A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond by Percival Everett, James Kincaid

didn’t mean to ignore your other letter exactly. It did have a strange calming effect on me. Like dribbling bourbon between my toes and strummin on the old banjo.
    Really, though I got lost in the story about how much you enjoyed basketball and sex in high school, I did do what you said. I went back to this second batch of stuff from Wacko Wilkes and tried to see if there isn’t something there.
    What do you think? All these petitions from Northern blacks do hint at something that is a partial but important truth: the South functioned as the North’s convenient Other, allowing the North to do very little toward establishing equal schooling, housing, and voting rights by presenting a whipping boy. Focusing on the demonic South allowed the North to keep its attention away from itself, certainly away from the plight of actual black people right there on the other side of the tracks.
    That’s true enough and it may hint at a stronger truth for us. What do you think? The North operated this way, constructing the South so as to deflect its attention away from its own defects and establish a kind of automatic virtue it could always draw on. The simple fact of living in the North allowed any asshole to feel righteous without doing a damned thing. The automatic quality is what strikes me. And maybe there’s an automatic quality too in Strom’s alliance with things like States’ Rights. I haven’t got it figured out yet, but maybe we will find that he is, for all his political smarts, less a calculator than a guy operating day by day within a set of assumptions he never questions, that are there for him in the air he breathes and come to him automatically. I guess we just have to be careful that we don’t breathe in the same air—or at least mix it with some L.A. smog.
    What do you think?
    P

    Interoffice Memo
    November 3, 2002
    Dear Percival,
    I see.
    Maybe so. Maybe old Strom just was there and acted on being there, kind of like a weather vane? Well, that makes him too passive, but I see what you mean. The North never really thought much about equality for blacks, just found itself in the pleasant situation of being able to feel real good by pointing out how unjust to the blacks the South was. That was certainly easier than doing anything themselves.
    But I see what you’re saying: it’s like both sides are battling windmills, setting up caricatures of the other and tilting away at them. Blacks simply define the field; they are of themselves of almost no importance.
    That’s too cynical, right?
    But you’re thinking Strom is less an independent force than a reflector of positions that are, somehow or other, always there for him—really there before him. He doesn’t wake up on Tuesday and think things through; he wakes up on Tuesday to find things thought through for him.
    J

    O FFICE OF S ENATOR S TROM T HURMOND
217 R USSELL S ENATE B UILDING
W ASHINGTON , D.C. 20515
    November 5, 2002
    Joy—
    What was the name of the girl who gave you her breast? Maybe I knew her. You ever think that maybe her other breast was deformed and she was ashamed of it, trying to protect it and save her dignity? Maybe it was wizened, marked with lines or strange circles, equipped with multiple nipples. Who can say? I’m rather glad you cannot, as it would probably have supplied you with more fuel for mockery. Not everything about sex is funny, you know. Women are not simply objects with tits and pussies and so forth either, just there to be manipulated and lied to so you can—AH! Mother enters the picture again, right?
    Philadelphia? Are you mad? That’s North. Look further east and a little south.
    Baa
 
p.s.
Oh, Roba! Roba! Roba!
 
Now please do not say No—bah!
 
Let’s grab our bags and go—bah
 
To the land of E.A. Poe—bah;
 
Where we can pitch and throw—bah,
 
Woo with our little Lo—bah;
 
Then jump a boat and row—bah
 
Away from cops and woe—bah,
 
Lie low, low, low, low, low—bah;
 
Then back to Lo,