Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

(On into the last half of them.) “There is something devilish going on. The niggers are moving to positions of authority. The Jew doctors cavort with them and trust them. I have been silent for so, so long. The other afternoon the black scoundrels were running in the hall drinking beer. In a psychiatric hospital, celebrating Christ’s birth. There was a group of intoxicated black orderlies gathered around the bulletin board at the middle of the esplanade. They had a jackknife and they were throwing it to stick up in the bulletin board itself, piercing the official state and federal information sheets thereon. White men were close with them. It was ‘Doctor’ Eis and ‘Doctor’ Clyde, the Jews. They applauded when one of the bucks stuck a knife in an announcement sheet from twenty paces away. Foremost in congratulating the nigger was ‘Doctor’ Eis. I made as if I hadn’t seen them and was walking up to see the week’s menu on the board, but a biggish nigger wearing the badge of a nurse, turned me around with his mealy hands and said, ‘See you later, alligator. You got to wear some pants when you come out on the porch.’ I shook him off, knowing I had on my gown. I was furious to know what ‘Doctor’ Eis would do with this nigger ‘nurse,’ as I saw him coming on. ‘You have to watch yourself,’ Eis said. His breath was also revolting with beer. Then he drew out my gown and dropped it, and I realized that I had had the edge of my gown caught up inadvertently on the top of my penis, which I had not known was in an erective state. I am not now such a freak as to come out with niggers throwing jackknives, in such a condition, consciously. The suetty demons. The Jews abetting them. I was excruciatingly embarrassed. But there is some accounting due me too.”

(Reading another, written in the fastidiously brittle old ink like the rest, with the letters slim and high, as if someone had dipped a dry eyelash in the inkwell and gone to work) “I will undergo electricity this week. Not at the behest of Eis or Clyde. I do it on the advice of a marvelous Christian psychiatrist who hails from Raymond, Mississippi. He seems just a boy to me. Would you believe it, he studied at the University of Massachusetts, the same as yours truly? Then he went to Johns Hopkins and to Tubingen, as a Fulbright Scholar.”

(Letter after the electricity, apparently) “I have made investigations. Eis is a voluptuary. His wife is a nurse here and he can’t keep his hands off her. I’ve seen other things, such as at the Coca-Cola machine. Eis was making change for a colored woman custodian. I could tell he had designs on her. I gave the black slut her dime. I wouldn’t take her two nickels. I slashed Eis with a sneer. He wasn’t my doctor any more. He couldn’t keep his sexual ‘projections’ out of the public eye. I do hate Jews. I do. One of them invented this hateful psychoanalysis, you know. God damn him! and all their interloping, their prowling, their secret-killing. Oh, Christ, to strangle, to torture! Christ! that I could personally have assassinated Sigmund Freud. The Jews cannot live at peace with anyone they can’t put their cancer to. They will raise up the nigger, and teach him power and pride of position, and somehow too they will have to deal with that barbarous voodoo ‘Christianity,’ and they will fail. They will succeed only in making hordes of niggers atheist warriors. They will be too ‘kind’ to deport and dump the niggers back into Africa and make it again the continental monkey-house it was intended to be, as we were too ‘kind.’ We let the cannon be set against our skulls, while we smirked vainly at having unloaded it and made it a phantom with our ‘humanity.’ And there we will be, looking at armed phalanxes of those mumbo-jumbo blackamoors brought over to my green and golden America by fools three hundred years ago. But I will not be of those whining insects of inevitablists who would let this happen. I am pointed to action: TO TREAT EVERY NIGGER AS IF HE WERE A JEW AND EVERY JEW AS IF HE WERE A NIGGER.

“… I now know, Catherine, that you have been hearing me in every letter. I have heard also, in the cold tones of Dr. Eis, of your plans. Be out of the house, then, by Tuesday, since you will not live with me. If you have preserved my letters, leave them. I will enforce. Do not write another check on my account. Do not use my name in any transactions. You must burn our marriage bed. Take everything else you want with you. I beg you not to engage lawyers. Believe me, you would not want the sordid fraction of lucre you might desire after I countenanced you even at the distance of one corner of a courtroom to the other. I would be civil, not, as you might wish, frothing in manner fit to be reinserted at Whitfield. You would see me tearing you to pieces with a little smile. You were ever shy of the public eye, Catherine. You know that. Even the postman. You were made for existing in that drear rodential shade of lichens up in the New Brunswick rocks. As a Quaker girl, you were always hiding your ‘inner light’ under a bushel, weren’t you? Take what you are offered and run, run all the way back to New Brunswick, and take what’s left of your life with your parents, the shade-mongers, the coolish, the tapwater Quakers of the four-room house, where it will be safe to speak of me ever again. The Same [He always signed this way], Peter.”

As I put the last letter back in its envelope, I noticed my friend was asleep, his eyelids gathered together in a great creasing. I felt alarmed, nasty, tired, and most of all, curious. I shook Fleece.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“A man.”

“A real man? Is he out of Whitfield now?”

“I’m not going to tell you. You hummed those hymns, you bastard.”

“I won’t do it again.”

“All right. He lives. And he’s loose. The day I went down to take pictures of the police arresting the Freedom Riders, he was there at the bus terminal. I didn’t know who it was then. Two years ago. A man wearing a big almost sheriff kind of hat ran over and grabbed my camera out of my hands. The strap was around my neck, and he jerked it off, snapped the strap, and hurt my neck. He smashed the camera on the pavement in front of the bus. I was just getting ready to be very indignant, but the man then comes after me , very indignant. So I ran. And he chased me, through the bus terminal and out to the street, yelling at me. I thought, God, for sure, he’s one of our Mississippi lawmen, with that hat and all. But the moment I knew he wasn’t was when he unbuckled his belt as he ran after me and whipped it out , coming for me. There was something too unofficially personal about that And you know what he was saying?”

“What?”

“He was saying ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ while I was saying ‘Why? Why?’ legging it, knowing it was simply between me and him, him being of some odd independent strain of creature. Well, I outran him. I couldn’t see why he was angry, what interest he had. The police whose pictures I was ready to take weren’t being too vicious with the riders when they arrested them. Not yet. They beat them in the jail with rubber hoses later. Ralph, my friend the police station clerk, told me. But later. Other camera people were at the scene. He must have noted me as unofficial, too young or something. Came at me. The man was Peter the letter-writer himself. Whitfield Peter. I didn’t know. I hadn’t even seen the letters yet.

“Two weeks later I did. My teacher in botany was always seeking field trips for our class. She wrote letters to landowners down around the coast, over in the delta, and she wrote to one real estate baron up in Madison County who had a spot advertisement for ‘Canton Harbors’ on television. He wrote back saying he was overjoyed to let students use his property for hunting specimens. He’d seen some very interesting specimens himself on his acreage, had yearned for them to be classified by botanists. Being the leading brain of the class, I was shown the actual letter by the teacher. Written in skinny tall glances in brown ink like the ones you’ve just read.”