The Ordways (26 page)

Out in the sunshine the crowd stood facing the speakers' platform, which was draped in red, white, and blue bunting. The day had turned off hot and rather gnatty, a boon to that candidate, one Dewitt O. Porterfield, with whose compliments the ladies had all been given pasteboard fans. It was before the days of universal suffrage, but here the enjoyment of oratory was an end in itself, and knew no sex.

The mayor of Paris finished his welcome to the day's visitors, and introduced the Reverend Cecil Clevenger, who would lead them in a moment of prayer.

“O Lord,” Reverend Clevenger prayed, “in time of elections we turn unto Thee. Think not of our deserts but of our sore needs, and send us, we beseech Thee, worthy candidates. Appear Thou unto our good men, inspire them to enter public service as Thou didst inspire Daniel in the lion's den, Shadrach in the fiery furnace, and Jonah in the belly of the whale. Persuade them to run, O Lord, and teach us, that we may know them. Deafen our ears to hollow blandishments. Abandon us not to our own weak judgment, but go Thou with us into the polling booth and guide our choice. With Thy help, O Lord, may the best man win, and once in office, lead him not into temptation but deliver him from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever, amen.”

“Amen,” said the crowd, and put their hats back on.

The lead-off speaker was the senior U. S. senator from the Lone Star State, the Right Honorable Clifford Venable, seeking re-election to his fifth term. “Cousin Cliff,” as he was affectionately known (“She's a cousin of mine—a kissing cousin,” he would explain whenever, as usually happened, his zeal for baby kissing led him to buss the mother too), Cousin Cliff came shod in those famous old broken-heeled congressman's gaiters which had been for so long his trademark. “Lord, folks, mah feet are a-killin me! Ain't yawl's?” he would at some point exclaim at every stop on the campaign trail, and hordes of registered Democratic fellow-sufferers from corns, calluses, ingrown toenails, and fallen arches would guffaw with pleasure, would poke their elbows into one another's ribs, and would mentally cast their votes right then and there. He would invite them to take the load off their feet, to just squat right down on the grass, and would himself, with a great mortal sigh, fall into a folding chair. “Why don't we all just slip the durn things off? We wasn't born with them on, and most of us, I hope, will go out with them off. Let's just ease out of them, what do yawl say? We're all friends here.” They would. By the hundreds. And the atmosphere on a hot day in stump-speaking weather would often get fairly feetid. And Cousin Cliff would take off those old gaiters of his, revealing socks with great holes through which his two big toes protruded. He would wriggle them, sigh again, and say, “Good gracious, Miss Agnes, don't that feel good!” In times of dispute on the Senate floor he had been known to issue the same invitation to the disputants. “Cooler feet mean cooler heads” was one of his copyrighted maxims, and he had caused to be read into
The Congressional Record
during more than one filibuster his documented theory that most of the ills of history could be traced to great men's bunions and to shoes that fit, as he phrased it, “a mite too soon.”

“Fellow Texans!” Cousin Cliff began.

When the applause finally quieted down, he continued, “Ladies and gentlemen. Citizens of Paris, the metropolis of the blackest land and the whitest people. Mah frans and neighbors.” He went on to say that it was customary, he believed, for a candidate seeking re-election to summarize his record during his term of office. He was not going to do that. In the first place, he himself could no longer recall all the bills that bore his name, reaching all the way back to the Venable Livestock Security Act of 1875, the law which, by putting an obligatory cowcatcher on every locomotive plying Southern rails, had saved from destruction unnumbered family milch cows throughout Dixie, thereby saving from indirect starvation at the hands of Yankee railroad interests whole generations of Southern infants. Coming rapidly up to date, he did not think they needed to be reminded whose senator it was, from what great state, who, during the late session of the Congress, in the struggle to preserve and maintain the sacred institution of the poll tax, when his Southern colleagues and brethren had all sunk one by one into impotent laryngitis, had hoarsely declared, “I have not yet begun to talk!”

No, he was not going to waste their time with these things. They knew them, and besides, he believed he could count on his young opponent to go into his long career at length. He hoped, by the way, that they would all stay and listen courteously to the boy.

The record which Cliff Venable had made during the twenty-four years he had represented them in the Senate of the United States (that federation to which, like it or not, they belonged) was known to every Texan. What he was going to speak about here today was
their
record during that time. He was going to speak of what they, the men and, God bless em, the women, of this great and glorious state had achieved during this past quarter century. Praise to the face was open disgrace, he knew, but he would ask them to restrain their natural modesty (a virtue which Texans carried almost to a fault) and listen unabashed while he told them of the miracle they had wrought.

Twenty-four years. … As he looked out now upon this sea of shining faces he was irresistibly brought to mind of that autumn day in the inglorious year of Our Lord 1874 when he first stood upon this spot, beneath this hallowed tree. Long had their beloved state lain under the murky flood of enemy occupation and so-called Reconstruction. Yet in 1874, unbeknownst to the great mass still huddling in the bowels of the ark, a few hardy souls had ventured up on deck, had released the timorous dove, and she had returned bringing in her beak the tender olive branch of hope. Then, like unto the legendary phoenix of old, they had arisen from their ashes, had rolled up their collective sleeves, had spat on their hands, and said, “There is work to be done.”

Then it was that he himself had been persuaded by a group of civic leaders to leave, like Cincinnatus, his plow, and add his humble voice to the swelling chorus. To awaken Texas, that slumbering giant, that Hercules in feminine attire, that Samson eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves. He well remembered saying as he stood on this spot of holy ground in the fateful November of 1874, “O Texas, cast thy nighted color off!” He remembered saying, “Fellow Texans, we are living
in
this great state, we are living
off of
it, but are we living
up to
it?” “Where now,” he remembered saying, “where now is fled that spirit which caused it to be said, ‘Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat—the Alamo had none!'” “O Crockett,” he had said. “O Austin. O Mirabeau B. Lamar. Thou shouldst be living at this hour. Texas hath need of thee.” They had but lost a battle, he had told them. The contest must go on!

How had they responded to that call?

They had fought on! The battlelines had shifted, new weapons been adopted. Swords had been beaten into plowshares; but plowshares were weapons too, every plowman a soldier in the fray. Industrial and agricultural competition had replaced the trial at arms. Above all, the battle had been carried into the very heart of the enemy's camp: the citadel where his very laws were hatched had been breached, and in a series of rearguard actions the equal in brilliance of Lee's Wilderness campaign in the military sphere, Southern statesmen had scored victory after victory in the halls of Congress—for no Yankee who ever lived could match a Southerner in parliamentary maneuver!

How stood the contest now? What report could he bring them back from the battlefront?

During the current campaign he had been privileged to tour once again the length and breadth of this seat of majesty, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this Texas. What had he seen? He had seen the sturdy yeoman tilling his fertile and ample plot, the thriving tradesman at his busy till, the patient blackamoor cheerfully, yea gratefully, restored to his allotted place in God's scheme. It was the harvest season and the good Lord had sent them His sun and His rain in reasonable quantities, and just enough of His boll weevils to keep the cotton prices up. The earth was piled high with His benison. Upon the broad plains he had seen the fatted herds—the ring-straked and the spotted. In the mighty forests he had heard the woodsman's axe, clearing the path of progress. In the rich deltas and savannahs he had seen a land flowing with milk and honey. Were these the wages of defeat?

By way of contrast he was brought to mind of the sights which had met his eyes on his official travels in the cold, unfriendly North. There he had seen the joyless Yankee farmer mortgaged to his rocky hills like Prometheus chained unto his cliff. He had seen the dreary files of listless millhands shuffling to their daily bondage like salt-mine slaves. He had seen their stunted, pale, consumptive children shivering in rags in the crooked streets of crowded, smoke-filled cities. Were those the wages of victory?

He had toured the battlefronts, and this was his report: the South—with Texas in the van—had won the Civil War!

There was stunned silence for some moments, then the crowd sent up a deafening wild rebel yell. It was minutes before the senator could proceed.

What, he asked them to ask themselves, was the Civil War all about? Was it, as some Southern apologists and historians had long maintained, a conflict of commercial interests? Was it a disagreement over such things as tariffs? Tommyrot! The issue could be stated in a word. The Civil War had been fought over the question of slavery. Now their side had fought for the preservation of that peculiar institution. They were accustomed to think that in losing it, they had lost the War. Well, how many of them had suffered hardship through the manumission of the slaves? Speaking for himself, his old daddy had never owned any slaves. Never could afford them. From youth to crooked age he had done all his dirty backbreaking chores his own self, as did many another back in the so-called good old days. He was not talking now to any born aristocrats there might happen to be in the audience. He was talking to all the rest of you hard-working, never-seem-to-get-nowhere, salt-of-the-earth ordinary just plain folks. What had the freeing of the slaves meant to them?

To answer that question it was necessary to pose another. Namely, what were the slaves? They were the hewers of wood. The drawers of water. The pickers of the cotton. And what did they do now—the nigras, that was to say? Still hewed the wood, didn't they? Still drawed the water. Still picked the cotton. The difference lay in this: who did they do those chores for before the War, and who did they do them for now?

It might not be what their friend Honest Abe had had in mind in promulgating his well-known Emancipation Proclamation, but he was here to state that what Lincoln had done was to free
them
, the white slaves of the South! With one blow the old rail splitter had broken up the detested plantation system, thereby creating a pool of cheap native labor on which all men were free and equal to draw. It was their emancipation! Not for nothing was Lincoln called the Great Commoner. He had taken their greatest natural resource from the greedy hands of the few and given it back to the many, whose birthright it was! He had put the nigra within the means of the common man—“you and me, mah frans, you and me!” No, it might not be exactly what old Abe had had in mind, but they had seen their opportunity and taken full advantage of it. It was a prime instance of spreading the wealth; and if they were against that, then he would ask them to please cast their vote for his opponent, and not for Clifford W. Venable.

“Some talker, ain't he?” asked, or rather demanded, my grandfather's neighbor, shouting in his ear to make himself heard above the roar of acclaim. “You bet he is! Regular spellbinder! And I'm a-going to vote for him, you bet, same as I have four times previous. Don't care what the other feller has got to say for hisself.”

The other feller came in now for a passing reference from the senator, who spoke of him as “a young man of promise… es.” As for himself, well, he had had his say, and now his feet was a-killin him. He would just add this: during the coming term he promised to do exactly what he had done for the past twenty-four years, and that was, to do what they, his constituents, told him they wanted done. To be the inside horse to their team up there in Washington, the clapper to their bell. And in that connection, and in conclusion, he wished to express the earnest hope that they would continue to write him their every wish and command, as so many had done in the past. Just address their cards and letters to Cousin Cliff, Washington, D.C. That would reach him. The postman up there knew him by now. And never mind about the spelling. If it was wrong, why he wouldn't know no better.

Waving aside the mayor of Paris as if to say that he needed no introduction, the next speaker, who had just made a last-minute appearance on the platform, took off his hat and began:

“Folks, I am not a politician.”

“Hah!” snorted those in the audience who had heard that opening before.

“I'm not running for office. I'm not on the program of speakers you're scheduled to hear today. In fact, I'm not supposed to be up here any more than any of you all. I wouldn't be if you had read the circular I had passed out around town this morning. I picked a bad day. I didn't know that these gentlemen” (indicating the office seekers at his back, buzzing now like a nest of rattlesnakes) “were coming into town today. But they did, and you all threw my circular away the same as the rest, thinking it was just another politician after your vote.”

Now the snorts came from behind him, while the audience, mistaking the guileless smile on the speaker's face for guile, chortled approvingly, and my grandfather (for he it was, rather frightened, but filled as always with trust in the inborn goodness of people and sure of the sympathy which his plight was bound to excite in even the stoniest breast, so that he felt confident of a hearing, and never noticed the two sheriff's men making their way down through the crowd to apprehend and eject him), my grandfather felt sufficiently encouraged to hazard a little joke: