*
“There’s a thousand reporters here,” Omar said later, addressing his deputies in the little high-ceilinged lounge the parish pretended was something called a “squad room.”
“Most of them are going to go home before long, but there’s still going to be a lot of attention placed on this parish.”
“So,” Merle said as he stood by the machine and poured himself coffee. “No incidents.”
“Particularly no incidents that could be described as racially motivated,” Omar said.
“We don’t get to have no fun at all?” Jedthus asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the air conditioner that rattled in the window. “We don’t even get to knock the heads of the niggers we’re used to knocking?”
“We live in a video world,” Omar said. “Let’s remember that half the people in this state have camcorders, and they’d just love a chance to earn ten grand selling the tabloids pictures of one of us whacking some coon upside the head. And then you’d be on network news, and we’d all be so surrounded by federal agents and judges and lawsuits we wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
“Damn.” Merle grinned. “For ten grand, I’d sell pictures of y’all.”
Merle settled with his coffee onto the cheap sofa. Cracks in its orange plastic had been repaired with duct tape.
“Just take it easy for now,” Omar said.
“By the way,” said Merle, “I heard from D.R. at the Commissary. He was afraid that the election might scare all the little niggers away from the camp meetings this summer.”
“Awww.” Jedthus moaned with mock sympathy.
“Well,” Merle said defensively, “they bring a lot of money into this parish. And a lot of it gets spent at the Commissary. It ain’t like D.R.’s got that much money to spare.”
The Commissary was the general store in Shelburne City, and had retained its name from the time when it was the company store of the Shelburne Plantation, which had once occupied much of the parish. Now it was owned and run by D.R. Thompson, who had married Merle’s sister Cordelia. D.R. was all right, Omar figured. He had slipped Omar some under-the-table contributions during Omar’s campaign and was a prominent business leader, for all that his business was just a general store. So he deserved some reassurance.
Omar nodded. “Tell D.R. we’re not fixing to do anything to the tourists. In fact,” he added, “I’ll talk to him myself.”
“But Omar.” Jedthus looked pained. “When are we going to get to do something, you know, special?”
Omar fixed Jedthus with a steely eye. “Wait for the word,” he said. “We’ve got to get these bloodsucking reporters out of here first.”
“Churches and meeting halls burn up real nice,” Jedthus said.
“One damn church,” Omar scowled, “and we’d have the FBI moving in with us for the next five years.” It was one of his nightmares that someone— possibly someone he hardly knew— was going to get overenthusiastic and create what would literally be a federal case.
The whole point of the Klan, he knew, was violence. The Klan often gave itself the airs of a civic organization, interested in charities and betterment— but the truth was that if people wanted civic betterment, they’d join the Rotary.
You joined the Klan because you wanted to be a part of an organization that stomped its enemies into the black alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta. And what Omar had to do now was restrain his followers from doing just that.
“Concentrate on lawbreakers,” Merle advised. “Just do your regular job.”
Jedthus scowled. Omar looked at his deputy and sucked his teeth in thought.
The problem was, he had been elected by people looking for change. And change wasn’t exactly in his power. He couldn’t change the last fifty years of history, he couldn’t repair the local economy, he couldn’t alter the power of the liberal media or the Jews or the federal government. He couldn’t change Supreme Court rulings, he couldn’t deny black people the welfare that guaranteed their independence from white control. Least of all, he couldn’t alter the situation by cracking heads. Cracking heads would only make the situation worse. Getting himself or one of his deputies thrown in jail wasn’t going to help anybody.
“Jedthus,” Omar said, “don’t do anything you don’t want to see on the six o’clock news. Remember Rodney King, for God’s sake. That’s all I’m saying.” He winked. “Things’ll change. Our time will come. You know that.”
“Reckon I do,” said Jedthus, still scowling. He cracked his big knuckles.
Omar looked at Merle with a look that said You’ll speak to Jedthus about this little matter, won’t you?, and Merle gave an assuring nod.
“I’ve got an interview with somebody from the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “Guess I’ve kept the little prick waiting long enough.”
He left the squad room with a wave. “See you-all at the shrimp boil,” he said.
Omar lived in Hardee, twelve miles from Shelburne City, just north of the Bayou Bridge. The house he shared with Wilona was of the type called a “double shotgun,” two long, narrow shiplap homes that shared a single peaked roof. Early in his marriage, when Wilona had first got pregnant, he’d borrowed some money from his father and his in-laws, bought both halves of the house, knocked down some of the walls separating the two units, and created a spacious family home. They’d raised their son David here, and saved enough money to send him to LSU.
Though he and Wilona— chiefly Wilona— had created a pleasant little oasis on their property, with a lawn and garden and a pair of huge magnolias to shade it all in summertime, the rest of the neighborhood was less impressive. The asphalt roads were pitted and badly patched, with grass and weeds springing up here and there. The houses were a mixture of old shotgun homes and newer house trailers, with an occasional clapboard church. Cars and trucks stood on blocks in front yards. Some of the vehicles had been there so long they were covered by vines, and fire ants had piled conical mounds around the deflated tires. Cur dogs lolled in the shade, dozens of them. Laundry hung slack on lines. Old signs were still pegged on front lawns: Omar Paxton for Law and Decency. Confederate flags hung limp in the still air.
Omar waved to everyone as he drove slowly through the neighborhood in his chief’s cruiser. People waved back, shouted out congratulations.
These were the people who had turned out in droves to see him elected, who had overturned the local establishment and put him in office.
Maybe now, he thought, we can get the roads resurfaced.
He pulled into his carport and stepped from its air-conditioned interior into the Louisiana heat. The air was so sultry, and hung so listlessly in the still afternoon, that Omar thought he could absolutely feel the creases wilt on his uniform. He sagged.
People used to work in this heat, he thought. He himself had spent one whole day chopping cotton when he was a teenager, and by the end of the day, when he’d quit, he knew he’d better finish high school and get a job fit for a white man.
Sweat prickled his forehead as he walked the few paces from the carport to his front door. Inside, chill refrigerated air enveloped him, smelling of chopped onion and green pepper. He stopped inside the door and breathed it in.
“Is that potato salad I smell?” he said cheerfully. He took off his gun belt— damned heavy thing— and crossed the room to hang it from the rack that held his .30-’06, his shotgun, his Kalashnikov, and the Enfield his multi-great grandfather had carried in the War Between the States.
Wilona— who pronounced her name “Why-lona”— came from the kitchen, an apron over her housecoat. “Enough potato salad for twenty people,” she said. “There aren’t going to be more, are they?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t do the invitations.” He kissed her.
Wilona’s expression brightened. “Look!” She almost danced to the coffee table, where she picked up a cream-colored envelope. “Look what else we got!”
Omar saw the address engraved on the envelope and smiled. “I was wondering when this was going to come.”
“Mrs. Ashenden invited me to tea on Wednesday!” Wilona’s eyes sparkled. She was happy as a child at Christmas.
Omar took the envelope from her, slipped the card out of the envelope, opened it. Looked at the elegant handwriting. “Very nice,” he said. “Guess we’re among the quality now.”
“It’s so exciting!” Wilona said. “We finally got an invitation to Miz LaGrande’s! It’s just what we’ve wanted!”
What Omar wanted, actually, was for Mrs. LaGrande Davis Rildia Shelburne Ashenden to die, choke on one of her little color-coordinated petit fours maybe, and for her big white house, Clarendon, to burn to the ground. She was the last of the Shelburne family, and they’d been in charge of Spottswood Parish for too long.
“I’ll have to find a new frock,” Wilona said. “Thank God I have Aunt Clover’s pearls.”
“Your frocks are fine.” Omar put the invitation back into its envelope and frowned. “You’ll buy a new frock for old Miz LaGrande and you didn’t buy one for my swearing-in?”
She snatched the invitation from his hand. “But I’ll be going to Clarendon! Clarendon is different!”
“I wouldn’t buy a new frock for some old biddy who will never give us the vote,” Omar said. “Is there beer in the icebox?”
“I bought a case yesterday. There was a sale at the Super-B.”
Omar found some Coors Light in the icebox, twisted off the tops of two bottles, and returned to the living room to hand one to Wilona. She was sitting on the couch, paging through a copy of Southern Accents that she’d probably bought the second she’d received Miz LaGrande’s invitation.
Wilona took the beer she handed him and sighed. He had neglected to bring her a glass.
Wilona had always harbored ambitions above her station, probably inherited from her mother, who was a Windridge but who had done something disgraceful at LSU and ended up living with her shirttail relatives in Shelburne and had to marry a filling station owner.
Wilona longed for the lost world of mythic Windridge privilege. She longed to have tea at Clarendon and join the Junior League and wear crinolines at Garden Club functions. She wanted to be Queen of the Cotton Carnival and every so often invite a select group of friends to a pink tea, where everything, including the food, was color-coordinated, and even the waiter wore a pink tie.
Omar knew that none of this was ever going to happen.
Even Windridge pretentions had never extended that far. Instead of the pink teas, there would be shrimp boils, and fish fries, attendance at Caesarea Baptist, and meetings where people wore hoods of white satin and burned crosses. This was Wilona’s destiny, and his. This was the fate to which their birth had condemned them.
And it was the quality, the people like Miz LaGrande, who did the condemning. Whose gracious lives were made possible by the sweat of others, and who somehow, along with their white houses and cotton fields, had inherited the right to tell everyone else how to run their lives.
It was traditional, in Spottswood Parish, for anyone running for office to have tea at Clarendon, explain what they hoped to accomplish, and ask for Miz LaGrande’s blessing on their candidacy.
Omar had not gone to tea at Clarendon. He had just announced he was running, and then he ran hard. He beat the Party, and then the official candidate, and then the courts. And all the opposition ever managed to do was make him more popular and more famous.
And he did it all without asking Miz LaGrande for anything. And he never would ask her for anything. Not a damn thing. Not ever.
But now Miz LaGrande was fixing to have that tea, after all. And not with Omar, but with his wife.
The old lady still had a few brain cells left, that was clear.
“Miz LaGrande has never been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “No Yankee reporter is ever going to ask her for her opinion, I bet. I reckon German television isn’t gonna send a camera crew to Clarendon.”
“Of course not.” Wilona paged through her magazine, sipped on her beer.
“What’s so great about the Shelburnes?” Omar asked. “They come out here from Virginia, they ship in a couple hundred niggers from Africa to do their work for them, and they build a Greek temple to live in. Would you call that normal?”
Wilona looked up from her magazine, her eyebrows tucked in a frown. “Don’t be tacky,” she said.
“She’s trying to get at you because she can’t get at me. She’s trying to get you on her side.”
“Oh, darlin’, it’s just tea. And I’m always on your side, you know that.” She turned the page, and then showed Omar a picture. “Look at that kitchen! Isn’t that precious?”
Omar looked at the polished cabinets and the cooking implements, some of them pretty strange-looking, that hung from brass hooks. “It’s nice,” he said.
“It’s precious,” She looked wistfully at the picture, then looked up at Omar. “Can’t we have a kitchen like this? Can’t we have a new house?”
“Nothing wrong with the house we live in now,” Omar said.
“Of course there’s nothing wrong with it,” Wilona said. “I just think we deserve something better after all these years. You’ve got a much better salary now, and—”
“People voted the way they did for a reason,” Omar said. “They voted for us because they thought we were just like them. Because we lived in their neighborhood, because they saw us in their church, because they knew we were born here, because we didn’t pretend to be anything we weren’t. Because we live in a double shotgun that we fixed up, okay?”
Wilona cast a wistful look at her copy of Southern Accents. “I just want some things in my life to be lovely,” she said.
He fixed her with a look. “Wilona,” he said, “it’s too late to pledge Chi Omega now.”
She looked away. “That was a mean thing to say, Omar.”
“It’s true, ain’t it?”
“You should shower and change your clothes. We’ll be late for the shrimp boil.”
The phone rang. Omar took a pull from his long-neck, then rose from the couch to answer. It was his son David.
“Congratulations, Dad!” he said. “I’m popping a few brews to celebrate!”
“Thanks.” Omar felt a glow kindle in his heart. David was finishing his junior year at LSU and would be the first Paxton ever to graduate from college. Omar had got David through some rocky years in his teens— the boy was hot-tempered and had traveled with a rough crowd— but now David was safe in Baton Rouge and well on his way to escaping the shabby, tiny world of Spottswood Parish.
A place that Omar himself planned to escape, rising from his double shotgun home on the wings of a Kleagle. Once you get the people behind you, he thought, who knew how far you could go?
*
The concussions of the earthquake still continue, the shock on the 23rd ult. was more severe and larger than that of the 16th Dec. and the shock of the 7th inst. was still more violent than any preceding, and lasted longer than -perhaps any on record, (from 10 to 15 minutes, the earth was not at rest for one hour.) the ravages of this dreadful convulsion have nearly depopulated the district of New Madrid, but few remain to tell the sad tale, the inhabitants have fled in every direction ... Some have been driven from their houses, and a number are yet in tents. No doubt volcanoes in the mountains of the west, which have been extinguished for ages, are now opened.
Cape Girardeau, Feb. 15th, 1812