Even Windridge pretentions had never extended that far. Instead of the pink teas, there would be shrimp boils, and fish fries, attendance at Caesarea Baptist, and meetings where people wore hoods of white satin and burned crosses. This was Wilona’s destiny, and his. This was the fate to which their birth had condemned them.
And it was the quality, the people like Miz LaGrande, who did the condemning. Whose gracious lives were made possible by the sweat of others, and who somehow, along with their white houses and cotton fields, had inherited the right to tell everyone else how to run their lives. It was traditional, in Spottswood Parish, for anyone running for office to have tea at Clarendon, explain what they hoped to accomplish, and ask for Miz LaGrande’s blessing on their candidacy. Omar had not gone to tea at Clarendon. He had just announced he was running, and then he ran hard. He beat the Party, and then the official candidate, and then the courts. And all the opposition ever managed to do was make him more popular and more famous.
And he did it all without asking Miz LaGrande for anything. And he never would ask her for anything. Not a damn thing. Not ever.
But now Miz LaGrande was fixing to have that tea, after all. And not with Omar, but with his wife. The old lady still had a few brain cells left, that was clear.
“Miz LaGrande has never been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “No Yankee reporter is ever going to ask her for her opinion, I bet. I reckon German television isn’t gonna send a camera crew to Clarendon.”
“Of course not.” Wilona paged through her magazine, sipped on her beer.
“What’s so great about the Shelburnes?” Omar asked. “They come out here from Virginia, they ship in a couple hundred niggers from Africa to do their work for them, and they build a Greek temple to live in. Would you call that normal?”
Wilona looked up from her magazine, her eyebrows tucked in a frown. “Don’t be tacky,” she said.
“She’s trying to get at you because she can’t get at me. She’s trying to get you on her side.”
“Oh, darlin’, it’s just tea. And I’m always on your side, you know that.” She turned the page, and then showed Omar a picture. “Look at that kitchen! Isn’t that precious?” Omar looked at the polished cabinets and the cooking implements, some of them pretty strange-looking, hanging from brass hooks. “It’s nice,” he said.
“It’s precious,” She looked wistfully at the picture, then looked up at Omar. “Can’t we have a kitchen like this? Can’t we have a new house?”
“Nothing wrong with the house we live in now,” Omar said.
“Of course there’s nothing wrong with it,” Wilona said. “I just think we deserve something better after all these years. You’ve got a much better salary now, and—”
“People voted the way they did for a reason,” Omar said. “They voted for us because they thought we were just like them. Because we lived in their neighborhood, because they saw us in their church, because they knew we were born here, because we didn’t pretend to be anything we weren’t. Because we live in a double shotgun that we fixed up, okay?”
Wilona cast a wistful look at her copy of Southern Accents. “I just want some things in my life to be lovely,” she said.
He fixed her with a look. “Wilona,” he said, “it’s too late to pledge Chi Omega now.” She looked away. “That was a mean thing to say, Omar.”
“It’s true, ain’t it?”
“You should shower and change your clothes. We’ll be late for the shrimp boil.” The phone rang. Omar took a pull from his long-neck, then rose from the couch to answer. It was his son David.
“Congratulations, Dad!” he said. “I’m popping a few brews to celebrate!”
“Thanks.” Omar felt a glow kindle in his heart. David was finishing his junior year at LSU and would be the first Paxton ever to graduate from college. Omar had got David through some rocky years in his teens—the boy was hot-tempered and had traveled with a rough crowd—but now David was safe in Baton Rouge and well on his way to escaping the shabby, tiny world of Spottswood Parish. A place that Omar himself planned to escape, rising from his double shotgun home on the wings of a Kleagle. Once you get the people behind you, he thought, who knew how far you could go?
The concussions of the earthquake still continue, the shock on the 23rd ult. was more severe and larger than that of the 16th Dec. and the shock of the 7th inst. was still more violent than any preceding, and lasted longer than perhaps any on record, (from 10 to 15 minutes, the earth was not at rest for one hour.) the ravages of this dreadful convulsion have nearly depopulated the district of New Madrid, but few remain to tell the sad tale, the inhabitants have fled in every direction… Some have been driven from their houses, and a number are yet in tents. No doubt volcanoes in the mountains of the west, which have been extinguished for ages, are now opened.
“This is delicious, Rhoda,” Omar said. He had some more of the casserole, then held up his plastic fork.
“What’s in it?”
Rhoda, a plump woman whose shoulders, toughened to leather by the sun, were revealed by an incongruous, frilly fiesta dress, simpered and smiled.
“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “Green beans with cream of mushroom soup, fried onion rings, and Velveeta.”
“It’s delicious,” Omar repeated. He leaned a little closer to speak above the sound of the band. “You wouldn’t mind sending the recipe to Wilona, would you?”
“Oh no, not at all.”
“This casserole is purely wonderful. I’d love it if Wilona knew how to make it.” Another vote guaranteed for yours truly, he thought as he left a pleased-looking constituent in his wake.
He wasn’t planning on staying sheriff forever. He had his machine together. He had his people. The state house beckoned. Maybe even Congress.
How long had it been since a Klan leader was in Congress? A real Klan leader, too, not someone like that wimp David Duke, who claimed he wasn’t Klan anymore.
Omar waved at D.R. Thompson, the owner of the Commissary, who was talking earnestly with Merle in the corner by the door to the men’s room. D.R. nodded back at him.
Ozie’s was jammed. The tin-roofed, clapboard bar past the Shelburne City corp limit had been hired for Omar’s victory party, and it looked as if half the parish had turned out for the shrimp boil and dance. The white half, Omar thought.
Omar sidled up to the bar. Ozie Welks, the owner, passed him a fresh beer without even pausing in his conversation with Sorrel Ellen, who was the editor and publisher of the Spottswood Chronicle, the local weekly newspaper.
“So this Yankee reporter started asking me about all this race stuff,” Ozie said. “I mean it was Klan this and militia that and slavery this other thing. And I told him straight out, listen, you’ve got it wrong, the South isn’t about race. The South has its own culture, its own way of life. All everybody outside the South knows is the race issue, and the South is about a lot more than that.”
“Like what, for instance?” Sorrel asked.
“Well,” Ozie said, a bit defensive now that he had to think about it. “There’s football.” Sorrel giggled. For a grown man, he had a strange, high-pitched giggle, a sound that cut the air like a knife. Being too close to Sorrel Ellen when he giggled could make your ears hurt.
“That’s right,” he said. “You got it right there, Ozie.” He turned to gaze at Omar with his watery blue eyes.
“I think Ozie has a point, don’t you?”