A Turn in the South (5 page)

The heat was a revelation. It made one think of the old days. Together with the great distances, it gave another idea of the lives of the early settlers. But now the very weather of the South had been made to work the other way. The heat that should have debilitated had been turned into a source of pleasure, a sensual excitement, an attraction: a political convention could be held in Dallas in the middle of August.

On the wall at the back of the podium in the convention center the flags of the states were laid flat, in alphabetical order. The flags of the older states were distinctive; they made me think of the British-colonial flag (and the British-given colonial motto, in Latin, from Virgil) I had known as a child in Trinidad. And for the first time it occurred to me that Trinidad, a former British colony (from 1797), and an agricultural slave colony (until 1833, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire), would have had more in common with the old slave states of the Southeast than with New England or the newer European-immigrant states of the North. That should have occurred to me a long time before, but it hadn’t. What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South had been too shocking. It had tainted the United States, and had made me close my mind to the South.

The convention center was very big. The eye could not take it all in at once. In that vast space the figures on the podium looked small. They could have been lost; but a big screen above them magnified their image, and scores of smaller screens all over the center repeated this living, filmed picture. It was hypnotic, that same face or gesture in close-up coming at one from so many angles. The aim might only have been communication and clarity; but no more grandiose statement
could have been made about the primacy of men; nothing could have so attempted to stretch out the glory of the passing moment. And yet, almost as part of its political virtue, this convention dealt in piety and humility and heaven, and daily abased itself before God.

A famous local Baptist pastor spoke the final benediction. His church organization was prodigious; its property in downtown Dallas was said by the newspapers to be worth very many millions. His service, on the Sunday after the convention, was to a packed congregation. It was also being carried on television; and it was a full, costumed production, with music and singing. But the hellfire sermon might have come from a simpler, rougher time, when perhaps for five or six months of the year people had no escape from the heat, when travel was hard, when people lived narrowly in the communities into which they had been born, and life was given meaning only by absolute religious certainties.

I began to think of writing about the South. My first travel book—undertaken at the suggestion of Eric Williams, the first black prime minister of Trinidad—had been about some of the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight then. It seemed to me fitting that my last travel book—travel on a theme—should be about the old slave states of the American Southeast.

My thoughts—in Dallas, and then in New York, when I was planning the journey—were about the race issue. I didn’t know then that that issue would quickly work itself out during the journey, and that my subject would become that other South—of order and faith, and music and melancholy—which I didn’t know about, but of which I had been given an intimation in Dallas.

F
ROM
N
EW
Y
ORK
I went to Atlanta. I had been told that there was an old black elite there, a kind of black-American aristocracy; that there were many established black businessmen, and a number of black millionaires; and that blacks ran the city. I booked an airplane flight; in Atlanta stood in a line at the airport to hire a car; and then drove through the mighty roadworks of the city center to the hotel. And there I was, slightly astonished that the journey, so long in the planning, should begin in such a matter-of-fact way.

And, as if answering my anxiety, all the little Atlanta arrangements I had made in New York came to nothing, one after the other, and
very quickly. A newspaperman had gone to another town to cover a story; a black businessman said on the telephone that he was out of touch, had lived these last twenty years out of Atlanta. And the black man whose name had been given me by a filmmaker said that almost everything I had heard about Atlanta was wrong.

The talk about a black aristocracy was exaggerated, this man said. By the standards of American wealth, blacks in Atlanta were not wealthy; in a list of the richest Atlantans, a black man might come in at number 201. Political power? “Political power without the other sort of power is meaningless.”

He sipped his wine, my informant, and seemed not at all displeased to have floored me.

I actually believed what he said. I had felt that the grand new buildings of Atlanta one had seen in so many photographs had as little to do with blacks as the buildings of Nairobi, say, had to do with the financial or building skills of the Africans of Kenya. I had felt that the talk of black power and black aristocracy was a little too pat and sudden.

I wanted to see for myself, though; and I was hoping to be put in touch with people. But there was no hint from this black man of that kind of help. I might see Andrew Young, the mayor, he said; but Andrew Young probably had about two hundred interviews lined up. (So I might be number 201—a popular number.) I felt about this black man, in fact, that—sipping his wine, looking at me over the top of his glass, enjoying my discomfiture, awaiting my questions and swatting them down—I felt he was being seized more and more by a spirit of contradiction and unhelpfulness and was about to grow quite wild: that soon I would be hearing, not only that there were no moneyed blacks in Atlanta, but that there had never been anything in Georgia, no plantations, no cotton, corn, or taters, that there was only himself in the wide vessel of the black Atlanta universe.

From my room at the Ritz-Carlton, the view at night of the windows of the big Georgia Pacific building was like a big pop-art print. The windows, of equal size, were all lighted. Each level was like a filmstrip, or a strip of contact prints, of views almost the same. From my room the view changed, level by level. At the lower levels I looked down at the tops of desks and the floor of offices. At eye level I saw the desks silhouetted against the office wall. Level by level, then, the desks vanished. At the higher levels I saw only the lighted ceilings; and at
the very top there was only light, a glow in the window. The offices were all empty; the men who sat in them during the day were in the suburbs somewhere. The paintings that hung on the walls of the offices of senior people were like arbitrary symbols of rank, mere rectangles at this distance, quite indistinct, even without color—the way great cities, from very high up, show as smudges below the earth’s swirls.

A formal society, private lives, a formal view: an introduction was needed to every one of those rooms, and the visitor didn’t know on what door to knock. Where did the news happen? Was it only a production, on the television?

B
UT THEN
I read in the newspaper about the affair of Forsyth County. Forsyth County was forty miles or so to the north of Atlanta. In that county in 1912 a young white girl was raped and beaten so badly that she died a few days later. A number of blacks were implicated. One was lynched; two others were tried and hanged. All the blacks of Forsyth were chased out of the county; and since then (so it was said) no blacks had been allowed to live in the county.

This last fact, about blacks not being allowed to live in Forsyth, became a public issue earlier in the year, when someone organized a “Walk for Brotherhood” in Forsyth in the middle of January, to mark the anniversaries both of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the birth of Martin Luther King. This march was attacked by some local people and Ku Klux Klan groups; it made the news. A second brotherhood march a week later—after all the publicity—was a much bigger affair. Twenty thousand people went to Forsyth to march, and there were about three thousand National Guardsmen and state and local police officers to keep the peace. There were protests nonetheless; fifty-six people, none of them marchers, were arrested.

The man who had stage-managed the marches, or had made the issue as big as it had become, was a black Atlanta city councilor, Hosea Williams, called simply Hosea by everyone who spoke of him. He was sixty-one, and had been an associate of Martin Luther King’s in the civil-rights movement. Hosea had since brought a lawsuit against some Klan groups for violating the civil rights of the people on the first brotherhood march; and he had also come up with the idea that some claim might be made against Forsyth County on behalf of the blacks who had lost land when they had been driven out in 1912.

Tom Teepen, of the Atlanta
Constitution
, with whom I had breakfast one day, spoke almost with affection of Hosea Williams. “A primary force, a rabble-rouser in the tradition of the Paris barricades, and canny.”

But I couldn’t see Hosea that week.

Tom said, “He’s in jail.”

“Jail!”

“It’s all right. He’s often in jail for some thing or the other. He’ll be out in a few days.”

When I looked at some of Hosea Williams’s own publicity material, and especially a
Who Is Hosea L. Williams?
pamphlet, I saw that his jail record mattered to him. There was a photograph of him in a cell. “Rev. Hosea holds the civil rights arrest record for jailings.… He has gone to jail about as many times since Dr. King’s death as during his life (a total of 105 times).”

He was born in 1926. So for very many years his racial protests and battles would have been desperate affairs. But Hosea had won his war; and (though he was still a brave man: the first march at Forsyth had required courage) I felt that Hosea might now have become licensed, a star, a man on the news, someone existing in a special kind of electronic reality or unreality. And his political life required him to beat his own drum. In
The Dimensions of the Man—Dr. Hosea L. Williams—A Chronology
, with a photograph of Hosea in an academic gown, apparently receiving an honorary degree from another black man, there was this: “Today he’s not content to watch things happen,
HE MAKES THINGS HAPPEN
.”

T
HE NORTHERN
suburbs of Atlanta almost touched Forsyth County. The freeways, which made Georgia look like Connecticut, enabled people to work in downtown Atlanta, where there were blacks in the streets, and then to drive twenty or thirty easy miles (in air-conditioned cars) to their houses in the suburbs, where there were few blacks—this part of Georgia had not been plantation country. There were branches of famous stores in the luxurious suburban shopping malls. The white suburbs could get by quite well without the black-run city center.

There was a news item in the paper one day that some of these suburbs didn’t want to be plugged into the Atlanta city-transit system,
because they didn’t want to be infiltrated by blacks. No Forsyth-like shouting, no Confederate flags, no white hoods and gowns—that wasn’t the way of these new suburbs. A transit official said, “It’s such a subliminal issue that it’s extremely difficult to deal with.”

A lawyer I met said that, to understand, it was necessary to remember that 120 years or so ago there had been slavery. For poor white people race was their identity. Someone well off could walk away from that issue, could find another cause for self-esteem; but it wasn’t that easy for the man with little money or education; without race he would lose his idea of who he was.

I spoke about my weekend with Howard and Hetty. Hetty had a strong idea of her racial and family identity, and yet she also had a high regard for Mr. Bowen, whom she considered a good man. Did that mean anything? The lawyer thought not. Southern white people would do anything for black families with whom they had a relationship, but that attitude stopped there; it wasn’t extended to blacks in general.

We were lunching, the lawyer and I, in a big club in downtown Atlanta. The club had been started in the days when there had been a general movement out of Atlanta, and business people had felt the need for a place where they might meet in the middle of the day. It was part of the bubble in which the white professional people of Atlanta lived: the house, the air-conditioned car, the office (perhaps like an office in the Georgia Pacific building), the luncheon club.

I asked the lawyer whether he personally felt threatened. He said the feeling was with him sometimes when he was out in the streets. He meant the fear of violence. But he also meant the larger fear of a world grown unstable: the more protective the bubble in which one lives, the more uncertain one’s knowledge becomes of what lies out there.

And this was why the lawyer thought it would be good if the black middle class could grow, if the blacks could become more active commercially. But—and like everyone talking about blacks now, he searched for words at once neutral and true—blacks (whatever their yearnings) didn’t have the business sense, the business vocation. In a society that was economically driven, blacks didn’t have the economic drive. But now there were immigrants of a new sort in the United States—Latin Americans, Asians. The lawyer thought that, when the blacks had a better understanding of what the presence of those immigrants meant to them, black racial sentiments might change.

It was there, then, as Tom Teepen had told me, at the back of
everything, however unspoken: the thought of race, the little neurosis, the legacy of slavery.

The topic came up again when I went to see Anne Rivers Siddons, the novelist. She lived in North Atlanta: hilly plots, tall pines, dogwood, azaleas. The spring I had seen in Howard’s home town was at its peak here, and the houses along the suburb’s curving roads looked quite embowered.

Anne Siddons had just published a novel,
Homeplace
, and was doing promotional work on it, at some cost to herself: she had got started on a new book. She was a little withdrawn, living internally, holding on to her new book. She lived in such beauty now; but—as I saw when I looked at her previous book,
Fox’s Earth
—her thoughts (like those of many Southern people) went back easily to a poorer time.