"Just how big is Pottsville, anyways?" "Well, sir," I said, "there's a road sign just outside of town that says 'Pop. 1280,' so I guess that's about it. Twelve hundred and eighty souls."
All my life, I've been just as friendly and polite as a fella could be. I've always figured that if a fella was polite to everyone, why, they'd be nice to him. But it don't always work out that way.
It was a kind of hard fact to face--that I was just a nothing doing nothing.
But we're a real God-fearin' community, like you've probably gathered.
They were all asking for it! And like the Good Book says, Ask and ye shall receive.
Just because I put temptation in front of people, it don't mean they got to pick it up.
I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn't seem at all bad by comparison.
Or maybe I'm just kind of sour...
--Pop. 1280 (1964) by Jim Thompson
Nearly sixty years and six months ago, on the night of Father's Day, June 21, 1964, three young, earnest and idealistic civil rights activists--James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner--were systematically shot and killed by a mob of vicious Ku Klux Klan thugs outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the trio of activists had been participants in the "Freedom Summer" campaign to register black Mississippians to vote. (Fewer than 7% of adult black Mississippians had been registered to vote in 1960.) For this transgression the trio merited merciless execution in the eyes of many white Mississippians.
After the young men's bodies were discovered buried in under fifteen feet of dirt at a dam site about six weeks later, federal authorities brought charges for the killings against eighteen members of Mississippi's supposed "master race," including the county sheriff and his deputy. It was clear that the racist white segregationist state government empowered by the good white people of Mississippi to keep their fellow black citizens "in their place" was not going to lift a finger to achieve justice for the victims.
Seven of the charged men were eventually convicted, but none of them would serve more than six years in prison. Many of the people implicated in the case would die peacefully in their beds, their pasts whitewashed as it were. It was a paltry dish of justice, to be sure, but the FBI was working in the face of implacable opposition from local whites, who still clung to the notion that through "massive resistance" (i.e., intimidation and outright murder) they could prevent black Mississippians from enjoying equal rights as American citizens. After all, they and their ancestors had successfully resisted reform for nearly a century after the Civil War.
Just around the time that the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were unearthed from their mean red clay grave, paperback publisher Gold Medal published Jim Thompson's crime novel Pop. 1280. The novel details the murderous activities of Nick Corey, sheriff in the tiny town of Pottersville (population 1280), the seat of rural Potts County, "the forty-seventh largest county" in an unnamed southern state. (In fact there are forty-seven counties in the state, get it?)
When the novel opens Nick Corey is facing the tiresome task of having to run for reelection for the office of county sheriff. This time around there may be trouble. He has gotten along for years by being amiable and inoffensive and doing nothing, but now the people seem actually to want him, so he frets, "to do a little something instead of just grinning and joking and looking the other way." Over the course of the novel Nick comes to the conclusion that the easiest thing for him is just to start killing people.
He starts by shooting the two pimps in charge of the local whorehouse, who had been giving him, along with a rakeoff, a lot of insolence. Whores are essential to the stability of Pottsville or any town, we learn. "Why," observes a deputy sheriff in a neighboring county, "if there wasn't any whores, the decent ladies wouldn't be safe on the streets." But them saucy pimps had to go and go they did. In dispatching them, Nick also takes time to setup for the crime a man he hates (quite rightly so).
Nick soon finds himself plotting murders to get out of other difficulties, like the problem of nasty town drunk Tom Hauck, with whose wife Rose he is having an affair. Nick's own wife, Miriam, despises him and he despises her, she having trapped him into marriage with a rape claim, scotching his plan to marry local beauty Amy Mason. Nick would like to ditch Miriam and win back Amy. There's also the problem of his opponent in the sheriff's race, who is that rarest of things in Potter County, a decent man. In fact, in the whole novel Nick's opponent is about the only decent person one will find, aside from the inoffensive old black man Uncle John.
Much of Pop. 1280 is sardonically amusing, as Nick slaughters and sets up people who are, frankly, quite deserving of the dishonor. But eventually things take a darker turn, as murder starts to go to Nick's head.
In this aspect of the novel, Pop. 1280 very much resembles inverted mystery novels like Francis Iles' Malice Aforethought from over three decades earlier, but where it very much differs from and ultimately transcends such books is in its political satire and utter nihilism. Pop. 1280 is one of the darkest meditations on the myth of the American Dream that I have ever read.
Though Thompson set the novel in the second decade of the twentieth century (most people drive horse and buggies, autos and telephones are comparatively new and there's a reference to silent film actor William S. Hart whose first film dates from 1914), he clearly wrote it with an eye cocked ahead fifty years later to the then present time of the second Reconstruction, when activists were pressing the federal government into finally fulfilling the promises of the first one by mandating desegregation and and civil rights, including the right to vote.
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| Lige Daniels lynching Center, Texas,1920 |
The greatest irony of Pop. 1280 is that the murderous sheriff is probably the most admirable, on-the-ball citizen of the county, with the most developed social conscience. It's his consciousness of the manifest absurdity and injustice of life that finally drives Nick over the edge into sheer nihilism. What he's really expected to do as sheriff, he comes to realize, is not administer justice, but to keep down the "white trash" and the n-----s, all those people who can't pay the poll tax or pass the selectively administered literacy tests and thus are denied the franchise and have to be kept in line on behalf of the respectable classes, who lie and cheat and steal and debauch just as much as anyone else but keep it all on the down low while they virtuously attend church on Sunday. There's no real justice in the world, no discernible meaning to life. Just kill or be killed. Be a master or slave.
There's a deeply radical critique of society here, one that sweeps beyond the personal drama of The Grifters to encompass an entire accursed place in time. In the United States MAGA regimes currently are banning what they call critical race theory and diversity education because they want to present a more positive vision of the the American past, but the sanitized vision which they opt for is a false one. Try to imagine growing up a black person in the South under the Jim Crow "separate but equal" regime between 1875, after the demise of Reconstruction, and 1965. How does a decent country allow that to go on for a century? How does it pat itself smugly on the back for its decency?
Pop. 1280 gets much closer than sanitized MAGA curricula to what life was like for a lot of people in God's country. That's partly why the book would be banned from school libraries under MAGA regimes.
Nick can be quite corruscating in his seemingly naive homespun country philosophy, like when he discusses southern lynching:
I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend do much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or an-hours left for practical purposes.
Or his observations on Henry Clay Fanning, a great believer in the rights of a parent, but not so much in his obligations:
That Henry Clay Fanning was a real case, what we call a cotton-patch lawyer down here. He knew all the privileges he was entitled to--and maybe three or four million besides--nut he didn't have much sense of his obligations. None of his fourteen kids had ever been to school, because makin' kids go to school was interferin' with a man's constitutional rights. Four of his seven girls, all of 'em that were old enough to be, were pregnant. And he wouldn't allow no one to ask 'em how they'd got that way, because that was his legal responsibility, it was a father's job to take care of his children's morals, and he didn't have to tolerate any interference.
Of course. everyone had a pretty good idea who'd gotten those girls pregnant....
I could see HCF on X today, vigorously denouncing both polio vaccination and "men" in women's bathrooms.
This is humor at its darkest and pointed as a stiletto. Coming in 1964, as the white South through criminal mayhem and murder was doing its damndest to maintain its regime of white privilege in the face of the increasing dismay and disgust from the rest of the nation, it reads like Jim Thompson's great Fuck You to his native region. (He was born in southeast Oklahoma, the son of a county sheriff, and later grew up in Texas.)
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies in the US critics (Anthony Boucher excepted) largely treated Pop. 1280 as pulp trash, but this pulp trash was appreciated, like Jerry Lewis, by the French. In "Donald Stanley's Book Corner" in the San Francisco Examiner in 1966, the columnist observed, with some bemusement, that France's Serie Noire crime fiction imprint, edited by Marcel Duhamel, now numbered 1000 volumes, 300 of which were by American authors. No. 1000 was Pop. 1280. Although "wholly ignored in its homeland," Stanley wrote, in France critics had lauded the novel"as a fine example of black humor." They compared Thompson to Henry Miller and Erskine Caldwell. I'd say here he's also R-rated Mark Twain.
It was the French who filmed Pop. 1280 in 1981 as Coup de Torchon. ("Wipe of the Cloth" I think would be a literal translation.) In France the film received ten Cesar nominations and it was also nominated for an academy award for best foreign film at the 1982 Oscars. If only we could see ourselves as other see us. Especially today.
Today the book is regarded as one of Thompson finest novels and I agree. The biggest weaknesses are its women characters--Nick's trio of girlfriends is pretty shrill and onenote--and its indeterminate ending, which was altered in the film. But for most of the ride it's masterful indeed, if you have the stomach for some home truths about the history of God's country.
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