t we blacktop this someday soon?” Harper replied, “Billy ain’t interested in improvin’ the pavement particularly. He just wants some more signs up.” Wallace snickered again. “That damn Watson. He ain’t satisfied I named a highway for him, he wants his name on signs all over the place. I might just take the durn thing back again, he ain’t satisfied with it.” After a pause Wallace inquired, “You reckon he’s gonna be able to make it out tonight for the rally? He’s been awful sick here lately and all. . . .” Harper said, “Hell, Billy’d have to be dead before he’d miss bein’ where there was a crowd and excitement goin’ on.” Wallace gazed out the window for a moment and then idly observed, “Well, they got the grass cut down mighty nice along here.”