A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (24 page)

THURMOND: I’m an old man. I’m not always sure what I’m saying.

KINCAID: You weren’t old in the seventies.

THURMOND: On really hot summer days down in South Carolina, we like to go sit in the shade by a river and fish for catfish. When I was a boy I used to keep me a trotline strung across the river and I’d check it every couple of days. I’d bring the fish home to our cook. She was a great big colored woman and she’d clean the fish and fry them up for lunch. She used to dip the fish in beer batter and boy was that good. Anyway, one day I caught this fish that was darker than the rest and she looked at that thing for a long time and finally said, “This here fish you shoulda throwed back.” I asked her why and she said, “This here is a negra catfish and it din’t know where it belonged and that’s how it come to be caught. You see, it ain’t fair.”

EVERETT: That’s a great story.

KINCAID: Yes, indeed.

THURMOND: Yes, I have always loved that story. I tell it often. I told it at a dinner at South Carolina State College, that’s a colored school in Orangeburg, and nobody seemed to get it. Funny, that. Anyway, I love that story. As far as education, I was a progressive, that’s true. I have always believed in the importance of a good education. But you have to be smart about education. My friend, Henry Hyde, likes to say that an intellectual is a person whose education has exceeded his intelligence. That’s the problem in these colleges.

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.

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
, I
NC
.
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

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
, I
NC
.
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

F
ROM THE
D
ESK OF
P
ERCIVAL
E
VERETT

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 ever 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