Offenders were plentiful what with the shambles in the land even sixty years after the Rebellion. It was against the law for whites and coloreds to pursue their felonious endeavors as the Confederacy struggled to recover the civilization of its past. Or so politicians and merchants throughout Alabama had explained it to P. W. Anderson. So there was a ready supply, a surplus even, of those who could be arrested and convicted and imprisoned by the state of Alabama. The ones that the Cotton State did not use as cheap labor on its public works projects were leased out to private contractors. From the late 1800s until the present, the system fortunes had to be reclaimed or made in the private sector, and had been very beneficial in the rebuilding of the great state of Alabama.
Kimbrough Company Works was one such contractor. The accounting and the legal departments had expressed concerns that cotton, the golden goose, was laying its last batch of eggs. Suspicions were also expressed that the company representatives on the scene in Acorn, given their self-interests, might not be as forthcoming as they might be. P. W. Anderson, Management Consultant, from the home headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, was on a fact-finding visit. There were indications that the system was ending its cycle of sustained profitability. P. W. Anderson was Kimbrough Company Works man in the field.
Anderson looked at the angel of the south in the bright yellow dress with the stenographer’s pad on her knee and wondered—well, wondered how forthcoming she would be to direct questions about her job security, and the lengths she would go to ensure it.
He explained he realized it was Sunday morning and she had been asked at the last minute to come in to take his dictation. It needed to go out in tomorrow’s mail. He also was to leave on the morning train, but he was not going directly back home. He had a side trip of a personal nature.
Miss Holden, he had been told, was her name.
“Eveline,” she said, “or Evy.”
“Evy then,” he said.
“Ready when you are,” she said.
He smiled. He began.
“All that I am about to dictate to you is strictly for the eyes of our corporate president in Hartford and officers of the board there.” He paused, looking at her.
She, with her pencil poised, understood.
“People’s positions, their jobs are on the line. Nothing I say must be repeated.”
She nodded.
He smiled and nodded.
“CONFIDENTIAL.”
She began writing, her eyes on him but her pencil making curlicue marks on the pad on her crossed knee.
“FROM: P. W. Anderson to the home office, Hartford Connecticut, etc.,” he said.
She waited, ready to continue.
He complimented her on her perfume.
She thanked him.
He wondered how she stood this heat, and asked her.
She was used to it she guessed.
Yes, he could see how fresh and cool she looked.
He lit a cigarette with his gold lighter.
Did she like her job?
Yes, she did.
Did her husband mind her working?
She wasn’t married.
No.
He was sure she would have been.
She showed him her bare ring finger. Front and back.
He made a joke about the common sense of the young men in Acorn.
She laughed and shrugged. She waited, her pencil poised.
He imagined the heat was much more bearable in the evening with a cool drink.
It was, she concurred.
He stood and turned to look out of the window in order to refocus his concentration.
From the second-floor window, he looked across to three old men on a shaded park bench in the town square. They wore no jackets and the collars of their white shirts were unbuttoned, they wore dark trousers and laced shoes, there were two canes between them. They were city men, maybe retired city fathers. Not farmers. They sat as if chewing their cuds, but otherwise were as inanimate as the Confederate flag that hung limp in the breezeless heat adjacent to the nearly two stories-high bronze confederate soldier in broadbrim hat, canteen at one hip, bayonet at the other, bed roll over his shoulder and across his body, his rifle held angled up from his waist, stationary in a forward stride atop the Greek-styled plinth facing north up Nobel street. It was a memorial to the vanquished Grand Army of the Republic, glorifying a futile pursuit. He had seen its like in nearly every sleepy hamlet or busting burg he had visited or passed through from his beginning six days ago at the capitol on his journey’s end in Acorn.
Others of Acorn’s residents made their way about the slow motion business of going to church.
He asked Evy if she minded if he took off his suit coat. They didn’t have this sort of heat or humidity in Hartford.
She pleasantly did not object. He was the boss. She watched him as he did and hung it over the back of what normally was her boss’s, Mister Pittsford’s chair. He turned back to the window.
He prided himself on his observational skills and fact-gathering techniques and being able to order and put them in logical sequence without the use of written notes. His dictation to her briefly and concisely recalled his observations and conclusions from his arrival in the Heart of Dixie, detailing the politicians and farm and factory owners he had met and their council and concerns.
He had recapped his journey to the point of his reaching the convict camp in Acorn yesterday.
When he looked back her pad now rested on her left knee. It had been on her right.
Was he going too fast for her?
No. No. She was fine.
He smiled. They were almost done, he reassured her.
She waited.
He hoped that it didn’t embarrass her but he was pleasantly surprised at how well they were—getting along—and how thoroughly professional she was. First rate. As good as any of the girls from the secretarial pool in the home office, many of whom had gone to the finest clerical schools in the north and east.
(Had that been a blush?)
Did she get a chance to travel much?
She didn’t.
She should. He found traveling really uplifting. The places you saw, the things you learned—people you met.
He smiled.
She returned it.
Where were they? Oh, yes. He apologized for the unpleasant nature of the details and opinions he was about to express.
He summarized that the conditions in the work camp were deplorable. They were below even the minimal standards that passed muster in this forsaken region.
He gestured to Evy to indicate, “Present company is excepted.” Her head was down and she did not respond.
“There is a camp supervisory guard in particular who encapsulates the vices and what virtues there might exist here. His name does not matter. As to his manner, he typifies in mentality and civility an individual as lowbred as any under my command during my time in the service with the 1st Division in France in the Great War.
“I offer a direct quotation: ‘A whipped dog is an obedient dog.’
“The supervisor’s defense of his use of corporal punishment was reasoned and spirited. I have my suspicions, given my extensive military experience with this grade of southern soldier, that his argument to justify his prescription of floggings as a remedy for their transgressions had less to do with work-related discipline than with particular quirks of his inbred character.
“In summary, it is his argument that these workers, after being released from his supervision, are more likely to respect the law than when they came to him. There is no empirical data to substantiate that.
“As a sidebar, it was alleged by other guards that this individual engaged several of those in his charge in unauthorized work to improve the property that he rents from the Corporation, including the digging and construction of a privy. I suspect that this practice is also fairly widespread among guards, although I only have anecdotal evidence.
“Paragraph. The above has led me to four conclusions.
“Paragraph. First, throughout the state there is a single voice singing a single note: the white man must control the colored man because the white man is superior to the colored man.”
Three stragglers, a lean countrywoman and her two scrawny daughters in cheap gingham dresses, hurried up the street toward the church.
“Conclusions. One. The agrarian south rushed headlong into a war with the industrial north and lost. This fact is lost on the vast majority of the population here. It is now trying to stumble backward toward some foggy memory of its antebellum nobility— that last word in quotes,” he told her.
“Paragraph. Conclusion two,” he continued. “On the face of it, they are right in their assessment of the inferiority of their Negroes—those last two words also in quotation marks. This paternalistic belief by whites, top to bottom on the chain of command, so entangles them in trying to keep their Negroes down, that they have fallen into a pit with them.
“Paragraph. Conclusion three. They are so ignorant in their half-wit worship of a soil-based economy that Alabamians are incapable of looking beyond the soon ending boom in cotton. This generation is not capable of leading Alabama into the next phase of profitability that Kimbrough Works is embarking upon. Therefore they are a burden. We will have to bring down our own people to manage things. The manner in which the natives here are involved should for the most part be limited to controlling the Negroes.”
He stopped. A shaggy brown dog was trailing two young boys, each with a bottle of Coca Cola. The old men were still sitting on the bench.
He turned to her. It was to give him time to look at her and for her to look at him.
“Evy, let me ask you a question. Not as a very pretty young woman—but as—a girl of Alabama. If you don’t have an answer just say so. I certainly won’t think less of you.”
He got a cigarette from his pack and lighted it, intending to give her time to consider his question and formulate an answer.
He sighed as if he wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “What do you think of a people who from the topmost to the lowest down lack the foresight to put useless traditions behind them?”
He smiled and let the smoke curl from his mouth. “Remember this is all confidential, just between the two of us.”
“I think they’re fucked,” she said. She flipped the spiral-bound cover of her notepad shut. “Just like you’re planning to fuck me, you Yankee son of a bitch.”
He was not sure if the twitch at the corners of her bee-stung lips was a smile or a feisty grimace.
He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray with the Kimbrough Works symbol under glass in its center.
“So now . . .” he said.