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Authors: Brian Kimberling
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turned first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan at a campfire meeting of Southern veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee.
If it was chilling for Dart and Loretta to find themselves surrounded by shadowy neighbors with malevolent intent, at least they could flee back home. It was and is terrifying to me to read about this man at length and reflect or suspect or somehow even know that he is family to me: that if we were to meet, I would understand him—not agree with him, of course, but know him instinctively as I know my own father, my brother, or my uncle Dart.
In some sense he would be easier to understand if he were merely monstrous: as a slave trader, commanding officer at the massacre of two hundred black Union troops in 1864, and Klan founder, he is that. But he is also celebrated throughout the South as a kind of homegrown Odysseus or Robin Hood. On one occasion he ordered his men to lay logs over wagon axles and march them in silhouette over a hill within view of Yankee scouts for several hours. The Union commander surrendered without a fight, believing himself outmanned and outgunned—and was dismayed to learn that Forrest had in fact only a quarter of his own troop strength.
Forrest himself was acquitted of that earlier massacre, though his men were not. He disbanded the Klan after six years, saying it had become a vehicle of personal vengeance. It was revived later by others.
There is no satisfying line through his life: he oscillated wildly between honor and perfidy. It is easy, even conventional, to admire the wisdom that circumscribed the actions of someone like Abraham Lincoln; it is easy to deplore the nature of someone like Sherman, whose appetite for devastation grew as it fed upon the South. Forrest remains unthinkable; the more I know of him the less I understand.
He was famously subliterate and temperamental (though smarter and calmer than his West Point–trained opponents)and I find, even now, that I wake at times in the small hours with some odd and irrelevant phrase attributed to him ringing in my head.
I done tole you twict already goddammit no!
He speaks in a voice I have never heard in my waking life, and I imagine it is a voice not unlike my own.
Loretta was in the house when Dart returned and I was on the front porch holding that .38 just to see if I could get used to it. I suppose she didn’t hear him, because she didn’t join us. He explained that he had been to see the judge.
“What did you say?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. “Come on,” he said. “Let me show you how to use that.”
He took me out to shoot tin cans, not turtles. I sold the gun to a pawn shop a week later, but I did enjoy that afternoon.
“Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it,” he said.
I was hopeless, and hit about one in five. He shot left-handed and didn’t miss.
“You gonna bury that sign?” I said.
“Done that already.”
“What exactly did you tell them?”
“First they wanted to know if I was affiliated and I said I was not. Then they asked if I would like to be affiliated and I said I would not. They asked me to clarify my views on certain subjects and I told them to mind their own business.”
“They thought you had made your views pretty plain.”
“Only Yankees have
views
. Texans aren’t that self-righteous.”
There was no point arguing a proposition like that with Dart.
“Well, what did you say to the judge?” I asked.
“I promised him fried songbird,” he said.
“At least tell me what you said,” I insisted.
“I clarified my views like they asked. I said nothing but nothing matters to me except my family.”
I thought he was bound to miss the next shot under the influence of all that sincerity, but the last tin can proved me wrong.
“Set up some more,” he said.
IV
No Offense
Strip search, jumpsuit, interrogation: I got through all that okay. I got deloused. They gave me a private cell. All the cells opened onto a metal platform with stairs down to a huge living
If it was chilling for Dart and Loretta to find themselves surrounded by shadowy neighbors with malevolent intent, at least they could flee back home. It was and is terrifying to me to read about this man at length and reflect or suspect or somehow even know that he is family to me: that if we were to meet, I would understand him—not agree with him, of course, but know him instinctively as I know my own father, my brother, or my uncle Dart.
In some sense he would be easier to understand if he were merely monstrous: as a slave trader, commanding officer at the massacre of two hundred black Union troops in 1864, and Klan founder, he is that. But he is also celebrated throughout the South as a kind of homegrown Odysseus or Robin Hood. On one occasion he ordered his men to lay logs over wagon axles and march them in silhouette over a hill within view of Yankee scouts for several hours. The Union commander surrendered without a fight, believing himself outmanned and outgunned—and was dismayed to learn that Forrest had in fact only a quarter of his own troop strength.
Forrest himself was acquitted of that earlier massacre, though his men were not. He disbanded the Klan after six years, saying it had become a vehicle of personal vengeance. It was revived later by others.
There is no satisfying line through his life: he oscillated wildly between honor and perfidy. It is easy, even conventional, to admire the wisdom that circumscribed the actions of someone like Abraham Lincoln; it is easy to deplore the nature of someone like Sherman, whose appetite for devastation grew as it fed upon the South. Forrest remains unthinkable; the more I know of him the less I understand.
He was famously subliterate and temperamental (though smarter and calmer than his West Point–trained opponents)and I find, even now, that I wake at times in the small hours with some odd and irrelevant phrase attributed to him ringing in my head.
I done tole you twict already goddammit no!
He speaks in a voice I have never heard in my waking life, and I imagine it is a voice not unlike my own.
Loretta was in the house when Dart returned and I was on the front porch holding that .38 just to see if I could get used to it. I suppose she didn’t hear him, because she didn’t join us. He explained that he had been to see the judge.
“What did you say?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. “Come on,” he said. “Let me show you how to use that.”
He took me out to shoot tin cans, not turtles. I sold the gun to a pawn shop a week later, but I did enjoy that afternoon.
“Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it,” he said.
I was hopeless, and hit about one in five. He shot left-handed and didn’t miss.
“You gonna bury that sign?” I said.
“Done that already.”
“What exactly did you tell them?”
“First they wanted to know if I was affiliated and I said I was not. Then they asked if I would like to be affiliated and I said I would not. They asked me to clarify my views on certain subjects and I told them to mind their own business.”
“They thought you had made your views pretty plain.”
“Only Yankees have
views
. Texans aren’t that self-righteous.”
There was no point arguing a proposition like that with Dart.
“Well, what did you say to the judge?” I asked.
“I promised him fried songbird,” he said.
“At least tell me what you said,” I insisted.
“I clarified my views like they asked. I said nothing but nothing matters to me except my family.”
I thought he was bound to miss the next shot under the influence of all that sincerity, but the last tin can proved me wrong.
“Set up some more,” he said.
IV
No Offense
Strip search, jumpsuit, interrogation: I got through all that okay. I got deloused. They gave me a private cell. All the cells opened onto a metal platform with stairs down to a huge living
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