All the Governor's Men , livre ebook

All the Governor s Men
STORY RIVER BOOKS
Pat Conroy, Editor at Large
All the Governor s Men
A MOUNTAIN BROOK NOVEL
KATHERINE CLARK
Foreword by Pat Conroy

The University of South Carolina Press
2016 Katherine Clark
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Katherine, 1962 November 11- All the governor s men : a mountain brook novel / Katherine Clark ; Foreword by Pat Conroy.
pages ; cm. - (Story River Books)
ISBN 978-1-61117-628-5 (hardbound : alk. paper) -
ISBN 978-1-61117-629-2 (ebook) I. Title.
PS3603.L36485A79 2016
813 .6-dc23
2015022535
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Front cover illustration by Wendell Minor
Contents
Foreword
Alabama Summer 1982
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
Author s Note and Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOREWORD
Katherine Clark published her first novel The Headmaster s Darlings to wide acclaim in 2015, and it is certain to become a classic American novel about the transformational power of great teachers. Katherine also introduced her readers to the paradisiacal charms ensconced in the site of her childhood, the dreamy hill town of Mountain Brook, Alabama, sitting as it does like a queen s jewel box above the roiled city of Birmingham in the valley below.
All the Governor s Men is the second in her series of Mountain Brook novels, published by Story River Books as the most ambitious literary project our young press has yet undertaken. Through Katherine s novels, we glimpse the entire history of Mountain Brook, and in this second novel, we peer into the political world of Alabama and the slow, tortuous death rattle of the Jim Crow South. All the Governor s Men tells the intimate story of one Alabama election that seems so authentic and universal it could stand as a case study in the ruinous underworld of politics everywhere. In the South, as in the rest of the world, politics is a blood sport that attracts its own special breed of gladiators and hangers-on. Katherine s novel illustrates how fools can disguise themselves as idealists, and even as heroes, until the mask of idealism falls away to reveal a grotesque-or, worse yet-an all-too-human visage beneath.
In this book, Clark does for Alabama politics what Robert Penn Warren does in All the King s Men for the Louisiana of Huey Long. Both novels let us know that Southern politics contain all the seeds of malice and corruption, with the music of stump speeches and good intentions played on instruments slightly out of tune. The disorder of politics is simply a magnified reflection of the egregious flaws in the family of man.
In All the Governor s Men , South Alabama boy Daniel Dobbs returns to his home state after graduating from Harvard, filled with a revolutionary zeal to bring Alabama into mainstream American society. He enters the political fray on the side of the gubernatorial campaign against that stalwart bastion of Old South populism, George Wallace, now wheelchair-bound after surviving an assassination attempt while running for president of the United States.
Daniel s parents were raised on farms and are newly broken in to their uncertain position on the lower rungs of the middle class. They have made only a modest advance up the social and economic ladder from their hardscrabble origins. Daniel, meanwhile, aims to ascend fully. He has chosen his girlfriend, the Harvard-educated Mountain Brook native Caroline Elmore, with exquisite care and a cunning eye fixed on the future.
But when Daniel brings his aspirations to the palatial Elmore residence in Mountain Brook, we come to know the clash of cultures and values that will plague the courtship of the small town boy and the Mountain Brook girl. No one understands better than Katherine Clark the immense power that social class still exerts in the South, in all its complexity and nuance. Her eye is unerring and her conclusions can be ruthless, but she writes with grace, subtlety, and a satirical voice that renders her set pieces hilarious.
Because I was born with the state of Alabama in my bloodstream, this novel holds particular fascination for me. My mother s family hails from Piedmont, Alabama, a backwater town at the foot of the Appalachians. It was the home place of my grandparents, and it loomed large in my upbringing as a geography to flee. It was a suffering place in my mother s haunted imagination, and it s why I identify so strongly with Daniel Dobbs s dreams of escape from his own origins.
I also got my own personal education in the glorious cesspool of Alabama politics when a producer wanted me to write a screenplay about the career of George Wallace. This script was eventually written by someone else, and starred the excellent Gary Sinise in the title role, but in the late 1980s, I traveled to Birmingham to discuss this project. I was met at the hotel by Gerald Wallace, the former governor s infamous brother. Because I have a particular fondness for scoundrels, I liked the open-faced sleaziness of Gerald the moment I met him. Our first conversation was memorable.
Do you want to go to the dog races with me tonight, Conroy?
No, thanks, Gerald, but you have a good time without me, I said.
Do you want me to send a whore up to your room? he asked.
No, thanks, Gerald, I said. But thanks for thinking of me.
You a faggot? I could send a faggot up just as easily.
You go on to the races, I said.
You like little boys? That could be arranged.
Your generosity knows no bounds, Gerald, I said.
You know that writer from Georgia? The one who wrote that book about my brother?
I know him well, I said. That was a brilliant book he wrote.
I got him a blow job every night he was here.
Good for you. Good for him. But no thanks, Gerald. I m fine.
When you leave I m going to tell everybody that I got you blow jobs every night with faggots.
That s fine with me, Gerald, I told him. But you and I will both know it s not true.
Are you asexual?
That s it. I m asexual. As far as you are concerned, Gerald, I am asexual.
The next morning he met me at breakfast and opened his wallet to show me a wad of five thousand dollars, all in crisp hundred-dollar bills.
I told you to go with me to the dog races last night, he said.
That s exactly why I didn t go with you, Gerald, I said, as he laughed.
This is the sleazy world of Alabama politics that Katherine captures with such relish as she contrasts it with the privileged enclave of Mountain Brook in all its quiet resplendence and refined serenity. Until I read her novels, Mountain Brook did not exist in my long overview of the places that define the bruised core of the Southern soul. Thanks to her, Mountain Brook has become a new territory in the many-faceted landscape of the Deep South. It is a misbegotten Camelot somehow parachuted into Alabama, where they don t talk about politics or the news of the day, but about their golf swings, their tennis strokes, new hybrids of gardenias, the status of the Crimson Tide football team, and whether the club is still serving lobster thermidor on Wednesday nights. Mountain Brook is a hideaway that has turned the absence of thought into an art form. In All the Governor s Men , Katherine Clark further establishes Mountain Brook as her literary domain for this ongoing series of novels. Her power as a novelist is on full display in her comic, shrewd and unflagging interrogation of the South on the cusp of reluctant but nonetheless metamorphic change.
PAT CONROY
Alabama Summer 1982
From George Wallace: Asking for One More Chance to Stand up for Alabama, by Powell Gaines, the New York Times, June 7, 1982
The George Wallace who appeared today on the campaign trail in Tuscumbia, Alabama bore little resemblance to the fiery demagogue seared into the national consciousness when he proclaimed Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever, as he stood in the schoolhouse door to block the entrance of two black students to the University of Alabama. That was in 1963, when Wallace was inaugurated for his first term as governor and sought to impede court-ordered integration of the public schools in Alabama. Much has changed in the two decades between then and now, as the 63 year-old George Wallace seeks the nomination for a fourth term as governor.
Although he still uses the slogan Stand Up for Alabama, the Wallace of today literally cannot stand up himself, as a result of the assassination attempt during the presidential run in 1972 that left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. In his prime, Wallace used to burst onto stage as a band played Dixie. Today he was pushed up a handicap ramp and wheeled on stage by a state trooper. Instead of whipping the crowd into a frenzy as he used to by railing about school busing, states rights and federal intervention, he merely thanked his supporters for coming out in the heat and urged them to give him one more chance to serve the people of Alabama. His voice was soft and slurred, barely audible. The words were perfunctory and polite, with no trace of the