A Turn in the South (6 page)

She said that Margaret Mead had made an important observation about the South: the relationship of the white man and the black servant woman, man and undemanding mistress, had left the white woman and the black man neutered. The black men, Anne Siddons said, were the disaffected ones.

And the newspapers—the
Constitution
and its sister paper, the
Journal
(“Covers Dixie like the Dew” was the slogan on its editorial page and its delivery vans)—were full of racial items, interwoven with the running serials: Forsyth County, and the ramifying story of the private life of a black politician accused of using cocaine.

One day there was this story. IBM sent a black executive to Columbia, South Carolina; but there was no room for the black man in the country club, no party invitations for his children. The next day there was this story: a black woman of thirty-one, a mother of two children aged five and two, took a revolver to work and shot herself in her office at Georgia Power. She felt she was being discriminated against by the company and passed over for promotion. She said in her suicide note that she wanted to give the managers and supervisors something to think about.

Desperation; but there was also the kind of playfulness that a political cause attracts when it has become safe. There was news of a black arts festival. There was news of a mighty piece of sculpture for Atlanta by a New York sculptor,
Nelson Mandela Must Be Free to Lead His People and South Africa to Peace and Prosperity
. The rock sculpture weighed seven tons and was too heavy for its first site, which could take only a hundred pounds per cubic foot. So the sculpture was going to
be moved to Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta. (Woodruff was the great man of Coca-Cola, running the company for sixty years; Coca-Cola and
Gone with the Wind
are the two fabulous success stories of post-Civil War Atlanta.) A twelve-foot iron fence, with a working gate, was to be welded into the rock. The gate was to be locked with a real key, and the key was to be given to the city of Atlanta, so that—assuming the key hadn’t been mislaid—the gate could be opened when Mandela was freed.

From Tom Teepen’s column in the
Constitution:
Metro Atlanta is a big city of 2.2 million; Atlanta is a medium city of 450,000; black Atlanta is a small city of 300,000. “The black leadership circle is a small town.” A good journalist finds good clear ways of putting things. Tom Teepen also said this: white people in the United States don’t have “leaders”; only black people have leaders. And I felt he had said that because (according to some other columnists in the paper) the current scandals about black politicians in a number of states were being used to run down black people generally.

I liked the point about leaders. I thought it could be applied to many black or backward or revolutionary countries, where the leader is everything, and where journalists and others from outside, falling unwittingly into a version of the explorer’s attitude (“Take me to your leader”), bestow on the leader alone the dignity that, in another kind of place, they would bestow more widely, on the country and the people. But then I began to wonder whether—since black politics in the United States were still racial and redemptive and simple—black people in the United States couldn’t after all be said to have leaders, people they simply followed. And I wondered whether it was possible in these circumstances for black people to stand apart from their leaders, any more than it was possible for people of the Caribbean or Africa to stand apart from the racial or tribal chiefs whom they had created.

I
HEARD
more about identity. Tom Teepen—shedding the suit and tie that he said was regulation office wear, and appearing instead in a many-pocketed vest or
gilet
—took me one Saturday morning to a century-old Appalachian settlement in East Atlanta: a big old red-brick cotton mill, white frame houses, a cemetery on rising ground beyond a busy road. Mill wages at the beginning had been very low, 5¢ an hour, it was said; but for the
mountain people the regularity of the wage had been a kind of security, and the community established around the mill had survived, though many people had gone away at various times, and the mill itself was now closed.

We went to a community-and-craft center in the settlement. It was run by a woman with the beautiful name of Esther Lefever. She had come to the settlement many years before as a folksinger—a ten-year-old photograph in the Atlanta
Constitution
showed her as a pretty woman with a guitar. But then, from being moved by the response to her singing—an old woman had got up and done a special dance, and other people had cried—she had become more deeply involved with the Appalachian community, and had even become a city councilor.

She was small and slender, still attractive and clear-voiced. She was not herself from an Appalachian community, but she understood their closeness. She was a Mennonite from Pennsylvania, the eighth child of a preacher. She spoke of what it had meant to her to move from the strictness of her Mennonite background. She had felt alone, she said. What did it mean to be alone? She said she had the picture of being the last tree on the hillside: the other trees had all been cut down. It hadn’t been easy for her even to give up the bonnet; all her life she had been taught to wear the bonnet out of respect for God and man. Even when she was in her twenties it made her nervous to be in the streets of Chicago. It wasn’t a fear of black men so much as a dread of white men who (according to what she had been told) drank liquor and were gross.

And then she had discovered the cruelty of the world outside, the cruelty of America. How had she discovered that? She told a story. One of her Appalachian women came to her one day and said she needed a job, “maid work.” Esther Lefever took the woman to see someone, a woman with a lot of blonde hair combed back, a woman (Esther Lefever said) just a step or two above the woman looking for maid work. And the blonde woman said, “Why does she want to do maid work? That’s for colored people.”

It was a simple incident, I thought; something that should have been passed over. The blonde woman herself (from the story) was as much a sufferer as everybody else. But the incident had many layers of meaning, and Esther Lefever had been upset and humiliated by it. She said, “They want to keep you in the slots they have fixed for you.” Who were “they”? She thought, and said that they were the people who had arranged the system and wanted to keep everyone in his place.

I asked her in what way identity was important, and whether there was some practical way in which it helped. She said that, if you moved to a new neighborhood or took a new job, and people were not too friendly, then it could be a help if you knew who you were; you could last out the hostility. If you didn’t know who you were—if (and this was my extension) you were dependent on other people for your idea of your own worth—then you were in trouble.

She was giving the view from below, the view of the poor people she was concerned about. And from what she said I got the impression that these people had raw sensibilities and lived on their nerves. I found that hard to imagine.

(And yet, at another level, and with another, half-buried part of myself, I understood. Perhaps in a society of many groups or races everyone, unless he is absolutely secure, lives with a special kind of stress. Growing up in multiracial Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, people brought over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work the land, I always knew how important it was not to fall into nonentity. In 1961, when I was traveling in the Caribbean for my first travel book, I remember my shock, my feeling of taint and spiritual annihilation, when I saw some of the Indians of Martinique, and began to understand that they had been swamped by Martinique, that I had no means of sharing the world view of these people whose history at some stage had been like mine, but who now, racially and in other ways, had become something other. And eight years or so later, in Belize in Central America, a similar feeling of the void broke through my other preoccupations when I saw the small, lost, half-Indian community of that wretched British colony, coastal timberland poached from what had been the Spanish Empire, peopled with slaves and servants, and then more or less abandoned: New World debris.)

And I heard more about the ways of identity in the South from a religious scholar. Among the people he instructed were men and women studying for the ministry. I thought that people who wanted to be ministers might have been moved by some religious experience. But that attitude was a reflection of my own temperament and background, my own lack of a religious faith, and my thirty-five years and more in England, where formal religion had all but withered.

In the United States, and especially in the South, religious faith was almost universal, and a religious vocation was as likely as any other. It was something a man could turn to for a number of reasons; and
what I heard from this scholar was that some of the people he was in touch with (and he meant white people) had turned to the religious life in order to be confirmed in their identity: people from poor families who felt racially threatened by the new developments in the South, people who, in the booming new South, had gone into business and had then felt themselves drifting so far from the Southern world they had known that they had given up, to return to God and the life they felt more at ease in.

I heard this talk about religion and identity far from Atlanta, at an open-air party on an estate in northwestern Georgia: hills, woods, long views, range beyond gentle range, blue upon blue.

The party was in a rough, long-grassed field between woods, and in front of a gray, patched-up wooden hut on low pillars. The hut was said to be very old. It stood almost at the foot of a slope; and when you looked through the back door and window directly to the green of the land sloping up in the shade of pines, the site did have the feel of an ancient, protective solitude, quite different from any solitude one might arrange for oneself today.

(Driving out from Atlanta, into the hills, aware of the fewness of blacks in the small towns I was passing through, I had felt I was driving into the wilderness. Some months later, when I was almost at the end of my journey, I was to approach Atlanta from the other way, from Nashville and Chattanooga, and this part of Georgia was to seem more used up and trodden over.)

The party was “Southern” in its motifs. A Confederate flag fluttered in the sunlight in the rough field between the woods. A skinned pig, fixed in the posture of a hurdler, had been roasting all day, held on poles a little to one side of slow-burning hardwood logs. (On a table were more contemporary fast foods and dips and things in waxed paper.) And a band played bluegrass music from the wooden hut. Flag, pig, music: things from the past. The musical instruments were big, the music simple and repetitive. I was told that it was the words of the songs that mattered. The accents were not easy for me to follow; but the effect, especially from a little distance, of the unamplified music and singing in that enclosed green place was pleasant.

Our hostess said, “Indians might have lived here.”

With that idea of being in the American wilderness, I felt a chill, thinking of them in this green land with its protective slopes, its shade, and rivers. Later I learned the ground was full of flint arrowheads.

It was in this setting, with the bluegrass music coming from the wooden hut, that I heard about the religious faith and identity of the people who had come after the Indians. And I had a sense of the history here resting layer upon layer. The Indians, disappearing after centuries; the poor whites; the blacks; the war and all that had come after; and now the need everyone felt, black and white, poor and not so poor, everyone in his own way, to save his soul.

The musicians were young and friendly; there was a girl among them. When they finished they put their big instruments in their pickup truck and went away. When the sun went down there was no wind; the flag drooped. It became cold very quickly; it was still only spring.

T
HE
Atlanta
Constitution
’s file on the affairs of Forsyth County didn’t come as a set of date-stamped newspaper clippings, but as computer printouts. The story of the events of 1912, as researched by one of the newspaper’s writers, was terrible in every way.

The white woman who had been dragged into woods, raped, and beaten—and died two to three days later—was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a well-known farmer. A hand mirror near the scene led police to a deformed eighteen-year-old black man. He confessed, and said that other blacks were also involved. Altogether, eleven blacks were arrested as suspects. Two days after the woman’s death a crowd broke into the Forsyth County jail, shot and killed one of the suspects, beat the body with crowbars, and hung it on a telegraph pole. Three weeks later the deformed man and another black man were tried for the rape and murder and found guilty. The sister of the second man testified against him. Both men were publicly hanged a month after the trial, before a crowd of ten thousand. The few hundred blacks who lived in Forsyth were chased away.

The destroyed young woman, the deformed black, the lynching at the jail and the hanging of the mangled body, the black woman giving evidence against her brother, the public hangings (ten thousand people turning up for that, in a county that fifty years later, before the Atlanta boom, had a population of under twenty thousand)—the story is unbearable in every detail. Yet what seemed to have survived in Forsyth above everything else was the knowledge, a cause for pride to some, that no black lived there.

The man who had sought to challenge this pride was a white Californian, a karate teacher who had been living in Forsyth for five years. He called for a March of Brotherhood to mark the anniversaries of the death of Gandhi and the birth of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind after getting abusive telephone calls and threats. But the idea of the march had been taken up by another karate teacher, also white, from the next county. This was the march—about fifty people were expected to take part—that Hosea Williams had intervened in. This was the march that had been attacked by Klan groups and others, and had seeded, a week later, the big march of the twenty thousand, with the protection of three thousand National Guardsmen and state and local police officers. So that within a week what had been a brave and lonely cause had been turned by Hosea and a few others into a safe cause; and it had become safer and safer.