Voices in Our Blood (43 page)

Toward the middle of the week the weather turned abruptly cold, and there was a flavor of woodsmoke in the November afternoons. Finally, one night, it snowed. The next morning the air was lyrically icy. Entering the little town of New Hope, Wallace's cavalcade pulled up behind a cotton gin, with a cold wind shivering puddles of melted snow beneath wagonloads of cotton, and smoke blowing through the bare pecan trees overhead. The band now looked a bit frozen and bleak in their sequins, but they were gamely whunking on for the crowd. At the edges of the gathering stood the inevitable old men, their faces and necks like those of turkeys, standing mute and alone, isolated even from each other, hands shoved deep in their coveralls, khaki shirts buttoned up all the way to their Adam's apples, their old mouse-gray felt hats yanked low over their eyes. Wallace and his bodyguards were now wearing overcoats, and Wallace spoke with his coat collar turned up against the wind. Later, down in the crowd, he would pause among the hands to dab his lips swiftly with Chapstick.

Back in his car, he put on dark glasses and lighted an oversized cigar as the party pulled away. He looked, huddling against the door, as diminutive as a dwarf; he had, indeed, something of a dwarf's quick, nimble, nervous alacrity, as well as that peculiar suggestion of danger: undersized, stumpy, brisk, he inevitably strikes one as vaguely dangerous, or at least as one secretly and suspiciously busy, in a room full of women taller than he. Yet, despite his size, he seemed in this small enclosure pent and cramped. After just coming from the crowd, where his presence dominated all the out-of-doors, his energy and urgency overwhelmed everyone riding with him now. Looking out the window, he mused, “New Hope, Alabama. Yessuh, I carried New Hope in 1962. . . .” And he recited the voting figures from New Hope in the 1958 and 1962 races for governor. There seems to be at work inside him some swift tabulation, as if, in privacy, whenever he stopped talking to remove or to receive his cigar, there might escape from inside him, briefly, a smooth, furious clicking and jingling, like an office full of adding machines all going at once.

As the car plunged on along a country road, Wallace observed, “This is some of the prettiest land you ever saw, ain't it? You know, we just about in Tennessee up here.” Wallace asked someone about a local family—“They got a farm over there in the holler, don't they?”—and as the car grew steadily warmer, he began rummaging up other names, families: “Now, Bladon's wife, her name was Lila Mann, you know. There's all those Manns. . . . And Dewey, Dewey's still around, ain't he? He had that heart attack not long ago, you know.” It seemed he had converted the entire state into his personal neighborhood, that every community was as familiar and intimate to him as his own flesh. Noticing an accident at an intersection ahead of them, Wallace abruptly broke off his monologue, snapped up straight in the seat, and peered at the scene through his dark glasses, turning his head as the car carried him past it, as if he had homed in on it with radar. “You reckon they all right?” he demanded. “Duhdn't anybody look hurt, do they? Reckon we oughtta stop? Reckon they called an ambulance yet?” He was reassured that things already seemed to be well in hand, and he leaned back in the seat and reinserted his cigar in his mouth. Then, going through a small town, he noticed a Negro in a pickup truck immediately behind. He turned in the crowded seat to wave out the back window, muttering, “Hi. Hi, there, fella.” The Negro's face behind the truck's windshield looked down on him with a stolid impassivity. Wallace redoubled the vigor of his waves. “He must not recognize me,” he explained. His men, with some uneasiness, began talking about something else. Wallace ignored them, though, even when they tried to fetch him away from the back window with cheerful calls, “Ain't that right, guvnuh?” He kept twisting around for another flurry of waves, in deep and remote concentration now. “He don't see me, see?” he murmured, more to himself than to anyone else, his face meanwhile grimacing in faintly grotesque expressions of amiability. At last, as the car turned a corner and lost the truck, he faced front again and declared in triumph, “You see that? He saluted, just at the last minute.”

Now he began reminiscing about his expeditions into the North during 1963 and 1964. “Hell, some of these places, they was breakin' glass and knockin' heads and I don't know what all.” He smiled slyly. “The police up there, you know, they hate those pickets—they'd wade into them with those big nightsticks of theirs, and you could hear heads cracking all over the place. Actually, a professor, I'm tellin' you, came out and tried to let the air outta our tires. That's right. The sheriff up there kicked him straight up in the air, said, ‘What the
hell
do you think you're doin'?' Yessuh. Kicked him six feet straight up in the air. One place we went to, the professors were all wearin' black armbands. Goddamn, idn't that silly? I went in this room full of professors, and every one of 'em had on a black armband. I just stood there a minute and looked around and said, ‘Who died?' Yeah, I looked around. ‘Somebody die around here? Hunh? Who dead? Somebody dead?' ” The car filled with laughter, but Wallace remained deadpan. “Up there on them Northern campuses, they just don't seem to have any manners. I don't know what's wrong with them up there. Damn uncultured, ignorant intellectuals.”

He fell to talking about his opponent, Republican James Martin, a former congressman. “He gets up there, he sounds like a senator, you know. He sounds just like a nigguh preacher or senator. He gets up there and starts out, ‘Naaoww, brethrenn. Ah—' ” Here, Wallace sat forward in the seat, pulled back his coat, puffed out his chest, and delivered himself of a few deep mimicking phrases, his right hand, still holding the cigar, making scooping motions like an opera singer ladling out notes. His companions were guffawing, but his face remained solemn. He did it again. “Yeah, he sounds like that. Kind of pompous, you know. Well, you can't have that insincere ring, you got to talk to the folks. Martin oughtta run for senator, he sounds so much like one. But that's the way he is. He goes to church every Sunday. I go to church too, but I always slip in the back of the pew so nobody'll notice. But Martin, do you know he'll walk slap down there to the front row every Sunday morning? That's right. He's like Strom Thurmond. They got to heckling him one time when he was speaking to a Yankee audience, and he stood up there and”—his voice sank to a deep stentorian bray—“ ‘Well, I'm a U-nited States senatuh, Ah don't have to take such as this,' got all huffy and walked off, you know. That just don't get it.” He sank back, crossed his legs cozily, and took a few rapid chugs on his cigar as he gazed for a moment out the window at the snow. Abruptly he observed, “Look at that snow. Lots of it, ain't there? You know what ole Jim Folsom said, ‘It's all them atom bums.' ” Guffaws erupted around him again, but Wallace only smiled, continued gazing out the window, and kept teasing the line, a favorite habit of his. “Yeah, all them atom
bums.
Big Jim said it was all them atom
bums
goin' off everywhere causin' the funny weather. Yeah. Atom
bums.
” He leaned back, smiling, comfortable, tasting the end of his cigar, still looking out the window. Then, abruptly, he said, “Yeah, I don't believe in usin' religion in my campaigns like he does.” In conversation he is given to making sudden blind swerves which set off hectic mental scrambles in his listeners to reassemble, reinvoke the context to which he has already secretly, by himself, returned. One thinks, “Like
he
does. He. Oh. Oh, yes. Martin. He has picked up after Martin walks slap down to the front of the church every Sunday morning. . . .” It's as if he keeps several themes running simultaneously, because one alone would be inadequate to his energies and concentration. He is like a ringmaster reclining serenely in the middle of the rapt attention of trained animals, watching, with a kind of remote lazy relish, the furious, desperate, scurrying adjustment that breaks out around him each time he blows a different whistle. “They all the time tryin' to get me to preach a lay sermon in pulpits over the state. But I don't believe in usin' no pulpit. I mean, I don't believe in anybody gettin' up there in a pulpit unless they an ordained preacher. I mean, we all got our faults. We all weak, you know.”

All the while, he was keeping an ever-vigilant eye out for Wallace stickers, frequently interrupting his monologue to murmur happily, “Lookathere, there's one.” Finally he leaned forward, placing his hands together on the back of the front seat, to notify one of his aides, “We oughtta got better glue. The glue wasn't too good on our stickers this year, I seen a lot of 'em kind of hangin' off. Don't know what the matter is. 'Course, these nigguhs been tearin' a lot of 'em off at the car washes, they tell me.”

As they approached the town of the next rally, the driver informed Wallace, “About twenty minutes early, Guvnuh.” Wallace mumbled through his cigar, “Well, we don't want to be gettin' down there no twenty minutes early, it wouldn't look right. Just drive around town a little bit, let's look at the folks here.”

When they finally began heading for the rally, Wallace, as usual, started fretting about what the size of the crowd was likely to be, inventing an exhaustive and ingenious variety of reasons why it wouldn't be large. He worried about the cold—to him, the deadliest enemy of political rallies, North or South. When someone in the car offered, “A lot of people came out here to hear you last spring in the rain,” he snapped, “That don't mean anything. It was warm, a warm rain. A little summer rain on their shirtsleeves, that's all right. But folks don't like much to come out in cold like this.” When the site came into view—a spot on the edge of town, along the highway—Wallace lunged forward, thrusting his head alongside that of his aide in the front seat, his forehead actually bumping the window. “Yeah, there's some folks,” he declared. “I see some folks.” And leaving his wetly chewed cigar in the ashtray, he scrambled out into music, excitement, extended hands.

When the last rally of the day was finished, there would emerge among the Wallace party, Lurleen excepted, a private holiday air, a festival or party exuberance, a spirit of happy release, with jubilant calls and the energetic slamming of car doors filling the dusk. Wallace would usually take aside whatever reporter happened still to be on hand and inquire one last time, his voice low and almost conspiratorial, “Well, what you think? We gonna get any votes up here?”

Among the last to leave all of Wallace's rallies were two women—a young girl, dowdily dressed, with pale skin and bad teeth and a cringing twangy voice and moist mournful woebegone eyes, and her mother, a smaller and more sprightly woman who nevertheless had the same air of besieged endurance. The two of them were entertainers of a sort. In summers, they packed their belongings into an ancient black Cadillac and journeyed down to Miami Beach, where they played a succession of dumpy little hotels, the daughter manning an organ and the mother briskly accompanying her on a set of drums. “We play “Dixie” real good and loud and clear for those Yank-kees down there,” the daughter likes to declare, with the shy brave pride of a Salvation Army maid reporting on her missionary efforts with a cornet outside a corner saloon. Now free-lance members of Wallace's entourage, they peddled campaign records on the fringe of the crowd at each stop, holding samples high in the air and soundlessly waggling them to catch people's attention—having not a lot of success, since most people were facing the other way. But they showed up at each rally, that shattered expression in their eyes, smiling abjectly, with an air of having gamely and even gaily borne unspeakable suffering, which they could never for a moment be able to describe or forget, but which they would not allow to get them down, either—that embattled but plucky air which women have when left, the last functioning survivors of their family, with nothing in this world to rely on but each other. At the end of each rally, Wallace would call to them before he got into his car, as if it were the first time he had noticed they had joined him, “Mighty glad to see yawl out here with us today, heunh?”

Toward the close of the campaign, a day was spent in the state's largest city, Birmingham. It is, in Alabama, the closest thing to alien turf for Wallace, not only because of its relative sophistication, but because the Republican party is particularly robust there. “You know, I ain't really their type here,” Wallace remarked, driving into town. “They got a lot of genteel folks here.” But the first rallies that morning were held in a fairly congenial section of the city: the mill villages, with their close streets of little brick and frame houses ranked endlessly under pecan and chinaberry trees, where one passes 1949 Dodge coupes with rubber buzzards dangling from the rear-view mirrors or plastic figurines of Jesus set on the dashboards. At each stop that morning there were unusually large delegations of minor politicians on hand, and they collected around Wallace like a cloud of pilot fish.

Around noon, driving to a Birmingham hotel, Wallace declared as the car passed a bank, “We stopped in there for a minute this morning, and all the girls in there were for us. Real genteel girls. You could tell they was college girls, you know. You have to have a college education to work in a bank. Yeah, they were for us.” He then mused, “My grandmother lives here, gonna be celebrating her ninety-ninth birthday tomorrow.” Someone in the car suggested he visit her with photographers for the occasion, but he dismissed that: “It'd look like I was using her politically, to campaign with. A fella just can't use his ninety-nine-year-old grandmother. . . .” He paused. “Can he?”

At the hotel he led a charge down winding marble steps to the men's room, his cigar in his hand, and then went back upstairs, pausing only a moment to refire his cigar, to the sunny dining room, where a waitress greeted him cordially with one quick grind of the twist, which Wallace, just barely, just perceptibly under his suit coat, reciprocated. When he was seated, the waitress told him he could quit his newspaper ads, he was already too far ahead for anything to happen to him. Tickled, he grabbed her hand by the fingertips and gave it a fond little shake. “Honey, you say we don't need to run 'em anymore?” He looked at the other people at the table expectantly, in delight. “Say we don't need any more ads, hunh? Say we already got it?” He finally released her hand when she began to take the order. She recommended tapioca pudding for dessert, and Wallace inquired, “Tapioca—now what would that be like?” She told him what was in it, and he said, “Well, honey, I think I'll just have me a little bowl of banana pudding.” When she left, Wallace informed the people at his table, “You know, her daughter was in an automobile accident not long ago up on the mountain. It killed her dead.” Toward the end of the meal, a crony came over and sat at the table, a heavy pie-faced fellow whose name, caught fleetingly, seemed to be Jimmie Moon. Moon began telling Wallace about the recent misfortunes of a local patriarch. “Yeah, he's got cancer of the rectum, all his garbage is coming out here—” Moon demonstrated, his hands forming a large circle in the vicinity of his watch pocket. “Twelve months is gonna get him, but he don't know it yet.” Wallace meditated a moment over his banana pudding. “Well, send a telegram, ‘Sorry to hear you're under the weather, but glad to hear you're feeling better.' ”