Dark Day Dreams, page 13
And it wasn’t just the music. Books and television and fashion and movies all started to change too. The powers that be started to realize what a goldmine the eighteen to thirty-four segment of the population was in terms of spending power.
Parents fretted and yelled and accused us of not being grateful for everything they’d given us. So we just got in the sports cars they bought us for high school graduation and drove some place we didn’t have to listen to their nagging.
On that particular hot August day, I decided to venture out before the sidewalks and city air got too toasty. Despite the heat, I was in a pretty good mood. The books were selling well and I had recently begun seeing a girl named Cinnamon. An older author friend named Desmond Tiller had introduced us to each other.
Sure, NYC is expensive and crowded. It’s nearly impossible to go for a walk without smelling bum urine at least once. But where else can you live and just happen to end up being pals with the man who wrote the definitive history of the Stevenson administration?
The country was doing well. Jobs were plentiful and there had been a government health care program in place since the late Forties. We put a man on the moon in nineteen sixty-nine and NASA was predicting they should be able to send a team on to Mars within twenty years or so.
FDR got us through the Depression and the combination of correct farming practices and decent weather seemed to fix the Dust Bowl problems for the most part.
That was really scary. One time my dad was telling me about being a boy in Cleveland and seeing a black blizzard headed toward the city…a windstorm carrying so much soil it blocked out the sun for a few minutes. I could tell by the look in his eyes that it was an experience that left behind a mental scar.
Cinnamon grew up in the Confederacy and it was plenty tough even just being part black. Over the years the government put in some new regulations regarding treatment of those with mixed blood but the working class white people down there just pretty much ignored them. In their opinion, if you weren’t pure white then you were a lesser human being and should be treated accordingly.
Well, at least her father didn’t own her mother. He was a visiting History professor from Yale who was spending time in Georgia, doing research with a colleague from one of the state colleges. He fell in love with a teaching assistant slave and they had a secret affair.
She got pregnant and when she began to show, she urged him to get in his car and head north of the Mason-Dixon line in a hurry. Her country wouldn’t appreciate a white Yankee knocking up one of their darkies.
Eventually the professor raised enough money to buy freedom for Cinnamon and her mother and bus tickets north. So she spent most of her pre-adult life in Connecticut and then moved to New York City in nineteen sixty-six.
When she and I first met, we talked a lot about the differences between the U.S. and the Confederacy. The culture in the southern states was still very conservative…women still couldn’t vote or get a legal abortion there, homosexuality was considered a criminal offense and a strict Protestant version of Christianity was the only kind of religious worship officially allowed.
I bet that last one was hard to enforce down in Louisiana and Texas. A lot of folks in those states would never consider stepping inside a Baptist church.
And of course, the southerners still had slavery. They did their best to call it by other names but everyone in the civilized world recognized the Confederacy was a corrupt and monstrous economy fueled by the misery of those descended from the Africans brought across the Atlantic centuries earlier. The whites in those states claimed the old, brutal means of control had gone by the wayside. But we all knew the whip, the gun and the chains still carried the day in Dixie Land.
A little over a hundred years ago, both sides were losing catastrophic amounts of men in the Civil War. So Lincoln and Lee finally sat down in a Virginia schoolhouse and drew up a treaty that not only ended the fighting but also declared the Confederacy was henceforth to be considered a valid nation.
Big swaths of the South had been destroyed during the war and needed to be rebuilt. So Lincoln suggested an arrangement where the U.S. could buy people out of slavery and the Confederate government could spend the money however they saw fit. Other large deals were also made at first but as the southerners got back on their feet, they grew less desperate and thus less interested.
I bought a newspaper and checked the headlines. Amazingly, the treaty between Germany and Russia was still holding. They had tense moments from time to time but neither one was threatening to invade the other.
I’ve seen old newsreel films of Hitler. He seemed to possess a truly scary kind of charisma…thank God those generals were brave and wise enough to poison him.
I wondered sometimes what it would be like living in a country that was continually at war or continually preparing to be in one. The United States hadn’t been involved in a military conflict with anybody since Teddy Roosevelt had charged up San Juan Hill. Wilson wanted to drag us into the Great War but Congress wouldn’t stand for it. We didn’t even have a draft in nineteen seventy.
There were still basically just two political parties in the United States. A small, rather powerless Republican one and the Progressives (who used to be called Democrats). The latter group started calling themselves that after the first Civil War ended. This was because (a) they’d cut all ties with southern politicians who used to belong to the party and (b) decided it would be good to have a name that more clearly expressed their governing philosophy.
So one Progressive or another had lead the country since nineteen twelve…Wilson, Mayweather, Parker, Ryan, Roosevelt (four terms), Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy and King. None of them had been elected less than twice.
Man, the Rebs threw such a shit fit when MLK got elected in sixty-eight. It was weird watching their leaders speak on television, acting like they still deserved to have input on who should lead our thirty-nine states. I remember one fat old Baptist preacher getting on the tube in one of the southern states. He was spouting all kinds of hate, saying that our electing a black man was an affront to God and all decency.
Truth be told, even a lot of Progressive voters were shocked when King announced his candidacy. But his speeches just bowled everybody over…they were so inspiring. He had the ability to make us see the goodness in others and the wonderful future that lay ahead for this country if we all worked together.
And JFK did a lot to help smooth the way with the whites. I read somewhere that John, Bobby and the reverend all became close friends during Kennedy’s second term. Like the former president once said, “It’s a lot harder to hate somebody once you’ve really spent some time with them.”
Well, they certainly spent a lot of time together when they were drafting the Civil Rights bill.
Like I said before, there was still a Republican Party. But by the time King got elected president, most people considered them not only strange but definitely out of touch.
They were a bitter group…the kind of hardened bitter that develops when you’ve been largely out of power for decades. Of course, they ran candidates in the House, Senate and presidential races. But with each passing decade, their ideas and arguments appealed to less and less voters.
Their worst defeat was when Goldwater ran against Kennedy in sixty-four. And in all honesty, I always thought attractiveness played a big part in that election ending up being so one-sided. After all, would you rather vote for the cool guy or the one who looks like he should be teaching high school Trigonometry?
One of the many things I loved about Cinnamon was that when we first met up, she was always enthusiastic and loving. I’d had girlfriends before her that always seemed to be playing one kind of mind game or another and it drove me crazy. Life is hard enough without having to worry whether the love of your life has changed her mind overnight.
When I got to her place on that summer day in nineteen seventy, she dragged me into her bedroom and we made sweaty, primal love. While she sat on top of me I thought about lava, volcanoes rising up and eruptions. When she came, she cried out and fell over sideways with the sweetest smile on her face.
Afterward, she made us two big glasses of iced tea and we sat together on the couch, watching the news. We had sat in those same spots the previous summer with a whole bunch of friends watching the moon landing. I remember that was also a brutally hot time but we didn’t care because we were witnessing a truly historic event.
Walter Cronkite was talking about President King’s visit to Kentucky. We had a lot of military folks down there on the border with the Confederacy.
The rebel president George Wallace had been making a lot of noise about MLK’s visit to the Bluegrass state. He said the Kentuckians needed to make sure he didn’t spread any commie propaganda during this trip, it might make all the horses want to cross the finish line at the same time during the next Derby.
Then he made a weird face and started laughing at his own joke. He was just such a creepy racist.
Kentuckians had always seemed a bit more conflicted about the breakup of the country than most citizens. Back in the old days, the white
citizens didn’t object all that strongly to slavery. But they stuck with the Union because that was where they sold most of their crops and goods. That was one of the things the South always had going against it…they were good producers but lousy consumers.
Cinnamon and I watched the president leave his car and go into a downtown Louisville hotel. A dozen or so Secret Service guys surrounded him and he seemed very well protected.
But then I heard a strange whooshing sound and watched the president disappear in the smoke and noise of an explosion. I immediately wondered if a bazooka had been fired. There was a great deal of shouting and everybody in the vicinity seemed to be caught between confusion and hysteria. Even the news people weren’t sure whether they should be running toward the hotel or away from it.
I said, “Oh, shit.”
Cinnamon hugged me and cried, “Oh God, they’ve killed President King.”
I felt sick to my stomach.
There’s just something so terrible about watching a grim prediction become reality. Over the years, so many pundits had said it was really hard to exaggerate just how many rednecks would consider killing MLK the greatest achievement of their sad little lives. He even said in an interview one time he knew when he took the job there was a good chance he might not live to see the start of a second term.
There was so much confusion and then Cronkite told us there was even more breaking news. A group of men dressed in grey uniforms had crossed into Illinois and killed our border security forces before ultimately being routed themselves. Nobody in our government was sure at first if the Confederacy had declared war on the U.S. of if maybe this was all the work of some renegade extremist group.
I called Russ and asked him if he’d heard what was going on. He groggily said no, he’d been busy partying with two of our female fans all afternoon.
I filled him in. Russ never seemed to know what the hell was going on in the world.
He didn’t believe me at first so I told him to turn on the television. I could hear him and his two
friends react as they watched the story unfold. One of the girls was crying.
When he came back on the line he said, “Jesus, who do you think did this?”
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It turned out the president’s murder was orchestrated by a group made up of men from both the Confederacy and the United States. There had always been factions down south who had grumbled about wanting revenge for the losses they suffered during the Civil War. And there were Republicans in the north who felt like the Progressives had become tyrants, aggressively pushing through various social and economic reforms easily due to their seemingly iron grip on the presidency. And there were members of both groups who just hated the fact there was a black man in the White House.
MLK was buried and then an epic war of words began. President Wallace claimed he had no part in the affair but was still happy to see “that uppity Negro removed from office.” Our new president fired back that King was ten times the man the Confederate leader could ever hope to be.
The media on both sides stoked people’s emotions. The New York Post ran a story that claimed the Soviet Union was planning to start supplying arms to the Confederacy. The Miami Herald printed an editorial claiming that King was in the middle of planning an invasion of Dixie when he died.
Around the middle of September, three Confederate fighter jets got off course and ended up getting shot down over Kansas. Some farmers caught the pilots before they could even get completely detached from their parachutes. A few hours later, the authorities found three bodies hanging from a tree.
King’s replacement was a white man named Henry Erickson. He came from a prominent New England family that had long been involved in the abolition effort, even occasionally financing rescue missions over the years into border areas. I had heard that he hated the Confederacy with a vengeance and so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he announced we were going to war with them again.
He revealed his plan during a speech he gave on television. “My fellow Americans, I believe it is
time for us to clean out the wound that’s festered in those eleven southern states all these many decades. There is no progress there, just a never ending legacy of hatred, enslavement and intolerance. We need to finish what was started so long ago by our righteous forefathers and regain control of the area currently known as the Confederacy.”
Truth be told, we in the north had grown a bit complacent about military matters during this long stretch of time without a war. But the vile nature of King’s murder forced the nation to immediately focus again like it had a hundred years earlier.
Ironically, MLK (being a man of peace) probably would have been against us declaring war on the Confederacy. But we as a nation knew the only way to ease the pain of our loss was to take action.
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Much to the surprise of my friends and family, I decided to enlist. It was partly something I did out of respect for our martyred president and partly because I felt like our decent and caring society was in danger of losing territory to a government I considered truly evil.
Basic training was really tough for me at first. I didn’t realize how out of shape I’d let myself get the past few years…too much wine and not enough calisthenics. But I was still relatively young and before too long I felt like I was in the best shape of my life.
Our unit was made up of guys from a mix of backgrounds. It was fun getting to meet people from all over the country. But no matter what kind of accent they had or where they grew up, they all expressed the same sentiment…the Confederates needed to pay for killing King. For the first time in our lives, we were all willing to do whatever it took to not only avenge him but defend something we considered bigger and more important than our own lives.
Our infantry unit moved down the coast and we eventually found ourselves in South Carolina, helping to lay siege to the city of Charleston.
Fighter jets were screaming overhead, dropping bombs to soften up the Confederate forces and make it easier for us to advance. We had superior technology but the other side seemed to have an effective force of guerilla fighters and snipers. I really hated that last
group…you’d be walking along a street thinking you were maybe sort of safe and then all of a sudden some joker up in a window would be taking your buddies out right and left.
Any time we came across a statue of some old-time rebel hero, we pulled it down and smashed it up. Anytime we came across a Confederate flag, we took it down and torched it. There was a feeling among our troops that too much tolerance and mercy was shown the last time around and we weren’t going to make that mistake again.
One of my great pleasures was seeing all the newly freed black slaves joining our side as quickly as they could get a uniform that fit. I noticed a lot of them had a look in their eyes that said somebody was going to pay not only for their suffering but also the wrongs done to every generation of blacks going back to the first days of the American slave trade.
The amount of mercy shown to individual slave owners depended on how bad their reputations were. If they were known to have treated their workers decently, they might just have some of their buildings burnt down. However, if they were
known as a particularly cruel owner, the U.S. military brass generally looked the other way if the black soldiers chose to even the score in particularly vicious ways.
We did our best not to kill indiscriminately. A lot of the white folks we encountered were just regular people who were unfortunate enough to be born in the wrong place. Of course, you always needed to be careful…one time a middle-aged housewife in Athens talked very sweetly to me right up to the minute when she almost blew my head off with a pistol she had hidden in her knitting bag.
It took me a while to get used to it being humid so much of the time. My shirts often started to feel damp five minutes after we began our patrols.
This one white Nebraskan named Nelson seemed to particularly hate the Confederates. He was always telling jokes about the gross stuff they liked to eat or how common incest was down there.
Some southern states were more committed to the fight than others. Texas and Florida more or less agreed to stay on the sidelines after the first year of fighting. I was never sure why…maybe the
people who ran those states had begun to see slavery as an institution that had finally grown obsolete.
Like in the previous conflict, the South reached out to several foreign powers and tried to make a deal. But this time around, nobody was interested in pissing off a country that maintained one of the world’s two biggest nuclear arsenals.
