me what I thought would be the best way to get the people excited about the show, and I told him there was no way except to inject a little politics into it.  I said if they would give me $50 or so, to buy Chinese lanterns, and about a hundred complimentary tickets to give away, pa and I could go to Atlanta a couple of days ahead of the show and we could organize a Roosevelt club among the negroes, and a Bryan club among the white fellows, and at the evening performance we could have the two clubs march into the main tent, one from the main entrance, and one from the dressing room, with Chinese lanterns, and one could yell for Roosevelt and the other for Bryan, and advertise that a great sensation would be sprung at the evening performance.  I said the tent wouldn’t begin to hold the people.

Every one of the managers and heads of departments said it would be great stuff.  Pa was the only one that kicked.  He said the two processions might get into a fight, but I said what if they did, we wouldn’t be to blame.  Let ’em fight if they want to, and we can see fair play.

So they all agreed that pa and I should go to Atlanta ahead, and organize the political processions, and, say, we had such a time that the circus came near never getting out of the town alive.  We overdid the thing, so they wanted to lynch me, and pa wanted to help.

The way it was was this way:  Pa was to organize the white men for Bryan, and I was to organize the negroes for Roosevelt, and we went to work and bought 600 Chinese lanterns, and pa stored his half of the lanterns in a barn on the circus lot and I stored mine in another barn owned by a negro that I gave five dollars to be my assistant, with a promise that he should have a job traveling with the show, to milk the sacred cow.  I told this negro what the program was, and that I wanted 200 negroes who had an ambition to be politicians, and hold office, and I would not only pass them into the show free, but see that they got a permanent office.  What we had got to do, I said, was to stampede the white procession, that would be led by pa, and the way to do it was for every negro in my party to skirmish around in the woods and find a hornet’s nest, and bring it to our barn, and fit it into one of the Chinese lanterns, and fix a candle on top of the nest, while the hornets were asleep.  Then when we met the Bryan procession we were to shout and wave our lanterns, and if necessary to whack the white men over the head with the lantern with the hornets’ nest, and the hornets would wake up and do the rest.

The negro wanted to know how I could prevent the hornets from stinging our own men, and I told him that we had been in the hornet business all the season and never had one of our own men stung.  I said we took some assafoetida and rubbed it on our clothes and faces, and the hornets wouldn’t touch us, but just went for the other fellows to beat the band.  Say, negroes are easy marks.  You can make them