Old Glory (56 page)

I had expected meetings, with long speeches. They turned out to be services, with prayers and gospel singing and sermons. At the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, Otis Higgs was getting into his stride. After each sentence he paused, letting the organist syncopate a long riff, low down in the bass with a lot of vibrato, to echo the phrasing of the words.

“Rip Van Winkle,” said Higgs into the microphone, “he fell asleep for a hundred years …”

“Woweow Boom Wadoopah,” went the organ. “Bobalee boba yong-di-woweow!”

From all across the church, answering voices came chiming in:

“Yes, sir!”

“That’s right!”

“So he did!”

“
Unh-hunh!
”

“Oh, my Lord!”

Higgs’s speech wasn’t his alone; it belonged to all of us. Everyone was helping it along. Some were clapping its rhythm on the off-beat; others were providing punctuation marks for it with their
Amens
and
Yes, sirs;
the organist was turning it, line by line, from talk into music. The whole event was more of an improvised symphony than a political address.

Higgs had taken “Sleeping Through the Revolution” as his text. He was wreathing together the stories of Rip Van Winkle and the sleepers of Gethsemane and bringing them home and up to date in Memphis.

“… our people, fast asleep.”

“Yeah!”

“Okay!”

“It’s all right!”

“I can hear my Lord saying, ‘Memphis! You got to wake up!’ ”

“A-men!”

“I can hear the God of the universe saying to Memphis today …”

“So can I!”

“Oh my sweet Lord!”

“Memphis, yes you can! Wake up! You been asleep too long!”

Now women in hats with tall boa feathers were beginning to go into ecstatic trances. They gurgled and shook. They laughed, then shrieked. They looked as if they had plugged themselves into a high-voltage cable. Writhing and sobbing, they fell in heaps on the floor, where they were decorously surrounded by three or four other women who fanned them with yellow order papers. The order papers waved in strict tempo, in time with each other, in time with the riffs on the organ.

The logic of the speech itself was strange. The breaks between one sentence and the next were so long that each line could afford to start out on a quite different tack. Sometimes the organ, the voices of the congregation and the holy fits would occupy a minute or more after Higgs himself had said only half a dozen words. After a while all he needed to do was contribute single tags and let the church take over and do the rest.

“I don’t have an ounce of negativism in my body!”

Organ, voices, shrieks, fits
.

“If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail!”

O., V., S., & F
.

“All you got to do is wake up!”

O., V., S., & F
.

“Keep on keeping on!”

O., V., S., & F
.

“I feel it. You feel it. Something
Within!
”

Oceanic outbreak of
O., V., S., & F
.

“You be the best of what you are and WAKE UP!”

The whole church now was riding on the pulse. The genius was not in the words but in the occasion itself; two hundred people driving each other on to higher and higher peaks of fervor. I was as excited as anyone. I was too inhibitedly Anglo-Saxon to join in the shouting, but I could feel the
That’s rights!
and
Amens!
struggling to get free of my buttoned-down voicebox.

Higgs reached his climax with a cluster of words so familiar that I would have thought it impossible to make them sound fresh again. The church transformed them. By the time we had finished with them, their author would not have recognized them as his own.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident!”

There was a great upward surge from the organ.

“That’s right!”

“We do!”

“That all men—”

“Yes, sir!”

“Unh-hunh!”

“Are created equal!”

Another dizzying run of organ notes and sixty voices crying out in tune.

“That they are endowed by their creator!”

“Oh, my Jesus!”

“He’s everything to me!”

“With unalienable rights!”

“Yes, he is!”

“A-men!”

“That among these are life …”

“Oh, yeah!”

“Give that to me, Lord!”

“Liberty!”

“Sweet Lord!”

“And the pursuit of happiness!”

It was an extraordinary, passionate and ironic moment. Jefferson, the obsessive rationalist, the intellectual heir of the
philosophes
of the Enlightenment, had written a magical incantation, a spell powerful enough to cast out devils and city bosses. We swayed, clapped, shouted, lifted by the organ. Otis Higgs was sweating over his microphone. He looked gray with exhaustion and hope.

•   •   •

At a family supper in the kitchen of a balustraded house in a green suburb, the man was saying, “It’s nothing to do with his being a Negro. His trouble is that he lacks the capacity for leadership.”

“He seems absolutely magnetic to me,” I said. “I just don’t see that.”

“I gave him my vote in the primary,” said the man’s wife. “I don’t know. I’m afraid that on Thursday I’ll be switching to Chandler. I wish I wasn’t. In honesty, I wish I could vote for Otis Higgs.”

“Oh, Mom!” said her sixteen-year-old son from across the table. “You only voted for him because he’s black and you feel sorry for him.”

Was this where Southern guilt came full circle? Guilty for feeling guilty, you switch your vote to the white candidate? I wondered how I could put this proposition in a more polite form, found none, and decided to keep it to myself.

“If Higgs is elected,” the man said, “I just know what’s going to happen. He’ll be a puppet prince. The Fords will be pulling all his strings.”

The Fords were the most powerful black family in Memphis. Their wealth, like that of so many black political dynasties in the South, was based on a chain of funeral parlors. Blacks had always wanted to be buried by their own, and the funeral business was one of the very few in which blacks had built up large fortunes over several generations. Running for office was expensive and most black candidates needed the backing of funeral-parlor money. The Fords had been lukewarm over Higgs. He had the lightest of endorsements from them. I had seen United States Representative Harold Ford performing once at a rally for Higgs. He had not said a word about the candidate, but had gone striding around the platform in a white suit, shouting slogans for himself. Anywhere but in the South, he would not even have been black. He was a “high yellow,” with a Chinese complexion and the chisel-featured face of a poor white. He had struck me as strident and posturing, but the congregation had roared for him just as loudly as they had roared for Higgs.

“From what I’ve seen of him,” I said, “I doubt if anyone will pull his strings. My impression is that he and the Fords can barely stand the sight of each other.”

“The Fords wouldn’t
allow
another Negro to govern this city unless the real control stayed with them. The only reason they’re letting Higgs run is because they know he’s weak enough to be manipulated.”

At the campaign headquarters, spooks were phoning in. Their calls were coming with increasing frequency, several times an hour. Some described themselves as “concerned citizens”; others claimed to represent
the Klan. A receiver was held out to me so that I could listen.

“If Otis Higgs is elected, I’m jes’ warnin’ ya …” It was a man’s voice. It sounded caked with farm mud. “He won’t be livin’ long enough to take office. Tha’s a’ Ah gotta say to you, and you better b’lieve it, now.” He clicked off.

“That’s kind of average,” said the woman who had given me the phone. “Some are
real
mean.”

Although most of the people who said they were Klansmen were merely using the society as an umbrella to hide under, the K.K.K. was out there, somewhere in the shadows. Burning crosses had been placed on the lawns of white campaign workers, and in the plague of anonymous notes and calls a handful did almost certainly come from the Klan and were taken very seriously indeed.

I had coffee with the aide who had first introduced me to Higgs. I told her that on my evenings in the east of the city I had met a constant complaint that the campaign was being feebly conducted there. Too few canvassers were knocking on too few doors; some people hadn’t even received handbills. Yet it was from this part of town that the essential votes would come.

“That’s deliberate,” she said. “In the white suburbs, particularly the rich ones, we’re keeping as low-profile as we possibly can. Look—” She showed me a leaflet which was just a numbered list of the planks of Higgs’s platform. It had no photograph. It looked as official and as dull as an income-tax form.

“You see, there are so many people who want to vote for Otis’ policies. They want Chandler out. They want a change in the city. But we can’t remind them that by voting for Otis they’re voting for a black
face
. If they see his picture, all they’ll be able to think of is that he’s a Negro. I know it’s terrible when you put it that way; but that’s the way things work in Memphis.”

“She was my closest friend. Cora. She was my closest friend.”

Later that evening, I had gone around to the aide’s house to split a bottle of wine with her. She was telling me about her childhood in Memphis; her closest friend had been her black nurse.

“Cora was from Mississippi. To her, Memphis was the North. Before she came here she’d never seen black people wearing suits and ties and living in real houses. For her, it was a liberation just to be here. And I used to sleep beside her in her bed … and I never wanted to eat food from my own plate; it had to be off Cora’s plate. She was more than my mother to me—can you understand that?”

Her forefinger was pulsing nervously against the rim of her glass.

“I must have been, oh, six years old … My mother had given Cora some money to buy me a new coat. Cora and I, we went downtown by streetcar. I was excited, not because of the coat but because of being alone with Cora. There was a big store on Main, and they had two drinking fountains, one for whites and one for Negroes. Cora was taking a drink of water and I wanted some too. Cora said, ‘No, honey—
that’s
your fountain, over there.’ ‘But I want to drink with you!’ I said. ‘You can’t, honey; it ain’t allowed,’ Cora said. And I started to shout and scream.
Why
did Cora have to drink at one fountain and me at another? We shared
everything
. People started to stare. There was this kid, yelling and stamping, and Cora had to drag me out of the store. I thought the world had gone crazy. It just made no sense at all. I wouldn’t go in the store again. I didn’t want the coat. I was hysterical.…”

She was thrilling herself with the memory of it. What she was telling was the story of a religious conversion.

“When we came home, my mother started laying into Cora. ‘Why didn’t you buy the child that
coat?’
Then I told my mother about the drinking fountains, and she tried to explain to me about segregation as if it was some kind of law of nature or something. She was talking in this sensible voice about white people and Negroes and how the two races each had to have their own separate
facilities
.

“ ‘But that’s so silly!’ I kept on saying. ‘That’s just
so
silly!’ And I was hating my own mother for saying these things. A six-year-old child could see it all perfectly clearly, and my mother was blind. It was so obvious to me. The whole thing was just
silly
.

“Oh, but down in Mississippi … that’s another country! You know even now there are places there where if you’re black the whites call you one of two things—you’re either a ‘field nigger’ or you’re a ‘house nigger’? Just saying those words—they’re obscenities to me. They’re like poison in my mouth.

“Do you see now? Do you see why I said that nobody in Memphis could be a white
liberal?
”

We had been waiting for Higgs for more than half an hour in the Unitarian church on the river. The three blacks in the audience were conspicuous among the thirty-five or so white businessmen and their wives. There was a lot of looking at wristwatches and irritable harrumphing. People had made a long Sunday-morning drive west from their suburbs for this meeting; if they could make it on time, why couldn’t Higgs? We had worked our way through the free coffee and
cookies; if he didn’t come soon, we’d be condemned to reading the book-review section of the Sunday paper.

He was apologetic when he arrived. When he started speaking, I found him almost unrecognizable. He was clumsy with his notes, shuffling them together on the bare pine table. He was difficult to hear. Keeping his face down, he read out a prepared speech in which he announced himself to be in favor of a series of decencies so low-key and ordinary that they came across as merely deferential. He said that he wanted to appoint a consultative committee of experts to advise him on the industrial development of the city. He hoped that more experts would come up with a plan for a workable mass-transit system. He coughed, lost his place, fiddled with his gold bracelet. My eye wandered beyond him to the window and the chunky filigree of the railroad bridge over the Mississippi. The voice to which I was now paying little attention was that of a stranger. It didn’t have Otis Higgs’s force or humor. It certainly didn’t have his capacity to play with ideas as he spoke. It was the kind of voice for which Mom might just feel sorry enough to give it a vote in a primary and switch her allegiance when it came to the real thing.

His campaign manager said that Judge Higgs would be happy to answer any questions. We turned into an interviewing committee. The men in the room started testing Higgs as if they were the senior professors and he the instructor who wasn’t going to get tenure. Where did he stand on crime? on enlarging the tax base? on public schools? For each answer, Higgs dug around among his papers and found another lifeless formulation. His profile was so low that one could see the railroad bridge running clean through the space where his head should have been.