The Last of the Savages (24 page)

“Beautiful silver,” said one of the boys from across the river. “I got a venison dish at home that’s the spitting image. Fellow in Savannah told me it used to belong to the Queen Mother of England.”

Cordell directed a skeptical look at his guest in which anyone else would have read chastisement; you only had to look at him to realize that it was terribly
common
, as his wife might say, to compliment your host’s home furnishings.

But the man from Arkansas was undaunted. “Where’d you pick it up?”

“Well, I
picked it up
, as you put it, at the home of a friend from Yale. It had been in his family since the end of the war and before that it had been in my family. It’s an interesting story, actually. When I accepted the invitation to my classmate’s home in Boston, Massachusetts”—this last word pronounced, as it so often is in the South, with an overenunciated sarcasm—“I had no idea that on his mother’s side he was a Butler.”

Cobb Hilton broke his corpulent silence with a grunt of distaste.

“You may recall from your history, Patrick, that General Butler occupied New Orleans, among other distinctions. I can’t recall his Christian name just now, but down here we normally call him Beast Butler for reasons we needn’t go into at the table, or sometimes Spoons Butler on account of his tendency to confiscate the silverware and other valuables of prominent Confederate families in the course of duty.”

He paused to examine the wine that Joseph had just poured for him, nodding toward my own glass. Joseph poured some for me, which I tasted and, with some trepidation, pronounced suitable. Cordell smiled and nodded his approval.

“Now, my great-great-uncle was in New Orleans during the war, and eighty-odd years later, when I went home with Toby Farwell for Thanksgiving, I was rather surprised to find myself eating from Savage-family silver. They hadn’t even bothered to remove the family crest. I didn’t say anything then but on the evening we were to return to school I requested an audience with Toby’s father and offered to buy everything back from him. He was quite indignant and sent me on my way. Well, a few years later Mr. Farwell Senior suffered some terrible reversals in business. I was of course deeply saddened to hear of this misfortune, but my distress did not prevent me from picking up the family silver at auction in New York.”

The next morning, over breakfast, Cordell filled me in on the later stages of the evening; I had gone upstairs to read when the poker started. “I apologize for the company,” he said, languidly buttering a piece of cornbread. “Not very stimulating. Those boys hoped to engage me in a business proposition. They were eager to demonstrate they were
men of substance and daring, and I was more than happy to take their money at the poker table. Then Tupper, the short one, wanted to cut cards for a hundred dollars. You know, pick a card, high card wins. An idiot’s pastime—if ever there was one. Then he wanted to cut for a thousand. Finally, just to get rid of him I said, ‘Tupper, how much exactly are you worth?’ Well he puffed himself up and started figuring his assets, I was half expecting him to start counting on his fingers any minute, and finally he says to me, with all false modesty, he says, ‘Well, all told about two million, I reckon.’ And I said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll cut you for it.’ Well, that got him out of the damn house, finally.” He inserted a slice of bacon into his mouth and chewed with evident satisfaction. Then, looking away, he said, “How’s Will?”

I offered the usual response, that he was thriving and happy.

“Will?
Happy?
Now I
know
you’re bullshitting me, son.”

“Relatively speaking. Happy for Will.”

“I would appreciate it if you don’t tell him I asked.”

I nodded.

“You know he’s writing letters to the attorney general blaming me for everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Chicago Fire.”

“He does tend to take historical events personally,” I said.

“Thinks I’m the damn Antichrist.”

Seeing him across the table looking at me with Will’s eyes, I suddenly arrived at my thesis. Intuitively, I felt I knew what had happened at Bear Track a hundred years before.

C
ordell Savage’s disappearance a few weeks later was the talk of Memphis and the Delta. He’d driven off to the Rotary luncheon one day and hadn’t been heard from since. Will phoned from his mother’s house, which was itself indicative of the gravity of the situation.

“Maybe he’s just off on a binge,” I said. “Surely
you
could relate to that.”

“Not the old man’s style.”

“Foul play?” I suggested, lawyerly.

“Smells rank, on somebody’s part.”

The missing person, I gathered, was himself one of the prime suspects in the matter of his own disappearance. Will said he’d let me know of any developments, and I asked if there was anything I could do.

“Keep in touch with Taleesha,” he said. “She likes you.”

I suppose he knew this would please me. After all, even fans need acknowledgment sometimes—an autographed picture, a kiss blown carelessly from the bright center stage.

The Savage clan was much on my mind that semester as I worked feverishly on my thesis. Cordell’s vanishing act emboldened me as a historical
analyst; I didn’t think he would approve of my project, and this prospect made me nervous. Will claimed that his father was a Bones man, and I was enough in awe of this fact to imagine his reach extending to the campus; I could imagine him looking over my shoulder as I wrote, barking his disapproval. All I had told him, as I departed Bear Track for Jackson, was that I had developed a keen interest in southern history.

I had been none too comfortable pursuing my research at the Mississippi Archives, though no one seemed particularly hostile. A middle-aged librarian named Lizzie Tyre ostensibly assisted me, glaring at the card catalog through her pointy Cadillac-fin glasses, making me wait for documents while she talked with friends and relatives on the phone. I started by asking for letters and diaries of planters, which were well cataloged and preserved. To locate the interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the Works Progress Administration took much longer. When eventually some of this material surfaced, it came in the form of faded and crumbling carbons on yellow paper fastened together with rusting staples and paper clips. Amazingly, most of these had never been forwarded to the Library of Congress in Washington, and thus were not part of the collection I had seen on microfilm in New Haven. This was particularly the case with those interviews that cast plantation life in a harsh light. This evidence of censorship at the state level was itself an interesting discovery, one which was noted later by George Rawick in his classic
American Slave.

I took time out from my thesis only to apply to law school and to campaign for the newly formed school senate. Not being a candidate for any of the secret societies, I’d run for election in an attempt to expand my orbit on campus and to bolster my undergraduate resume for my law school applications. Shortly after I was elected by classmates who did not necessarily covet the honor, various members of the Black Panther Party were charged with conspiracy in the murder of New Haven party member Alex Rackley the previous year. Initially, like most students, I didn’t assume that the trial concerned me in any manner. Yale was Yale, aloof from merely local events.

The first scheduled meeting of the senate was canceled for lack of a
quorum, and for some reason the second was canceled as well. In the meantime I received acceptances from Virginia and Michigan Law Schools—but no word from Harvard. When we finally convened in April, more than a hundred spectators—half of them black—awaited us in the lecture hall. The agenda for the meeting included a number of resolutions formulating Yale’s response to the Panther trial, but the chairman of the steering committee, intimidated perhaps by the clamor from the back of the room, announced that he would entertain motions from the floor. This immediately proved to be a mistake. A shaven-headed black man demanded we vote for a university-wide strike in support of the Panthers.

“We don’t recognize your authority,” shouted a white man on the other side of the room who was draped in a red hammer-and-sickle flag. It was hard to believe he was a student—certainly I’d never seen him before.

“This body is irrelevant,” he proclaimed, “an artifact of the corrupt, discredited power structure. It should be disbanded immediately. Power to the people!”

At this point the floor exploded with shouts and jeers. Our chairman pounded his gavel and pronounced the mob out of order. But it was a little late for that. Everyone was shouting. Looking down from the raised platform, I saw a black woman in the second row looking directly back at me, screaming “Fuck you fuck you fuck you …” I was startled by the hatred in her face. So far I hadn’t even said anything. And the senate hadn’t opposed the strike; we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to consider it. Who were these people, I remember wondering. Had they been at Yale with me all this time?

Prevailing over the mayhem, a black man with an Afro every bit as impressive as his dashiki addressed his remarks to the podium. “You pathetic lackeys—go home to your white corporate masters. Go lick the boots of the masters of the military-industrial complex.” He held the commandeered microphone in one hand and thrashed the air with the other. Standing beside him I suddenly noticed Aaron Greeley.

Without thinking, I waved to my former roommate—and then instantly dropped my hand, realizing how inappropriate this gesture was
under the circumstances. However, it apparently confused the speaker and created a strange hiatus in the proceedings. For just a moment, the noise subsided, no one knowing quite what to make of my inexplicable semaphore. Aaron stood there rigid beside the orator as if immobility would disguise him.

Looking directly at me, the man in the dashiki regained his composure: “You make me sick. All you privileged fucking honkies with your pathetic parliamentary bullshit. You wanna debate rules of order while the pigs are breaking their clubs on our heads. We’re done with bullshit. You got that? In the name of the people I hereby declare this meeting adjourned. The black student union will hold a press conference at ten tomorrow morning and introduce a little reality into this fucking university.”

He jumped down from the podium and walked out, trailing dozens of the spectators, including Aaron, in his wake. But the lecture hall still seemed on the verge of a riot. Somehow the chairman was able to shout out a proposal endorsing a strike, which most of us timidly voted for, if anyone cared. And then we ran for cover.

Shaken as I was after my close encounter with the revolution, I had naturally called Will. Taleesha answered at the Peabody and told me with no discernible goodwill that he was at his mother’s house. Cordell Savage had surfaced in London with Cheryl Dobbs, his dead son’s recent fiancée.

“Some Memphis people saw them at the American ambassador’s in London,” she said, “and the old bastard’s lawyer has contacted Mrs. Savage to ask for a divorce.”

This incredible news served to promote the tenuous reconciliation between Will and his mother; at the cost of a difficult and unloving husband, Mrs. Savage seemed to be regaining a son. This amnesty did not extend to her daughter-in-law, who had yet to meet Mrs. Savage or set foot in her house. “I understand,” Taleesha claimed, unconvincingly. “He’s all she has left.”

She’d spent Easter with her own family while Will stayed by his
mother’s side. The good news was that he’d finagled a special compassionate exemption from military service on the grounds of his mother’s recent loss of Elbridge and fragile health—an exceptional dodge which probably, ironically, had much to do with Cordell’s residual political clout.

“So you got the Panthers on trial up there in New Haven,” she noted.

“I didn’t put anybody on trial. As far as
I’m
concerned they can all go free tonight.”

“Sorry. I was just making an observation is all.”

When I told her about the disrupted senate meeting, she sighed audibly. “There was actually a moment, right before I married Will, when I thought everything was getting better.”

I thought I knew what she meant. “Then King was shot.”

“Yeah, that and a lot of other stuff.”

I called Memphis several times over the next week, but Will was never at home and I didn’t want to call his mother’s house for fear she might answer. He finally called me to hear firsthand about events in New Haven, so intrigued by the prospect of anarchy and revolution, by the putative alliance of ruling-class students and black revolutionaries, that he was planning to fly up to add his body to the fray. “Didn’t I tell you the old ivy walls would come tumbling down?”

“And what are you going to put in their place,” I asked, “communal farms?”

“Poppy fields,” he proposed.

“Get real, Will.”

“You’re just afraid you might not get your precious Yale diploma.”

He was half right. The events of the week were leading me to believe Will’s interpretation of the momentum of recent history; the times were beginning to seem apocalyptic. The strike—supported by much of the faculty—was in effect, and that morning only three other students turned up for Professor Morgan’s class on the American Revolution. Since I’d mostly been hiding out in the stacks, my front-line information was scant, but I dutifully repeated all the rumors I’d heard at meals: that the Hell’s Angels were roaring into town en masse for May Day, that the three Weathermen who’d fled the exploding townhouse in
Greenwich Village were already here; that gelignite had been stolen from the chem lab, although no one stopped to ask what gelignite was doing there in the first place.

“What news on your father,” I asked, thinking that if I ignored it, the revolution would go away.

“There’s nothing to say about my father. I don’t have a father anymore.”

“That’s exactly what he said about you two years ago.”

“You’re going to have to unlearn this habit of quoting deceased authority figures.”