The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  Over the course of the fall, he and I, and numerous other Citizen reporters, compiled over twenty-five hundred pages of notes, interviews, phone numbers, hotel and restaurant receipts, all sorts of trivial documents. We could have done Ph.D. dissertations on any of these four men: Thomas John Berryman, Jefferson John Terrell, Bertram Poole, Joseph Dominick Cubbah.

  Lewis was writing a book then too, but he was also being conscientious, even noble, about his city editor responsibilities.

  He’d sit around the Citizen city room nitpicking some fourteen-year-old farmboy’s account of an automobile wreck, then he’d call me at home at twelve midnight, and ask if I’d like to meet him somewhere like Lummie’s Heart of Dixie.

  “Just to kick around some theories I have about Berryman,” he’d always set the hook. “Just for thirty minutes or so, Ochs.”

  More often than not I’d meet him.

  Lummie’s Heart of Dixie is a Citizen-Reporter lunch bar which is returned to the local, or “real,” people after 5 P.M.

  From five o’clock on it’s crawling with failed country music singers who will slide into your booth and give you a sad song for the price of a Sterling beer. By my standards, it’s the best, certainly the cheapest show in town.

  By general Tennessee standards though, Lummie’s is a talking bar.

  Because of my high 6’7” visibility, and my general good-natured laugh, I’m tolerated by the crowd there.

  Lewis Rosten, however, can be a wholly different matter.

  On account of this, we generally tried to commandeer one of the red vinyl booths near the rear exit. It would take us twenty minutes to spread out all our notes and scraps, and they’d cover up every flat space available.

  Only then would we begin the ritualistic struggles over what was going where, in which article.

  This letter is typical of the kind of notes and scraps we brought to decide what to do with. It had suddenly appeared in my mail slot one Monday in late September:

  Dear Mr. Ochs Jones,

  My occupation is customs inspector. I live at Rockaway Beach in the Queens, New York. Recently I read one of your stories about the killer Thomas Berryman in Parade magazine. This was the story that ran here on September 7th.

  Well, to get to the pernt. At the end of July, I was sent Diner’s Club chits for four dinners at the Tale of the Fox restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee. But I had never been to Tennessee, and sure enough, when I check my wallet, no Diner’s Card, and a few others missing too.

  The forged tabs were forged J.P. Golly, myself, and it wasn’t until this month that they were traced to Thomas Berryman. Included on each tab was a listing of the exact meals which might be of interest to your files.

  1 Vodka Gimlet

  1 Sirloin

  1 Black coffee

  I even started to picture this character, this elegant pickpocket, settling down to these cute little dinners. On yours truly!

  Anyways, I don’t know what this information is worth to you, but I don’t think I should be the one to pay for the dinners.

  John Patrick Golly

  GS-11

  The funny (peculiar) thing was that J.P. Golly had already been recompensed for his losses by Diner’s Club. The Citizen-Reporter wasn’t about to pay him, of course, but we checked with Diner’s anyway.

  Rosten and I checked everything that could humanly be checked.

  Moses Reed had written an editorial about Jimmie Horn the day after Horn’s election in 1970. An immediate public opinion poll was taken on the piece’s merits, and the side and rear windows of Reed’s Country Squire were subsequently broken by men and boys with Louisville Sluggers.

  The editorial had begun:

  IN HIS CHILDHOOD PHOTOGRAPHS, JIMMIE LEE HORN, A SQUARE-JAWED CASSIUS CLAY PHYSICAL TYPE, LOOKED LIKE A LEADER, AN OBVIOUS, NATURAL-BORN LEADER.

  SO TOO, HORN’S EARLY WORK IN THE NASHVILLE SCHOOL SYSTEM BORE OUT THIS FACT.

  HAD THIS CITY, THEREFORE, HAD THE FORESIGHT TO SELECT HIM FROM AMONG THE CHILDREN GROWING UP AT THAT TIME IN OUR SHANTYTOWN DISTRICT, HAD THIS CITY PUT HORN THROUGH TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF FORMAL SCHOOLING (INCLUDING SEVEN YEARS OF IVY SCHOOLING); HAD THIS CITY GIVEN HIM THE HARDBOUND EDITION OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES WHICH HE BOUGHT FOR HIMSELF UPON HIS VALEDICTORY AT PEARL HIGH SCHOOL; HAD THIS CITY GROOMED THIS OBVIOUSLY SPECIAL NATURAL RESOURCE, AS IF IT WAS DESTINED TO BECOME SOMETHING OTHER THAN A BUS STATION REDCAP–

  –HAD WE FINE CITIZENS OF NASHVILLE DONE ALL, OR INDEED ANY OF THESE THINGS–THEN, WE WOULD HAVE SOME WAY OF UNDERSTANDING WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE THIS WEEK.

  BUT AS WE DID NONE OF THESE THINGS FOR JIMMIE LEE HORN, SINCE WE IN FACT CONSPIRED TO RETARD HIS DEVELOPMENT, WE ARE A CITY IN SHOCK TODAY. WE ARE IN SHOCK, AND MANY OF US ARE IN SHAMEFUL AWE AT THE WAY JIMMIE HORN HAS COME UP OUT OF SHANTYTOWN, AND BECOME OUR MAYOR, AS WELL AS EVERYTHING ELSE HE IS TODAY …

  I personally got to know Horn and his family fairly well after his election in ’70.

  Since that may sound like false modesty coming from a man who won prizes writing about him, I should say that Horn had the most elaborate set of defenses I’ve ever seen any man build around himself.

  Not the least of these defenses was a quick, joking manner that had led some other reporters to create a media myth that Horn was just a “happy-go-lucky nigger.”

  I don’t believe Horn was a happy man at all. In fact, that’s one thing I’m fairly certain of. He was a driven man. He had conditioned himself to be a successful black leader and a spokesman. That was his life. With the exception of a few unguarded moments (and those usually had an ulterior purpose), I never saw what I would characterize as the private man in Jimmie Horn.

  Over the years though, I built up a collection of tapes on the public man: on Horn the thinker, the writer, the bull-thrower.

  Jimmie Horn Speaking on Jim Crow:

  “Just after Vietnam got important, in 1967, my youngest brother’s best friend–he was a veteran, and also an Esso gas-pump jockey–was fished out of the Cumberland River with his testicles in the pockets of his bluejeans.

  “You see, he’d been gossip-associated with a white woman. More than that, he’d been loving her regularly.

  “So now, we come to the middle 1970s. And now, barring some unforeseen and unlikely event, the pundits say I could become one of Tennessee’s senators. Just like it was Massachusetts down here.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if anything has changed quite like that.

  “Jim Crow may be gone, technically, but he’s not forgotten.”

  On Beulahland:

  “Believe it or not, I have always embraced the southern values of honor, hospitality, and graciousness.

  “I like the way things are up-front down here, much better than I liked it up North.

  “A sheriff in Jackson City says, ‘The only thing I like better than arrestin’ niggers is catchin’ a big seven-pound bass.’ I like that. I like knowing who is they and who is we.”

  On James Earl Ray:

  “The damndest pity I know of.

  “The entire Memphis court proceedings, following one of the most spectacular and heinous crimes of the century, King’s murder in cold blood, took one hundred and forty-four minutes … After a little more than three hours, during which no formal legal procedures took place, it was over. There was no cross-examination of James Earl Ray/Galt/St. Vincent Galt/Bridgeman/Sneyd, or anyone else for that matter. It was history as the mosquito bite, the blink of an eye.

  “Then, three years ago, after throwing my weight around in some ways I don’t care to remember, I got to visit Ray at Bruskey State Prison.

  “Ray was wearing a bluejean jacket and work shirt, and he was dusting leaves along a sidewalk. He seemed to me to have the natural look of a groundskeeper.

  “We sat down on a front yard bench and for some unknown reason he offered me a cigarette. ‘You want to know how I did it, too,’ he said.

  “No, I told him. I’d like to know who did it.
>
  “Ray smiled and lighted a second cigarette for himself–one already being in his mouth. He puffed on two cigarettes for the next five minutes or so, staring straight at the ground. He said absolutely not one more word. I think he was playing with me.

  “For the first time, and I don’t know exactly why, I believed that he’d actually done it. I believed that he’d done it for his own personal satisfaction, and I felt he was proud of what he’d done.

  “Then recently they moved him to Nashville of all places. He’s appealing again. Now nobody believes he did it again.”

  On a Magazine Article Claiming He’d Read Amy Vanderbilt to His Wife:

  “This is true. Last night, in fact, Maureen and I discussed a lesson in etiquette for upwardly mobile black people.

  “In the lesson, two up-and-coming black painters, both foremen, are working on a tall building and one of them falls. ‘Hey, now, don’t fall,’ his friend says. ‘I can’t help it, I already fell,’ the falling man answers. ‘Well, you’re goan fall right on a white lady down there,’ the friend comes right back. And that falling man stops falling, and returns to the roof.

  “That is etiquette for black people. Just as I read it in Miss Vanderbilt’s fine book.”

  On Being Shot:

  “I read that Dr. King thought about it a lot. For him, it seemed to be a means of guaranteeing his legacy. I doubt he looked forward to it, though, as some have written.

  “I saw James Meredith get shot in person. Nineteen sixty-six, in Hernando, Mississippi. He was shot in the stomach. He had on a striped short-sleeved shirt and it literally turned red down the front. Meredith crawled to the side of the road on his hands and knees before anyone could help him. It wasn’t inspiring for me to watch.

  “I’m more fatalistic about it now though. I try to deal with it openly, even within my family. I can joke about it going into some big rally outside of Nashville or out of state. In Nashville itself, I feel pretty safe.”

  On Fear:

  “Fear is the one thing that has kept the blackman down so long in the South.

  “My grandmother used to tell us a story–and she was a strict, card-carrying Baptist lady who didn’t exaggerate, much less lie–she said that in plantation days, the people were so terrified of whites that they put their heads in cooking pots or the wood stove before they would dare to pray out loud.

  “I remember too, there was always this phrase around when I was growing up–‘What if the white people find out?’

  “And that’s why, above all, a black leader cannot show fear… Of course I’m a lot braver with my thirty-seven-year-old body than I was with the one I had when I was twenty-five or so. (Laughs.) You know me, Ochs.”

  But I didn’t really know him. Not really.

  Nashville, June 25

  Marblehead Horn, a sentimental small businessman (greengrocer), had cultivated four, proud, jungle-thick inches of hair directly over his son’s skull. He cared for it like a private gardener for thirteen years, then gave his young son the choice of whether or not to keep it. Jimmie Horn kept it.

  This haircut wasn’t the modern, natural look, but an old-time style from the early days of Reconstruction Nashville. From the unpromised land days just before Tennessee passed the very first of the Jim Crow laws. It was near the shape of a kidney bean; but singular-looking; and somewhat impressive on Jimmie.

  People generally liked “the burr,” as it was called. I did.

  One eastern political consultant named Santo Massimino didn’t like it at all. He told Jimmie it would lose him all of eastern Tennessee, and be was right. He asked him to get it barbered before he started his campaign for the United States Senate. He assured the mayor that he knew how hard it would be for him, and Jimmie Horn assured him that he didn’t know any such thing.

  Barber Robinson was cute in a bizarre way. Like an old, old blackbird, close up, with its little gray-black crew cut.

  He played his razor strap with an ancient but gleaming straight razor. He rocked the spindly knees lost somewhere in his baggy trousers. Gummed his old yellowbone teeth over and over. “Yesss indeedee,” he finally spoke. “My main baby is back in Nigeria.”

  Jimmie Horn smiled a crooked smile and slapped the old-timer’s butt as they passed like familiar dancing partners in midshop. “Your baby is getting old before his time.” The mayor affected another friendly grin. “I have gray hair … uh,” he was setting up a punch line or sad truth, “on my balls.”

  The old man roared and tossed his little head back as an afterthought. “If you be old, Jimmie Horn, I mus’ be daid.”

  He hustled over to his money drawer, and brought back shiny black-handled scissors to trim the mayor’s hair. He smiled with his tiny black-bird’s head low to the red leather of the barber’s chair. “Regular trim?”

  Horn shook the burr in reply. He fluttered his lips. He coughed into his fist. “Have you ever heard,” he asked the old man, “of a political consultant?”

  Barber Robinson gave the question some thought. “Nuh, I haven’t,” he finally concluded.

  Rarely looking up, preferring to watch ambitious weevils crawl walls in a lidded mayonnaise jar, the mayor told his barber about Santo Massimino’s request.

  When the “bulljive” was completed, Horn watched the barber shuffle away to sit in a straight-backed chair by the door. He looked out to the street. He looked over the backs of two autographed photos of Horn on display in his front window. Over the back of an old Vitalis poster. Over a new Afro-sheen one. And a new red, white, and blue basketball reputedly autographed by the Memphis Tams.

  The old man relit a Camel stub off his countertop and smoked as if it was stinging him.

  Potbellied little boys were playing stickball past his face out the door. It was buggy summer. Jimmie Horn thought that the feel of the room was like a veterans’ hospital.

  Rubbing his palm back and forth over his short peppercorn hair, the old man said, very softly, “Shee-it.” Then, flicking his butt to the middle of the dirt sidewalk, he said, “Fuck me in the rear end.”

  Still ignoring the mayor, shaking to the naked eye, the old barber stood rigidbacked and began patting talcum powder up and down his skinny, knobbed arms. He started another Camel.

  Then quickly saved it, back on the counter by the Morobine. He carefully turned on the Zenith and the protruding orange tubes blinked, blinked, then caught.

  He swiped at a pin-striped bib and faced the mayor with a fierce, smothering look about his eyes. With redness and tears. “Shee-it in my pants,” he said.

  Jimmie Horn nodded. Then he looked straight ahead at the chalky mirror.

  He saw the burr. The familiar, friendly burr. Not a kidney bean. Not a vote obstructor.

  He recalled photographs featuring the burr. Reflections of it. Its shadow at night: his furry hat.

  Like some careless hedgecutter, the old barber came head and shoulders into the mirror and lopped a chunk off the tall, revered pompadour. “Stand out like a diamon’ in a goat’s ass,” was the comment.

  Horn accepted his punishment without flinching. Without words. Stoical as Aurelius, whom he admired when he was tired or sleepy, he watched his own stone-face in the mirror.

  “No way,” the barber sang an old tired-voiced tune, “no way you was gonna lose election, baby. Hundred percent black people’s cooperation.” He yanked a strip of hair away that left Jimmie Horn nearly bald in one spot.

  With that the mayor brought both his dark eyes to the right, to Robinson’s eyes. “Be careful,” he warned in his soft, firm voice. “You are Jimmie Horn’s barber. You pay attention to your work.”

  The old barber took his message and there was a brief silence.

  “Come brand new into this town,” he resumed his speech with a new cutting angle. “Massomino or which-what. Says hop to Jimmie Horn. And Jimmie Horn hop. He hop right exactly to.”

  “I have my reasons.” Horn finally found himself at the point of apologies. “You don’t get to see eve
rything that goes on … uh … It’s complicated. Just cut my hair, please, Robbie.”

  The old man slashed down on one fuzzy sideburn. Then he got the other one. “What’re you doin’ to us baby?” he started crying. “I don’t like this. Understand it…”

  Jimmie Horn drifted into a Sunoco parking lot with a popped-up Spaulding outside in the street. Into the alleys of an urban renewal project. He drifted in his own sports memories. Drifted in memories of solemn old men and women giving him dreamy, semi-lucid talkings-to. Asking him if he knew that he was smart enough to go off to Tennessee Agricultual Industrial one day?

  The old man started in with his sharp straight razor. “You know they gonna kill Henry Aaron yet. You know that,” he said. “I dream that.”

  “You know I’m just your dumb baby,” Jimmie Horn answered with his eyes closed. Feeling hot lather on his throat, lots of hot lather. “No common sense,” he smiled, teeth whiter than the shaving cream.

  “Don’t you smile at me like that,” the old man was strong on top of his blade. “I know that one other dumb baby.” Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. “He smiled. Played his piano so pretty he got his fingers broke in a car hood. And that pretty Carma. She smiled too. Dumb happy baby. Shot her with women’s stockings over their heads.” Scrape. Scrape.

  Scrrrr-ape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. “Finished.”

  Jimmie Horn opened his eyes and took a good look at himself in the mirror. Something in his mind said frown, but he didn’t.

  “This is good,” he patted the shrunken head. “You’ve done it.” He grinned so convincingly that the old man took pleasure. “Saved me.”

  But Jimmie Horn was singing a different tune to himself. Like a diamond in a goat’s ass, he repeated. You are exactly right, old wise man.

  Horn drove the city’s Oldsmobile back toward downtown Nashville. He followed Church Street to 6th, then switched over to West End Avenue. It was 8:15 on the clock outside Morrison’s Cafeteria and he still had some work to do. It was something he had little stomach for, but it had to be done anyway.