A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond
Page 13
Separate-but-equal was always good enough for me. I think it’s a natural, even wholesome desire on the part of a people to want to educate their children among their own kind. You have to admit that bussing, everywhere, North and South, was a miserable failure. I’m not saying that funds weren’t split unfairly back in the first half of the last century, but now I think we can do that part better. But it ought to be up to the people who live in their communities. You know, slavery was an awful thing, but it was a thing of its time. And slaves weren’t treated so badly.
EVERETT: Jim, what time is our flight?
KINCAID: Oh, yeah. If we’re going to make it, we should leave now.
THURMOND: What about lunch?
EVERETT: You’ve been so kind to us that time has just slipped away. We’ll grab a bite on the road. Can you recommend a place where we can both eat?
THURMOND: There’s a nice rib place at the edge of town. [silence] EVERETT: Well, thanks for everything.
THURMOND: Wait, I want you boys to see something.
EVERETT: Jim, that’s not a…
KINCAID: A headstand.
EVERETT: Is it good to stay upside down like that?
KINCAID: Well, we have to be going.
THURMOND: Hollis!
EVERETT: We can see ourselves out.
HOLLIS: Senator, you know what the doctor said about blood getting to your brain.
THURMOND: That’s “rushing to my brain,” Hollis. Have you boys ever seen anything like this?
KINCAID: I should say not.
EVERETT: Not today.
THURMOND: Hollis will see you out. Hollis, see our guests to the door. And give them some clear directions to that rib shack. You know the one, just outside town.
HOLLIS: Certainly, Senator. This way, gentlemen.
EVERETT: Thanks, Mr. Hollis, but we don’t need the rib shack.
HOLLIS: I should say not. It was burnt down thirty-five years ago.
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
January 3, 2003
To: Percival Everett
From: Martin Snell
Dear Percival:
This is to acknowledge receipt of your alleged expenses, all itemized and put in columns, pertaining to what you say was a trip to talk with Senator Thurmond. Kincaid’s too.
I am very glad to hear that you are meeting and talking. That’s good. Very promising.
Twice burned is once ________. [I can’t decipher this word.]
Of course meeting and talking is not reading and writing, now is it? Writing is what we want here at Simon & Schuster. I suppose you know that but you don’t always act like it.
As a friend, I am cheering you on and am delighted at what is probably (or at least maybe) good news. As an editor and a professional, I am about as interested in these preliminaries as I would be in the news that you had found relief from chronic constipation and were able once again to resume gardening.
We can correspond as friends. I never said we couldn’t. Birds of a feather, you know. But as editor and writers, our correspondence is different. For instance, the news that you are talking to the Senator and have incurred expenses thereby is of interest, though mild, to a friend. To an editor, it is—how shall I put this?—inexpressibly annoying.
If you are concerned about being reimbursed, I suggest you contact your university or withdraw funds from the stock previously supplied to you by Simon & Schuster for your work. As we have yet to see any work at all, I am sure you don’t expect us to pay extra for expenses you encountered in the pursuit of what, for anything we know, is not writing at all.
Now that should put us on an equal footing, with everyone on a level playing field and shooting the same caliber rifles. Instant gratification is the curse of the X generation. [I may have got this wrong. Please check.]
Love,
Martin
Dictated to Juniper McCloud
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
January 4, 2003
Dear Percival and Jim,
I just noticed that Slime Snell sent out as if it were a letter the rough copy I typed out from my notes. He thinks I take dictation.
It’d be one thing if he told me what he wanted and let me write the letter, but instead he says to take down precisely what he says. “Every word, every emphasis, every little gesture, Juniper!” When he said that, I swear to God he started singing, “Every little movement has a meaning all its own—” and then he started kind of dancing. And I was alone in the office with him. He only knew that one line of the song and kept singing it over and over, each time to a different tune. Every time the word “meaning” got more and more elongated, until I thought he’d get apoplexy. He started brushing his hand across my head and then my brow as he went at it—” me eeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeennnnnnnnnng” with this clammy finger-brush across my face as he sashayed by.
Should I shoot him?
Anyhow, excuse the incomprehensible letter you got from him. Or don’t.
My guess is that the burden of the letter is this: we ain’t paying.
Yours faithfully,
Juniper
Interoffice Memo
January 4, 2003
Dear Percival,
Happy New Year!
How is it I missed you at MLA? You didn’t even come to the department reception you were hosting. Nobody noticed. And that’s good.
I sat in on lots of the interviews. Between you and me, it’ll be blind luck if we get good people. The other people interviewing, our colleagues, mostly didn’t like the smart people and asked them such assy questions they wouldn’t come anyhow even if we made them an offer. The dumb candidates they of course liked. No threat. Some of the minority ones were good. Too bad you weren’t there to show them we aren’t all white. I said maybe we could prop up a cardboard cutout of you and set it over aways from the candidates, by the toilet, so they’d see how we welcome blacks and all. Ha ha.
Anyhow, we haven’t talked since the Strom lunch, really. I was hot to talk right afterwards, but you had that friend to see, so you said, and then you slept all the way back on the plane. It’s my view that we should have been talking then, while everything was fresh. But never mind. I do tend to get things a little mixed together in my mind as time goes by, as we retreat, as it were, from the actual event. But you made a transcript, right? You wouldn’t tell me. Did you tape it? The meeting, I mean.
Anyhow, I am really hot, still hot, to get to this. We may not have gotten much clarification or material from Strom, but that’s OK. I sorta like him, and I don’t think that’s a racist thing to say. You admitted you sorta liked him too. There was that quasi-headstand, of course, but think of it as pathos. He’s just trying to find his way back to the light as all the windows are closing on him. That’s a good line we can use in the history.
Maybe we can start with that.
Anyhow, let’s start putting pens to papers! That’s how I feel.
Best,
Jim
FROM THE DESK OF PERCIVAL EVERETT
January 5, 2003
Dear Jim,
I was hoping I’d get this off to you before you chirped in with your views. Unfortunately, I missed.
Sorry we didn’t hook up at MLA. I didn’t go.
I’m sorry to say, Jim, that I do not share your enthusiasm for this project or your glowing memory of our meeting. It was perhaps interesting in a bizarre way, but I think we got as much from Hollis as from Strom. Not one damned thing.
But I did get the sense that I want nothing to do with this project or with anything I can see coming from it in the way of a book. You heard Strom: he’s politely unrepentant, twisting everything so as to make himself seem not only fair and understandable but a fucking champion of the “negra.”
All the fun has been drained from this. Right now I can’t imagine how I e
ver thought it would be fun. So I’m quitting. No more.
I am sorry that you feel differently, but there’s no reason you can’t go it alone, if you want. You can have my share of the dough, if it’s OK with Snell and all.
Speaking as your Chair, colleague, and friend, I would advise you, though, to drop out of this too. It couldn’t be good for your career. And you do need something good for your career right now. Don’t get all defensive either. You know it as well as I. And kissing Strom Thurmond’s baboon ass in print wouldn’t be good.
Best,
Percival
Interoffice Memo
January 6, 2003
Dear Percival,
Now here’s a switch, but not for the first time. Not for the first time do I find myself playing the role of wise counselor, seasoned pro, cool vet to your part as headstrong youth, jumpy hysteric, rank amateur. But in a team such as ours, and I think you’ll agree with this, we both play all the roles. Like a repertory company. We have one of those repertory companies in our little town, not a good troupe, but a troupe all the same; and they all take turns playing different parts. At least I think they do. I only saw them once. It was a production of “The Innocents,” you know, the Deborah Kerr movie thing, based on Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” which you may have read but probably not. The most talented actors were little Miles and Flora. The others ranged from barely mediocre to shut-your-eyes awful. And there was a problem even with the kids. Flora was just fine, but Miles, for all his talent, was costumed in a nightgown, which was appropriate for a kid who is often supposed to be in bed but is actually prowling the grounds, but Miles (the actor) was quite fat, really awfully fat (though I know we shouldn’t say such things without acknowledging that we may be encouraging anorexia), and his nightgown kept creeping up over his thighs, very unseemly.
Anyhow, Percival, please don’t quit. I am really interested in this project. But that’s not the point, really. It’s the first project I’ve had in years, the first real project and not just something I’ve invented a title for and never done. I mean, this I can do, but only with your help and not just because they wouldn’t do it with just me because I’m white. It’s because you’re black, see?
I messed that up. What I mean is, I think this may be my last chance and I plead with you as a friend not to take it away from me.
Jim
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
January 6, 2003
Dear Percival,
My Juniper, I refer to my assistant Juniper McCloud, just told me, after an unconscionable amount of hemming and hawing, that he was responsible for a rough draft, really what we call “dictation copy #1,” being sent to you as if it were a letter.
My apologies. If the burden of that letter—its gist—is unclear, do let me know.
Do you know the song, “I get no kick from champagne! Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all! So tell me, why should it be you? So come do the trick, la la loo”?
This is the last straw with that Juniper. Whatever his virtues, and I won’t say he has none, so don’t spring to his defense, are beclouded by this impertinence. I’d call it insubordinate, wouldn’t you?
Warmest personal regards,
Martin
FROM THE DESK OF PERCIVAL EVERETT
January 7, 2003
Dear Jim,
Of course I’ll carry on. I hear what you’re saying and we won’t have to mention it again.
I enclose here a copy of a letter from Snell about expenses. I think you got the one from Juniper clarifying the Snell letter. But without the Snell letter, you must have been pretty confused.
So, here we go. You be little Miles and I’ll be Flora. But please don’t wear a nightgown.
Percival
p.s. We do have to find a way to guard ourselves from Strom heavily revising what we write. He strikes me as still partly, if not functionally, literate.
OFFICIAL NOTICE
From: Martin Snell
To: Juniper McCloud
Date: January 8, 2003
I hate to be official here, as it sounds so impersonal. However, as what I am about to say, even to you, is really, in its way, not a personal issue, this seems the best format. By “format” I refer to the memo form. What I mean is that it’s personal but it’s not. You and I are persons, and I am writing to you. That makes it personal. It is not “personal” in the sense people use when they say to someone they have accidentally insulted or spilled food on, “nothing personal.” Often, of course, that’s just an excuse, when people say that, and what they mean is, “This is personal as all hell.” But not with me.
As you know, McCloud, Vendetti has been putting great pressure on me to release you to him so he can make use of you. I do not know what use he has of you or what uses he expects you to fulfill. It did not seem quite right for me to inquire. In any event, I have withstood his pressures for a superhumanly long time, considering his tenure here and mine and what a loudmouthed son of a bitch he is. I can no longer withstand them. A lesser man would have caved in long ago. I am sure you appreciate that.
None of this will, I dare say, alter in any way the social side of our arrangement. You know: the busy-buttoned-up-executives-by-day-larking-playboys-by-night duo we have become. I mean, why should it?
Now, you will be thinking that your gaffe, your latest gaffe I mean, wherein you sent a rough draft to Everett and that other fellow, Kindy? You will be thinking that you are being punished for that. Don’t let yourself dwell on such imaginings. After all, you signed on with Simon and Schuster, not with Martin Snell. Try to keep that straight. Of course, I am not going to put up with shoddy work and with such egregious and embarrassing sloppiness. That just stands to reason.
You see now what I mean by it being nothing personal. Be assured that I can always be counted on to do the fair, the just, the kind thing.
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
OFFICIAL NOTICE
To: Percival Everett
From: Martin Snell
cc: Jane Kinkade
Date: January 8, 2003
Hi!
I trust you are making good progress, but this notice does not concern that point, though you might say while IT doesn’t concern your progress, your progress IS it for me.
What isn’t of any real concern to YOU is the subject of this memo, i.e., notice. However, it’s best to let everybody in on everything. That’s an excellent rule of business management, when it’s used with discretion: it’s best to let everybody in on everything, which is much like letting nobody in on nothing.
Somebody stop me. I’m rolling today.
As of this inst. R. Juniper McCloud (I didn’t know there was an “R” until I looked it up in personnel records. Did you? Anyways, in the records it’s just “R.” Frustrating. What does it stand for, not that it matters, but is it Randolph? That’s my guess) is no longer assigned to your project. He is no longer assigned to me. He remains under Simon & Schuster’s warm wing, at least for now, but he will be working for a Ralph (call me “Ralph”) Vendetti. You don’t know him (Vendetti), but he makes Woody Hayes (remember him?) seem cultivated and suave by comparison. It’ll do McCloud good to work for him, and if it doesn’t, fuck him. Fuck McCloud, I mean; though for that matter, Fuck Vendetti.
So, for now, I will be handling this project myself. Let me assure you that I remain hotly convinced that it is a winner and look forward to seeing the completed manuscript in short order.
OFFICE OF SENATOR STROM THURMOND
217 RUSSELL SENATE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20515
January 10, 2003
Dear Perce and Jim,
Barton here. Your friend or used to be.
I know about the lunch. I knew about it before it happened, by way of a friend who keeps me in touch with the Senator’s social calendar.
I am not involved with that sort of thing, with scheduling those meetings where the Senator can give out awards and look up the skirts of Brownie Scouts. I am what you might call his non-social secretary, the guardian of his intelligence, the protector of his positions, the paladin of his integrity and consistency (making sure that he says today more or less what he said yesterday).
But the lunch. I just hope you are satisfied, fully satisfied, with the fruits of that little get-together.
Don’t say I didn’t send a little birdie to sing in your ears a little tune: “Tweet, tweet, oh lovely day, don’t try to see Thurmond, oh wail-a-way.” I told you it would be a miserable waste of time.
You thought you could get straight to the horse’s mouth. But you have to turn the horse around first.
Why did you do it?
I am not sure I can go on walking under the dark clouds of distrust, wetted by your suspicions and petty qualms. Do you suppose you’re the only ones with qualms? Well, think again. You suppose I don’t have qualms, what with never seeing any write-ups of that rich material I have sent you over and over. Oh yes, I have my qualms.
The difference between us is that I would never have farted them, those qualms, in your faces. It’s a matter of honor and charity. I have them; some don’t.
You know, I am trained in the deadlier forms of martial arts, the kinds that make no pretense about being for self-defense. No, mine are of the attack mode exclusively. No oriental occultism, no spiritual enlightenment, just ways to splay noses over seven counties and drive bone into brain.
I mention this in a friendly way, just to lighten a letter that might seem to be veering into the heavy. I expect we all have our little hobbies and harmful happinesses. You do too, I am sure. They make life so much fuller, I feel. In my case, they also provide me with a certain aura and a reputation. Both the aura and the reputation I can back up, not that I mean any part of that as a threat.