Old Glory (57 page)

In the largest and woodiest of the floodlit white mansions, a woman was saying, “He has to win. He
has
to. I see this election as Memphis’ last chance. If he loses, it’ll be as bad a day for this city as the day they shot Martin Luther King.”

At the fund-raising breakfast in the Olivet Baptist Church, the other Otis Higgs was back in town.

“I can hear God Himself saying this morning, ‘Memphis! I’ll show you the way!’ ”

“Hallelujah!”

“That’s right!”

“Yes, we can!”

The walls and ceiling were tricked out with looping colored paper chains. We sat at trestle tables, forking up grits and drinking orange juice while the collection plates moved around at eye level like Frisbees.

“White folks who are right don’t mind black folks’ being black!”

“Unh-hunh!”

“Yes, sir!”

“If you feel it like I feel it, right down in your soul—”

“Oh, yes, I do!”

“I’ve got the feeling, now! I’ve got the spirit!”

“A-men!”

“Oh, yes, I’ve got it!”

The organ chords were coming in languorous waves behind the words.

“If Birming-ham can do it and Memphis fails, then I’m telling you we ought to crawl back into our holes and never come out!”

“Yes, we can!” someone shouted, and the slogan began to gather voices around it. The organist found and embellished a triumphant do-re-mi to accompany us, and we pumped the line out again and again until the church was solid with the sound and one could feel the rhythm of it in the timbers and the glass.

Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! YES, WE CAN! YES, WE CAN!

There had been many rumors. Canvassers who came back to the Higgs headquarters from the poorest of the black suburbs said that people there had been visited a few days before by white “social workers.” The “social workers” had explained the tricky points of electoral procedure to illiterate voters on the register. The chief of these points was that many people apparently thought they were supposed to vote twice. By registering to vote, they had already voted once. The election on Thursday was only for those who hadn’t registered. This helpful piece of information was now common knowledge in several of the housing projects and was spreading through northern Memphis.

On Tuesday, a burning cross was pushed through the kitchen window of a frame house where a woman lived alone with her teen-age son. The odd thing about the event was that the mother and son were black and had no known political connections. They seemed an unusual target for the Klan, and some curious reporters went out to interview them. They returned with word that the boy was Otis Higgs’s illegitimate child.

I watched Higgs as he stood in front of the TV cameras. He made a brave show of it. He held his dignity. He denied nothing. He said that it had happened a very long time ago when he himself was in his teens; a fair provision had been made for the boy and his mother, and the burning cross was a cruel and disgraceful trick. If it revealed anything at all, it showed only to what moral depths his opponents were prepared to lower themselves.

At dinner that night, I said I was afraid that Higgs’s chances of winning had been terribly damaged by this piece of beastliness.

“Oh, no—I don’t think it’ll affect him at all,” said the woman on my right. “You see, for Negroes the idea of virginity, chastity, monogamy, why, it simply doesn’t exist for them. I remember when I was a little girl we used to have a nursemaid named Ula Mae. And I saw Ula Mae getting fatter and fatter, and I asked the cook, ‘Why’s Ula Mae getting to be so fat, Ella?’ And the cook said, ‘Why, honey-chile, Ula Mae’s gonna have a baby.’ ‘But I didn’t know Ula Mae had a husband,’ I said. ‘Oh, lawdy, no, chile—Ula Mae’s not
married
.’ ”

The woman had the kind of expensive Southern smile in which, if you looked carefully, you could see whole genealogies of cotton planters in frock coats. She looked as if she had explained everything very nicely. Her watermelon-darky accent was evidently a party piece.

“I mean to say, in the Negro community, hardly
anybody
knows for certain who their daddy is. That’s just their way—”

“It’ll probably bring Higgs a big sympathy vote,” her husband said. “It may even turn out to be the thing that wins him this election.”

It was at that dinner that the husband had said, “Memphis is still the cotton capital of the world.” Yet cotton kept almost as low a profile in the city as Otis Higgs had kept in the Unitarian church. There was the Cotton Exchange on Front Street, and in a week I had seen five or six bales of the stuff standing outside one of the few remaining warehouses still in business. I had wanted to meet a cotton man, and in a grubby, sunny upper room on Madison where the Wolf River Society for the Prevention of Taking Oneself Too Seriously held its daily lunches, I was given an introduction to a cotton factor.

Mr. Deans’s office was decorated with photographs of mule carts on the levee and field hands’ camps. Until as recently as twenty years ago, cotton had been a shaping social force in the life of the city. Like the steamboat trade, it had been something that everyone could see; it assembled masses of people around it; it caused annual waves of migration between the rural plantations and the river wharves. You could
take pictures of it. Now, like the towboat industry, it was a subterranean economic force. It was almost invisible. The millions of dollars that cotton brought into Memphis came into the city as secretly as laundered money. Cotton was no longer picked by hand; it didn’t create labor camps anymore. It was divorced from the river. Most of it now went by freight train to the Carolinas. The warehouses on Front Street had begun to die when the government changed its regulations and the stamping of an official grade on each bale began to be done out on the farm and not here in the city.

“It may not look big to you,” Mr. Deans said. “But it’s bigger than ever. In this part of Tennessee we haven’t been hit by the Recession like the rest of the country. Cotton has insulated us from it. You see, we can afford to grow it where other countries can’t. In places like Egypt and Pakistan, they’re giving over more and more cotton land to rice and wheat because they need to feed their people. Here, we’ve got the space. We’ve got machines they haven’t got, so we can grow it cheaply. Don’t let your eyes deceive you: you’re looking at a boom right here and now.”

He took me upstairs to the warehouse, where the bales were stacked to the roof. He reached into a bale and rolled a staple between his forefinger and thumb.

“Two thirty-seconds,” he said.

“How long does it take you to learn to do that?”

“Oh, it’s a knack you pick up. Like playing the piano. In this industry you start off as a ‘squidge.’ That’s what squidging is. The first thing you need to get is just the feel of cotton on your finger. As soon as you know by instinct that it’s two thirty-seconds, that’s the time you graduate.”

The sample boxes were all labeled with girls’ names. The highest-grade staple was called “Clara” (“She’s the best girl”); the lowest, “Trixi” (“She’s a kind of mean, low-down kind of girl”).

“You know, one funny thing about this business … When I started out in it, you worked with Negroes. You always worked with Negroes. Now you see a black face on a farm and you notice it. Nowadays, the Negroes are all too grand to work in cotton.” He gave a dry, sarcastic little laugh. “They consider it … beneath their dignity.”

On election day, the bars were shut. I was drinking behind closed doors with a mild, bleary man who had spent the last few years gently boozing on a private income. He was the heir of an old Memphis family; a sad gay who seemed typecast to represent the end of something.

“You have to remember,” he said, his voice thick with bourbon, “you’re in the South here.”

“It’s not something that I’m in much danger of forgetting.”

“In the North … they … love the race and hate the individual. In the South, we love the individual … and we
hate
the race.”

The Higgs headquarters shone like a full moon on Union Avenue. A cordon of cops, their arms linked, was holding the crowds back. The building was framed in a white blaze of television lights. The figures who appeared on the balcony looked blind and pale. I had been given a card that turned me into an honorary personal aide, and I hustled and butted my way through to the house and its unearthly limelight. The crowds had come for a spectacle, as they might have gone to the scene of a plane crash or a multiple murder: the election of the first black mayor of Memphis, like the election of the first black mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, was going to be a national event. It would be on Walter Cronkite and
Good Morning America
.

Inside the corral, people were jittery with anxious elation. It had been a close-run thing, but yes, touch wood, we should have just scraped through. The ground floor was a maze of pinboards, one for each precinct, dotted with red and blue tags. Everywhere one looked there was another portable television set, and the campaign workers were sending messages to each other in code over the smoky crush of heads and cola cans.

When they came in, the results arrived in a flood, far too fast to follow. The tags were moving on the boards. Someone made a whooping cheer, and was shouted down. Then it was suddenly there, on a TV screen, and no one believed it. Chandler had 52 percent. Higgs had 48 percent.

The woman standing beside me was sobbing. An aide called that there was going to be a recount, that not all the precincts had come in yet, that … but the TV screen was showing the outside of Chandler’s headquarters, and he had already started in on his victory speech.

“What you want to look at
him
for? Why d’you want to look at
him?
There’s only one place I want to see him—in a long pine box!”

Chandler’s face looked as if it had been gouged and whittled from a lump of soft Dutch cheese. That morning’s
Commercial Appeal
had cartooned him as Goliath about to be toppled by the slingshot of Higgs’s David. A fiercely reasoned editorial had argued that any sensible Memphian must vote for Higgs.

Higgs had meant to speak to the cameras from the balcony outside. Now he couldn’t face that. Two TV crews came into the building and
set up their lights. Higgs stood in the chaotic litter of his failed campaign. Women were crying; men were sullen-faced, biting on cigarettes as if they were bullets.

“Mayor Judge Higgs! That’s what he is to me, and I ain’t saying any different!”

“Amen!”

A microphone was pushed into Higg’s face. He was too shocked to be generous in defeat.

“The loser tonight is Memphis,” he said.

“That’s right!”

“The people’s mayor!”

“Yeah—the people’s mayor!”

“There’s something here that’s missing over in Chandler’s headquarters. Black and white. Jew and Gentile. Protestant and Catholic …”

“Oh, my Lord!” a woman moaned. “Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord.”

The television lights were switched off. The crowd leaked quickly away. National news was not going to be made tonight in Memphis after all. In our own headquarters we were left with prickling eyes and brave, bitter little jokes. There was still the rest of the evening to face out: a whole floor of the Rivermont Hotel had been booked for a triumphal party, and we were going to have to toast defeat with canapés and Gallo wine; wormwood and gall.

“I think perhaps I shouldn’t go,” I said to my friend the aide.

“No, you must. Please—just for Otis’ sake. He needs us all right now.”

I found a telephone and called the Doric mansion where I had dined with Higgs’s most impassioned white supporters. The wife answered.

“I cried when I heard,” she said. “I wish it had never been. I wish it had never been.”

We were too few and too low-spirited for the ballroom at the Rivermont. Television cables lay like trailing vines across yards and yards of empty floor. There were as many waitresses with drinks on trays as there were guests. The best we were able to do with the piles of food on long tables was make it look as if the mice had been at it, leaving small serrated toothmarks at its edges.

An interviewer with a microphone was posing Higgs with his wife and son and daughter, arranging a family portrait of a loser for the ten-o’clock news. Under the lights, Mrs. Higgs was putting on the bright determined smile of a woman about to tell the watching world about a new brand of laxative or breakfast cereal. The children blinked. A video camera trundled along the room toward them on its
dolly. It subjected them to a blank, oxlike inspection and rolled back again.

When the cameras had finished with him, I went up to Higgs and touched his sleeve.

“I’m sorry, Otis. I badly wanted to see you win.”

He put his arm around my shoulder and gripped me so hard that it hurt.

“Yes. I know that. Thank you.” His face was stiff with the effort of choking back tears of disappointment.

There was one person at the party who didn’t seem too depressed by the result of the election. I could hear her laugh across the tables, a rich coloratura laugh, full of runs and trills. The third time I heard it, I turned to see who it was who was having fun at the wake. She caught my glance, waved and beckoned me over.

“Hi! I know who
you
are—you’re Jonathan. I’m Deedie. You want to insult me, call me Dolores.”

“I’ll stick with Deedie.”

“I’ve been keeping my eye on you. It seems like I can’t go into a church nowadays without seeing your face there. I’m telling you, it’s unhealthy.”

“What, going to church?”

“No! The way
you
go to church. You ain’t getting religion; you’re getting politics, politics and more politics. That’s not right. You want to see some real religion, not all this preaching mixed up with politics. You want to feel the spirit. You come with me to my church on Sunday, you’ll see religion the way it ought to be—”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“You ain’t getting out of this, now; you just fixed yourself a date.”

Deedie’s church was out in Whitehaven, to the south of the city. I had thought of the black suburbs of Memphis as precarious slums. Whitehaven, with its smart two-story houses, its lawns and trees, its new campers in driveways, was such a world away from the stained concrete, tar paper, rotting wood and corrugated iron of Chelsea and Hollywood that I feared I’d got my directions muddled and come to the wrong place. In Memphis my own eyes had grown instinctively racist: Whitehaven didn’t look comfortable, or green, or well tended, or decently spaced out; it just looked white. If one’s eyes could learn to see like that in ten days, what kind of crippling myopia would a lifetime’s experience give them?
The idea of virginity, chastity, monogamy, why,
it simply doesn’t exist for them. What do they do for it? Smoke, sass and drink Coke all day. Integration is as new for us as it is for the South Africans
.