Decker; or, The Klan and I
by Joe Palmer
[ places - july 02 ]
This story is true but not factual. I saw it, or read about it, or heard about it.
"Writing is a vague, unreasonable, but ancient quest." - Borges
Hooded Klansmen and women, a dozen of them in white, three of them in purple robes, walked silently and slowly in single file up the central aisle of the American Methodist Church in Decker, Indiana, under the awed gaze of the congregation, who stood in respect and fear as the Klansmen took their seats, filling the front pews. As the last one walked up the aisle, the shrill voice of a little girl broke the solemn silence.
"Oh, there's Ellie Pea. I can tell from her new shoes!"
It happened that in 1925 nativistic compulsion and xenophobia had again become political in the land. There were atheistic communists abroad and treacherous foreign immigrants within. The little girl who saw that the emperor wore no clothes was my mother Edith. The Klansmen were my people, safely demonstrating their solidarity among their own kind in uniformed disguise, beating their drums, showing their colors, trying to convince themselves that they were God's avengers, keeping the blood pure and the True Faith dominant. They were manufacturing belief in an imaginary ideal of American identity that had little room for diversity of race, religion, or ethnic origin.
One is tempted to attribute the rise of the American Party, the Know Nothings, and the Ku Klux Klan to class struggle and the manipulations of the people by the capitalist oligarchies of the times, but that is a simplification of the true origins of politicized group hatred, which rises spontaneously out of the bowels whenever disrespect is shown and detected, part of the nature of the beast, the human pack animal. Why else are feral children so naturally raised by wolves?
The parents of my people had been wandering, rootless newcomers, just like the waves of immigrants that had arrived in America in the 19th Century. Indeed, many of their relatives were latecomers racially indistinguishable from them. They were the children of immigrants, tired and poor, who had sailed and walked from Northwestern Europe to the Middle West.
Beginning in 1775, Daniel Boone had laid out the route to the West from Virginia across the Cumberland Gap, working for the Transylvania Land Company. In 1820 near present-day London, Kentucky, on Boone's Wilderness Road, two traveling rangers came upon the remains of a wagon train and the bodies of massacred pioneers. A child remained alive, a tiny girl. She had been scalped and left for dead, the hair and skin at the top of her head cut off. The men bound a tobacco poultice to her skull, and the next day they gave her to the first family they met, German Pietists named Myers, who were on their way to claim their land in Missouri. The Myers named the baby Missouri Ann. They prospered in Missouri, and when the girl grew up she married, and in 1843 near Alton, Illinois, gave birth to my great-great grandmother Sarah Jane. Missouri Ann wore a bonnet all her life to hide her scars. She hid behind a popular costume of the day, like her progeny in their ceremonial robes.
Once upon a time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Albert Einstein were on television together in New York City, participating in the first ever public television broadcast, from the RCA Pavilion at the World's Fair. It was 1939, the year my parents decided to try to live together and make a home for me, their only child. Television came to Indiana in 1950. No one in Decker, Indiana, had a television set.
I am not Joseph Palmer of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who in 1830 was shunned, stoned, prayed for, and thrown into jail for being a public nuisance because he wore a beard twenty years before wearing a beard became fashionable. Nor am I the Joe Palmer who received a Gold Congressional Medal for serving in the Marines in the South Pacific during WWII as a Navajo code talker. Nor was I the one I most probably could have been, the Joe Palmer whose henchman Clyde Barrow broke out of a chain gang in Crockett, Texas, in 1935, and who was fried in the electric chair later that year to punish him for his crimes.
I was six months old when that Joe Palmer was put to death, born in 1934, in November of the year my mother was graduated from high school. So it can be calculated that I was conceived in February. That this conception was initiated in the back seat of a Model A Ford behind a levee on the White River near the village of Decker in Knox County, Indiana, cannot be calculated.
Decker was a whistle stop at the southernmost edge of the glacial moraines that cover the Midwest, near the confluence of the White and Wabash Rivers, whose waters join the Ohio and the Mississippi. What is left of the town sits on a sand hill at the edge of the deepest, blackest, richest soil outside the Imperial Valley of California, comprising land eagerly claimed first by French colonists and then by American settlers. The nearby town of Vincennes had been a major Indian commercial center, situated, as it is, on the Wabash River at the eastern end of the old buffalo trace that crossed Illinois and the prairies leading to the West. The first black people in Indiana were five slaves owned by French settlers there in 1746.
It is said that my father Granville Harold Palmer impregnated my mother Edith Lenore Miley in a borrowed car on a cold night in January, in the back seat of a Model A Ford, parked out of sight behind a levee, a dike used to keep the river in its banks, fornicating fast and frigidly, if we can believe the only person who ever talked about it. Who talked about it? Who told that story over and over for sixty years? Edith did. Her complaint was not the circumstances so much as the premature ejaculation. She always said Granny was a lousy lover. Edith was the most beautiful girl ever to be seen in those parts, a Norwegian Viking blond temptress, the kind of girl boys stare at. Granville was a handsome movie hero who always got the girl, in his mind's eye.
The prettiest girl I ever saw
Was sippin' cider through a straw...
So cheek to cheek and jaw to jaw
We sipped some cider through a straw.
And now I've got me a mother-in-law
From sippin' cider through a straw
Much of this story is hearsay, smellsay, tastesay, and feelsay that has become reconstructed memory, a view of a foggy past seen through a crazed, shatterproof glass, tales told in justification of choices and changes, family stories like the tides of history that get frozen into a semblance of truth. Edith had a litany of personal traumas that she repeated over and over whenever she needed to feel sorry for herself, which was daily. Granville never opened his mouth, except to brag about his small triumphs at playing poker, baseball, and the horses, and to convince the listener of his righteousness and bad luck in business and in love. He would have received 100% on his high school history examination, but his teacher did not believe anyone was perfect. So, these anecdotes are outlined by fact and colored in by my mother's opinions.
Conceived in January? It doesn't add up. But I was a ten-month baby, Edith said. What I could hear of the outside world made it an unappealing place to visit, as I recall, so I was hesitant about committing my body to outrage on the outside, but that was preferable to premature death. So in pain and squalor I was coerced by a young doctor from Hazleton, a nearby village, who was called in to something right. Old Doc Hoover's intention was to cut me up and extricate, pry, wrest, wrench, or take me out piece by piece. Doctor Blaine took hold of my head with a pair of big pincers and wrestled me into the outside. Twelve pounds, eleven ounces. They had to give my father a sedative. I still bear the scars. Do you suppose Edith would ever let me forget that which I can remember only through an act of imagination? After the horror of that experience, she refused to bear another child, and so she lived in fear of pregnancy. Only after I was a grown man did she start repeating how much she had hated having to wash out my father's condoms so he could use them again, he being too poor or too stingy to buy new ones.
Saving my life was Aunt Ophie's decision. I suppose I should always be grateful to her for insisting that they send Granville to fetch the young Doctor Blaine to see what he could do short of murdering me. Aunt Ophie was Edith's brother's sister, a Miley too. She had raised Edith after her mother died. Most of Ophie's brothers and sisters in the family of twelve kids where she grew up had other last names, all of the kids borne by Mary McGowan from a variety of partners.
In that Hillbilly household where my parents were living with my father's mother were several people. The little house belonged to two brothers who had married sisters. Each couple had a daughter. One of them, my paternal grandmother, Della, lived there with her double-cousin Emma as her sister, which she was, genetically. The great-grand parents were Abraham and Elijah Heacock and their wives Sarah Jane Cox McGuire and Emma Jane Cox. Abe was my great-grandfather. Della had three sons, Granville, Donald, and Nile. The oldest, Nile, was a Johnson. When he was born Della changed her name to Delta. Oscar Johnson was long gone, replaced by Jesse Darwin Palmer, my grandfather, who sired Granville and Don when they were sharecropping, living near Robinson, Illinois, on the west side of the Wabash River, before he joined the army in WWI to get away from the squalor of life as a landless peasant. Grandfather Palmer served on the docks in Corpus Christi as a guard, and then he became a gangster in Herrin, Illinois, returning to Indiana only twice, to my knowledge, decades later to confer with my father. He was the smart one, a professional gambler and bootlegger. He taught my father how to cheat at poker and craps. Dressed like he owned the riverboat, with a bowler hat and wearing a vest and a camelhair coat, he spent hours with Granville, teaching him the secrets of success at the gaming table. Granville learned enough not to get caught.
Donald, an older brother, had married Elsie Mae Ellis and had had a child, Don Jr. And then Granville had married Edith, by driving down to Kentucky and finding a Justice of the Peace, doubtless under coercion, sometime prior to my birth.
But who would want to take a bride to live in that household? Living in that small cabin were several people bound by custom and kinship to share what little could be had, the patresfamilias and their wives and daughters, and their daughters' children, and their daughters' children's children. Getting away from that home was the goal of all the younger people.
With no running water, the house was crowded and primitive. The village had no paved streets. Overflowing septic tanks stained the sand with rainbow colors outside the homes of its wealthier landowners, and it was the Ku Klux Klan that controlled civic affairs. Indeed, the entire state was controlled by the Klan, a fascist parody of Freemasonry, a pseudo-Greek fraternity of bigots that had gained political control of a loud majority of the voters. A bad tribe lived on that hill in Decker, a precarious polity exactly like every other group of people who have had through force of circumstance to make a life together in a hostile world. Petty, barbarous, and cruel, and living in fear of strangers while aspiring to ideals of civic virtue and proper conduct, the folk of Decker had turned inward upon themselves like a poison prune, a nexus of hatred, suspicion, and profound xenophobia. No Negroes or foreigners, not even Catholics, were welcome to stay after sundown. They wouldn't dare. Huddled masses longing to be free were competing with them for the necessities of life.
The old homestead, which once had a barn and some sheds surrounded by a wire fence, was a small frame cabin at the edge of the thriving village. The cabin was comprised partly of a summer kitchen, which had been enclosed to form a part of the main cabin, a sleeping room, and a sitting room. We ate in the kitchen. Living there was like going to a permanent summer camp.
I slept sometimes in the sitting room with my grandparents, where there was a potbelly stove and a heavy, wooden bed. The younger adults slept upstairs in the loft, a space reached by a narrow stairs, on the floor on corn-shuck mattresses, the oldsters in the bedroom on rope bed-frames. A wood-fired range, a giant frying and baking stove, where the women made buttermilk biscuits twice a day, stood in the kitchen, the enclosed porch added to the two-room cabin. The kitchen had an Indiana hutch - a cabinet for the baking supplies, an icebox, a dry sink, and a slop bucket. An old covered well with a hand pump stood just outside the back door. A bucket of water with a dipper for drinking was kept on a bench beside the pie safe, where the bacon and cooked food was stored. A privy, a jakes, a wooden outhouse, stood across the yard, sometimes next to the chicken coop or the pigpen. Privies have to be moved when the holes fill up.
One of my earliest memories is the horror I felt when I was lowered at age three into the new well that was digging, handed down into the wooden caisson sinking ten feet into the sandy soil, for the amusement of the diggers, until I had screamed enough for their pleasure.
The stable was part of the barn farther up the hill beyond the barnyard where the livestock, a milk cow and a fattening beef or heifer, was kept. The kitchen was the site of a conference of houseflies. Flypaper spirals decorated the kitchen shed. The screen door banged and banged.
There was no electricity. Light came from candles and coal oil lamps, smelly, dangerous, delicate apparatus that had to be filled from a can of kerosene, and the wicks trimmed, every day. Soap was the leftover grease it was made from, a slimy mixture of wood ashes, lye, and cooking fat. A bath was something you took on Saturday evening in a washtub on the floor in the kitchen, when your turn came to use the warm water, if it was not winter, when no one wanted to risk getting pneumonia. People bathed in order of their age, in the same water, babies last, being naturally dirtier than their elders. They didn't know how bad they smelled of wood smoke, lard, and dried funk. Every culture at all times tolerates its body odors in its own way.
Each person owned two sets of everyday clothing, for work or school, and perhaps a set of Sunday clothes for going to church, the main social event of the week. That is all. Most clothing was home made. Houses had no closets built into the walls for keeping clothes. They were hung on a peg in the wall or put in a cabinet, press, chest, chifforobe, or wardrobe. Clothing was worn until it became very dirty before it was washed, or cleaned by beating and hanging. There were no chemical dry cleaners. Children wore shoes only in cold weather, and to school and church
There was no toilet paper. Soft corncobs, the ones left over from shelling corn for the chickens, and old newspapers and magazines served another purpose. A corn-shelling machine, a cast-iron box with a hand crank, was my favorite plaything. I put ears of corn in the top. Cobs and grain fell out separate chutes when I turned the wheel. I fed the chickens. I put the silken cobs in the privy for later use, and carried the slop bucket with its garbage to the pigs in their sty. There was little manufactured waste to recycle, except glass bottles. It was not until the war came in 1942 that people began to save tin cans and old newspapers. They also saved tinfoil, leadfoil, and string. There was no plastic or aluminum foil. Bottles were stoppered with corks. Brown paper packages tied up with string were put into the shopping bags that women carried to stores.
How did Abe and Lige support that menagerie? Mostly by sharecropping in the Bottoms, land along the rivers where the soil was enriched by annual flooding. Having come from nowhere and owning nothing, all they could do was to hire themselves out as laborers and to borrow enough land on which to grow crops, paying the owners in kind, a portion of the produce, mostly field corn and tomatoes and melons. In addition, Abe drove a team of horses pulling a wagon daily to the county seat, Vincennes, where he bought fresh bread, milk and ice and delivered it to folks along the way and near the village. He was a peddler. He carried groceries and hardware in his wagon, and he bought whatever he could sell. His grandson Granville always made a show of his personal aversion to horses, which he said he got from helping his grandfather Abe, the knacker, drive worn out, useless horses to the White River where they shot and skinned them in order to sell the hides and hooves, throwing the carcasses into the river.
Horses and piles of their shit were in every street and on every road, constantly present. People rode horses for transportation, not just pleasure. They drove carriages and buggies, and shays. Milk, bread, and ice were delivered to homes in the city by horse-drawn wagons. Horses drew the fire wagons from firehouses, bells ringing, accompanied by Dalmatian dogs. The world smelled of horse and funky folks.
Most folks in those middle days of the Republic drank like Russians, public drunkenness and despair being a constant reminder of how difficult it was to make a living. Temperance was the ideal of the age, with preachers cajoling audiences to be sober and save their money. In the year 1900 Knox County voted itself dry, prohibiting the sale of alcohol. So one of Abe's more lucrative items was the whiskey he carted to Decker from the bootleggers at the county seat.
There was always the threat of the poorhouse to keep people honest and hard working. In those days, the leftover people, the ones who did not fit into the system, were incarcerated in concentration camps, so they could be looked after, at the lowest cost, and cajoled by preachers to be good. These places of confinement were the orphanage for homeless children, the asylum for the people who refused to play their parts in the social game, the poorhouse for those who could not pay their debts, and of course the jails and prisons, which used to have White inmates.
Decker was too small to support any such institutions. Instead, family, friends, and exploiters absorbed the fatherless, mad, and poor, and so shared their poverty, insanity, and bastardy. Those convicted of crimes were taken away for incarceration.
A certain neighbor higher on the hill, a landowner who looked down on the less fortunate, was very much obsessed with the necessity of temperance in regulating the affairs of the poor. He was John Ready, a wealthy Baptist puritan who believed that behavior preceded causes, that is, that people suffer because they are bad. It was common knowledge that Abe Heacox sold whiskey illegally from his huckster wagon, a civic blight, a mark of Cain, the Devil's handiwork much to be censured, evil incarnate. Stop the sale of whiskey and you stop drunkenness.
One evening, two of the Ready girls came to Aunt Jane Heacock and asked her to sell them a pint of whiskey for their mother because Old Doc Hoover had told her she ought to take some toddy for her rheumatism. A dollar is a dollar, they always say, and the next day John Ready came with Marshal George Jones who arrested Abe on charges of bootlegging. He was arraigned, pleaded no contest, and was sentenced to pay a fine of one hundred dollars and serve six months in prison. They sent Abe away to the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. That is one story. He probably only spent a month in the county jail, if that.
After he got out of prison, on his way home he stopped in Vincennes and bought a pistol. He had alerted everyone by letter that he was going to avenge himself upon the Readys, not because they had caused him to be punished for breaking the law, but because they had lied to Aunt Jane. It was a matter of pride. When Abe stepped off the rain at the station in Decker, much of the population had gathered to see the show: the Readys and their friends were waiting for him. He confronted John Ready and his two sons.
John Ready asked Abe Heacox whether he had forsworn his evil past, and was ready to repent. Abe Heacox called John Ready a snake in the grass, and shot him in the chest, killing him in front of the good people of Decker. The Readys later sold off their property and moved north to Sullivan County, where their descendants live to this day. I went to college with two of them. Abe did not go to trial; it was obviously self- defense, justifiable homicide, no crime.
What I was supposed to believe depended on who was telling the story. Another different tale is that on his deathbed Abe confessed to having slit John Ready's throat when John surprised him one night stealing a horse that John had pastured down in the Bottoms. That was my mother's version, probably a considerably more accurate one.
Cousin Jeraldine (Jimmy) Palmer, Luther's son, the nephew of Jesse and Gilbert Palmer tried to rob the bank in Monroe City, ten miles from Decker, on the very day in 1933 when Marshal Jones went to make a deposit, or he got in a fight after a poker game in Vincennes, and consequently there was a warrant out for his arrest. The marshal shot him in the back as he was running away. He drove to his folk's place in Iona in the melon fields outside Decker where he bled to death sitting on the front porch alone in regret.
What you have you do not want.
What you want you will not get.
What you get will be taken away.
One of the jobs that my father was able to get in addition to working in the fields was riding in the backs of the trucks that were used to haul produce to Gary and Chicago. There were no highways in those days and no big tractor-trailer trucks. Almost everything moved by rail. However, a farmer could send a truckload of produce, and so make a profit from the higher city prices by eliminating the middleman, if he didn't have to pay the railroad to transport the apples, peaches, melons and tomatoes. That is how my father got into the farm trade, which he later developed into his own farm-produce business. One of Granville's best stories was this one: He often rode on the back of a truck full of tomatoes holding a baseball bat, protecting the cargo, and swinging the bat at Polacks, Hunkies and Niggers who tried to steal it. On one occasion, after they had delivered their load in Chicago, they sold the produce, went to the YMCA, got cleaned up, and went to a movie show. And when they came out the police arrested Granny on suspicion of his being John Dillinger, the notorious Hoosier outlaw, because he looked just like him. They took him to the police station, where they all had a good laugh when he proved who he was, the handsome devil.
Granny was a champion horseshoe pitcher during his years of retirement. He and his brother Don were semi-professional baseball players during the Depression years when every town had a team that played in leagues for entertainment. In those days when radio was still a novelty, people amused themselves by attending ball games, by performing and listening to music and stories, and they went to church often. They went to movies on weekends if there was a cinema house, and their religion did not forbid it, or itinerant salesmen showed free movies projected onto bed sheets hung in grange halls, where they sold patent medicines to the gathered and gullible yokels, just like television today.
Tribal insularity, the peasant mindset that compels fear of strangers and change, the defense mechanism that made Egyptian peasants hack to death their own airmen who parachuted to earth for safety, the original flaw that resides in Ulstermen and Republicans, in Israelis and Palestinians, in Hindus and Muslims, the weakness that allowed brothers to kill each other with impunity, pride, and satisfaction in the American War Between the States, that led to the slaughter of Iroquois and Tutsis and Bosnians and Rwandans, the compulsion that arises from the Human Condition compounded by the emptiness of American culture, with its masquerade of pleasure, its mindless entertainment, and its neglect of basic human needs in the name of the freedom of the individual were the motives of naturally petty, barbarous, and cruel people.
The people of Indiana prove this fact again and again. There are no Indians in Indiana, a fact that always puzzled me as a child. First the settlers destroyed the Red Indians who were a part of the land, and then they built little forts of resistance against the outside world, small, isolated linguistic communities of hermetic communists or plebeians. Take for example New Harmony, founded in 1815 just south of Vincennes, a perfect communist community. It lasted only thirteen years, and the seeds of isolation were planted. Similarly, the Mennonites, the Amish, radical Christians, live in small communities throughout the state, maintaining their isolation and tribal dress. The people of Indiana seem to share a collective fear and disdain of outsiders.
Their ethnic history is perhaps unique, being both Southern and Northern American. Indiana is culturally a part of the South, united with it and defined by the former routes of transportation, the great rivers, the Wabash, and the Ohio, tributaries of the Mississippi, yet it lies astraddle the old National Road, Highway 40, the main route of 19th century immigration that runs from Wheeling, West Virginia, to St. Louis, Missouri, the heart of the Middle West.
Past events in Indiana, had they taken place in the South, would seem ordinary. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. Between 1865 and 1903 in Indiana twenty Blacks were hanged without indictment or trial. In 1900 there were 57,000 Blacks living in relative safety, by choice in Indianapolis, the state capital. In 1903 there were race riots in Evansville, a major city on the Ohio River.
The 1816 Indiana Constitution forbade "Negroes, Mulattoes, and Indians to serve in the militia and vote." In reaction several black communities were founded so that free Blacks would have places to live: "Beech" in Rush County in 1829, "Cabin Creek" in Randolph County in 1825, "Lost Creek" in Vigo County in 1830, and "Roberts Settlement" in 1837 in Hamilton County.
Negroes were banned from attending public schools in 1843. Not until 1943 was segregation banned by the General Assembly.
In 1968 a black girl trying to sell encyclopedias door to door in Martinsville, near Indianapolis, was attacked and stabbed to death by a passing motorist, for no apparent reason. There were no Blacks in Martinsville.
"US Department of Justice, for immediate release, October 22, 1999: Two Indiana men arrested for cross burning in Gary, Indiana. Indicted by a federal grand jury... Riley and Cumbow built a seven-foot-tall wooden cross and burned it in the backyard of a black couple Ulysses Lacy and Carmen Estelle... couple's seven-year-old son discovered the cross..."
When the only force holding them together is evangelical Christianity, not social ideals or sectarian membership, they form bad tribes, hillbilly heavens, places that strangers need to stay away from. And through modern communications of the sort that were first used during the 1920s, they were able to revive a new and virulent Ku Klux Klan. Brown Shirts in Germany: white robes and red necks in America, but the KKK did not especially persecute Jews, Mennonites, Gypsies and other reclusive groups, perhaps because of their smaller numbers, and perhaps because they were a fixture of American life, indispensable as Jews were to trade, commerce, and the professions, and as isolated as were the others.
White Protestant nationalism became a fixture of life in America after the Civil War, when reactionary, well-meaning Whites tried to preserve the high culture that had obtained in the South before the War Between the States, as it is called in the South. The reconstruction of the South after its destruction had caused much resentment. Two sympathetic, explanatory works of art grew out of that period: Griffiths' film 'The Birth of a Nation', and Dixon's novel 'The Klansman'. Both show how complex the situation really was, with ignorance and punitive righteousness creating the evil destruction of a proud way of life.
Then after World War I, in the 1920s, a defensive hatred of anyone not native born, White, and Protestant, became the mainspring of the resurgent Klan, a secret society devoted to maintaining imaginary racial and ethnic purity. Indiana had the most powerful Klan in the United States by 1924, with its high-ranking officers including the governor, Ed Jackson, the mayor of Indianapolis, all the congressmen, and all the major officials of local government throughout the state.
The Klan members held meetings dressed in conical, hooded hats and long, white or colored robes, in order to mask their shameful political agenda. And then they went en masse to church services dressed as they were, like ghosts of the Confederate dead, dressed that way because they feared reprisals, and they wished to imply that they had other-worldly powers, the might of God's vengeance. The truth is that they were ashamed of themselves and afraid of each other, swept up in mass hysteria, fearing not to do as their neighbors were doing.
Everybody's doin' it, doin' it, doin' it.
Why don't you and I?
The power of the Democratic Party in the South was broken by the Klan when Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, a Democrat, ran for president in 1924. The Klan killed him politically. Like the Know-Nothings of the 19th Century, who reacted to the immigration of millions of impoverished Irish and Germans by forming the American Party, four to five million Americans joined the Klan in the 1920s to try to keep America "pure." Even at the national level polluting ideas were being resisted. The best-known puritan communist-chaser of the day was Attorney General of the United States A. Mitchell Palmer, who trashed the Bill of Rights, punishing outsiders for being different from the ideal native-born citizens, and preserving the economic status quo. For example, Emma Goldman, who advocated birth control and draft evasion, was deported to Russia for her speaking out. Still in the 1960s and 1970s, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan William Cheney claimed 250,000 members in the state. Even today, patriotic fundamentalists, the Aryan Nation, White Supremacists, the National Knights of the KKK, and even the federal government, urge "extra-judicial means of law enforcement," especially against alleged terrorists or others who have funny-sounding names. We live in fear, and it is nothing new.
Now, I would not want to judge my father's family. I didn't know them well enough to say what they were really like, and by doing so I would be judging myself, a solipsistic, untrustworthy exercise at best. But if my mother and other Hoosiers can be taken as representative, my impression of their behavior might have some truth in it. For her own reasons, mostly because her mother-in-law Delta, the Klanswoman, treated her abominably, never letting her forget her sin of conceiving me and being from a family poorer than her own, my mother picked me up and fled one day. She grabbed me and ran away from that house on the sand hill because she "couldn't stand it any more."
She took me to her sister, Ruth Chesser, who had had the same mother, Lulubelle Harper, and who lived in the same village. When their mother died, at an early age when Edith was four years old, Edith's father Orland Pearl Miley had given her to his mother Mary (Grandma) McGowan to raise, taking her by force from the Harper household. It was from the McGowan household that Edith escaped by marrying Granville. It was from Granville's family's household that Edith escaped by running away to Evansville, a city forty miles away, leaving me, an infant, behind with her sister. Those people were always getting rid of another mouth they wouldn't have to feed.
Edith's running away is probably part of a true story. Edith must have gone with someone or to someone. I don't know what she did, under those circumstances, but Uncle Bud's story, Granville's story, is no less dramatic than Aunt Ruth's.
According to my father, my mother and I had disappeared. I had been taken away by my ungrateful mother. Word went out to find me. It was reported that Edith was living with a man in a log cabin out on the Illinois prairie. One day Uncle Nile Abraham Johnson, Granville's half-brother, went to find me, which he did, sitting alone and naked, except for a dirty diaper, on a dirt floor in a cabin on the prairie. Nile kidnapped me, and took me to the safety and love of his mother's home in Decker, Indiana.
Aunt Ruth Chesser, Edith's half-sister, says that when Granville learned that I was living with her and her father, his wife and two children, Granville went to them and demanded that they turn me over to him or he would kill the whole family. They believed him, and complied, after Granville "got the law after them."
How my parents ever got back together, they wouldn't say, nor did I hear this story until I was a father myself. But I grew up in a miasma of hatred and suspicion and constant quarrel that made no sense to me as a child. My parents detested each other. My grandmother had to take care of me while they separated and quarreled. My grandmother Delta detested my mother Edith, and vice versa. "No love lost," they both said time and again. And who was to blame? Me. "I love you more than your mother does." "I love you more than your grandmother does. She's a hateful old bitch."
It wasn't until I was four years old that my parents got back together and set up housekeeping in an apartment on Seventh Street in Vincennes, near the Coliseum. That family unit, my father and mother and I, endured ten years in love and squalor, suspicion and delight, in quarrel and frequent separation, during the occasional times when Edith did not have to drag Granville out of a bar on pay day to get his salary away from him before he spent it on drink.
When I was not in school, and when my parents were not together, which was often, I lived usually with my grandmother Delta and her husband Joe Cargal, after whom I was named. Joseph Cargal was Delta's fifth husband, out of six. She was obviously seriously serially monogamous.
Her first husband was Oscar Logan Johnson, who sired Delta's firstborn son Nile Abraham. Nile married Roxie, and had two daughters, Toots (Delta) and Betty, who looked after me sometimes. When Nile shot and killed Bob Parmenter for stealing fish from one of his trot-lines in the White River, after surprising him in the act one dawn, no one thought very much about it. Thou shalt not steal.
The second husband was Jesse Darwin Palmer, who gave me my father, Granville Harold, an uncle, Donald Emil, and a middle name. The "Darwin" is a fanciful affectation. One of his brothers was named "Luther," the other Gilbert, perhaps after Sir Humphrey the 16th century explorer, or more likely after Sir William S., who wrote the verses for Arthur Sullivan's popular songs in the 1880s. My mother had an uncle named "Admiral Dewey." Go figure, as they say. I'm glad they hadn't heard about Freud.
The third and fourth husbands I know nothing about, except their names, Edward Fielder, and William Ross Bierce, whom Delta said she married because she felt sorry for him. Maybe she felt less sorry for him when they divorced. The fifth was my namesake Joe Cargal, the son of a Welsh miner who had got to La Fayette (pronounced La Fate), Georgia, where Joe Cargal grew up. There was a phonograph record made by the singing evangelist Joe Bierce, who was Joe Cargal's nephew. Joe Cargal often played it, and sang basso profundo along with it:
My sins have been buried,
Have been buried down deep,
Away down deep in the sea.
A tall, handsome man, who looked very much like the movie star Gary Cooper, he worked as an electrician in the coalmines around Bicknell, Indiana, immediately north of Vincennes. He had been working as a clerk and window dresser in a department store when he met Delta. A souvenir of that job was a toy electric train he gave me that had been used in a Christmas display. He claimed to have lost two uncles in the War Between the States, one at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, the other in a prison camp. We always went to church together on Sundays and on Wednesdays, to the Nazarene or United Brethren Churches, depending on where the grandparents were living. Miners had no job security. Joe Cargal said grace at every meal, even when there were guests, always making a show of religiosity. He cooled his coffee by pouring it into a saucer, and then sipping it, always smelling of coffee and tobacco. He cracked the skulls of squirrels baked in a garlic sauce with the handle of a table knife so that I could eat the brains, a great delicacy.
Delta did not dance, go to movies, or wear makeup. She loved sing and tell stories, and give recitations of moral tales for young people, traveling around in her old, black Buick car to churches and schools, where for a small fee she entertained, instructed, and edified the locals. We saw her occasionally driving her car always at 35 mph, a habit she had learned during the war when 35 mph was the speed limit. I once asked her to take me to a movie that the other kids were talking about, a Tom Mix cowboy movie. "No, I'm sorry, Honey, because people would talk, you know" she said. She had six husbands, outliving them all. I was nine or eleven years old, and learning to roller skate. I kept a pet billy goat then, and I was in bliss, a pampered child who was known to all as "Joey," the boy who made "Popeye faces," grimacing and clowning.
Joe Cargal gave me my first gun, a small, nickel-plated twenty-gauge pump gun when I was five years old. He later gave me a Fox-Stevens Model B twenty-gauge double-barrel shotgun that I still wish I had not traded away. For pleasure Delta and Joe hunted and fished, and took me along and taught me what to do. The old subsistence practices die hard; once upon a time it was necessary to hunt in order to eat. The American firearm ethos is based on this memory. I thought I had killed my first squirrel with a Red Ryder BB gun, hunting with Grandpa Joe at age four, but he had pointed out the squirrel to me and then had me shoot it after he had put it in a tree. Once walking into the woods, following him along a railroad track, I played with the trigger of my gun. It went off and brushed his leg with shot, astonishing us both. I learned what not to do. He never told anyone about it. A tobacco chewer, since smoking in the mines was prohibited, he died of a cancer of the esophagus in 1952. We used to go to the mine to fetch him at the end of his work shift. When the men came up to the surface of the earth on the elevator, they were so black that you couldn't tell one from another. They showered in a washhouse and changed clothes there. It is hard to imagine what miners and their families went through before there were such amenities for them, thanks to the unions.
Delta had been an officer in the Ku Klux Klan, wearing a purple robe to meetings and believing that she was helping preserve the sanctity of the White race and the Christian religion. She read dire warnings to me and to other children from little pamphlets that were like catechisms. Foreigners, Negroes, Catholics, and Jews were to be kept away; they were the enemy, the Anti-Christ who would slit open the bellies of Protestant Christian women if they were given the chance. She often spoke of the Book of Romans, Paul's Epistle, Chapter 12. It concerns itself with exhortations to love all others as the Christian ideal. It also says that we should prefer ourselves, one another, over others, that "vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord," and that by nourishing the enemy "thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." The Others, and vengeance, and coals of fire seem to have a connection to burning crosses and lynchings, madness, popular delusion, and mass paranoia. This from the mouth of a woman who spoke with the neighbors in their native languages - French with the Belgian immigrant miners, German with the farmers. She and her sister had studied Latin in school. She sang "Jesus Loves Me" in phonetic Chinese.
Delta was a good shot, and proud of it. She always kept a small revolver in her handbag, or next to her bed. After she died, my father threw that revolver in the river so no one could get it and hurt himself by firing the decrepit old gun.
In a democracy you can't throw a silent majority in the river, unfortunately. Rule by and for the people, who are at bottom no damn good, is a profound error, but possibly better than any alternative system, they say.
From the grandparents Joseph and Delta I learned the answer to the question "Who wrote the Bible?" Everyone knows that God inspired man to write the Bible. And from attending the Nazarene Church regularly, and paying careful attention to what Brother Creselius did, who smelled of prunes and tobacco, whenever the congregation prayed together, I learned not to show off, not to turn around and kneel facing the pew to pray like the hypocrites who "love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at street corners that they may be seen by men." I was embarrassed at the public display of piety then, and I still am. I think that public church-going is an abomination, a display of vanity and weakness, a penalty I had to endure then for my sinful, youthful ways, a disgrace and humiliation now. I go to church on my own, wherever I feel like it, in a cathedral or a wooded glade, and I take communion or simply sit alone. For years I had the habit of going to take communion at the monastery of St-Benoit du Lac just before eleven o'clock when the Eucharist was served, avoiding all the rest of the folderol.
