The Thomas Berryman Number

That night he actually followed Horn’s car from City Hall. The mayor rode with an armed chauffeur and lots of company that evening—a cadre of paranoid white men who were constantly glancing around each new landscape, checking it for danger signs like scared jackrabbits. Another car, probably police, a green Dodge, also followed the Horn vehicle.

Horn’s little girl met the car at the head of the driveway, and he got out and walked with her to the main house. Their arm-in-arm walk was easily five hundred yards and Berryman wondered if they did it every night. The car went on ahead. The Dodge parked near the front gates.

Looking on through roadside bramble and an eight-foot spiked fence, Berryman could hear their footsteps on gravel. He could also see another police patrolcar parked in the circular part of the driveway up near the house.

Jesus Christ,

he was thinking,

they sure watch out for his ass.

Directly behind him, very close, Berryman heard bushes crashing down. He turned around to face a tall state trooper with a mustache.

“You cain’t park here,” the man stated in a matter-of-fact drawl. “You want your look at fancy ni-gras, you got to go to the movies. Move on now, buddy.”

“Do that.” Berryman grinned as stupidly as he could. He got up from his knees and fled to his car in a fast duck waddle. “Yes sir, do that right now,” he stammered. “Damn idle curiosity anyhow.”

Once back inside his car, driving down the asphalt road away from the mayor’s mansion, Berryman could feel blood pounding in his brain. Now Thomas, he was thinking, you have got to do a whole lot better than that.

Which he did.

Nashville, June 28

Berryman concluded that the New South, the physical plant anyway, was a colossal mistake; it had no personality; it was living-boxes out of 1984 … The next morning he was back poring over city maps and other books about Nashville.

He quickly memorized street names, routes, alternate routes, key locations; he tried to get a feel for the city; a basic feel for what happened when he went north, went west, went east.

He wore hornrim eyeglasses and was continually massaging the bridge of his nose. His eyes were sore. He worked right through the cleaning lady.

Study, study, study—and then study some more.

Do it right; perfect your technique.

After a café lunch of eggs, grits, and tenderloin, Berryman drove and walked around the capitol and business sections of Nashville. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a Levi’s shirt, cowpuncher jeans.

He thought that downtown Nashville was typical of the New South: it was a small town, with big city pretensions.

The Nashville skyline was a cluster of fifteen-to-twenty-five-story buildings which made Berryman think of a smaller, poorer Houston. The capitol buildings looked like a miniature Washington. A pretzel configuration of parkways added a hint of Los Angeles.

It was a clean city though; and the air was still relatively fresh.

Nashville’s rich and poor alike bought their clothes off the rack. The men wore Sears and Montgomery Ward double-knit suits. Most of them wore white patent leather belts and white loafers with golden chains and buttons.

Nashville women still wore short skirts, and stockings. Thigh ticklers and hot pants were on display in all the department and dime store windows.

The southern city was practicing conspicuous consumption, but most of it was being done in Rich’s department store and Walgreen’s.

To help complete his own ensemble, Berryman stopped in a Kinney’s Shoe Store and bought a pair of beige Hush Puppies. They figured to go well with the green suit, and they were also dress shoes he could run in.

The clerk who packaged them looked from sunglasses to shoes, shoes to sunglasses. “Don’t look like your type,” she said.

“Mos’ comf’table walkin’ shoe in America,” Berryman smiled. It wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it.

In the late afternoon, he drove uptown to Horn campaign headquarters. It was located in an unrented automobile showroom on West End Avenue.

Still squinting in the harsh sunlight, he stood outside the storefront and walked its length.

The showroom windows were covered with posters of Jimmie Horn talking

one on one

with a wide spectrum of people. All of the photographs were striking; Horn apparently had some southern Bruce Davidson following him around with a camera.

There was Jimmie Horn standing on some grassy knoll with a white football coach. Horn with his wife by their kitchen stove. Horn with Howard Baker and Sam Ervin. Horn fishing off some country bridge with an old black grandfather. Horn with Nixon. With Minnie Pearl. With a young vet just arrested for robbing a gas station.

Berryman felt the correct emotion: a warm friendly feeling about Jimmie Horn.

Behind all the photographs, inside the showroom, a gabby campaign worker cheerfully outlined the mayor’s Independence Day schedule for Berryman. She sat under a faded Sign of the Cat, talking like a parrot.