“Would you say the same principles apply in areas other than bidding good-day one another?” they continue. “Not exactly,” is my answer.
You know, I was thinking that it is a mistake to confine your discussion of this History and Senator Thurmond to political and public matters. That is to say, Senator Thurmond feels that his engagement with the human beings around him, including blacks, has always involved a great deal more than legislation, public policy, and picnics. He has entered into the people’s spirit by way of what one might call an enthusiastic participation in their culture, the full culture and not just part of it.
You see where this is going. What is African-American culture? Is it just some marches and riots and rapes, leading to legislation? No. It is singing and dancing very well indeed in a certain way and basketball and jazz. But I am sure you two know nothing about any of those things. (I mean that as a compliment.)
What you undoubtedly know about is the literature, right? I mean you are in English Departments, so I’m just saying.
So, while you’re getting the historical materials I sent you some time ago to write up in the mail to me, I will send you some matter more to your liking. These are, of course, the Senator’s ideas, comingled with mine, as our lives have been. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had all that many close ties in my life. Funny, isn’t it? Consider who and what I am, and you’d say, “Barton has friends clinging to him like moss on a vine.” But that’s really not so. I could of course say I choose not to be close, that I could have friends if I wanted them. But none of that’s true.
But that’s a menu for another meal. For now, please write up some of these.
—Frederick Douglass. Don’t forget the extra s. What the Senator is interested in is his book: Narrative of the Life of…. Not his speeches and such like. What strikes us especially about the book is what he has to say about violence and Christianity. He seems to us very smart and very courageous, you know, when he points out how Christianity was used as a cover for cruelty, how it did not combat but encouraged the false equation of slavery with outright ownership, irresponsible ownership. As the Senator sees it, slavery was a contract, with rights and obligations on both sides. You’ll say it was an unequal contract, but waive that. What the Senator zooms in on here is the way Christianity allowed the worst in the South (and we had some, though not a monopoly!) to forget the contract. Now, look at Douglass’s book and write that up.
And don’t mince words. Christianity and irresponsible violence. Douglass said that the worst masters were always the most Christian. The Senator finds that telling, especially insofar as the Abolitionists cloaked themselves in THE VERY SAME DOCTRINES. Doesn’t this suggest that the abolitionists were attracted by the very torture and torment they pretended they wanted to end? I mean, what would they have done without it? They loved the violence and took not only their cause but their identity from it. They were like antipornography crusaders who want to think of nothing BUT pornography.
The Senator says the issues were all territorial (geographic) and economic. As soon as they got muddied up with morality, the Negro people were lost in the shuffle. Nobody gave a good goddamn about them.
In this, he is with Douglass and has learned much from him. So write that up.
—Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery. Now here’s a rich field to plow. The Senator feels that Northern people who criticize Washington for being an accommodationist simply do not understand the situation. Senator Thurmond has known the KKK, has known real redneck terror. Washington knew it too and was trying to find a way to make some slow progress in the face of unreasoning brutality. It was very easy for DuBois, with his white boy education and know-it-all Northern safety, to mock Washington. But it was cowardly of him to do so. Did DuBois know what a lynching was? Did he have the lives of others in his care? Washington did. When Washington made his “Atlanta Compromise” speech, how many lynchings were there in Georgia and South Carolina that year? Add in Alabama and Mississippi and you see what he was up against. Washington was in a real world, trying to save real lives. DuBois was in a comfy world of self-flattering tough talk that pumped him up and accomplished nothing. Well, that’s not fair. It might have done something. It might have got a few hundred Negro men lynched.
—Zora Neal Hurston. Look at how she was treated. She strayed from the party line and got jumped on by the totalitarian males in the Harlem Mafia. She wasn’t writing to advance “the cause,” they said. Well, Langston and Co., who are you to define “the cause”? Stalin? They managed to ruin her career, kill her. And why? Because, as she said, she refused to see black lives as simply a defensive formation forced on them by whites. She didn’t think black people were no more than what white people said; she didn’t think black people could exist only by battling the definitions foisted on them by white people. She didn’t think black was the opposite of white. She thought black was a world and a people that could make themselves, tell their own stories, form their own lives.
I hope you agree with me, James and Percival, Percival and James, Permes and Jacival. This is the Senator at his best. You may have imagined he didn’t have it in him, this subtlety and thoughtfulness. “I like to think outside the box,” he often says to me.
He is so much more than the labels slapped on him. Those who do that use him as an excuse, a person to hate so they won’t have to hate themselves. For my part, I can find it in my heart to love him. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I admire him exactly. Still, for all his short-circuiting and conniving, he has struggled not to be defined by the circumstances in which he found himself. Of course he has not succeeded, but he has never stopped trying.
Which of us can say the same?
I’m not feeling as well as usual, so I will close this short letter. Ordinarily, I am like a dandelion: not much to look at but not likely to wilt on you. I don’t know exactly what it is now, but I feel like Wordsworth: The things which I have seen, I now can see no more.
Affectionately,
Barton Wilkes
Barton Wilkes
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
March 1, 2003
Dear Juniper,
I write this in letter form and not as a memo, since the material I intend to present to you (as a gift) is not at all memo-like. You understand. This is a voyage of discovery for me, this letter.
Barton Wilkes has been fired. I showed you the memo from Thurmond’s office. You remember? I hope so. I need your memory, among other things. He has been fired, and you and I both know what his twisted mind will do with this. He will sit in his bare room (a much-befouled bed, a lamp, a cheap bureau, a desk with pictures on it—of movie stars and Senator Thurmond and those he broods upon). On whom does he brood? Yes, I’m afraid so. Me. And I’m very afraid his brooding will turn to thoughts of vengeance. He will want to hurt me in the worst way. I just know it. He will want to stick things in my ears and eyes and tongue and anus. You feel I’m right, don’t you?
Of course I had nothing whatever to do with his firing. You may have, but I didn’t. But will that matter? Ha! Might as well tell the Voyager Satellite that blew up that you were sorry you decided to come on board as tell Wilkes he is misdirecting his rage. He is obsessed with me, I know. Now he will be thinking of blood. What is it Macbeth says? Something about wanting blood. Anyhow, he needs distracting. Wilkes, not Macbeth. Once started, both are like locomotives on a straight track. It’s Macbeth’s wife I’m thinking of, come to think of it, and that just makes it worse.
I count on you renewing your physical association with Wilkes. That way you can discover what is on his mind (or minds) and also act to deflect his passions, as it were. Try domestic animals.
Whatever you do, tell no one he has been fired. Tell no one. If it spreads, he will come after me. He will come after me anyhow, but if he thinks I’m the one who spread it, he’ll come after me—well, indeed he will.
Tell no one, especially not Everett and Kincaid, that Wilkes has been fired. I’m almost sorry I told you, except that you know already and I need you to help me.
What’ll I do when you are far away and lonesome too, what’ll I do? You know that song. It’s very apropos. Please.
St. Patrick’s Day. Party at my place. The theme will be “concealed green.” We’ll each wear (or adorn ourselves with) green in places—well, you know. There will be prizes for those who can most successfully search out the other’s green pastures, so to speak.
Love and I mean it,
Martin
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
March 2, 2003
Dear Barton,
I have just heard from that horrible Snell person—can you imagine a world in which Snell presents the best alternative available?—that you are no longer an associate of Senator Thurmond. I hope and trust this is an excretion from Snell’s diseased brain. You seem to me to be the one who provides all the energy there, certainly the one, according to Kincaid and Everett, providing the material and guidance for the book.
Say it ain’t so, Barton!
So or not, I realize that you are in a position far worse than mine. You are forced to disguise your talents and, I suppose, your views. I cannot, certainly, say that such is the case with me. I simply have to be around Martin Snell’s mad insecurities and uncertain lusts. I don’t really think Snell is possessed by ill will.
But are you in such a situation? Madness is one thing, but active and informed plotting is something else.
I am writing a very bad letter here, Barton, struggling to sympathize with you without knowing anything about the circumstances.
What I should have said was that I am your friend and hope you will tell me how I can help, if help is needed.
Fondly,
Juniper
March 5, 2003
Dear Juniper,
I think there’s an old saying that goes something like: when you’re down and out, lift up your head and shout, “There’s gonna be a great day!” Actually, it’s a song. You will hear his horn: rooty-tootin.
Well, your letter came rooty-tootin to me, Juniper. It’s extremely noble of you to reach out your hand to such as I. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend. God knows I’ve tried. I learned as a kid the best way—the best way for me, anyhow—to have a friend was just to pick someone and hang around and hope they assume they are your friend. I mean, you try and force them, which is what it comes to, to do the things friends do and hope that means you’re friends.
If you can stand it, I’d like to pursue this a bit. During the summer after my freshman year in high school (quite undistinguished school, only a few students reached the level of mediocrity, such excitement as prevailed was centered on the football team and the choir, directed by a very colorful pedophile, whose detection and ejection sucked away the only creative energy which had been there)—during that summer, I say, I found myself without the easy means of doing with others things friends did. There were no classrooms, no gym changing rooms, no lockers, no enforced lunch periods. I lived a few miles away from those I wanted in my little friendship play. They didn’t come to me or call me. I had no way to get to them (no car, city bus line a bit embarrassing, landing me on a wide street and forcing me to go house to house like a salesman, which I was, but without a product anybody wanted). So I would call them, one after another, and say, “Hey, let’s go to a movie!” Movies were all I could think of to do. (Then and now.) Every so often, somebody would go and I would be very happy. But the acceptance rate was lousy, and I should have seen what was building up. These reluctant movie attendees were comparing notes. That fall, when school finally started and I swooped into my old drama with something more than relief, I was met by my mates, who, together, made a great show of laughing together and telling me they were anxious to go to movies with me. I wasn’t especially hurt. I just saw what had happened, not that I was able to avoid it after that. It was all I could think to do, and my need remained greater than my wit.
You’d think my obvious yearning for friendship, my open advertisement of myself as friend-in-waiting, the clarity with which I expressed my liking for others, would have attracted somebody. Maybe it did. After a while, I did manage to be alone less, though the summers were never less vacant.
Two years ago, at a class reunion, Lynette Archer, a quiet and pretty girl, told me she had had an aching crush on me through high school. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Oh, Barton, you were always so popular, and I was so shy.” She smiled and touched my coat sleeve. It was the best moment of my life, not because I could now entangle myself with Lynette Archer—she was now, happily I hope, Lynette Russell—but because what I had wanted all along had happened. I had had friends. I hadn’t known it, really, but other people had. So maybe they were right.
But it isn’t often I think so.
And it was your letter that came along, like Lynette Archer, only better.
In any event, let’s talk about you. I am sorry that you are leashed to Snell, who doesn’t strike me (even me) as having enough holes in his bowling ball. Tell me how I can help.
As for the book, that will go on as if nothing had interrupted it. It’s sure that somewhere the sun is shining! And so the right thing to do is make it smile for you. A heart full of joy and gladness will always banish sorrow and strife! So always look for the silver lining, and try to find the sunny side of life. You know that lovely tune? I know it can be ridiculed, but I have never had much talent for ridicule.
So, the book will go on. I’ll work with K and E, who seem (I must say) very good at receiving material and not quite so good at doing anything with it. Still, they are writers and must proceed at their own pace, assuming that the word “pace” applies to them at all.
It’s important that K and E, E and K, know nothing of this pebble in our path, this temporary shower of trouble, this slight blip on the screen. I will be back where I was in no time, certainly, and there’s no need for them to be distracted.
Nor you.
Your friend, your grateful friend,
Barton
Interoffice Memo
March 7, 2003
Dear Percival,
Since you’re often accusing me of jumping the gun, being preemptory, getting my oar in ahead of the rest of the crew, I can only say, “well”?
I have been waiting and waiting. For your response, you know. Where is it? We got that stimulating letter from Wilkes (dated February 27) several days ago. What’s your view? I can tell you my view, but that’s what you always object to, me telling you my view before you tell me yours.
I sometimes think you are giving too much time to other things in your life: the other books you wrote a while back and are still publicizing shamelessly, this fucking English Department, your students, your stock portfolio, your pets, your exercise regimen, your arty-crafty projects, your partying, and those chemicals you ingest. Oh, and your wife. I am not being judgmental about chemicals. As you often point out, chemicals are in everything we swallow, like broccoli. I take your point, as an uncle of mine, who never understood any point unless he sat on it, used to say. Still, there must be a difference between broccoli and those pills you buy from that rummylooking guy over by the Coliseum.
In any event, here’s what I think. I know you don’t care, but I do. I know you don’t want me doing anything ahead of you. But what happens when you aren’t doing a thing? Am I supposed just to wait? Add it up, ace. Looks to me like doing things that way is no way. Nothing would ever get done.
Therefore.
What do you think of this rough outline for the book?
Part I: Political History
a. Strom on Slavery
b. Strom on the War
c. Strom on Reconstruction
d. Strom on the KKK
e. Strom on The Dixiecrats
f
. Strom on Civil Rights
g. Strom on Washington generally—amusing musings on blacks in politics and non-blacks too
h. Strom on our contemporary world and the blacks in it
Part II: Cultural History
a. Strom on blacks and music—real music, not gangsta rap
b. Strom on blacks and the theater
c. Strom on blacks and the domestic arts (making quilts—shit like that)
d. Strom on blacks and painting (? Query: have there ever been any?)
e. Strom on blacks and the dance
f. Strom on blacks in film, television, radio, journalism
g. Strom on black fashion models
h. Strom on blacks and sports
Part III: The People
a. Strom on blacks and the family
b. Strom on blacks and the schools—here’s a real strong suit
c. Strom on blacks and public transportation
d. Strom on blacks and food—what they eat and how
e. Strom on blacks and religion—maybe we should write this for him?
f. Strom on blacks and domestic décor
g. Strom on blacks and dirt farming h. Strom on blacks and criminality
I have some misgivings about IIIh. Don’t you?
Hey, but isn’t this a masterful idea? Masterful. We’ve got 3 Parts, 8 sections each, 15 pages a section, with some illustrations, it’s over with. I can write 15 pages in one day on any subject. All we need’s some hints from Strom and we can finish this book by the end of the term—easy.
Don’t thank me.
Blesings on you,
Jim
FROM THE DESK OF PERCIVAL EVERETT
March 8, 2003
Dear Jim,
I WILL thank you, buddy. This is a very good outline. And when did I ever criticize you for displaying initiative? Never, that’s when. Never had occasion to. Initiative, you see, is very different from blind panic and aimless flailing, both of which you are prone to. But this outline is by-Jesus initiative, Jim, and don’t let them tell you any different.
A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond Page 16