Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (10 page)

With a hundred or more white Observers involved, mostly women with free daytime hours to devote, a few minor hitches were bound to develop. One lady sailed angrily up to an acquaintance who had merely stopped at a lunch counter for a bite to eat after a hot afternoon’s shopping, and snapped, “What are
you
doing here? This place is reserved for the Unitarians.”

Integration of the movie theatres presented yet another problem. Informal agreement was finally reached with some of the theatre managers that blacks would be admitted, but to smooth the initial stages of the change, they would be expected to walk directly to their seats and not to stand in the lobby, patronize the candy stand, or use the restrooms. A white lady Observer, seeing a black patron in front of her move as though to rise from his seat, reached forward and grabbed him, saying loudly, “You’re not supposed to go to the restroom!”

What early experience or sudden turn in life had prompted the missionary zeal of the Observers? This was hard to discover. “I guess I’ve always felt this way, ever since I was a child,” said one. “It’s just that there was never any opportunity to
do
anything about it until the sit-ins started.” I was to get the same sort of answer from many another Southern white.

I asked my hostess what sort of reaction her activities evoked among her friends and relations. “They never discuss it,” she answered stiffly. I thought I could see why: she was in truth intimidatingly ladylike, not the sort with whom one would seek a rough-and-tumble argument. Furthermore, it seems to be a characteristic of polite Southern society to avoid subjects which may lead to unpleasant controversy, or which start a train of thought at the end of which lies change and unrest. I had further occasion to remark this in Nashville. I spent an afternoon with an elderly intellectual, one of those rare women whose entire life is spent in the realm of scholarly endeavor. She was a leading authority on Boswell and Johnson, a translator of eighteenth-century French poetry, a student of modern thought from Freud to Sartre—and an alert, interesting conversationalist. At one point, I asked her what she thought the outcome of the segregation problem would be. She became exceedingly ruffled, and answered quite crossly, “To tell you the truth, I never give it a thought.” Evidently, to think about this particular problem would be disturbing, and in an area in which she had no wish to be disturbed.

If one stayed long enough in the company of people like the Observer ladies, it might be possible to get the wrong impression. It would not be difficult to travel through the South entirely in such company, for today they exist to one extent or another in every state—even in the deep South—and, like all minority thinkers, they tend to hang together. They are for the most part a deeply dedicated lot. In the North, there are countless numbers of white people who contribute occasionally to CORE or NAACP, go once in a while to a meeting or lecture on race problems, and vote for a local black candidate; but these activities are on the periphery of their lives. Among the Southerners I met who have taken a stand for integration, it seems to have swallowed them whole, and to occupy their every waking moment.

Once you start out with the integrationists, they are likely to pass you from hand to hand and from town to town without giving you much chance to peer at the other side. I mentioned this to a young attorney, originally from Jackson, whom I met in Nashville. He laughed and said, “You should tra meetin’ Kissin’ Jim Folsom.
That’d
open yo’ ass.” For a moment, I was frozen with astonishment—until I realized he was saying “
eyes
.”

TRIP NOTES

Atlanta. So far, everywhere I’ve been (Louisville, Nashville, and now Atlanta) people keep saying, “This isn’t the
real
South,” or, “It’s more of a border city.” Yet they look like Southerners, they talk like Southerners, they act like Southerners. I gather what they really mean is that Atlanta, Nashville, and Louisville have better newspapers, better colleges, more enlightened leadership, and consequently better race relations than other Southern communities. Therefore to say they are not the
real
South seems vaguely unfair.

I met a couple of Southern belles, 1961 models. The first was a senior at a women’s college on the outskirts of Atlanta (“academically, the best school in the South,” she told me). She had the delicate look of a spring flower—yet a certain bounciness of manner—and that special softness and highness of voice often encountered in Southern women. “What made me join the sit-ins? I don’t know. I always wanted to do something about discrimination. When I saw them there, I felt I had no choice but to join in,” she said. She had not known any of the Negro participants. One day she was downtown shopping and came across a Negro picket line. “I just started picketing with them, but the tears were rolling down my cheeks.” She distributed CORE literature all over campus, and eventually about six of her fellow-students took part in the picketing. She regards herself as “neither a leader nor a follower—just an individual,” yet she conveys the impression of one who will make her mark on history.

The second Southern belle, conventionally honey-haired and blue-eyed, was introduced to me by her mother who said, “I want you to meet my li’l ole jailbird daughter. She’s just been in and out of those jails since the sit-ins started—haven’t you, lamb chop?— and now she’s on her way to Jackson with the Freedom Riders.” Lamb chop, an honor student at a New Orleans women’s college, is jeopardizing a coveted Junior Year Abroad by making the dangerous journey to Jackson; but with her, as with a growing number of her generation, the “mewvement” (as they all pronounce it) must come first.

The little old jailbird’s attractive and delightful mother took me to some meetings where I met the men and women of good will who were busily organizing for D-day—that day in September when the schools would be desegregated for the first time. (“Don’t ever say
integration
, we like to call it
desegregation
—it sounds so much more palatable, somehow.”) A network of committees and subcommittees with their cleverly contrived names—HOPE for Help Our Public Education, OASIS for Organizations Assisting Schools in September—were meeting almost daily, often to the background whir of a mimeograph machine grinding out the latest mailing. From the top-level planners, including Y leaders, churchmen, school board people, to the neighborhood groups and youth committees, hundreds were involved in this huge humanitarian enterprise. I heard the superintendent of schools tell a gathering that police protection for the entering students would be as carefully planned as the invasion of Japan. It was all thrilling, and heartwarming, and inspiring—with one tragicomic aspect: this great outpouring of best-intentioned energy was directed to the very modest end that nine black children (out of three hundred applicants) should be allowed peacefully to take their rightful places at school in September. These nine had survived every conceivable test known to educators. Academically, they had to be above the 50th percentile of the school to which they sought transfer, their behavior record had to be blameless, their personalities had to be declared outstanding. No such tests were required, of course, of their white classmates, which leads one to speculate whether the old phrase “separate but equal” is being supplanted for the blacks by the concept “together but vastly superior.”

TRIP NOTES

Montgomery. At last people have stopped saying, “This isn’t the
real
South.” My favorite sort of houses everywhere, white frame, two or more stories, most with nineteenth-century gingerbread trim. Even in the better suburbs, none of this split-level streamlined modern that gets so tiresome in wealthy California ... everything half-hidden by the rampaging vegetation, a Corot-Monet-Manet land ... the frescoes round the walls of the cupola in the State Capitol, incredibly like the worst examples of Soviet art, depicting scenes of Montgomery history ... one, titled “The Golden Years,” shows a group of happy slaves toting bales of something, each with delighted smile on face. No postcards of this available, to my sorrow, as I should have liked to tease my friends at home with them ... the Elite Café, Fine Food (pronounced “Eelight Cafe, Fan Fude”).... Weeds pushing up all over the tennis courts in the immense public park; a couple of years ago blacks won a court decision granting them use of the park, so the city authorities closed it up for everybody ... noses and faces being respectively cut off and spited all over ... they disbanded the zoo, too, and now if you want to take the kids to the zoo you have to go all the way to Birmingham—where the zoo is integrated!

Social gatherings in Montgomery are full of echoes of the past. The food in private houses tends to be in the shape of things—ice-cream boats or hearts, fish-shaped aspic salads—and almost everything is creamed, not only creamed but served with cream sauce. The fare is as mild and gentle as the ladies themselves, no bitter or pungent taste to offset the bland, no crisp consistency to contrast with the soft. The very form of conversation seems more nineteenth century than contemporary. At ladies’ lunches the talk proceeds like a croquet game, with three standard opening moves: (1) the weather: “Well, is it hot enough for you?” (2) the food, about which someone is bound to declare pretty near the beginning that Rosie-Belle’s whatever-it-is is just simply out of this world, (3) the frontal-assault type of compliment where somebody declares that my you get younger-looking every day and how in the world do you manage it, and goes on to bet your husband doesn’t like to let you out of his sight for one single minute. (This sort of remark may as well be delivered to a matron of fifty as to the latest bride, and trips off the tongue as readily.) Exaggeration as a way of life may confuse the auslander. My hostess answers the telephone and is heard to say, “Why Janie, that’s just about the nicest thing I ever heard in my whole life”; upon being asked later what the call was about, it turns out that Janie has invited us over for a drink. No use to comment that my hostess must have had a rather thin time if that was really just about the
nicest
thing she
ever
heard in her
whole
life; she merely stares uncomprehendingly.

As conversation warms up—which of course it does, eventually — the sense of the past is intensified, for so much of it deals with endless ramifications of family history and gossip about old times. One thing leading to another, the long-ago romances of Aunts Willie-Jo and Sarah-Marie, Cousins Robbie-Lou and Marigold, are brought out for examination and speculation. Anecdotes often end, “And the thing of it was he simply up and took a shotgun and blew his brains out.” “And of course she was found in the river. We all felt so bad and no one ever did exactly get the right of what happened.” “The poor feller just actually took to the bottle (well you
know
he did, and of course it’s in the family, his father died an alcoholic) and well anyway I declare one day they found him in the garage hanging from a belt....” “Of course nothing was ever proved about it, but they do say her death was
not
accidental.” Few seem to have died in their beds. All this, in surprising contrast to the peachy-creamy surface of life in Montgomery.

The Montgomery country club is much like the one in Louisville—spacious, old-fashioned, French windows giving on to a long outdoor terrace, presumably for Gone With the Windish occasions. As in Louisville, good whiskey and terrible food are served by old-family-retainer types of blacks in white coats. There were a lot of young people in the crowd, girls in diaphanous evening dresses, boys in white dinner jackets. Their talk was all but incomprehensible, their “y’alls” rang out like Rebel Yells. I found myself talking to a middle-aged man, introduced to me as a member of the school board; so we discussed education—in its noncontroversial aspects, for I was a guest and on my best behavior. The topic was the difficult situation of the unusually bright child, whether he should be “skipped” or handled otherwise. It is a safe and well-plotted subject, with enough “on the one hands” and “on the other hands” to keep one going for a while. My interlocutor explained that in his district, the problem is being tackled by grouping the children within each grade according to ability. I rejoined that the same system obtains in Oakland—and could not help adding that in our grammar school, there is a fifth-grade group of six children with I.Q.s of over 150—two whites, two Orientals, and two blacks. With genuine forehead-wrinkling puzzlement (and no apparent rancor) the school board member drawled, “Is that so? It don’t seem possible no Nigra could have an I.Q. of 150, do it, now?” I started to say, “To me it do ...” when our hostess hurriedly bore me off to talk to someone else. (A friend of mine in California, herself a transplanted Southerner, insists I have exaggerated this story, that educated Southerners do not talk like this. But I heard what I heard, and what’s more I’ve caught her talking in the same vernacular when she gets around her own folks from down home. To forestall a probable further criticism—that I have represented the whites but not the blacks as speaking in dialect—I can only say that educated Southern blacks are indeed far more particular about their diction than are their white counterparts.)

For a breath of fresh air, I went to the mass meeting in the black community where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was to speak with the Freedom Riders. Actually the air was disturbingly filled with tear gas at one point, and no one quite knew if we’d get out of there alive. The hostile white crowd outside, which had been gathering for some time before the meeting, was suitably attired, I noted with approval, in the latest thing in mob wear. In faded cotton frocks revealing insect-bitten bare legs, or dirty shirts and jeans, they might have been movie extras assembled by a rather unimaginative director to do a corny mob scene. A well-read lot, they appeared to be, too—versed in the literature of their region. Surely that half-beaten-down half-savage look, that casual yet brutal slouch, that mean glitter in the eye could only be achieved by one with at least a passing acquaintance with the works of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Eudora Welty. There was no police protection, of course; just one or two very nervous-looking U.S. marshals. To achieve the church, I parked my borrowed car nearby and walked past the extras with all deliberate speed, as the Supreme Court would say—for, being hatted, gloved, and stockinged, I felt more than a little conspicuous.