Half of the front page was occupied with a history of “The Paleface Roll-Caller.” The editor was a simple gentleman farmer from Alabama who had never thought of putting a newssheet together until one winter he was at a convention of Big Dutchman farm machinery dealers in Chicago and was walking along minding his own business when a Negro dope addict asked him for five dollars, and when he refused, in his natural Alabamian accent, the Negro pulled out a sharpened “church-key” on him and called him a “paleface.” The Negro told him to call his friends too, because he wanted to cut them up as well. The Alabamian began shouting for his life, but, though the opposite sidewalk was covered with white citizens, no man came to his aid. The Negro laughed and told him he had no friends. He told the Alabamian that he wasn’t worth cutting, and, leaving casually — this criminal — he told the Alabamian that he knew some “intelligent” palefaces that, before the day was over, would not only give him the money he needed, but would, one of those women palefaces, remove his sordid rags and kiss him all over the duration of his heroin spell. This was in Chicago, U.S.A. The editor had never seen the Situation like this before. He’d been too simple. Now he had seen the Situation. Even though he lost money on “The Paleface Roll-Caller,” it must appear.
It was time to go in if we were going in, and we did. Fleece had the camera up ready to snap and run, but there was no one in the front room. There was a carpet and three chairs and a table, with more reading matter on it, but no Whitfield Peter. I sat down and took up another copy of “The Paleface, etc.” The same history was on the front page. Apparently a permanent space was given over to it every issue. On the rest of the front page, I read about JFK, how Secret Service men had to drag him out of one Harlem brothel after another; and about a “certain gynecologist” in D.C. who had performed a number of abortions while Jackie was a gadabout reporter, pre-JFK. Other articles spoke of grassroots upheaval in the Catholic Church if it continued to hang the threat of excommunication over certain white patriots in Louisiana. Another harked back with some incoherent curse against Eleanor Rooseveltstein. The last returned to Jackie. Her nose was as “Semitic” as the nose of Lady Bird Johnson, wife of a key traitor among the Democrats. There was some bad spelling in the paper, but it was a wonder of consistency. Bobby Kennedy, who had so many children he didn’t know what to do besides dance and sleep with Jackie, had recently met with Negro “leaders,” and made a secret promise of billions to them. Jackie had had her influence.
“Somebody’s back there,” said Fleece. There was a room off the narrow hall in the back. I hadn’t noticed the light. A shadow burst out against the opposite wall. I was frightened too. I started bellowing, putting it on.
“Shitfire, finally the truth! Everything in this paper’s the real god rightout trooth! All of it, ever shitfire comma!”
Peter came out in a wide, lank wool suit colored like a speckled eggshell. It was in a style which had never either come or gone, as far as I knew. At last I saw his face. There were locks of grayish tan hair, parted high, and the actual face was flushed like a doll’s, red cheeks and lips and also the ears. There was the mask of a pretty, babyfat boy behind the whiskers, the crow’s-feet wrinkles at the eyes, and the liver spots; there was a vulgar trapped boy in his face, and he horrified me. I couldn’t move. I saw he was thinking that we were rednecks.
“The truth always has good manners,” he said. This was the first time I heard him speak. He was scolding me. But his voice was so pleasant it would put you to sleep. There was none of that hateful Southern yap in it. We got up and left, in fact, to the soothing ring of it.
Out on the street, Fleece was shivering. I was such an amateur about cameras, I thought the camera might’ve worked somehow by itself. I asked Fleece if he had gotten the shot.
“Hell no. When he came in, I turned the thing upside-down.”
I drove up to Lamar Street, couldn’t find a space, and finally found one on Pearl, behind the post office building. We walked around the porch of the building. Being on Capitol Street again, we sat down, on the post office steps. On the curbs it was solid spades, young and old. Fleece was wearing his camera in case he saw something, but he was not hopeful. As for me, knowing his mind was still on Peter, I’d slipped the gun out from under the carseat and dropped it in my raincoat.
I’d never seen so many Negroes together at one time. You could smell a high character of smoking fish in the air. We stood up when the first band came down. On the steps like this we could see. The colored girls would walk with the bands. They had on sweaty bobbysox and pointed witch lace-ups like the fad at Dream of Pines two years ago. I was looking at their ankles as they tried to break into the line of spectators to see their band. Some just followed the band on the sidewalk. One group was four-across, doing the skip-and-kick for school spirit, and they created a jam coming down the sidewalk.
The first four bands had snaky ranks and played very loud, with majorettes desporting on their own, each a star in a separate audition; and this held true for some of the musicians too. I saw a tuba man doing a private jazz ballet and skiffle to the march, his eyes closed, and dancing off into the spectator ranks before he opened his eyes and found out where he was. Then we saw him and his huge instrument running after his band. A small boy ran after him slapping his pants like he was a stray dog. The crowd in front of the post office put up a cheer. Up till now it had been Count Basie set to march-time, and shallow in arrangement.
“This is awful!” said Fleece. “You hear that a nigger has rhythm, and these bands are making a fraud out of that.” I was absorbed in the way the bands kept tooting away and falling apart One drum major who was using his band as a moving, undulating yellow backdrop was hopping and slithering and even doing flips on the pavement, grinning, and confident that we were seeing him in black relief, as we were. At the peak of arrogance he would throw his baton.
There were quite a few whites standing on the steps with us. That arrogant drum major’s baton shot up some forty feet in the air, spinning, and we watched it come down at his skinny body, wishing — if the crowd was with me — that it would crash on his teeth and take some of that prissiness out of him. But he caught it mid-twirl in an even more arrogant act, looking sideways away from it and catching it in a strut, as if ignoring it altogether.
“Look at them jump! Look at the niggers jump!” said a man on the higher step behind me. This man wore a big felt hat The hat seemed to have started out as a full cowboy venture, had a wide brim, but it was crushed deep across the crown like somebody had slammed it with a crowbar. It was beige with a gray band. The fellow’s suit was a speckled beige sort of wrap. The pants rolled out like curtains. Then I caught the face. I jerked my face away. Then I nudged Fleece.
“Look behind me.”
“Great God. Him. How fast did he fly this far up Capitol Street.” Fleece put on the snap-on sunglasses again. “I’ m going to step up two steps and see if I can shoot a profile. Don’t move or look his way.”
Peter had been hollering all the while.
“Give that coon a spear!” he called, about the drum major. “Did you ever think you’d see Jackson so full of jungle bunnies?! I’ll tell you what the problem is going to be. The problem is going to be getting this trash out of town once this honky-tonk jamboree is over. It’s going to be dogs and hoses, my friends…. You call that out there marching? What we’re looking at is a Mau-Mau rehearsal. These Afra-coons have been given dope, you can tell by their eyes. You know who’s in town?” I felt his hand brush my shoulder. I felt ill. Kept my face forward. “Martin Luther Coon, that’s who. Don’t tell me I didn’t see a black Cadillac full of silk-suit jigaboos riding up and down Capitol this morning,” he challenged me. I did not swerve. Out of the corner of my eye, his hat and suit seemed frighteningly large. The suit seemed to flare at me. All I could tell was that he appeared to have no special friends on the steps. But there was a cop leaning on the pole at the curb, and he turned around, looking over the Negro heads at the bands. Peter made a motion and the cop gave him a smile and put his hands up to his ears.