Ross Thomas: The Seersucker Whipsaw

“How much is all that, you reckon?”

I shrugged. “I’d guess twenty million annual billing.”

“Dollars?”

“Pounds.”

Shartelle chuckled and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Now ain’t that something? Old Pig’s got himself a fifty-six-million-dollar-a-year nigger candidate and he’s calling for help. From me. Now that’s really something.”

“He said you’d say that.”

“What?”

“Nigger candidate.”

“It bother you?”

“Nothing much bothers me, Mr. Shartelle.”

“Let me tell you one thing, boy.”

“What’s that?”

“It wouldn’t bother Pig.”

There was a silence that grew. I lighted a cigarette, an honest Lucky Strike, and smoked it without pleasure as Shartelle looked at me with a slight smile. It was the same smile he would have given a fifteen-year-old. That was all right; I felt like thirteen.

“Look, we can sit here all night and you can make snotty remarks about Duffy, but he’s paying my salary, so don’t get upset if I don’t chime in.”

Shartelle grinned. “Now, Pete, you’re just pissed off because of the nigger talk, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not pissed off.”

“Now, boy, I could pull out my cards in the N-Double A-C-P and CORE and show them to you. Or I could put in your hands some kindly letters I got from some of my colored friends who’ve been right active in all this Civil Rights hoop-to-do. Or as a Southern gentleman I could tell you that I know colored folks because I was brought up with them, which I was, or that I had a fine old colored mammy who I loved better than anyone in this world, which I did. I could parade, right before your eyes, evidence — real evidence — that I am probably the world’s biggest nigger lover, and to top it off I could describe in detail to you a high yellow I once courted in Chicago and would have married except she ran off with some smooth-talking firetruck salesman. He was of the Jewish persuasion, I believe. Now when I say nigger it’s because I plain can’t stand to hear some flannelmouth like me from Opelousas or Natchez trying to say Nee-gro and the word just sticking in his throat like a catfish bone. When I say nigger, it don’t mean a goddamned thing because I go by the Shartelle theory of race relations, and the Shartelle theory was pounded and shaped out of a hell of a lot of experience with black and white alike and, boy, I’m gonna give you the benefit of long hours of serious thought and hard study, and I’m surely not one for much introspection. I am possessed, you may have noticed, of an outward-going personality.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Well, now. The Shartelle theory of harmonious race relations is simple and straightforward. My theory is that we either ought to give the niggers their rights — not just lip service, but every blasted right there is from voting to fornicating, that we ought to make them have all these rights and enforce their right to them by law, and I mean tough, FBI-attracting law, until every man jack of them is just as equal as you middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I said either and I mean it. Either we give them the right to marry your daughter, if you got one, and fix it so that they’ll not only have the same social and educational rights that you have, but the same economic rights — the same ways and means that you’ve got to the pursuit of happiness out there in one of those fine suburban developments instead of in a slum. And then they’ll be just like you white folks with all your sound moral values, your Christian virtue, and your treasured togetherness. ’Course, they might lose something along the way, something like a culture, but that ain’t nothing. Now I say either we do that for them — make ’em just like everybody else — or, by God, we ought to drive ’em down in the ground like tent pegs!” Shartelle slammed his fist down on a table to show me how tent pegs are driven.”

“What do you mean ‘your’ social rights, Shartelle? You’re in just as deep.”

“Why no I ain’t, boy. My great-grandmother was a pretty little octoroon thing from New Orleans. At least that’s what my daddy told me. And that makes me about one-sixty-fourth colored, which is more than enough in most Southern states. Now who has the better right to say nigger than us niggers?”

“You’re putting me on, Shartelle.”

“Now I may be, boy, but you’ll never know for sure, will you?” He paused and grinned wickedly. “And you don’t mean to tell me it would make any difference?”

We had breakfast the next morning. Shartelle had said he wished to study Duffy’s proposition during the night. “I want to give it my most careful consideration, just like a Congressman writing to a constituent who’s got a plan to build a bridge across the Grand Canyon.”

At breakfast he was wearing a dark plaid suit pressed to perfection, a blue oxford shirt with a button-down collar, and a striped blue and black tie that he must have borrowed from another English regiment. We ordered sausage, eggs, toast, coffee, and milk for Shartelle. He had his eggs up; I asked for mine over.

“I made a few calls last night, Pete,” Shartelle said as he buttered a piece of toast.

“To whom?”

“Couple of people in New York. Pig was doing some bragging there. That’s to be expected. But there’s something else you might be interested in — you’re going to have some opposition.”

“What kind?”

“Another agency.”

I made the kind of face that Eisenhower did when they told him MacArthur was fired. “Who?”

“Renesslaer.”

“My. Or maybe I should say my, my.”

“You echo my reaction,” Shartelle said. “The name Renesslaer does hit a responsive chord. Like a kid drawing his fingernail across a blackboard.”

I thought a moment. “With offices in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Zurich, Rome, a dozen cities in the states, Hongkong, Bombay, Tokyo and Manila. What did I miss?”

“Toronto, Sydney, and Johannesburg.”

There are all kinds of advertising and public relations agencies. Some are desperate, one-man operations that exist from the commissions paid by equally desperate radio stations and trade publications. There are the swift-moving, hot-eyed agencies that skyrocket to success and then mellow into the pattern of the business world, much like a plumbing fixture manufacturer. And then there are the agencies like Duffy, Downer, and Theims, Ltd., multi-million dollar concerns running on charm, genius, exuberance, and the business morality of a bankrupt carnival. Finally, there are a dozen or so agencies whose size, financial power, and ruthlessness are equalled only by their stunning grasp of the mediocre. It is to these agencies, and the pilot fish which swarm about them, that the nation owes thanks for the present level of its television, radio, and the large chunk of American sub-culture that has been so profitably exported abroad.

Of these dozen or so agencies, Renesslaer was the third or fourth largest, and while the majority of them were snaking their fortunes by following Menckenian law and betting their all on the bad taste of the American public, Renesslaer had developed a world conscience.

“They’ve set up, in that agency, a world public affairs section,” Shartelle said gloomily. “And it combines all the worst features of Moral Rearmament, the Peace Corps, and International Rotary. They have a speakers’ bureau that will fly a speaker any place in the world on twelve hours notice for the guarantee of an audience of five hundred people. And he’ll make the speech in his audience’s language. They’ve got an Oceania desk, a Southwest Africa desk, an Italian desk, and an Icelandic desk. For all I know they’ve got an Antarctic desk.”