“Look at this. I ripped it out before Creech got to it the other afternoon.”
The piece was a letter from “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” in a Jackson paper:
Honorable Mayor and City Counciclass="underline"
The parade permit you have granted to the Afracoon marching bands is a mistake. Mr. Mayor, you with your degree in Greek should of all people know that Jackson cannot do with having the projected parade and the swarms of irresponsible young negroes it is bound to attract along Capitol Street. Every sighted scholar of history and that race knows what an Afracoon festival generally turns into before the day is over. I am not so namby-pamby as not to mention that the cooties and lice will be fighting it out for predominant pestilence, which will linger behind for weeks, you can be sure. They will be hopping in our socks on the very steps of the grand Old Capitol we citizens reached in our tax-pockets to restore.
I wonder if even the Governor’s Mansion will be spared. I wonder if the Afracoon “fieamales” would not take time out from open fornication on the street and the Governor’s lawn to storm the doors and find the guest chamber and the pillow upon which Senator Kennedy once laid his head as a guest of Governor Coleman, (For once, don’t we Mississippians regret our famous hospitality?) so they might kiss this memento of their “celebrity” president. (Or has some official of integrity burned it, hopefully?)
I suggest incidentally that the Kennedys use their whiskey-millions and buy our Afracoons their own island and construct a swine-wallow the size of Capitol Street down the middle of it for parades. Perhaps some of our “Neegro” bandsmen and their camp followers would march on into the deep blue sea. I am confident that a navy of the Orkin exterminators could deal with the raft of cooties and louse-ridden banjos remaining afloat. Of the resulting slick of Royal Crown hair-straightener, we could only hope the wretched pollution would eventually find its way back to the beach of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and that Bobby and Jackie and Johnny and Teddy would see what it is like to sailboat in the voodoo sewage with which they want to drench this land.
With those who would rise and say “Never,”
Col. P. D. Lepoyster.
“It’s Whitfield Peter,” said Fleece. “Of the letters.”
“You never said he was a colonel. Colonel of what?”
“Oh, he was an honorary ‘colonel’ in Fielding Wright’s governorship years ago. I guess he gave money and influence to the campaign, whatever. When I saw his picture in the paper, this was explained under it”
“What picture?”
“A picture of him making a citizen’s arrest on some group of sit-in demonstrators outside of Walgreen’s, Capitol Street. He was just holding them until the police got there; as a matter of fact, a cop was advancing in the edge of the picture. Peter was planted there like a rock, rather states-manly. Oh, he’s quite a citizen, when anything ‘racial’ comes up. You’d think he’d had an operation where they put a police radio in his head. But do you realize this is the first time since?”
“The first time since?”
“That letter is the first time I’ve heard him speak directly since that night in front of my teacher’s house he threatened me about having the letters.”
The day of the parade we drove over in the morning and made a little affair out of it. Fleece had his camera, a Japanese mistakeless thing that looked damn near like a typewriter. I was carrying my hardware also, the pistol. I’d had a wild hair about the day, and so I’d brought it. I wasn’t sure why Fleece had come. He bit his hands. We were passing the Hickory House on West Capitol. I told him really, Harley’s band ought to be good. He could stand it.
“Oh, no. Oh, simple ass,” he said. “I was thinking about my camera. I was thinking about where or when I might see him to get a shot, looking around at the goddam miserable light in case I could get one anywhere, and I just saw that bastard.” He slapped my coat pocket. “Let me out.”
I pulled over and stopped the car. I didn’t care. It was all right with me just then if I never heard the moaning or the disgust or the imprecations from Fleece ever again.
“You can’t walk around with a pistol, you rube.”
Then I told him to get out. He seemed surprised, but tried to hide it by slumping carelessly in the seat. He wasn’t getting out. And when he spoke, after I drove on, he changed his voice into a more equable tone.
“The pistol is just there, Fleece,” I said. “I don’t have to use it. It makes me feel like something may be coming any minute. I walk around, you understand, watching out turn after turn, like I was in a wild country. It sets a light on the things or people I see. I see what I see in the light of what it might be if I pulled out the gun, and what things would do, how things would change.”
“You talk like you want to discover a country, is the hopeless thing,” said Fleece, in the new tone of an impartial observer. “You’ve been reading about that Indian. But, although it’s true you look like Hernando DeKotex with the swamp boots, you ought to know that Mississippi has already been discovered, and that… it’s enough of a rectangle of poor woe without you putting on that costume and pistol roaming around out of some pageant of gunslinging. They could use you in the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a salute-shooter at the cemetery in their birthday of the Civil War service. I thought it was funny you scaring that organist with a pistol. But I don’t think it’s funny you carrying it around ever after.”
“Another thing I want to settle,” I said. I was fed up. “Whichever tone of voice you take, I don’t want to hear so much of it, for godsake.”
We’d just passed the King Edward Hotel. Fleece had been almost deathly quiet. Suddenly he said to pull over. I could go where I wanted to but he was where he wanted to be. I found a parking space. Bobby Dove took out a pair of snap-on sunglasses and fixed them on his regular hornrims.
“All right.” He urged his nose up to test them, and I could tell he was unable to see much. As he’d complained a few minutes ago, the light today was dismal; there were odd cloud strands the color of coal in the sky — odd for April, I mean. “I bale out. See me at Al’s Half Shell in an hour if you want to see a scared mother.”
“Where do you think you are?”
“Just beyond Peter’s real estate office. There was an ‘open’ sign on it. He might remember me, but I want a shot of him head-on, to go with the letters. I’ve almost forgotten what the old pecker looks like.” Fleece embraced the camera and opened the door.
“He ran at you with a belt, Bob,” I told him, getting out myself. Fleece looked terribly small with that elaborately sensitive camera clutched to him, and in the sunglasses.
“No gunslingers. Go on.”
I sat back in the car, took out the pistol, put it under the seat, with Fleece watching. All ready to escort. I wanted to look at the man myself. Fleece began walking toward the narrow box of glass which was Peter’s office front, and I came up. In the window was a showcase, with reading material laid on a display board. One item invited you to buy a lot on a lake in beautiful Canton Harbors, Madison County, and here is the number you dial; to one side of the other display literature was the front page of a newspaper called “The Paleface Roll-Caller.” Nearby it was an outstretched page of the Jackson paper with the letter in “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” circled in brown ink, the same shade as in the letters from Whitfield, but I’d already read the newspaper letter and went back to “The Paleface Roll-Caller.”