A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (42 page)

Anyhow, when you look back on your life or, in my case, on the life I have shared with African-American people and their struggles, you realize that all you have are a bunch of stories, stories that may or may not pack a wallop but that certainly don’t seem to me to pack anything else—like revelation. Maybe it’s just me. That’s possible. I’ve always been a man who knew the lay of the land for twenty yards on every side. Knew every detail. If you train your eyes that way, by frilly damn, you are harder than hell to beat in an election. You become the best politician you can be. Maybe I am the best politician of the twentieth century. I don’t know who has won more elections and lost fewer. I also don’t know whether that’s a good thing to be, whether I haven’t paid a high price.

What kind of a history can I write when I never looked past twenty yards? But then I wonder if anybody really does have much more range than that to plow in. What the hell do you say past that point? I mean, who knows what the big issues are anyhow?

My daddy loved to tell a story of Big Ed McClellan, the worst coon hunter in the county. Big Ed had the best dogs anybody could want and he even, it is said, bought a book on coon hunting. He’d lived here all his life, wasn’t any youngster, and seems as if he’d done nothing but coon hunt. It wasn’t that he was dumb exactly or handicapped, the way some are, with poor eyesight or real strong body smells that make hunting tough. Big Ed was greedy and he was a thinker. It was the last that got him in trouble. No sooner was Big Ed out with his dogs than he started to think. If the dogs headed one way, got a scent, Big Ed would think where other scents might be coming from. If they got a coon treed, he’d think where all the untreed coons was. Also, he’d remember coon hunts before and try to make ‘em match up with the one he was on, so he could either copy the success or avoid the failure of the past. The result was he thought so much the coons was as safe with Big Ed hunting them as if they were in a zoo.

You get the moral of that, you kind readers out there? My daddy said the moral was, “When you got a coon treed, keep your eye on that there coon and none other.” I was never too sure what that meant and am not too sure to this day. Maybe my daddy thought the idea was to keep a short, unwandering focus. I always thought the moral was to keep to the present, not to imagine that the past had any bearing on it or that the present would have any impact on the future. I guess that view came to be known as a kind of existentialism. That’s what an aide of mine said, when I explained my view of that story. But if my view deserved a fancy name it was sure by accident. Anyways, I wonder now if Daddy didn’t steer me wrong. Maybe he should have said that Big Ed was simply thinking at the wrong time and that there was a better thing for a thinker to do than go coon hunting.

Worst of all, my daddy taught me to believe that stories had secrets in them and that we could find them or reveal them. You would think such a belief would be good training for a historian, which is what I’m trying to be here. After all, history is just a big story with a lot of little stories inside it. But what if the stories ain’t worth a damn? What if there’s nothing at all inside them?

But I didn’t mean to get off on that. I really meant to be talking about what it means to be a politician and to think always of what you can do right now under these circumstances. The politics I know always involved working as best you could to play a game whose rules were already there when you started. See what I mean? You always have to deal with what’s there, whatever it is. Usually what’s there is a tangle, some of which makes sense and some of which don’t. In the case of the African-American people, lots of what was there might have seemed unfair and cruel to anyone not trying to make things better inside the conditions we had.

Let me try again. Until I started to write all this, I never thought of some things. That’s not quite right. I never thought of things outside a certain way, outside the confines of that twenty-yard circle I was telling you about. I never had time, I guess, or the occasion. I wonder now about all that. I wonder if I could have thought different, not different things but in a different way.

Here’s an example, just to jump right into the subject. Take schooling for Negroes. Now, when I was growing up, we were surrounded by people, lots of them just no good, who would exercise their lungs hollering against African-American people, “niggers” they called them (a word I never used to denigrate another human being). Long after slavery, long long after, they still didn’t want black people to have any education. None at all. “They aren’t fit for it!” they’d say. “Makes ‘em uppity. Takes money away from decent white folks. Makes ‘em think they can take our jobs. Makes ‘em think they can take our women!” I don’t think people today know how loud these people were or how many there were of them. “Poor white trash” is a phrase that doesn’t cover them. Most poor Southern people, like most poor people everywhere, are very good people. I’m talking about scoundrels, and there were lots of them.

Now, my daddy and his friends hated these scoundrels and knew how much damage they did to South Carolina. My daddy and his friends did not hate the Negro. If you won’t grant me that, please don’t read any more. It’s the honest truth. And it’s true for me too. Here’s how we saw the picture, the twenty yards we saw. It was a white problem, a problem of white scoundrels, not a black problem. I tell you and please believe me: most black people we knew were very hard-working, respectful, Christian people trying to get along in the world without causing trouble. Try not to pin a label on what I just said. I’m not apologizing, just trying to describe the game I grew up inside. I didn’t make the rules. I guess I didn’t know there were rules. I just saw what was…twenty yards around me.

When I got a job as school teacher, then various county posts, then as judge, I saw my work as a game where the players were these: the decent white people, the scoundrel white people, the decent black people. Of course there were black people who were trouble, but not enough to make it into the game. The problems were those of violence and the justification of violence, of the Klan and lynchings and horrible housing and education. At least, that was the world I saw and went to work in. I didn’t make that world. I just saw it and lived in it. But I did try to make it better. I worked hard for better black schools, higher pay for the teachers, training in reading and writing for black people, even what we now call day care centers, also for black people.

Now people say I was the King of Segregation, that I never saw the answer to all these problems that came to be written: blacks and whites in the same school. That idea wasn’t part of the world I was in. It just wasn’t. Equality, for me, meant one thing and it meant another to people I couldn’t understand.

I’ll say this and get it out of my system: They couldn’t understand me any better than I could understand them. They had their own twenty yards of compass and I had mine. To make what they saw morally superior to what I saw and to make me seem conniving and evil all along seems to me simply a failure to see that none of us saw very far. I had a debate once with Senator Jake Javitz, a fine man and a dear friend. Javitz was going on about conditions in the segregated South, saying how we were systematically mistreating, deliberately and wantonly, every black citizen. What he was really saying was, “Hey, folks, New York is superior to South Carolina and I, Jake Javitz, am sure as hell superior to Strom Thurmond.”

But what was the condition of black men, women, and children in New York? Were their schools better? Their housing? Their jobs? Were they safer, less likely to end up in prison? To his eternal discredit, I must say, Jake really couldn’t see the point I was making.

To my eternal discredit, I could never see his. I wish I had been more like Big Ed, looking past the coon up the tree to try and see what the forest looked like.

You get the idea.

Best,

Percival and Jim

May 9, 2003

Dear Juniper and Reba,

Please rescue me. I was sinking deep in sin, far from the happy shore. Very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more. But the master of the seas heard my despairing cry: from the waters lifted me, now safe am I.

Be the masters of my seas.

Barton Wilkes I thought was in L.A. but I have too much reason to believe he’s not. I swear I saw him outside my apartment. I thought I would die from the shock. You know that scene in “Rear Window” when Jimmy Stewart locks eyes with Raymond Burr through the telescope Stewart has been using? Burr’s a killer and now knows Stewart knows and heads right over to silence Stewart. We know all that in a flash as soon as their eyes lock.

Well, I was looking out my apartment window, just like Jimmy Stewart, except of course I was looking at the skies, not in somebody’s window, which we all know is against the law. There are several young people in the apartment opposite mine, very nice looking young people, WHICH IS PRECISELY THE REASON I WOULD NOT PEEP AT THEM.

I looked down from the skies, and there on the street corner, sort of as in “The Third Man,” stood a man in an overcoat, leaning on a lamppost, smoking a cigarette, and casting a long shadow. Don’t tell me I’m hallucinating. I couldn’t see his face, but that makes me even more certain it was Barton Wilkes stalking me. Who else would be out there on a foggy night at 3 a.m. or a little after?

Here’s my plan. I know you two have moved in together and thus have room for me. I won’t take up much space. I’ll pay 40% of the rent. Now, that’s more than fair. Cooking and cleaning can be divided in thirds. We each get privacy if we want it. No stringing wet underwear over the bathtub, I promise.

Through all kinds of weather! What if the sky should fall? Just as long as we’re together, it doesn’t matter at all. Though they’ve all had their quarrels and parted, we’ll be the same as we started: Just travelling along, singing a song, side by side.

Love,

Martin

May 11, 2003

Dear Martin,

Reba and I both like your songs. That’s a nice touch.

You can bring Pearl; she’s a darn nice girl, but don’t bring Lulu. Lulu is the smarty who breaks up every party. Shamalan goo-goo! Don’t bring Lulu! I’ll bring her myself!

Reba thinks “Shamalan goo-goo” is wrong, but I just listened to the record and I know.

You can tell we’re having a nice time here. I am afraid, Martin, that there’s no room at all for another. I’m sure you understand. It’s not just me and Reba but also our separate guests, who are sometimes or even often here. It’s a two bedroom place, and they aren’t kidding when they say two bedrooms. There aren’t any hidden solariums, offices, studies, guest areas, or even closets.

More importantly, there is nothing to fear from Barton Wilkes. I am surprised you were not included in the conciliatory and kind message he sent out. I understand that he has been employed to work on the CLASS ASS project, which seems to me a splendid idea. (Also, the Strom project will probably go on just fine, allowing Kincaid and Everett to work on what they have so far and what they can worm directly from the Senator.)

Do be reassured, Martin. You sound so very distraught. Maybe you could come over to dinner. I could even invite Barton, just so you’d see. Next Friday?

Till then—

All best,

Juniper

p.s. It’s “peaceful shore,” Martin, not “happy.”