Read Online God'll Cut You Down by John Safran - Free Book Online Page B

According to Earnest, over at the museum in Vicksburg, a museum official denies black Union soldiers fought at all! In the Vicksburg National Military Park, another official denies black troops their glory. And Earnest has seen the new park historian dressed in a Confederate uniform, performing a monologue,
real tears
streaming from his eyes as he moans how the South has been treated.
    But worse is that there are blacks who don’t think the Civil War is their history. Idiots, Earnest tells me, who refuse to see that their ancestors weren’t just the slaves but the soldiers who helped free black people and defeat the South.
    White Southerners still trying to win the Civil War. Black people thinking of themselves as helpless figurines in someone’s (or God’s) bigger plan. This, he tells me, is Mississippi.
Vicksburg
    Like historic Jackson, Vicksburg is decaying, ivy slithering over crumbling white walls. I roll the car down steep and lumpy roads. Up against the Mississippi River, the abandoned Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad Station is fronted by six white columns mighty enough to front a plantation mansion, but it’s a beautiful corpse. One red wooden carriage goes nowhere on the track behind it.
    Outside a gas station, a black man is sitting on a red box. He’s the only person I’ve seen since pulling off the highway. Twenty meters after we pass him he rasps phlegm and I can hear it. That’s how quiet Vicksburg is.
    The casinos ended up winning the Siege of Vicksburg. There are five here, and they are the only things new and shiny. We’re one hour early for Jefferson Davis accepting the presidency of the Confederacy. Earnest points me to one of the casinos, a “stationary riverboat” floating in the Mississippi.
    “I’m staying in Vicksburg a couple of days so I can catch up with my girlfriend,” Earnest says as we burrow into the casino. “You should have dinner with us.”
    I ask him how long he’s been with her.
    “Well, I’ve known her thirty years,” he answers, “but only lately been dating her. I’ve been waiting for her to mature. She’s fifty now, but she still thinks I’m too old for her.” Earnest is sixty-nine.
    His girlfriend used to weld in a factory but lost that job, and now rips beaks and claws from chickens.
    “So you’ve never been married?” I ask.
    “No.”
    “No kids?”
    “No. Well, there’s only one that could be, but I don’t know.”
    Like Jim Giles, Earnest is an old man who seems a bit lonely.
    Electronic bleeps and blips and bings dance through the air. The poker machines try to outsparkle the belt buckles squeezing in the Mississippian bellies.
    We stop in front of the Kitty Glitter poker machine. A white kitten is wearing posh earrings.
    “Look at the people!” Earnest urges. “Take a census!”
    This is the most integrated I’ve seen Mississippi. Unlike, well, everywhere, there’s a jolly mingle of black and white. Fat blacks in cowboy hats yabber with fat whites in cowboy hats.
    Earnest isn’t impressed. Considering the demographics of Vicksburg, considering these whites are all from out of town, this room
says something
worthy of our attention.
    I’m confused about what Earnest is getting at. Not least because I don’t know whether he thinks blacks at a casino is a good thing or a bad thing.
    “I rallied against this casino for five years in the
Jackson Advocate
,” Earnest says. “Then I came in because I was writing a story. And I decided to put five dollars in a machine. And I won eighty. And I was hooked.”
    Hooked?
    “So you gamble a lot?” I ask.
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “How much have you lost?”
    “A lot.”
    “Ten thousand dollars?”
    “Oh, more than that.”
    “More than ten thousand dollars?!” I squeak. Jesus, I chose ten thousand because I thought it was so ridiculously high and he’d be able to chuckle,
No, no, don’t be silly, John.
“How much?” I try again. “Fifty thousand dollars?”
    “Oh, more than