A Turn in the South, Page 5

  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.

  THE 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.

  A radio show had been taken to Forsyth. A very famous afternoon-television talk show with a witty black hostess had gone to Forsyth, and a program had been recorded in a local restaurant. Hosea, applying equal passion to the safe cause as he had to the brave one, had picketed this show, because only Forsyth residents were allowed to have a say, and they of course were all white.

  Hosea had managed to be arrested, to add to that record of his—105 jailings at the time his Who Is Hosea L. Williams? pamphlet had gone to press. According to the Atlanta Journal, Hosea had shouted as he was being put into the police van, “This is Forsyth County! This is what you see!” And Hosea’s married daughter, who was with him, had shouted, “My daddy! I want to go with him!” And she too had been put in the van.

  Tom Teepen hadn’t been able to arrange a meeting with Hosea when he had first told me about him, because Hosea at that time was in jail for a few days. And Tom couldn’t find Hosea when he came out of jail. But then, late one morning, Tom telephoned me with the news that if I hurried to a certain building I might see Hosea. He was being arraigned on another charge at a federal court at eleven-thirty. It was almost that already, but Tom said that these affairs usually ran a little late.

  I took a taxi. It was driven by an African, a man from Ghana. It was a short run for him; in almost no time he had set me down again. An open paved forecourt, the big building set back; a security doorway; an elevator to the sixteenth floor. Hardwood doors, low ceilings, a brown-carpeted corridor, neat nameplates: formal, without drama, safe, even cozy. But the hearing was over. And in a room that was like a small lecture room or classroom there was a little group in one corner, like the subdued group that sometimes stays behind after a school examination to talk over the questions.

  In the little group I recognized Dick Gregory, gray-bearded and white-suited, a man grown old in the wars, and now really looking quite saintlike. And there was a squatter man with a bigger beard who could be none other than Hosea himself. Even in this moment of stillness in the courtroom his eyes suggested bustle—a man with many things to do and little time to spare. He had a toothbrush in his top pocket—a man ready to go to jail.

  He also had a press officer with him, a slender brown woman. She had a handout “for immediate release.” And it seemed from what she said that my chances of meeting Hosea and having a heart-to-heart talk with him were not good. Hosea and Dick Gregory were going to f
ly to Washington that afternoon to picket the CIA. After that they were going straight off to Europe, to London and the Vatican, to do some work about apartheid. The handout from the press officer was about drugs: Hosea was saying that certain recent incidents were being used “to defame black leaders,” and that the Mafia and the CIA were the ones most involved in the drug trade, which was “destroying our children and the future of our nation.” That, in fact, was why Hosea and Dick Gregory were going to picket the CIA.

  And suddenly, before I could fully take in Hosea’s eyes and beard and toothbrush, the little group had gone.

  Four or five minutes had passed since I had arrived, no more. And to add to the randomness of the occasion in Court No. I, there was my encounter with someone who, when the little group had gone away, had been left behind, like me. He was a reporter, quite young. He too had come too late for the arraignment. He too was new to Atlanta and didn’t know a great deal about the affairs of the city. In the courtroom, in the brown-carpeted corridor, and in the elevator, we talked about his time in England. He had gone there to study the ancient Roman walls, Hadrian’s Wall and the later Antonine wall. I had never seen those walls and was interested in what he had to say.

  We separated downstairs. When I was going out of the front door of the building I saw a small group around a bearded man. It looked so much like what I had seen upstairs that I thought the man was Hosea, giving an informal interview. It was only when I was almost in the group that I saw that the talker wasn’t Hosea, was blacker, differently dressed, without the toothbrush, and that he only had the big stiff beard.

  THE CONVENTION business was important to Atlanta, and there were many big hotels in the center of the city quite close to one another. It was hard to think that these hotels could all be full at the same time. But it sometimes happened. A girl in the Ritz-Carlton dining room told me one day that an important convention was in town. What was this a convention of? Dry cleaners. And they were important because there were so many of them—as there had to be, if you considered how many dry cleaners there must have been all over the United States—that they had filled the Atlanta hotels.

  No hotel gave off such a company-holiday or convention feeling as the Marriott Marquis. And none was so overpowering. To enter it was like entering a gigantic, hollow, twisted cone. It had an atrium forty-seven stories high: gallery upon curving gallery, following the twist of the cone. That twist was unexpected; the eye was always led upwards. Great red streamers, like something from a Chinese festival, hung down the middle space. And all the time, like fairground conveyances, tall glass-walled elevators, their ribs picked out in lights, slid up and down the atrium wall.

  But the black man who worked for the Hilton (atrium-style there too, with the internal galleries, but not so sensational), with whom I had a talk one evening about the hotels of Atlanta, thought that I had done well by going to the Ritz. He said, “That’s where the ’lite stay.”

  As if in confirmation of this, I heard one day (with what truth I don’t know) that Gloria Vanderbilt was staying in the Ritz and had been seen in one of the elevators.

  She was in Atlanta to do a promotion. Two weeks or so before, in New York, I had caught her on a talk show. She was talking about her life and about the way a woman is defined by the men whom she loves. And I assumed when I heard she was in town that she was here to promote her book. But there was much more to this promotion. “The Enchantment … The Heritage … The Prestige … MACY’S Proudly Introduces GLORIOUS by Gloria Vanderbilt.… Only a truly great fragrance has the power to stir our emotions. Glorious by Gloria Vanderbilt … Gloria Vanderbilt will autograph a complimentary photograph and any Glorious purchase.”

  That was going on in Macy’s, just across the road from the Ritz, on the morning Anne Siddons came to the hotel, to talk to me about growing up in the South. She was as intense and intelligent as I had expected; and though she was a little withdrawn (because of the book she was writing), and though the promotion she was doing for her publisher (on a different scale from Gloria Vanderbilt) was a further depletion, she spoke with a full heart, offering me a little of the experience that was her capital as a writer.

  She was Southern and Georgian, and almost Atlantan. She was born in Fairburn, twenty miles south of Atlanta. Fairburn was an agricultural and railroad town. Her father was a lawyer; though they were not rich, they were comfortably off. Her father was the first of his family to go to college.

  “We came down from Virginia around 1820. Our branch of the family farmed the same piece of land for seven generations. It makes me feel wonderfully rooted. But at the same time I feel it can be a yoke. I feel that we Southerners can be too deeply and narrowly focused into that land.”

  I told her about my trip to Howard’s home town and what I had seen there of black farming families.

  She said, “It’s one thing Southern whites and blacks have shared. We have both been landowners since abolition.” And she told me what Howard and his mother had told me: that land had been given or bequeathed to black people by the white men for whom they had worked. Some decades ago, she said, it had come out from a study of oral history that this giving of land had been seen by black and white as a benign aspect of the master-slave relationship.

  I asked, “In what way can the land be a yoke?”

  “We don’t tend to lift our sights to get a broader vision.”

  People settled too easily for staying on the land. They tended to say or feel, “Our sort don’t go to college. We are farmers.”

  Anne Siddons said: “I was a bright only child in a grammar-and-high school dominated by children from the surrounding farms. And everything I was naturally, I felt ashamed of. I spent twelve years trying to hide the fact that I was a bright child. Intellect has had no place here. The people who came to lead us obviously had intellect. But they had other things as well, to make it go down more easily. They had great charm, for instance.”

  When we had first met she had said, “We are a colonial people.” She made the point again. Southerners, she said, were uncertain of themselves.

  “I am talking about white people. At the time I was growing up, the white Southerner in the rural and small-town South felt threatened by the blacks. You don’t hate what doesn’t threaten you. As long as somebody was below you, you knew you had power. It was all about power, really. We were a conquered and occupied people, the only people in the United States to be like that. And this—our attitude to blacks—was the only way we could feel or exercise our power at all. We were a poor agricultural community, and we had bone-deep memories of real conquest and occupation and total humiliation.

  “We were untraveled people, the bulk of us uneducated. The only way we had of coping with change was by pretending it wasn’t there. When the civil-rights movement was beginning, though it was just there, in Alabama, we could pretend it wasn’t there. And when change did come it was brought to us right to our door by those black hands, which we hated and feared more than anything else in the world. These feelings are here still. What thoughtful Southerner couldn’t know they are still there? This would be the background of a lot of thought.”

  “Isn’t it fatiguing for you, always to be with this idea of race?”

  “A lot of us find it almost too stifling to live in.” That is why, she said, many Southern intellectuals had moved out of the South.

  I asked about racial protest. Hadn’t it become formal, almost ritualized? There was the affair of the marches at Forsyth. It was clear, from the newspaper accounts, that only the very first protesters had risked anything. After that, the mood and tone of protest had changed. It had become the popular cause, the protected cause; some commentators had become self-righteous.

  “Of course the idiocy up in Forsyth needs to be dealt with. But the response can—and did—become banal.”

  She had been shocked by the first news from Forsyth. But then she had had to acknowledge her own personal limitations as someone over fifty, someone who could now
wake up in the mornings with the knowledge that death was going to come.

  “Active revolution is romantic for the young. The problem is: how do you deal with passion in middle age, when you must hoard passion? There can be no resolution of this problem, or at any rate not a neat one. And, aside from media notice and marches, I don’t know how to deal with it. The form of the protest has got to be a cliché—Lord knows, Americans will protest anything.”

  But race as an issue—it couldn’t be avoided. “I deal with race in some form in every book I’ve written. It’s my great war, I guess. I write to find out where I am now, what I think, to make order and simplicity in my own world. It’s an impossible task. You can’t simplify that. You can only clarify bits of it.”

  I talked of the oddity of slavery in the New World, of the two far-removed races it had brought together, African, European. Now there was a common language and even a common religion.

  “I tend to think that they have enriched us more than we have enriched them. Perhaps we do on some deep level realize how very similar we are.”

  She said a little later: “I feel very guilty about the civil-rights movement. I didn’t march, back when marching would have been passionate and real and spontaneous. I was a young woman newly come to Atlanta and still deeply caught in that web of what is seemly and what is not.”

  When was that real and passionate time?

  “I think the great marches in Selma were about 1965. Although I got into trouble for a column I wrote for our student paper. I was at a small college. This was when Autherine Lucy entered the University of Alabama. And there were cavalcades from all over the state going over to heckle those two poor blacks, heckle and worse. Nobody went from my college. It was because they were lackadaisical, really. I wrote a column praising the noninvolvement and made a few of those simplistic and sophomoric statements about race and about whatever—”