A Writer's Life (40 page)

They walked together in the streets, dined together in restaurants, and stood waiting together in the ticket line outside the local cinema. Whatever unfriendly curiosity or hostile comments they encountered from
white people, and occasionally from blacks, they ignored. In this divided town they cut their own path. The mayor distanced himself from the situation while retaining Randall on the municipal payroll, and the Miller Funeral Service did not appear to suffer financially, even though Winona Miller gained allies in the black community as she expressed outrage over her husband's behavior. He, meanwhile, moved out of their home, was proceeding toward a divorce, and was residing temporarily in living quarters that he had established for himself within the funeral property. Sometimes he would visit Betty at her apartment, on the second floor of a building in an integrated neighborhood. Later he acquired the house at 209 Alabama Avenue, where I had gone to interview her.

Having spent an hour with her, and aware that Randall Miller might be walking in at any minute—it was now nearly 6:00 p.m.—I thought I should soon be leaving. He might not be happy to find me speaking to his fiancée about intimate matters that involved him. I had been lucky in finding her at home and in a receptive mood, but I had been calculating as well in pursuing her after being told that Randall Miller was in Montgomery. I instinctively felt that she would be more forthcoming without him being there. Were he in the room, he might have interrupted her thoughts or attempted to prevent her from telling me things that he believed should remain private. My talk with Betty was “on the record,” as evidenced by my taking notes in front of her. I could only hope that when Randall returned home, he would have no misgivings about the interview, for I later wanted to spend time with him and get his version of the relationship. I also wanted to attend the next day's wedding. After I had proposed this, requesting that I bring a photographer, Betty voiced no objection but recommended that I clear it directly with Randall. She said that about twenty people had been invited, split evenly between blacks and whites; in addition to her daughters and one of her nieces from Arkansas, and a few of Randall's siblings and cousins, the list included Randall's old friends, and Betty's new friends, who had been the most supportive of the couple.

I stood and shook hands with Betty, and as she escorted me to the door, I told her that I would be calling back within a few hours, at around 8:00 p.m., hoping that I might then return and introduce myself to Randall Miller and take the two of them out to dinner at the Tally Ho, a popular restaurant on the outskirts of town. Betty said that they had gone there in the past and liked it, and she hoped that Randall would be home when I called and would be willing to meet with me.

A
S
I
DROVE THROUGH DOWNTOWN
S
ELMA ONTO
H
IGHWAY
80 toward the Holiday Inn, which was where I and most of the out-of-town media who were here for the silver anniversary conclave were staying—along with Jesse Jackson and the other honored guests and speakers—I continued to think about the wedding and how coincidental it was that Betty Ramsey and Randall Miller would be formalizing their union at a time when civil rights proponents would be memorializing the disaffection that had led to Bloody Sunday.

Most of what I read about race relations in the Selma paper that week focused upon the tension and differences of opinion that made the chances of cooperation between the town's blacks and whites seem highly unlikely in the near future. There was a police report that a bomb might be planted at the base of the bridge over which the twenty-fifth anniversary participants were scheduled to march. There was an interview with Jesse Jackson in which he described the bridge as symbolizing “Calvary” for black people, explaining, “We carried the cross of oppression and suffered the crucifixion so that all would have a new hope.” But this hope, according to a white councilman named Carl Morgan, was being undermined by the contrariness of such black leaders as Rose Sanders. Her well-publicized accusations that a racist grading system prevailed within the classrooms of Selma's public schools was a manufactured controversy, Morgan suggested, one that kept Rose Sanders in the headlines and provided her and her anti-Smitherman friends with a lively issue to rally around. It was noted elsewhere that Sanders was currently raising funds for the establishment of a voting-rights museum near the bridge; it would display artifacts and memorabilia associated with the 1960s era of Dr. King, the Freedom Riders, and the rampaging posse of Sheriff Jim Clark. There was also a guest column on the editorial page of the Selma paper by J. L. Chestnut, Jr., in which he asserted that he and his parents had been
receiving many threatening phone calls at night from white people who were part of a “planned conspiracy to assault and harass.”

With these and other articles concentrating on the grievances and ill-feelings that were said to characterize the city, it seemed to me all the more important that I emphasize in my story for the
Times
what was apparently
not
deemed to be newsworthy here in Alabama—the fact that, despite all the local reports of contentiousness, it was nonetheless possible in today's Selma for a black man to walk arm in arm with a white woman along the sidewalks without being physically impeded. Did this not say something about changing attitudes in Selma? Was it not a step forward along the path of what Dr. King called the “highway up from darkness”? Did this not exemplify a black man's right to choose? In this state still associated with the notoriety of the Scottsboro trials, and in this city still marked by its own prejudicial prosecution of William Earl Fikes, was not Randall Miller newsworthy for having flouted what in these parts had long been a taboo?

The William Earl Fikes conviction, following testimony by white women about his sexual transgressions, had led in 1954 to the creation of an antiblack organization in Selma called the White Citizens' Council, which, according to the historian J. Mills Thornton III, in his book entitled
Dividing Lines
, motivated white people to adopt an “unusually aggressive and unanimous commitment to an extremist racial position during the coming decade”—the decade that produced Bloody Sunday. And yet what influences had emerged in Selma since then that might explain Randall Miller's bold and confident pursuit of a white woman? He had wooed her, had won her, and had finally obtained a license to marry her—and, except for some snide commentary uttered within the community, he had fulfilled his intentions without being challenged. He had cuckolded a white man in Selma and had gotten away with it. Betty's then husband had returned to Arkansas feeling anger and humiliation, but, insofar as I gathered from talking to her, he had held
her
accountable for what had happened and not her suitor, and he had never contemplated seeking revenge upon Randall Miller.

I thought about this as I continued to drive through the early-evening traffic toward the Holiday Inn. In my ancestral part of Italy, a husband who had been cuckolded would often get a gun and shoot bullets at his unfaithful wife and her lover, and then elude a prison term because it was a “crime of honor.” I wondered how Betty's ex-husband was now getting along in rural Arkansas? What did his friends and neighbors say and think about the situation? Was losing one's wife to a black man doubly deflating
to Mr. Ramsey's ego? Or did it provide him with the excuse that the failed marriage had nothing to do with him—wasn't it obvious that Betty had to be crazy and out of control to leave her family and cohabitate with a black man in Selma? But since I had no intention of going to Arkansas to explore this matter further, I returned my attentions to my area of interest, which was Selma.

Selma was
the
reason that the interracial affair represented a story to me. I would not have considered writing about it had it occurred in Toledo, Sarasota, Wichita, or Buffalo, or in any of a thousand other places, including such southern cities as Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, or Memphis. Memphis was where Dr. King had been murdered in 1968 by a white man, and yet that city had not been demonized as Selma had been after Bloody Sunday, even though on the latter occasion not a single demonstrator had been killed. But the widespread media depictions of the staggering tear-gassed protesters being pummeled to the ground by law-enforcement authorities were so riveting and revolting that Selma thereafter represented the national nadir in narrow-mindedness, the last lingering remnant of the Civil War South and of white-columned bigotry and enslavement. This city that had been identified with prejudice was presently on the receiving end of prejudice from the press.

Even now, twenty-five years after Bloody Sunday, reporters from around the nation, including correspondents employed by news organizations in England and Germany, were here to cover the silver anniversary memorial, and Rose Sanders was raising funds in order to enshrine the area as the hallowed grounds of a quasi-Holocaust; and I was considering using the anniversary as the backdrop for the story about a local black man who had ventured across the color line into the arms of a white woman. Was I misinterpreting its significance? Was I trying to turn Randall Miller into a connubial Jackie Robinson? Would I be doing a disservice to this weekend's civil rights gathering if, instead of producing a story that would remind readers of the black anguish preceding the congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act, I introduced into my coverage an almost contradictory scenario that focused on interracial love and was
not
what the
Times
editors in New York were expecting? How come the local newspaper had not already published something about the couple, especially after the two of them had divorced their spouses and let it be known that they intended to marry? It seemed to me that if the
Selma Times-Journal
had sought them out for a feature story, or had at least printed an item on the social page about their forthcoming wedding, it might have been picked up by the national media and been presented around the
country in a way that would have put Selma in a good light—giving the impression that the city, in being the locale of such a ceremony, was deviating from its image and was no longer supporting principles that denied African-Americans full equality with regard to opportunities and choices.

I considered driving over to the
Times-Journal
building and questioning the editorial bosses about why they had ignored this story, but I doubted that they would tell me much. Decision makers at news organizations are characteristically guarded when asked to explain why they have
not
published something, usually responding that it is nobody's concern but their own. Maybe the
Times-Journal
's business office had advised the editors to stay away from the story, arguing that to do otherwise could indicate editorial tolerance of interracial sexual intimacy, and this might prompt some of the newspaper's leading advertisers to withdraw their financial support. Or maybe the editors shied away for reasons of their own, perhaps out of concern that a printed story might offend readers who were hard-core segregationists, resulting in a rock or a bomb being hurled through the window of Randall Miller's home before or during the wedding—an incident that would surely bring forth protests from black activists and
more
unwanted attention to Selma from out-of-state media. And, furthermore, there was no proof that the African-Americans of Selma or elsewhere in the United States liked reading about their people marrying whites any more than white people liked reading about interracial marriages with blacks.

While U.S. census data pointed to a substantial increase in black-white marriages in the aftermath of the civil rights movement's challenges to segregation in schools and the workplace—in 1960, there were approximately 50,000 black-white marriages; in 1990 the estimate was about 300,000—there was no evidence that this rising number had broadened or hastened the general acceptance of blacks into the white social world. And advocates of black pride could well resent such marriages, reasoning that they contributed nothing to the movement's cause and might lend credence to the idea that a solution to racism was achievable via the gradual eradication of the black race, the watering down of black blood into the white mainstream through the repeated and prolonged process of miscegenation. The birth of millions of mulattoes before and since the Civil War had failed to have a positive impact on the historical problem of racism in America—and, more often than not, black separatists and white segregationists were generally in agreement on the undesirability of marital relationships between black people and white people. Oddly allied on this matter was the Black Muslim leader,
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and the onetime sheriff of Selma, James G. Clark.

In the early 1960s, former president Harry S. Truman spoke out against black-white marriages when I interviewed him as a
Times
reporter. It was then customary for Truman to permit the press to accompany him when he visited New York and seek his comments on topical subjects during his postbreakfast walks along Park Avenue near his hotel; and on this particular morning, since interracial conflicts were dominating the headlines, I asked him whether he thought that racial intermarriages in America might become widespread in the future.

“I hope not,” Truman said unhesitatingly, maintaining his quick stride while I and three other journalists tried to keep pace while taking notes. “I don't believe in it,” he continued. “What's that word about four feet long?”

“Miscegenation,” I replied.

Neither slowing down nor seeming to be impressed that I knew the word, Truman turned toward me and asked, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?”

“Well,” I said after a pause, surprised that this interview had now turned personal, “I would hope that a daughter of mine would marry the man she loved.”