Read Online I Am Abraham by Jerome Charyn - Free Book Online

Congress and ruled over us as “King Andrew.” That heartless son of a bitch annihilated more Injuns than any other man in America and herded all the rest into the Territories—they were no more than cattle to King Andrew. So were his horde of little people —the Democrats—who helped him win. He beckoned them into the White House in their buckskin drawers.
    I was a Whig, like the luminaries of the town. We despised anything to do with the dictator, yet I still had a strange affinity with him. He was a heart smasher who went about in the finest silk shirts and could draw crowds like a magnet in an electrical storm. And I knew I couldn’t win without that magnetism. So I campaigned in a silk shirt, like Andy Jackson—and Lord Byron. Jack Armstrong and his Clary’s Grove Boys were Democrats, but they decided to back their old captain. I ran across the county rubbing shoulders and shaking hands, with the Boys as my welcoming committee. Justice Green was my manager.
    “Lincoln,” he said, “whatever stand you take, there’ll always be someone to take the opposite side. Best be neutral. That’s politics.”
    “But it’s a coward’s way,” I said.
    “Lincoln, it’s called electioneering. You can palaver all you want once you’re in the Statehouse. But until you get to Vandalia, you electioneer.”
    So I marched around in the briar patches and was introduced as Captain Lincoln of the late Black Hawk War in Byron’s silk shirt with an open collar. I didn’t talk about voting privileges for the female population of Sangamon County. I didn’t mention those despots and dictators, the Democrats. I didn’t utter a word about education. I told tall tales, and the farmers liked them filled with smut. They couldn’t get enough of Marie Antoinette’s chamber pot or George Washington’s privy. And I borrowed some barnyard fables from Æsop, but instead of the Lion and the four Bulls, I had a Queen Lion.
    “Boys,” I said, “the four Bulls had their designs on this Queen. They meant to poke her until she was silly.”
    The farmers guffawed and slapped their thighs. But one of the farmers was a bit more perspicacious than the others.
    “Captain Lincoln, a Lioness is still a Lion.”
    “Sir,” I said, “the four Bulls couldn’t have subdued her singly. Their plan of battle was to steal upon the Lioness, and one would mount her while the others watched. But they’d never met a Lioness with a bread basket between her legs. She swallowed the four Bulls inside her royal quim.”
    That’s how I proceeded until I didn’t have enough spittle to recite another tall tale. But I won a seat in the Legislature, with the second-highest score in Sangamon County. We had a torchlight parade. Justice Green led the parade with a cutlass that he tossed into the air like a baton. Children flew kites in my honor and wore devil masks; the kites glowed in the dark and swirled over the treetops like gigantic bats. The blacksmith’s wife danced with me. Rutledge near burned my scalp with his torch. “Hooray for Lincoln, hooray!” The luminaries slapped my back while they assessed my worth in the Legislature. Fizzle-sticks skated over my eyes. I was feeling as blue as a posthumous child. Seems like every soul in the county was there save one. And then she marched out of her father’s tavern. Her eyes had a terrible flicker in that flare of light. Some dark dream had invaded Annie Rutledge. For a moment I thought she had run off the track. But that darkness fled. And she was gentle Ann, who had nursed me through many an illness while I boarded at her father’s tavern.
    I should have been ashamed, because I had lewd thoughts about Ann when I was slugging for votes—I’d endowed the Lioness in my fables with Ann’s own bodice and quim. I wasn’t ashamed at all. It was dreaming of her quim that drove me from campfire to campfire and made me feel palpable in my pantaloons.
    “Did you miss me, Abraham?”
    “ Yes ,” I howled