A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (30 page)

A 20% increase and protection from Vendetti. What do you say to that?

Your dear friend,

Martin

p.s. I have the most ingenious welcome back present. I won’t tell you what it is (or they are), but I’ll give a hint. Zippers must be zipped (or Unzipped, as the case may be) to reach them, to display them.

February 15, 2003

Dear Barton,

You have always been kind to me. I hope you don’t think I imagine otherwise or suppose that I harbor anything but good feelings and good memories. You are a friend, and I hope never to feel anything but gratitude and a kind of wonder toward those who wish me well.

In your case, you not only have wished well, but done well.

Thank you, Barton. I look forward to resuming our work.

Your friend,

Juniper

February 15, 2003

Dear Percival and Jim,

I just talked with Reba, who confirmed what Martin Snell had told me. And Barton Wilkes, in a letter so sweet it made my eyes water. Snell’s letter didn’t, since it was his characteristic prose and manner.

But I am back, thanks to you two. I know you threatened Snell, and I gather Barton did too. Imagine that. I am still dazed and even a little shaken by the kindness of you, who have never met me and have little to go on except my griping. You must be good on principle.

Whatever it is, my heart is touched and I am so grateful.

Yours,

Juniper

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
, I
NC
.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

February 16, 2003

Dear Percival and Jams,

I am doing my ow typing these days, what with Juniper nott back as yet and not quite realizing how to use the spellchecker thing. But things like typing stay with you, don’t you thik? I went bowling just last week. Hadn’t been in oh a dozen yeart and you know what? I bowled 196. I don’t know if you juys bowl, but that is a fine score. And I think typing is just like bowing.

Wanted to let you know right off, tthought, that all is well. Juniper is back on boar and will be in tomorrow I think. We did it. I credit you just as much ws me in gettinf him his job back after Vendetti and all. I won/t say it was exacrly easy, you know, but I pulled it of.

Now we’re back in business!

I drink a typewritten toast to both of yoi.

Your fiend,
Martin

O
FFICE OF
S
ENATOR
S
TROM
T
HURMOND
217 R
USSELL
S
ENATE
B
UILDING
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C. 20515

To:       Martin Snell, Simon & Schuster

From:  Amos Jackson, Assistant to The Hon. Strom Thur-mond

Re:      Barton Wilkes

Date:  February 25, 2003

Be advised that Barton Wilkes is no longer Public Relations Advisor to Senator Strom Thurmond. He has now no connection whatever with the Senator. It obviously follows that he will not be connected in any way with the book project.

That project will proceed uninterrupted.

O
FFICE OF
S
ENATOR
S
TROM
T
HURMOND
217 R
USSELL
S
ENATE
B
UILDING
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C. 20515

February 27, 2003

Dear James and Percival,

Hey there! There is a person in the office who, when I do not manage to evade him, brightens his eyes, narrows his lips, tenses his ungainly body, and then uncoils with a pert and jaunty, “Hey there!”

Some people would say, “So what? What does it matter how he greets you, when it’s all just conventional anyhow.” “Precisely,” I say; “it’s for that very reason that one should take the greatest pains with these matters.” “Why?” they say. “Because they are conventional!” I say. “Tell us what you mean, Barton,” they plead. “I will,” I say; “it is by conventional compasses that we navigate this world. Convention allows us to rub together without galling one another. Convention is, when you think of it, how we live.” “And?” they are prone to say. “And,” I respond, “it follows that, since we get through life relying on convention and not originality, we should respect and nurture that convention.”

“So what should he do, this hey-there man?” “It’s plain as those little pimple things at the corner of your nostril: say, ‘Hello, Barton.’ Then, if he sees me a few minutes later, he should nod, kindly but mutely. Is that so difficult? That’s what convention dictates, and convention never makes unreasonable demands.”

“Would you say the same principles apply in areas other than bidding good-day one another?” they continue. “Not exactly,” is my answer.

You know, I was thinking that it is a mistake to confine your discussion of this History and Senator Thurmond to political and public matters. That is to say, Senator Thurmond feels that his engagement with the human beings around him, including blacks, has always involved a great deal more than legislation, public policy, and picnics. He has entered into the people’s spirit by way of what one might call an enthusiastic participation in their culture, the full culture and not just part of it.

You see where this is going. What is African-American culture? Is it just some marches and riots and rapes, leading to legislation? No. It is singing and dancing very well indeed in a certain way and basketball and jazz. But I am sure you two know nothing about any of those things. (I mean that as a compliment.)

What you undoubtedly know about is the literature, right? I mean you are in English Departments, so I’m just saying.

So, while you’re getting the historical materials I sent you some time ago to write up in the mail to me, I will send you some matter more to your liking. These are, of course, the Senator’s ideas, comingled with mine, as our lives have been. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had all that many close ties in my life. Funny, isn’t it? Consider who and what I am, and you’d say, “Barton has friends clinging to him like moss on a vine.” But that’s really not so. I could of course say I choose not to be close, that I could have friends if I wanted them. But none of that’s true.

But that’s a menu for another meal. For now, please write up some of these.

—Frederick Douglass. Don’t forget the extra s. What the Senator is interested in is his book:
Narrative of the Life of….
Not his speeches and such like. What strikes us especially about the book is what he has to say about violence and Christianity. He seems to us very smart and very courageous, you know, when he points out how Christianity was used as a cover for cruelty, how it did not combat but encouraged the false equation of slavery with outright ownership, irresponsible ownership. As the Senator sees it, slavery was a contract, with rights and obligations on both sides. You’ll say it was an unequal contract, but waive that. What the Senator zooms in on here is the way Christianity allowed the worst in the South (and we had some, though not a monopoly!) to forget the contract. Now, look at Douglass’s book and write that up.

And don’t mince words. Christianity and irresponsible violence. Douglass said that the worst masters were always the most Christian. The Senator finds that telling, especially insofar as the Abolitionists cloaked themselves in THE VERY SAME DOCTRINES. Doesn’t this suggest that the abolitionists were attracted by the very torture and torment they pretended they wanted to end? I mean, what would they have done without it? They loved the violence and took not only their cause but their identity from it. They were like antipornography crusaders who want to think of nothing BUT pornography.

The Senator says the issues were all territorial (geographic) and economic. As soon as they got muddied up with morality, the Negro people were lost in the shuffle. Nobody gave a good goddamn about them.

In this, he is with Douglass and has learned much from him. So write that up.

—Booker T. Washington.
Up from Slavery.
Now here’s a rich field to plow. The Senator feels that Northern people who criticize Washington for being an accommodationist simply do not understand the situation. Senator Thurmond has known the KKK, has known real redneck terror. Washington knew it too and was trying to find a way to make some slow progress in the face of unreasoning brutality. It was very easy for DuBois, with his white boy education and know-it-all Northern safety, to mock Washington. But it was cowardly of him to do so. Did DuBois know what a lynching was? Did he have the lives of others in his care? Washington did. When Washington made his “Atlanta Compromise” speech, how many lynchings were there in Georgia and South Carolina that year? Add in Alabama and Mississippi and you see what he was up against. Washington was in a real world, trying to save real lives. DuBois was in a comfy world of self-flattering tough talk that pumped him up and accomplished nothing. Well, that’s not fair. It might have done something. It might have got a few hundred Negro men lynched.

—Zora Neal Hurston. Look at how she was treated. She strayed from the party line and got jumped on by the totalitarian males in the Harlem Mafia. She wasn’t writing to advance “the cause,” they said. Well, Langston and Co., who are you to define “the cause”? Stalin? They managed to ruin her career, kill her. And why? Because, as she said, she refused to see black lives as simply a defensive formation forced on them by whites. She didn’t think black people were no more than what white people said; she didn’t think black people could exist only by battling the definitions foisted on them by white people. She didn’t think black was the opposite of white. She thought black was a world and a people that could make themselves, tell their own stories, form their own lives.