novel form of entertainment.
?These films don?t recreate the way it feels. They create false feelings.
?The news clips of Jimmie?s shooting, for example. They didn?t recreate any truth for me. There was nothing,
about the actual scene. In reality it was a fucking disgrace.
?On the other hand, I can remember the way TV portrayed the death of Lyndon Johnson.
?That was sad. That had dignity. It gave you a feeling for what had occurred. For the way his people may have felt.
?Maybe it?s because I have a touchstone in my experience for deaths in the family, but not for wholesale shootouts.
?Maybe these TV shootouts will begin to pass for touchstones. That?s what I?m afraid of sometimes.?
The rally at the Fair Farmer?s Market was calculated to cookie-cutter black voters out of the large, doughy black bread of Tennessee. It was a carbon copy of rallies Santo Massimino had held in municipal parking lots in Newark, and in trucking yards in Roxbury, Mass.
By two-thirty, adventuresome families had lined up across the Better Crust bakery and the jewelry and dime store rooftops. Little flying dresses were playing tag on one roof. What good was it to come, they seemed to have all decided, and not see Jimmie Horn in Technicolor.
Rows (there were actually small lines) of school-age boys boosted one another up on greasy tractor trailers, and even onto the buckling Dr Pepper and Wrigley?s advertising billboards.
It was hectic and exciting, but also pretty in a democratic way.
The market lies five hundred feet beneath Snake Hill, and from the hill?s crest it?s said by local people to look like a
Coming down off the hill, pushing his way through waist-high grass, stumbling on hidden rocks?kicking them with his boot heel?Bert Poole had the strange feeling that he was walking in a foreign country. Someplace like Jamaica or Brazil.
Poole?s attention kept drifting away from the podium.
He looked down on families of ten and twelve people?sharecropper antiques?shuffling across a nearby farmer?s field. Some of the children trampled tomatoes. Danced on them. Threw them back and forth like sponge balls.
Poole looked back to the dais. It was up on a level with the Commercial Southern bank roof, and up over the people standing on the bank roof was the white eye of the hottest sun of the summer.
A small man with a plump, pink head stood at the podium microphone with his thumbs in his belt like a baseball manager.
?Mrs. Betty Lou Rice is eighty-two years young,? he announced over the happy background of carnival noise. ?This week. This week of July fourth. She has walked. She has walked over one hundred miles. To come and see her young prince. That is Jimmie Horn.?
?As a younger woman, Mrs. Rice just told me, she did the same thing ? To meet Mister Huey Long of Louisiana.?
White-shirted managers of the Plaza stores were lined up to give the old black woman gifts like a pair of black-tie grandmother shoes. She didn?t look as if she knew exactly where she was, but wherever it was, it was swell, and worth a big grin. ?Jim-mah Hone? was the only thing she ever said.
The four Cadillacs seemed to float into the sea of hands. The sun made stars and circles off the chrome, and the steel guard tires made a sound like a sticky tape being pulled up off linoleum.
Young Massimino and Potty Lynch trooped man-of-the-people style in front of Horn?s car. They waved and smiled as though everyone in town knew them.
Joe Cubbah was last in one line of three husky troopers flanking the limousines. He searched the crowd for Berryman, holding the limousine door handle so he wouldn?t lose track of the car.
Ten-year-old Keesha, and teenager Mark Horn, were laughing and dangling out the windows of the car ahead of their parents. The lead car carried Horn?s own mother and father.
Smiling black faces and arms were disappearing inside the rear windows, ready to shake hands with any of them, knowing that if they succeeded, they would later claim it had been Jimmie.
Naturally enough, Jimmie Horn was happiest and at his best among predominantly black crowds. He felt he could loosen up and show more of himself?be a person instead of a phenomenon.
Black people, especially country folks, liked to touch Horn to make sure he was real.
They wanted him to touch them too, especially their children, and tell them they were going to be doctors or lawyers or teachers. Sometimes when Horn bent and spoke to a child specially dressed to meet him, the child?s mother or grandmother would start to cry.
But it was too noisy for Horn to be heard that afternoon in the Farmer?s Market. Smiling black faces mouthed complicated-looking sentences at him, but he just shook their hands and held their hands, and ran his big hands through the fluffy hair of their children.
When he let go of one smiling, hollering boy he found the boy had left him a photograph.
It was of a black family of eighteen or twenty members all dressed in suits and organdy dresses and men?s and women?s felt hats. They were all posed with a cantankerous-looking Marblehead Horn, standing in front of the old man?s run-down grocery.
