John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Something else afoot, I can smell it.” He was on one of the Fusionist ward committees for a while, then quit it when the infighting boiled up. “Word is they got a couple reporters from up North in town, come to watch the ruckus, and it’s gonna wait till the yankees leave town. Something tricky afoot.”

He waits till she drifts to the piano stool, sits, and meets his eye again.

“You think bad of me? Cause the polls don’t close till—”

“You did the right thing,” says Jessie. What she means is that if men insist on keeping politics to themselves, they may do with it as they wish. With Royal the unsaid was always something you couldn’t risk yet because you weren’t certain, the unsaid was tantalizing and delicious—

“I can march right down there and look them in the eye, tell them here is Dorsey Love, make what you want out of it—” Dorsey has straightened up now. He sounds like Father— “—throw my ballot on the fire — cause that’s where it’s going — and let the Devil have his due. If it make you think better of me, Jessie, I am willing to suffer the consequences.”

Dorsey has no trouble with words. Maybe because he has never read the books, not the love stories anyway, and has not learned to lie from them. Dorsey hides nothing from her and at the moment it brings tears to her eyes and she crosses to put her arms around him. She has never been the first to touch before.

“You stay right here,” says Jessie to her husband. “I don’t want you to suffer a thing.”

There was some talk of using the Dance Hall for a polling place, but the Exalted Africans didn’t think it looked good. “Think of who we’ll be associated with,” said one of the reverends. “Put a ballot box among the low crowd that congregates there and we’ll look like a cartoon from the Messenger .”

Jubal doesn’t read the Messenger or any of the other white papers but has been forced to look at some of the comic pictures, inky coons smoking cigars and bug-eying at white women, and stood for the usual “ Aint that you, nigger, how long you have to pose for that picture? ” and sometimes wishes he could draw to point out how funny white people look. He doesn’t mess with the Exalted Africans either, the whole crowd with their clubs and their college degrees that his brother Royal been sniffing around, as if Dr. Lunceford was ever going to let that boy lie on his daughter and act happy about it. So it’s not any polling place, but when Jubal steps into the Dance Hall there are a pair of ballot boxes set up on the bar counter and you got to put your money in a slot if you want a drink, one with an old post-office WANTED FOR ASSAULT drawing of Pharaoh Ballard pasted on its front and the other with the same for Clarence Rice who disappeared some time ago. His drawing says WANTED FOR LARCENY and Jubal is about to drop a dime in the slot when Pharaoh Ballard himself calls out from the corner. “Don’t you be feedin that box, boy, or you answer to me.”

Gus Mayweather behind the bar takes his dime and puts it in Pharaoh’s box. “Right good turnout we had today,” he says. “Half the First Ward been in to vote.”

“Can’t get a drink nowhere else. You got beer?”

“Wet and cold.” Gus bends to pull a bottle from an ice chest at his feet, pulls the cap off. “Yeah, when we heard the mayor was thinking of closing down the saloons we laid in some supplies. Imagine that — no liquor on Election Day.”

Simon Green, the butcher’s man, steps up next to Jubal. “That mayor up for office this time around?”

“Not for another two years.”

“Well he aint getting my vote.” Simon drops money in Pharaoh’s box.

“You register?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t vote or not vote for the man. You aint even counted as a person.”

“They put somebody up that’s worth the trouble, that’s the day I register for their little game.”

“Like who?” asks Jubal.

Simon thinks a long while. “Mr. Miller.”

“Thomas Miller?”

“That’s the man. I owed Mr. Miller ten dollars, he let it ride for two weeks and didn’t charge me no extra.”

“That aint no reason to vote for a man.”

“Yeah, well he got white-people kind of money, owns lands, owns buildings, only he don’t try and act like them. These other high-tone sonsabitches—”

“Exalted Africans,” says Jubal—

“That’s the ones. I deliver to their houses all the time, mostly got to bring it to the back door.”

“You sellin em pig guts, Simon,” says Gus. “You think they want that mess coming through their parlor?”

“These ones won’t eat no innards, they rose a bove that. They eatin high off the hog.”

“Still, any kind of quality folks, you expected to deliver to the back.”

Simon isn’t having any. “Just cause a man is a nigger,” he says, “aint no reason to treat him like one.”

“How’s this vote going?” asks Jubal, sipping his cold beer and nodding at the ballot boxes.

Gus leans in and lowers his voice, glancing over to Pharaoh and Little Bit and some of the others sitting at a corner table. “The calculations won’t happen till late, but I’d say our friend there has opened up a fair lead since he come in to supervise the proceedings.”

“And old Clarence aint here—”

“Changed his name,” says Jubal. “Went off in the Army with my brother.”

“You heard of a absentee ballot?” says Gus. “Clarence a absentee candidate.”

“It’s pretty much that way outside, too.”

“You tried to get in?”

Jubal shrugs. In here it seems silly but their Mama took both him and Royal down to register the minute they came of age. “ Your Daddy risk his life for that vote ,” she always says, “ and you boys damn well gonna use it .”

“You never know,” he says, feeling like it’s an apology, “maybe somebody you help to get in do something for you later. Get you a job or something.”

“Post office,” says Simon Green, nodding. “Wear that uniform. Or on the police like old Toomer.”

“That’s right,” says Jubal, feeling better about it. “Give and take. That’s politics, right? Or maybe the white folks got something planned, take one of our schools away, and we got a black man up there he can stop them.”

“So you get there?” asks Gus.

“Got close. But there was a line of peckerwoods outside, showin off their hardware.”

“Guns—”

“Pistols, rifles, shotguns—”

The bunch from the corner has drifted over, listening in.

“You got to pick your ground,” says Jubal. “Like they taught my brother in the 25th. The ground aint right, you back off and fight another day.”

“So you didn’t get in?”

Jubal feels them watching him. “It made me think. If the vote don’t mean nothin — how come they so set on taking it away from us?”

“How many was there?”

It is Pharaoh Ballard, leaning his back against the counter so his coat falls open to show everybody the pistol in his belt.

“Oh — nine, ten of em.”

There had been six, but two had shotguns and they looked desperate to shoot somebody.

“Don’t no white man deny me entrance, I wants to go in,” says Ballard.

Gus laughs. “You can’t vote, Pharaoh. You a convicted assaulter.”

“Maybe I just want to walk in the door, see how things is comin along—”

“You gonna mess with a posse of rednecks, you only got that old — what is it—”

“.45.”

“Man got a Colt was old when they buried Custer and he wants to start a war.”

“The point is how they get to strut about our section of town, wavin their iron? What happen if we march down Market Street all loaded up and ready to shoot?”