CLARKE: The structural organization is very simple if you’ll follow along.
JONATHAN: Where are we going?
CLARKE: I’m going to explain how the Klan is organized so that you may have a better idea as to whether you may wish to become a member.
JONATHAN: I can be a member of both the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association and the Ku Klux Klan?
CLARKE: My dear sir, you may be a member of however many organizations you wish. That is entirely up to you.
JONATHAN: Including “Catholics and Jews for Miscegenation”?
CLARKE: I beg your pardon.
JONATHAN: How about “The N.A.A.W.S.”?
CLARKE: “The N — Double A what?
JONATHAN: “The National Association for the Advocacy of White Slavery.” I would prefer to serve on the Committee overseeing the surreptitious monitoring of the opium dens.
CLARK: Ho, ho, Mr. Blashette, you are pulling my leg.
JONATHAN: You can pull my legs too, but it might keep you busy for a while.
CLARKE: Ho, ho. Now if you’ll follow this colorful chart I’ve set up.
JONATHAN: Did you say “colored” chart?
CLARKE: No, Mr. Blashette, I most certainly did not. Now, here at the bottom we have the Kleagles. The Kleagles are the rank and file of the organization. The foot soldiers, if you will.
JONATHAN: Yes, I see.
CLARKE: We have divided the country into “realms.” And each realm is headed by a King Kleagle. And several realms constitute a “domain.” The head of a domain is called a Grand Goblin.
JONATHAN: Sounds a little scary.
CLARKE: For a man with Negro blood, I would think so, ho ho.
JONATHAN: Who’s this man standing all alone at the top of the pyramid?
CLARKE: That would be me, the Imperial Kleagle.
JONATHAN: You’ve been drawn to look like Teddy Roosevelt.
CLARKE: Have I now? Well, I must confess a certain fondness for President Roosevelt.
JONATHAN: So you asked your illustrator to make you look like him?
CLARKE: It’s only a slight resemblance. I didn’t think anyone would mind.
JONATHAN: I don’t recall that President Teddy Roosevelt ever endorsed your organization, Mr. Clarke. What’s more, I recall that he invited Booker T. Washington, a man of African descent, to have dinner with him at the White House.
CLARKE: It was no dinner, sir. I believe that Teddy and Mr. Washington merely had a hasty sandwich in the scullery.
JONATHAN: That isn’t what I heard. Furthermore, I understand that the two men shared a fruit cup following a confusion of spoons that very well could have resulted in the bringing to the president’s lips of a utensil that had been thoroughly licked by a blatantly colored tongue.
CLARKE: That is preposterous.
JONATHAN: (interrupting) And at one point…
(The voices now begin to break and grow in volume as Jonathan is clearly being led to the door to be expelled.)
CLARKE: I will hear no more of this.
JONATHAN: Alice, the president’s mischievous daughter, climbed into Mr. Washington’s Negro lap and pretended to be a ventriloquist’s dummy.
CLARKE: THAT, SIR, IS AN OUTRAGEOUS MENDACITY!
8 HOW YOU GONNA KEEP HIM DOWN ON THE FARM?
1. “Even a week in this ridiculous quarantine was too long.” Jonathan’s Diary, JBP. Although Jonathan spent only eight days in the cave, a number of other Pettivillians passed a good part of the autumn and winter of 1918-19 there. True, none of these apocalypse-minded Arkansans caught the dreaded Spanish flu, a pandemic that was hitting this part of the state just as brutally as it was the rest of the world, but many of those who retreated into the cave did endure nasty bouts of scabies as well as the tyranny of Rance Chesler who installed himself as “Cavern King” and issued edicts from his stalagmite throne.
The bizarre tale of this fascinating chapter in Arkansas history is documented in Donna Krell’s self-published, yet finely written Dwellers of the Night: the Story of the Flu Dodgers of 1918–1919 (1993). Curiously, though, Krell chose to engage her daughter Jacinth as illustrator. The stick figures offered by the seven-year-old do not enhance the text, and in some ways detract from it. By way of example, in Chapter 7, as Krell explores the regrets of some of the cavern-dwelling expatriates who articulate their longing for the salubrious light and warmth of the sun, Jacinth offers a group of stick men and women wearing large and irrelevant orange fright wigs, eating multicolored peas.
2. Lucile took the pledge. Lucile Moritz like many members of her generation took “the pledge” when she was very young. It went something like this:
“I pledge that I may give my best to home and country. I promise, God help me, not to buy, drink, sell, or give alcoholic liquor while I live. From all tobacco and other harmful things I’ll abstain and never take God’s name in vain.”
Maura Hester, Love Interminable or Till Death We Shall Not Part: Fifty Great Enduring Love Affairs (Savannah: Bookmirth Publications, 1975), 47–52.
Her sister Beryl took the pledge as well, but broke nearly every clause on the same day, December 5, 1933—the day Prohibition ended — declaring at a St. Louis speakeasy turned “speakfreely”:
“Make mine a double, wouldja, barkeep? Hoo! Hoo! Drought’s over, boys! Hey, handsome, gimme a Goddamned light.”
Bowie French, How Dry I Am: an Oral History of Prohibition (Cicero, Illinois: Luck Be a Lady Press, 1947), Preface.
3. “Will You Marry Me?” Jonathan Blashette to Lucile Moritz, 24 December 1918, carbon copy, JBP.
4. “Yes, oh yes, I will be your wife, my Christmas angel!” Lucile Moritz to JB, 26 December 1918, JBP.
5. When Lucile did not show up, Aunt Evelyn became worried. Evelyn Waldron was very close to the “good niece,” having served as surrogate mother to both Lucile and her scheming sister Beryl. According to Evelyn’s account of the harrowing week that followed, when Lucile failed to arrive at her “Gloucester, Massachusetts retreat” to receive pre-nuptial pampering and trousseau selection assistance from Evelyn, Jonathan was notified and put directly on the case. He immediately alerted law enforcement authorities all the way from New York City to Gloucester of Lucile’s disappearance. In the meantime, Evelyn fell into a morass of fear and agitation and eventually had to be sedated. The initial anodyne was administered by a Madame Lourdes, a French holistic whose herbs did little more than make Evelyn “feel a little droopy.” A second physician was brought in and Evelyn was successfully tranquilized and received the horrendous news in a dull stupor. Interview with Paulette Poole (great niece of Lucile and Beryl Moritz), November 22, 2001.
6. “Yes, we have a sticky Jane Doe.” It was Jonathan who correctly identified the molasses-covered body. No one can say why Lucile ventured to Commercial Street in Boston’s North End while awaiting her train connection to Gloucester on that deadly day in January. But there she was, just as the Purity Distilling Company’s huge cast-iron tank burst open and the great swell of raw molasses — more than 2.5 million gallons of it — gushed forth, drowning twenty-one and turning the city of Boston into sickeningly sweet-smelling flypaper for weeks. Patrick Oldeman, Tears for the Shawmut (Boston: Old Corner Book Printer, 1995), 223–228.