Spinning Dixie (19 page)

I located the Panamanian, who was working on his laptop in a sitting room upstairs in the mansion.

“How'd it go?” he asked.

“I could be wrong, but I think he likes me.”

“Good. It's prom season, you never know,” he said.

I handed Marcus back his flag pin–camera.

“Were you watching while I was inside?” I asked.

“Off and on,” he said.

“J.T. sure likes golf.”

“Workhorse, huh? What about security, Jonah?”

“I was cleared in by a grandmother. I could probably kick her ass if I had to.”

“You're not a man to trifle with,” Marcus said.

“What have you learned about Hilliard's other security?” I asked.

“We've been scouting them at night. They've got watchmen. Average age: one hundred and four. The guy they have sitting at the main desk watches TV. We've got a little treat for him. Oh, and I know a bit more about the property ownership.”

“Lay it on me,” I said.

“The land around the mansion has been purchased in parcels by a trust that's administered by a law firm in New Orleans called Moscowitz & Forelli.”

“MoFo!” I exclaimed.

“Huh?”

“MoFo. That's what Mickey used to call that firm. He used to laugh about it.” I fixated on a cloud that resembled Carol Channing.

“What is it, Jonah?”

“Mickey didn't keep a lot of records, but I saw an envelope from MoFo years ago when I cleaned out his safe-deposit box. There was a bunch of legal stuff, bills and all.”

“You don't seem too surprised by this intel.”

“I knew the Hilliards subsidized the Polks. Mickey made that pretty clear when I left for college. I just thought it was a pretty straightforward thing, like the Kennedys and the Bouviers—the Hilliards brought the cash and the Polks brought the class. But why would they set it up in a trust through some mobbed-up law firm?”

“Maybe the Hilliards wanted to hide their ownership,” Marcus said.

“Why would they want to hide something that they so blatantly coveted? The mansion and a few acres around it are in J.T.'s name.”

“They'd want to hide ownership of property if they were up to no good on that property. Or if there was something valuable on that property,” Marcus said.

“I don't know, Marcus. That doesn't quite work. First of all, Smoky was too cagey to swallow all that buried treasure talk. And even if he did, wouldn't he want the land in his own name, so that when he found it, it would belong to him?”

“I don't know. Maybe those buried treasure stories aren't so crazy. You've said yourself that some folks around here take that Lost Cause stuff seriously. What now?”

“I'll have to go back to Washington to look through my safe deposit box to see if I still have that MoFo envelope,” I said.

The Panamanian nodded, frowned, and pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. I unfolded it. The first thing I saw was a tiny footprint.
Omnia vestigia retrorsum,
I thought. It was a copy of Sallie Hilliard's birth certificate. May 23, 1981. No surprises. Claudine was listed as Sallie's mother, J.T. as her father. Birthplace: Nashville.

“Marcus, don't these things say anything about blood type?”

“No, Jonah, they don't,” he said.

“I left Rattle & Snap in September of nineteen eighty,” I said. “Or…” I envisioned Claudine and J.T. together in the hayloft right after I was booted out. Or, worse, maybe they “got together” while I was still here. My eyes felt heavy, and the muscles around my jaw stiffened. A wave of nausea passed through me.

“Can't we check…blood?” I asked.

“You want us to grab Sallie off the street and take a blood sample?”

“Of course not. I don't know. There aren't records or something?”

“No, Jonah. It doesn't work that way. To confirm paternity, you need to draw fresh blood. Preferably with the child's consent.” The Panamanian smirked.

“Or, Marcus, I have to take Claudine's word.”

“Sounds like you don't trust her.”

“Obsession and trust are two very different concepts,” I said.

The difference between polling for businesses and polling for politicians is time. When you design a poll for a corporation, they run it through a committee made up of people who like to say things like “Let's take a few steps back.” In English, this translates into “Let's not do anything.” In large corporations, only a few people think about gain; the remainder are content to contemplate how to avoid losing. The pathway to not losing is doing nothing.

In presidential politics, the rewards are huge, but failure is a probability. Everything, therefore, is done quickly and with minimal “strategic thinking,” because there just isn't any time to do it any other way. So it was that when I called Sydney Crane, a brilliant Atlanta-based opinion researcher, she designed a focus group guide in thirty minutes and had a facility booked in Nashville for the following day.

In her early thirties, Sydney Crane had the scrubbed good looks that men associate with the-pretty-girl-who-was-nice-to-me-anyway in high school. Similarly, Sydney's wholesome appeal managed not to be threatening to women who would feel guilty about being mean to someone who was so, well, nice. Her approachable demeanor was a big asset in focus groups, which were designed to draw people out, get them talking with someone they trusted.

Today's group consisted of eight people who, loosely speaking, represented the population of central Tennessee. They were (as I designated them in my notes from my perch behind a one-way mirror) Soccer Mom, a thirtyish blond; an athletic professional man in his midforties I called Ralph Lauren; an impeccably dressed black housewife, Proud Mary; Miss Dixie, a grandmother with a silver power-coiffuer that could house a Super Bowl game; a voluptuous beauty queen type, Peach Pie; Preacher Bob, a grave and studious black man who wore an expression betraying disappointment in a civilization that had failed to hold itself to a higher standard; a sensitive, doe-eyed woman in her thirties I deemed Earth Mama; and Garth Brooks, a strapping agricultural products salesman hell-bent on using this group as his stepping-stone to the presidency.

Sydney began, “Thank you all for coming. My name is Sydney Crane, and this is what's called a focus group. I have a client that is interested in learning what consumers—you—think about certain issues. The way we learn is to spark discussions and listen to what people say. Behind the one-way mirror back there, there is a camera that records our session for analysis later.”

“Are there people watching us?” Soccer Mom asked.

“Sometimes,” Sydney said. My clients come and go as they please, but sometimes they watch the proceedings.”

I observed some low-grade fidgeting on the part of Soccer Mom and Ralph Lauren.

“The subject today has to do with the state of our country, how things have evolved in the South since the Civil War,” Sydney continued.

“Who is your client?” Ralph Lauren asked.

“I'm not at liberty to identify my client, because it may bias the group.”

“Will you tell us at the end?”

“Unfortunately not, we have to keep this confidential.”

“Why?” Ralph Lauren pursued.

“Clients often don't know how the research will be used, and prefer that people don't know that they're conducting research in the first place.”

I sensed by the way Ralph Lauren adjusted himself in his seat that he was unappeased, but his gentlemanly nature and respect for decorum restrained him. The discussion began on vague territory: the political climate.

“Very divisive,” Garth Brooks said.

“How so?” Sydney asked.

“Red states and blue states. We're all at each other's throats,” Garth said with a confident bob of his head.

“It's a shame,” said Earth Mama. “There's no reason we can't all just get along.”

I was pretty sure that I saw Ralph Lauren roll his eyes. I was inclined to roll my own.
There's a good reason we can't all just get along,
I thought:
human nature.

Fortunately, Proud Mary weighed in. “We've been divided from the beginning. There's nothing new in all of this, we just give it different names. North and South. Red state, blue state. It doesn't matter.”

Sydney facilitated a debate to identify the fissures in our culture. Everyone had a theory.

Ralph Lauren
: Black, brown, yellow, and red versus white.

Soccer Mom
: Mason and Dixon.

Miss Dixie
: Anarchy versus decorum.

Peach Pie
: Feminists versus the beautiful (scoring a wince from Earth Mama).

Earth Mama
: Tolerance versus insensitivity (a snort from Peach Pie).

Preacher Bob
: NASCAR versus
The New York Times.

Garth Brooks
: Beer and hot dogs versus chablis and quiche.

Proud Mary
: City versus country.

There were other mentions: Tobacco versus microchips. Democrats and Republicans. Wall Street and Main Street. Choice versus life. I scribbled these things down, suspecting every one of these people of being a little right and a little wrong. The discussion, as planned, got specific when Sydney brought up symbolic battlegrounds. Clinton and Lewinsky. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Terry Schiavo. She concluded another round of spirited exchange by asking if anyone believed the South would ever gain cultural respect.

“Are you kidding?” Soccer Mom said. “Look at who's become president. LBJ. Carter. Clinton. Bush II. Truitt. Southerners. We're doing just fine, thank you very much.”

Everyone chortled.

“I read that seventy percent of Americans attend a church of some kind,” Proud Mary said. “We're a religious country.”

“But the Confederate flag isn't flying over statehouses,” Garth Brooks said. “And I don't think it should, by the way. Brings up bad memories.” Earth Mama nodded, pleasantly surprised, having probably pegged Garth as the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

The discussion shifted to the perception of the South as a hotbed of bigotry. Earth Mama cited an article from the 1930s that purported to explain why so many Jews played basketball. “The article said that basketball required cunning and deception, which is why Jews excelled at the sport. Isn't that incredible?”

Preacher Bob laughed: “Remember when Jimmy the Greek said that blacks couldn't swim because they're not as buoyant as whites?”

The group laughed.

Proud Mary said, “And now, so many African Americans play professional basketball, and I don't know of any Jewish players. When did my people get devious all of a sudden?”

Soccer Mom speculated archly, “Maybe while African Americans were getting devious, Jewish people were getting buoyant!”

Preacher Bob: “That must explain Mark Spitz!” Everyone howled. “He floated pretty well in Munich.”

Sydney allowed the tangent to proceed unabated, which was smart. Tangents, provided that they're not totally off point, relax subjects and give them permission to be candid without retribution. When the chatter subsided, Sydney said, in a manner that seemed offhanded: “Speaking of divisive issues, there have been legends since the Civil War that Confederate militias hid gold in different locations throughout the South. Have you heard these stories?”

All but one of the people (Earth Mama) were familiar with the legends.

Miss Dixie and Ralph Lauren told stories about how they had first heard the legends as children. The gold was in an Arkansas mountain. The gold in Fort Knox
was
the Confederate gold, the U.S. government having stolen it. It's in the pillars of some old plantation between Nashville and the Georgia state line.

Ah.

“Let's say gold is discovered? Who does it belong to?”

“Whoever finds it,” Proud Mary said to near unanimous acclaim.

Sydney: “I believe the law says that the U.S. Treasury can seize any gold once controlled by the Confederacy.” “See,” Ralph Lauren said. “You can define the law any way you want. That's the problem. Every big institution is a protection racket. Business. The Vatican. The government. If you pay up, you're okay. If you don't, you're in trouble. I don't know if there's gold all over the South or not. If there's gold down here, be it one ingot or Fort Knox, the government will want it. It's not about the Union versus the Confederacy, it's about power and money.”

“It's not about gold, it's about culture,” Miss Dixie said. I was intrigued. “It may sound paranoid, but I think the government still likes to remind Southerners that the North won, that the way of life in New York is better than the way of life in Nashville. Washington doesn't need that gold, they want it as a tweak.”

Sydney asked, “You believe this even though the president is a Southerner?”

“They're giving him what-for,” Miss Dixie said, “But he can only do so much, especially with this Supreme Court fight. Judge Dewey's a fine man, but the folks on the Upper West Side of Central Park don't like him, so I think he's going to get hammered in those hearings coming up. These are the same folks on Wall Street investing in the companies that want to pave over Civil War battlefields to put up Wal-Marts.”

“Wal-Mart's an Arkansas company,” Ralph Lauren said.

“But they've got to go through Wall Street to get to Main Street,” Peach Pie said.

“What does that mean to you, if the legends about Confederate gold were true?” Sydney asked the group.

Peach Pie said, “I think what we're trying to say is that it's not about who the gold belongs to, it's about how a lot of us feel, which is that we don't trust the government. We don't like being stepped on, whether it's for gold or Supreme Court justices or snide remarks about how President Truitt pronounces the word ‘nuclear.' It's code, Miss Crane. It's code for ‘I'm better than y'all.'”

This point was a catalyst for cross talk and shooting hands. Almost everybody had a comment.

Soccer Mom:
“No sane person anymore thinks Southern values are about slavery. Our values are about God and family. Any way Hillary Clinton and her crowd can ridicule that, they will.”

Preacher Bob:
“Wherever that gold is found is where it ought to stay.”

Proud Mary:
“If there's money, it's dirty money, but that doesn't mean I trust the government's motives. It's symbolism is all: ‘I have the power to do this to you.'”

Earth Mama:
“I think the government has a right to take whatever plunder came from slavery.”

Ralph Lauren:
“It's all tribalism. One tribe thinks it's better than another tribe. It's just a matter of finding the right obscure law to justify it. Your tribe wants to pave over my tribe to build a Wal-Mart; my tribe wants to pave over your tribe to fly the rebel flag—and so on.”

Garth Brooks:
“Well, I don't want to fly that flag myself, but no matter how you shake it out, we're two countries.”

“It's symbolism is all.” That's what Proud Mary had said. People reacted to symbols of disrespect as opposed to engaging in prolonged analysis. Think about what happens whenever a white person speaks to a minority group using the phrase “you people.” Not a bigoted statement per se, but the suggestion of a broader agenda.

The other simple concept that leapt out at me was derived from a word Miss Dixie used: Tweak. One didn't need to elaborate on a belief, one simply had to tweak it. The challenge then became locating the mechanism with which the tweak could be visited upon our target audience.