My Dear Klansman

For about three weeks, Thomas has been working the gift shop at the First White House of the Confederacy, a museum and historical landmark in the modern age. He was an outsourced student-worker from one of the local universities, an overly-educated slave that existed to be a hammer for whatever his school could make into a nail for him, and in another breath an insignificant little bug that gobbled up little more than minimum-wage. He had been an adjunct only a month ago, but after suffering the throes of a breakdown and bringing his little stretch of unfortunate moodiness into the classroom with him, passing out papers with an attitude and muttering slurs under his breath and expressing an uncomfortable and paranoid worldview whenever he delivered a lesson, his administration pulled him out of his classes and ordered him to counsel with another of their graduate students, some shy and nearly faceless woman who was working on a doctorate in psychiatry, who would have never made it in a private practice and so never wrenched herself from the academic tit that fed the both of them. 

Thomas, she began nervously, where do you think your emotional trouble began?

I don’t know, Thomas told her and covered his eyes with his hand, feigning tears and peeking through his fingers at her cleavage, my childhood home and my family, I guess.

She nodded and almost purred in reply, Mmhm, that’s an excellent observation. Could you tell me more, Thomas?

He replayed the rest of the scene in his head while he stood bent over the museum toilet with his pants around his ankles, rubbing at himself vigorously and taking special note of the self-piteous tears brimming at the corners of his eyes and relishing them. He finished and washed his hands sloppily beneath a mirror that had held the reflection of history-shakers and hotblooded insurrectionists then wiped his eyes against the sleeves of his shirt and tried to suppress the shame eeking out from the little kernel of clean spirit that still somehow kept a residence within him and softly shut the bathroom door behind him. He started back towards the gift shop, where the kitchen would have been in yesteryear. 

It was a beautiful home scarred by promotional flyers and informational plaques, Thomas thought. There was an ugly flatscreen that hung on the wall over the staircase that displayed advertisements for local businesses, but it was cozy and quaint albeit historically unfortunate and infamous; an exemplar of the elegant sturdiness that antebellum architecture possessed. The trademark columns of its neoclassical style manifested within the porch where a rotund four held up its tiled roofing and sat neatly upon a base of cut bricks alongside the railing that connected one to another. The wooding siding of the exterior held a rich cream color that complemented the dark green that dressed its front door and shuttered windows. The interior was filled with antique furniture and Davis-family heirlooms. Thomas was an angry little stinker; he wiped his sticky wet hand across one of the chairs as he passed. 

The museum rarely entertained any guests besides the infrequent visits from the white private schools around town so Thomas would spend much of his shift sitting idly beside the ancient stove in the kitchen, looking over the rows and rows of Jefferson Davis bobbleheads that were meant to be sold. He would sometimes read and think while he sat there waiting, looking over with a spiteful eye the self-help books that his administration-mandated therapist had prescribed to him and jotting down his thoughts, most of them sinister and shriveled, across little scraps of paper and entertaining the idea of composing a manifesto out of them. Most of all, Thomas liked to search by innuendo or slang different methods of suicide without tripping some kind of warning or mental health advisory from his phone’s browser, a fun little game that he liked to play with himself. 

Thomas spun over in his office chair to the kitchen mini-fridge and pushed his way past old tupperware and empty fastfood bags to swipe a pint of vodka from the back. The historian-in-residence had been a distinguished professor at one of the private universities out in the country a long time ago; some obscure tragedy had pushed him towards alcoholism and Thomas never dropped a chance to take from his stash when he wasn’t present. He downed the pint and chased it down with an opened can of coke that had been sitting behind an old tub of gray meat. He sat back for a moment and waited for the burn in his chest to subside before pulling the bag out of the kitchen trash for the bottle of whiskey sitting at its bottom. 

He sipped and thought up synonyms for ‘noose’: a sad scarf, vertical lasso, a belt for my throat, drop-snag-snap, umbilical gibbet and a gallows bungee. 

Thomas kicked off the wall and spun like a top into his little desk and knocked over a stack of Robert E. Lee shot glasses. He took a swig and slapped himself twice in the cheek. The vodka swirled around his head and made the whiskey easier to drink as his thoughts turned toward the greater themes of his life and all of the littles bumps in the road that made his little existence so crooked and bent, fresh regrets and older wounds. 

I think that you’re a good person, Thomas.

Really?

Of course, you’re going through a lot. 

It doesn’t seem like a whole lot. It seems like a lot of nothing really.

She frowned and drew from memory an excerpt from a textbook, Over six million men suffer from depression every year, Thomas, and then added uneasily, It’s a war and you’re one of its soldiers, so to speak.

I’m not really depressed though. I just feel angry.

Angry over what?

Thomas threw his head back and shaded his eyes with his hand again and wrinkled his nose to simulate wild emotion. She leaned forward to push a box of tissues across the coffee table between them and Thomas took the opportunity to take another gratuitous look at her chest. He thought about pushing the mouth of a shotgun into the back of his throat. He blinked, I don’t know.

The kitchen lights were bright. He choked the rest of the whiskey down before hanging his spinning head between his legs. It was about noon and his shift would be over in about four hours. He had to take stock of all the merchandise before he could clock out. 

But look! Over there at the entrance, as Thomas began to drift in thought towards auto-erotic aphyxiation, a guest stepped through the front door and stood under the chandelier in the foyer; a klansman in full and brazen dress. A ghost that smelled of pitch and gasoline. The animus of the south, given form to fill out robes and provide shadow to the new locality beneath his feet. Thomas looked up and went into immediate hysterics, wheeling himself into the corner of the kitchen and banging his head against one of the cabinets, “It’s always me, it’s always me. Oh god, it’s always me.”

He leapt from the swivel chair and kicked the kitchen wastebasket and spiked a Jefferson Davis bobblehead into the ground, watching its plastic skull bounce off the linoleum floor and shatter against the wall with great catharsis. He took the span of a breath to collect himself and stumbled out of the kitchen with an outstretched hand aggressively held forth, “How can I help you?”

The klansman received him cordially and Thomas shuddered at the sensation of his cold and clammy palm making friction with his own. His eyes were concealed by a layer of mesh behind his mask, but Thomas could regardless feel the intensity of their probing. The klansman wished to have a tour of the museum; the Confederate memorabilia and the bedrooms and possibly the gift shop afterward. Thomas stammered and gestured to the adjacent dining room where miscellaneous artifacts from the Civil War and prior sat beneath the glass of various display cases, “R-right this way.”

Thomas breathed heavily through his mouth as he stumbled toward a case full of badges and medallions, feeling the slow-action of his mind as it tried to generate coherence against the sloshing alcohol inside his head. He rolled his wrist as he tried to summon words, “Um, t-this one has medals.”

His guest stepped to stand next to him and raised a gloved hand to his chin. He pointed one of the medals out and asked about its personal history, if Thomas happened to know any details about its recipient and designation but he could only nod in silent reply, not having caught a single word–but deep feelings of dread and despair like he was failing some kind of cosmic test and that the klansman could at any moment turn his attention to the shriveled and dry soul that hung behind his eyes and say in some powerful voice that some divine authority had lent baritone and cutting-edge that Thomas was condemned to the little slivers of inches in hell where the flames never licked and light of God’s wrath never shone. He repeated his question and Thomas answered that it was awarded to an unknown soldier for bravery on the battlefield. 

Here was the boogeyman of a dead region and another polyp on this cancerous world whose reminder to Thomas was not that he lived landlocked to a place where some struggle had taken place centuries ago and had passed over everywhere the earth was sensitive and prone to scar and that all the ornaments of its tangential wrong were all around him and fed him in a secondhand way or that one ghastly avatar of societal ill stood and breathed before him, but that he was malformed in a way that did not track with the spiritual ailments pervading the other or touched by the grand narratives of morality that might have claimed the klansman as the fruit of one of its ends. Thomas wanted to be the klansman. He wanted to be so terrible as to not be so far away from redemption, existing to what is good and correct as an opposite only a climb or turn away, not some middling loser whose sickness was his own unacted desire. Give me a knife and I will kill, Thomas thought. Then I will cut penance into my body and weep over what I have done. 

The klansman gripped his shoulder and asked him if he was okay. Thomas asked him quietly if he knew how to properly tie a noose, and the klansman bent his head to catch his question again. Thomas shook his head and continued with the tour, stumbling over to a rack of old rifles and a mannequin donned in the Confederate uniform, “These are guns over here and the uniform that the soldiers wore.”

His eyes. Thomas wanted to peel away the hood and the mesh underneath to look hard into the klansman’s eyes and see the veins that marked true flesh tunneling like roots through his whites. He could not trust him otherwise. 

The contents of his stomach were beginning to grow sour and send up wafts of nausea to his head, bouts of gummy haze that made the klansman seem truly ghastly, and led him over to the bottom of the staircase. The klansman had asked to see the bedrooms. He immediately imagined the klansman masturbating underneath the sheets of the king-sized mattress that Jefferson Davis would have shared with his wife, and Thomas felt like the last important and structural string inside of him had snapped and lashed against his sensitive insides with all of its previous tension at the tips of its new halves, striking and wounding with malice. 

Thomas took the steps and his deluge of worrisome thoughts and notions slowed to the pace of a stroll as he pulled himself up by the bannister, allowing him to wonder in earnest whether or not the klansman was some kind of cosmic test sent from above. He turned to look over his shoulder and he could tell that he was an old man beneath his robes; the slow wind of his knee and the calculated placement of his foot upon the stair runner and the rolling belly beneath the belt of his outfit. Could he kill an elderly man? With what?

The old man stepped into the master bedroom and shuffled to stand beside the bed, feeling the fabric of the comforter and running a finger along the edge of the nightstand, and Thomas turned away to grab a paperweight from the desk that stood in the corner of the room. It was quick. A murderer can be forgiven; perhaps Thomas could be redeemed.