cruising down this boulevard: a two-ton Jeep propelled at forty miles per hour down a four-lane road, past a hock shop named the Gospel of Pawn, past a payday lender with a neon sign that blinks: GET FAST CASH TODAY, BECAUSE YOU COULD DIE TOMORROW. He’s surprised by the glut of storefronts with out-of-business signs, by abandoned service stations stripped of color. Andre searches for a bank, a broker, an insurer. Instead, he spots a law office whose shingle claims expertise in personal injury, paternity testing, Social Security disability, and bankruptcy protection. The stoplight turns green, and Andre gently feeds the Jeep gas.
A billboard displays an acne-scarred white man, a physically unattractive—no, downright ugly—school board candidate. His slogan, written in gold biblical font, is “One Nation Under God. Teaching Tradition.” Andre assumes billboards around here are cheap, because most small-town candidates can’t afford a full billboard. Small-town candidates might run their entire campaign on less than one thousand dollars. Two years of saving a few bucks from each paycheck.
One block later, beside a dollar store, a pictureless billboard displays the name ARETHA MERRIWEATHER, her slogan “Making schools work for our children.” At once, Andre draws two conclusions. First, Aretha Merriweather is black. Second, thirteen weeks from now, when the polls close, Aretha will lose in a landslide. She’s wise to withhold her picture. White voters in racially polarized communities will take one look at her skin and immediately support her opponent. If Andre managed her campaign, the billboard would feature a stock photo of a young white mother, arms wrapped around an adorable blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. But where Aretha Merriweather has erred is in using her real name. Has anyone ever met a white woman named Aretha? Andre taps his thumb to each fingertip, counting the number of Arethas he’s ever known: three in sum, all black, not including Her Majesty, the Queen of Soul. But just as fatal as using her real name, her slogan, with the italicized our, invokes the type of racial pandering detested by most whites. Such slogans may play well in Baltimore or Detroit, communities where a majority-black electorate will always support the black candidate. But African Americans make up 6 percent of Carthage County’s total population, 3 percent of registered voters. So, Aretha Merriweather: go on ahead, sister, make these racial appeals, but be sure to have a concession speech ready on election night.
The next block, he pulls beside a strip mall anchored by a hardware store. A dozen men, each dressed in tattered jeans and a dirty T-shirt, sit astride the curb awaiting work. He steers the Jeep toward an empty corner, a tree-shaded space beside a newspaper box. Today’s headline: SCHOOL WON’T LET BIG GIRL SWING. The front-page picture, above the fold, features a fifteen-year-old girl, maybe three hundred pounds, in her ill-fitting marching-band uniform, trombone in hand, sour expression across her face. Apparently, the school board has affirmed the principal’s decision to expel the girl from the marching band. Some parents complained that her shape set a bad example, says the pull quote. It was increasingly difficult to meet her special needs.
Andre has one hour to buy clothes, but first, he visits the liquor store, which has the air of an interrogation room, one hundred square feet divided by glass two inches thick. Behind the spotty glass, on full display, sit rows of cheap high-proof spirits. Andre waits behind four wrinkled women, each with a violet bob and uneven bangs. The first lady in line, clutching a sheet of stationery, reads aloud a set of six numbers, then stops to watch the cashier transform digits into one lottery ticket. The process repeats, slowly, number by number, ticket by ticket, with no end in sight.
A decent rail gin. That’s all he wants. Something to help him sleep. Can’t he cut ahead in line? His mother, cursed too by insomnia, enjoyed White Russians to help her sleep, and Andre still fondly remembers those late nights when mother and son would watch British wildlife documentaries till sunup. Hector, who once slept through a hurricane, claims those nights are fiction. If anyone ever asked Hector, he’d say their mother was a selfish woman, a narcissistic eccentric who spent each night away from her sons: naked in her latest lover’s bed, stoned with her bohemian friends in some ratty underground club, or, more likely than not, in jail, prison, or the DC psychiatric hospital.
* * *
In the attic, set atop an easel, rests a poster-sized sample