Voices in Our Blood (42 page)

That harrowing winter even affected him physically. Seen lunching one February afternoon in the state capitol's bleak basement cafeteria, he had the look of a small rodent that was slowly starving: the skin over his cheekbones and narrow forehead was taut, glazed, and yellowish, his ink-black hair was combed back long and thin and scraggly to the nape of his neck, there were hollows behind his ears like empty sockets, and in his eyes was a ragged despair. He waited fretfully for the others at the table to finish eating, tearing off shreds of paper napkin with his gnawed rusty fingers and wadding them into tiny moist pills which he arrayed along the rim of his plate. He kept working almost viciously at his teeth with a toothpick, his lips curled back in an unconscious snarl.

But when, in the spring, the decision was finally made to run his wife, he seemed restored, whole, even peaceful again. In a packed café one afternoon shortly after the start of the campaign, after exchanging hugs and kisses and ardent double-fisted handshakes—oddly suggestive of secret fraternity grips—with the sun-scorched ginghamed and khakied folk filing past his table, he turned back to his plate and speculated with some glee, savagely hammering out ketchup onto his hamburger with the heel of his hand, about what “those Anglo-Saxons” in the several counties in which Negroes were running for sheriff would do to any Negro who might be elected. “The Black Panthers talkin' all the time about rev-o-lu-tion if one of their boys wins. A nigguh sheriff—the folks over there just ain't gonna stand for any kind of stuff such as that. When those Anglo-Saxon people get stirred up, boy, they don't mess around. Wouldn't one of them nigguhs last thirty minutes if he was to have the misfortune of gettin' elected.” He went on to express the hope that John Doar, frequent Justice Department emissary into Alabama, would be shot between the eyes before too very long. Later, after his hamburger and buttermilk, as he stood outside in his shirtsleeves in the warm May sunshine waiting for his wife to finish her short introductory speech, he seemed possessed of the high vivid exhilaration of someone who had just emerged from a long and dangerous illness.

Lurleen won the spring primary dizzyingly, drawing more votes than her nine opponents combined. The general election campaign began in the late fall, and though Lurleen technically was the candidate, it was more like a long celebration by Wallace of the reaffirmation of his existence. As one veteran Alabama reporter has noted, “He's never quite so alive as when he's out on the road again running for something. Each time, it's like his own little personal Easter.”

The last week of that campaign began in soft October weather. The mornings were fine and bright and watery, just warm enough to produce a light dew of sweat on the upper lip. In the exhausted drab little towns where most of the rallies were held, the crowd would be gathered in a parking lot beside a brick store with a dimming inscription:

LEHMAN FURN. CO.

WARM MORNING HEATER

Drink

Royal Crown

Cola

and the hillbilly band on the flatbed trailer—pale youths, luxuriously coiffured, wearing twinkly, sequined black-and-gold suits with gold valentines running up their pants legs from black boots—would still be conjuring people out of the countryside with the lickety-split, devilish fiddle music, sawing them on out of the stores: farmers, filling-station workers, slippered women with their hair pinched up in curlers. The band would alternate spry gospel music with abject love ballads—forlorn, inconsolable, stricken, yelping, tragic, full of death, loss, violence, insanity, tears, night—which, with the arrival of the Wallace cars, would abruptly switch to rapid wheedling music while a large bell, carried from rally to rally in the back of a truck, would begin clangoring.

Wallace, in his faintly iridescent beetle-black suit, spurted out of his car, coming up on the first handshake with a slight dip, bending his knees, and then swooping upward, a flourish of body jazz, and then moved along the edge of the throng while the band kept playing, he fidgeting with his cuffs and scuffing at the pavement with the toes of his shoes, like a fighter shuffling about in his corner before the opening gong. While Lurleen spoke, he huddled with the local candidates behind the platform, and people passing behind him gave him light pats on the shoulder, which he accepted, not even turning around. (At one stop, a small pack of young razorbacks stood near him and loudly observed, “He's a rough-lookin' little devil, ain't he?” Wallace went over to them and, grinning, shook hands all around. “Glad to see you fellas out here today, heunh? Yawl doin' all right?”)

When Lurleen stepped back to a spatter of applause, he would skip snappily up on the platform, take off his three-vent coat, and briskly roll up his shirtsleeves, once, twice, leaving bulky cuffs high on his biceps. Behind the microphone, his hipwork was fancy, vigorous, and vaguely obscene, with one blunt little paw constantly stroking the microphone stand: “These unidentified flyin' objects people are seein' outta airplane windows, they not flyin' saucers, they these intellectual morons and national politicians havin' runnin' humanitarian fits about my wife's candidacy down here. . . .” (Lurleen's principal function in the campaign, besides her brief overture speeches, was to supply Wallace with a clipping or magazine from the pack she kept in her lap whenever he thrust his hand toward her—“See here, they got a picture of yo guvnuh in this magazine that goes all over this nation”—he flourishing the item and then swiftly returning it to her as he went on, she placing it back neatly in the battered packet in her lap and getting the next clipping ready and then sitting primly with her hands folded over it as she waited.) “The national press now, anything's that bad about yo guvnuh, oh yes, they gonna run that. But anything good—why, you know, one national magazine had an article by a lady out in California during one of the guvnuhs' conferences, called us Dogpatch folks down here 'cause of the way we dressed. Well, I want to tell you something, the woman that wrote that article, I wisht you had seen what
she
was wearin'.” Jubilant whoops from the crowd. “The
Life
magazine—yeah, I think they out here with us today, and the
Newsweek
and the
Time,
they all here—they wrote an article criticizin' my wife for not goin' to the guvnuhs' meetings when we were out there in California. Well, of course, she wasn't guvnuh then, and they had a program for the guvnuhs' wives and they had conferences for the guvnuhs. But for the benefit of the
Life
magazine—and there's some of 'em with us today—I just want to say that next year, after she's elected guvnuh, she'll go to the guvnuhs' conferences, and I'll go out with the guvnuhs' wives.” There was another roar of guffaws, and one old-timer chortled to his friend, “Damn little rascal, he would too. He'd cut up a time with 'em.”

His addresses everywhere were extended monologues rather than speeches, a hectic one-man argument without any real beginning, progression, or end. He added to and took from his sack of notions sparingly, line by line. The total effect was like that of an orchestra perpetually tuning up—a cacophony of peeves and exasperations. His points were scattershot, his climaxes came hurly-burly. At one stop, in the middle of his address, he was abruptly silenced by the deafening hoot and clatter of a freight train barging interminably past behind him, and he finally adlibbed in a loud voice, “I'm glad to see our railroad folks go by, 'cause they've endorsed my wife too, and I hope we can always keep them runnin'. Yessuh.” He manages to exploit any interruption, assimilate any distraction.

His head tilting to one side, one hand plunged in his pants pocket and the other chopping and stabbing the air, his hips pumping and scooping furiously, he told the crowds, “You get a bayonet in yo back with the national Democrats, and you get a bayonet in yo back with the national Republicans. This Richard Milhouse ‘Tricky Dick' Nixon, he hadn't got the sense of a Chilton County mule. He comes down here to talk about Alabama politics like it was some kind of his business. Sure, I went over to Mississippi to make a speech awhile back, but it was just a philosophy speech over there at the state fair. But I'll tell you, if I had said as much and done as much against the state of Mississippi as ‘Tricky Dick' Nixon has said and done against the state of Alabama, I wouldn't have the brass to go within a
hunnert
miles of Mississippi, I'd just go around it or over it or something. And this Romney, singin' all those songs about overcomin' evuhthing—and Bobby Kennedy: he's the one that wants to give blood to the Communists all the time. Now, he's gone to South Africa tellin' them what to do in South Africa. Maybe he'll stay there this time. And now they wantin' to transfer yo chillun ten miles over in another county so they can conduct
social experiments
on 'em. And if you get a book sayin' Robert E. Lee was a good man, and the Confederate flag was a symbol of honor, they can put in books sayin' Robert E. Lee was a bad, vulgar man, and the Confederate flag was a symbol of dishonor. But I'll tell you, the mommas and poppas all over this country are mighty mad about them movin' their little chillun around like this. Emanuel Celler, he called yo guvnuh a devil, but then he found out they were gonna transfer his chillun too all the way across New York City, so now he's sayin' he's gonna have to look into all this guideline mess. But I tell you, if they don't all wake up, I'm gonna go all over this country tellin' those folks in Washington, ‘You better mind about our chillun. You triflin' with our chillun now, and you better watch out.' . . .”

Afterward, he would lean from the platform to shake the hands of the people filing past below him—when there was a gap in the line, his hand would grope about in the air until someone stepped up to take it. Finally, stepping down from the platform and submerging himself in the crowd, he would keep a tight clasp on someone—sometimes two at once—as he turned to talk to still another over his shoulder, and in pursuit of unshaken hands he would sometimes drag people along with him, through shrubbery and rain puddles, as if reluctant to release them until he had fastened himself to the next hand. There would slowly come over the faces of the people caught in Wallace's grasp the expression of faintly amused embarrassment. At times he would unexpectedly break through the crowd into empty space, and propelled by sheer momentum, walk in aimless circles, trailed by his bodyguards, until he found the edge of the throng again, pulling himself back into their midst with double-handed clutches, his face fixed in a cozy little nose-wrinkling, teeth-gritting grin of gratification: “Yes, yes, I know yo uncle, he works down at H. L. Green's. Tell him hello for us, heunh? He sho is our friend. I saw yawl up the road, I believe, I sho 'preciate yawl bein' with us today, heunh? I 'preciate yawl's suppote, you know Hollis Jackson died. Honey, thank you very much, heunh? Glad to see you—yes, how is yo daughter now? Well, you tell her I been thinkin' about her. Hi, sweetie pie, honey, thank you. Yes, you know, I still miss Mr. Roy. I heard, I understand she was goin' to the junior high. 'Cose, her daddy got killed, you know. I sho will. I be glad to shake hands with her. She in the car? Yeah, all right, I'll be over there in a minute. . . .” He seemed somehow to be caressing, fondling, stroking, kneading the masses between his hands, and he would sometimes draw an out-of-state reporter close to him and inquire, sotto voce, “How you like these Alabama folks, hunh? They all right, ain't they?” and bob off without waiting for an answer. At several places he was approached by local young businessmen who asked him with poignant anxiety if it were possible to bring a factory of some kind into their community—a desperation to be found in every town in Alabama, no matter how small. Wallace would rub his hands together and tell them, “Now, you just keep tryin', and you know it'll all come about,” and the young men would nod—“Yes. Well, thank you, Guvnuh. Anything you could do would be appreciated”—and wander away, somewhat dispirited. But Wallace was obviously buoyant when making his way through the crowds. He would pluck fistfuls of black snap-on Wallace ties from the hawkers and distribute them himself. “Here, here you go. Here's you one. And you, too.”

Inevitably there would be a flock of elderly ladies sitting in plastic lawn chairs or cane-bottom rockers under a tree or on the courthouse porch, patiently waiting for him, and when he finally approached them, they would all chorus, reaching for him with heavy wattled arms, “Good ole boy. We all pray for you. . . .” “Sleep tight, honey, you gonna make it. . . .” “I love you. I just love you. . . .” “God bless you. You're God's man for us. . . .” As the crowd began thinning away, he would bounce on back to his car—a suggestion in his spry, ebullient haste of a schoolboy skipping and hopping—sometimes stopping to smooth out a drooping Wallace sticker on a car bumper, personally tidying up, sprucing up, putting the finishing touches on a good situation. Before leaving, though, his party would usually have to wait a few minutes while he retreated to a men's room. Finding one for Wallace—or, as his bodyguards put it, “giving him a chance to do what he wants to do”—was an unusually persistent problem all through the campaign, coming up virtually at every stop. At one gathering in a community Democratic headquarters, Wallace, while ecstatically shaking hands all around, began standing briefly on his tiptoes to glance furtively over the tops of partitions in the room, and finally, after an urgent hurried conference outside between the bodyguards and some local party officials, Wallace was conducted to the rear of a closed filling station next door.

Eating seemed to him a tedious distraction, an interruption best gotten out of the way fast in order to return to more interesting matters. When his party stopped at a school cafeteria for lunch, Wallace shook hands all the way to the feed counter. After he had settled himself at a table with his tray, a teacher came over and stood beside him for a full fifteen minutes confiding to him such pieces of news as, “Fifteen boys the other day broke into a farmhouse over yonder and tore things up pretty bad. We caught 'em and got it straightened out now. There was one colored boy with 'em.” It was like a local village elder making a report to a touring tribal chief. Wallace listened, grasping a huge glass of tea with his stubby fingers and taking quick little sips, pushing food on his fork with a roll, looking up at the man only when he turned to leave, lunging to give him a fleeting pat on the back. “Well, awfully good to see you again, heunh? Tell yo folks hello for me.” He managed to keep his mouth full for the duration of the meal, despite frequent pauses to turn and shake the hands of passing students. “Yes, yes, yawl in the ginnin' business, I know yo folks. You tell Charlie hello for me, heunh?” Once he turned automatically, his hand already in midair, only to discover three young Negro girls passing him with their trays, their faces serenely averted as they floated on past him. He quickly returned his attention to his plate without so much as a blink.