Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (9 page)

In such small ways do we influence the portentous decisions of Captains of Industry; but this was not all. A few months after “Proceed with Caution” appeared, an article clearly inspired by the telephone company ran in the
Wall Street Journal
and other newspapers around the country, describing various kinds of thievery suffered by the company necessitating (they claimed) an increase in rates. Rip-offs reported in the article were for the most part rather crude, such as teen-agers breaking into pay phones and stealing the money; but one example given was that of a traveling salesman in Detroit who, wishing to let his wife know his whereabouts, calls his home number person-to-person for Homer V. Hickles. I, of course, was dying to sue the telephone company for plagiarism; but as usual, wiser heads prevailed.

YOU-ALL AND NON-YOU-ALL:
A SOUTHERN POTPOURRI

ESQUIRE /
May, 1962

TRIP NOTES

All the advice you get when you’re going on a trip. This time, it’s mostly advice not to go at all. “You’ll probably come back and write a do-gooder’s tract,” they say. Or, “I’ve got a good title for you: Live Oaks and Dead People.” Or, heavily sarcastic, “Have
fun
.” I can’t get anyone to go with me. They all say, “We’d go if you were going somewhere sensible like New York.”

The prejudice Northerners feel towards Southerners is roughly parallel to that felt by English people towards Americans, and is compounded of many of the same ingredients—a thoroughgoing dislike of their public policies, contempt for their level of education and culture, and a sort of instinctive recoil at the sound of the accent—larded in both cases, it must be said, with a thick layer of that particular form of snobbishness that sneers at the provincial. It is distasteful to the Northerner that a human being should have the given name of Lady Bird; it grates on the Northern ear to hear an educated person say “sumpn” and “prolly,” or speak of a “mess of fried chicken” pronounced “maiss of frad chickn.”

The photographs that appear so regularly in the newspapers of white faces caught in the act of hate outside some school or drugstore fill the Northerner with uneasiness and almost incredulity; for when the Northerner segregates and discriminates, he does it on the whole slyly rather than overtly, and without passion.

Thus the white South comes to be pictured in the Northern mind as an undifferentiated, arid wasteland of the human intellect and spirit, a hopeless mess of a place, cluttered with irrationality and ignorance, incongruously smeared over with a sticky coating of sugary politeness and sentimentality.

All the same, there are hints that changes may be on the way: a high-school student’s appeal for reason in Little Rock; a white minister leading his child past hostile mobs to school in New Orleans; white college kids extending the hand of friendship to three black classmates at Georgia Tech.

My point in going to the South was, as a certain kind of tourist will often put it, “to see how the people really live.” I was not too interested in the usual interviews with V.I.P.s on both sides of the integration question. To slide into the daily lives of people, to soak up their ordinary conversation, to savor their manner and manners, to achieve an oblique rather than a direct look was my plan. Slightly easier said than done, I found; people are always shoving you off to talk to community leaders or to meetings where The Problem is under discussion.

Also, although I deliberately chose a time when things seemed tranquil—the sit-in operation largely over in the communities I visited, the aims of the Montgomery bus boycott long since achieved—violence followed me, and unwittingly I found myself in the middle of it. However, I thought when it was all over, the mobs and the violence and the meetings to discuss ways of preventing violence
are
really part of the daily lives of ordinary people in the South.

TRIP NOTES

On the train, through Kentucky. There’s already a marked change of atmosphere. The women on the train seem to travel in Sears catalogue dreamy date dresses. One is wearing a beige silk sheath, spangled semi-transparent top, high-heeled simulated glass slippers. She’s a great kidder. The conductor, checking on reservations, just asked her, “Are you Mrs. Jennie Lee Kelley?” She answered, “Can’t you see I am, by my browbeaten look?” Shrieks of laughter from all, especially her fat husband.... Lovely pale green, lush country outside ... In a Louisville hotel: already the punctuation and spelling are breaking down. A brochure in my room says, “Derby Lounge. Stall’s are named and portray famous derby winners ...” and also, “YE-OLE KENTUCKIE BREAKFEASTE.” Why the hyphen? Borrowed from you-all?

Louisville, a town on the turn, is a mass of contradictions. There is one major department store that not only refuses service to blacks in the cafeteria, but denies them the right to try on or return clothes. There is another, equally substantial, that not only serves blacks in the cafeteria—but has complained that not enough of them eat there! The manager points out that the transition to acceptance will be smoother in the long run if the whites become accustomed as a daily matter of course to seeing blacks served.

A black newspaper editor told me, “In these border communities it’s not popular to believe in segregation. Most whites will tell you they have ‘colored friends,’ even though they generally mean their maids. But although there’s abstract agreement about the inevitability of desegregation, there’s no agreement about implementation—the when and how.”

The editor asked me if I’d like to meet some women who were going to do “the Testing.” He explained: In the wake of a successful sit-in movement by students the year before, some ninety eating places had agreed to desegregate, and now their good faith was being tested. The Testers, a group of well-dressed black women, gathered at the black Y.W.C.A. for instructions and assignments. There were the usual asides so familiar to anyone who has worked in P.-T.A., Girl Scouts, the usual civic organizations: “Can’t work beyond two o’clock, my Jimmy gets back from school then.” “Sorry I couldn’t come Tuesday, Miz Brown, but my kids all came down with the flu.” Efficient-looking mimeographed forms were handed out, with spaces for “Place Tested,” “Time Tested,” “Environment (check one): Low, Medium, High,” “Attitude of Waitress or Manager (check one): Poor, Fair, Good.”

“The trouble is, you have to drink so much coffee before the day’s over,” confided one woman—a complaint I had further occasion to hear in the course of my travels. The chairman, a pleasant-looking middle-aged schoolteacher, issued a few last-minute reminders: “Don’t get in any arguments. Don’t forget to bring the completed form next week.” The Testers received their assignments and drifted off in pairs for the day’s work. It was all very matter-of-fact, a chore that had to be done, a little reminiscent of a League of Women Voters survey of some community facility.

For another view of Louisville, I accepted an invitation to dinner at the country club. This was, for me, a little like being shown around a steel factory behind the Iron Curtain; never having seen the inside of one at home, I had no basis for comparison. Nevertheless, a certain amount of Southern life revolves around these country clubs, and I thought it would be a good thing to have a look.

We were a party of five, two couples and myself. Rather to my surprise, conversation centered for a time on the Servant Problem. I have, of course, heard and read of such discussions, but had never before been actually present at one. The subject was first broached by one of the guests, a middle-aged man whom I shall call Mr. Mitchell. He related the sad story of his experience with
Life
magazine, which had recently run a series of articles on domestic servants. A
Life
editor had called Mr. Mitchell about his old Uncle Mo, who has been with the Mitchell family for thirty-five years; then, just when Mr. Mitchell figured the story was all set,
Life
dropped him and Uncle Mo, and picked some upstart who had only been with
his
white folks for eighteen years. “With
Life
, many are called but few are chosen,” I murmured, but the other couple now chimed in along these lines: “Why, Wilfred, you all certainly have it easy! Why, our Chorine, she’s simple terrible, I mean she’s just awful, simply ruined the best silver by pouring bleach all over it, we’ve rechristened her ‘Chlorine.’ ” ...

Just as I was being overcome with prickly embarrassment, Mrs. Mitchell came to my rescue and turned the conversation to books. Mrs. Mitchell jerst lerves to read. In fact, the local branch of the public library simply can’t keep up with her; she just
gobbles
up books, five or six of ’em a week. Why, books are just bread and meat to her.... Mr. Mitchell demurred. He never reads anything unless it has first been digested by the
Reader’s Digest;
he’s a ve’y ve’y slow reader, always has been, can’t git through these long, long books of three-four hundred pages, that’s asking too much of a man. He means, he
likes
reading, but why drag it out so? Mmm, you’ve got a point, I said.

I felt that time was staggering on and we were somehow missing the crux of life in the South today, and now undertook to change the subject myself. “What do you think of the sit-ins?” I asked of the general assemblage. Mr. Mitchell undertook to propound the position for the group. He explained that it was like this. In’egration may be inevitable, but it’s gotta be fought, because just as sure as night and day it will lead eventually to the Mongrelization of the Race. Using bits of tableware, he illustrated: “Here you’ve got a race horse,” producing a fork. “And here’s a cart horse,” marshaling a sugar bowl that did look a little bit like a fat, plodding old nag. “Mix ’em, and what have you got?” Since, reader, you have heard this one before, I will cut it short: You’ve got sumpn that ain’t fit for running and ain’t fit for hauling—a cross-breed, a misfit. “And what, oh what, have you got if you breed a slow reader with a fast reader?” I asked anxiously; but answer came there none.

Fortunately there are other viewpoints to be found among Louisville whites. Louisville is the home of Barry Bingham, publisher and owner of the liberal
Courier-Journal
. Bingham impressed me as one who would be more at home in London or Paris than in this provincial setting, a cosmopolitan in outlook and by preference; yet he works conscientiously with the locals for liberalization of racial attitudes in his home town. It is also the home of Carl and Anne Braden, who some years ago faced ostracism and criminal prosecution because they helped a black veteran buy a home in an all-white tract. Carl Braden is now in prison, serving his year for contempt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His wife keeps house for their three children and works full-time for the interracial Southern Conference Educational Fund. She is a pale, determined young woman who speaks in the accents of her native Alabama. She has great confidence in her fellow-Southern-whites: “Once people down in these parts start to shake loose from their prejudices, it’ll be a landslide. It’s beginning already among the young folks, college and high-school age. There’s really an awful lot going on that you never read about in the newspapers.”

TRIP NOTES

Last day in Louisville. No fair using taxi drivers for copy, but this one’s an exception. She’s a rugged, strong-looking woman, build of Marie Dressler. I ask her what she thinks of the sit-ins. “All for them!” she calls out gaily. Goes on to tell me about her son’s elementary school picnic last year. There were about sixty white people, kids and parents, and one black boy. The park custodian refused to admit the black child—upon which the whites, by common agreement, decided to chuck the whole thing. Surprising, because I’m not at all sure this would necessarily have been the outcome had a parallel incident happened at home in California.... On to Nashville. I’m told it is known by its inhabitants as “the Athens of the South.” Leads one to speculate for a fanciful moment on whether Athenians ever think of their city as “the Nashville of Greece.”

In Nashville, I drove to a shady road on the outskirts of town, one of those roads bathed in the luminous green that is the hallmark of a Southern spring; you feel almost as though you were swimming through the weeds of a sunny, overgrown pond, so exuberant is the vegetation. The large, tidy house at the end of the circular drive was of the vintage of its inhabitants, perhaps a little older, and furnished in the style of their youth with lots of leather, varnished maps, flowery chintz, and fringed lamps.

Several ladies were gathered for tea, which was shortly served by a prim black maid. The sweet, soft voices twittered away: “I declare, Francie-Lou, these brownies are just mouth-watering.” “And I never did get my ramblers to bloom just right last spring, but then the weather was downright unseasonable.” Touches of lace rose and fell on dimity bosoms, old fingers groped in purses for photographs of grandchildren. One might have stumbled into a scene from a Mary Petty cartoon. Soon enough, as often happens in a gathering of the leisured elderly, the conversation turned to Good Works. The particular form of Good Works practiced by these ladies for the past several months was being Observers at the black sit-ins.

The role of an Observer, they explained to me, was merely to sit at the lunch counter or in the theatre where blacks were seeking accommodation, and in silence to lend moral support to the effort. There was no contact between Observer and sit-in demonstrator, and no words were ever exchanged; nevertheless, “by some sort of mental telepathy,” as one expressed it, the friendly intent of the Observer was usually somehow transmitted to the black group. Looking round at these particular Observers, I felt it wouldn’t require much detective work to divine that a Woolworth’s lunch counter was not their customary eating place, nor
Son of Tarzan
their preferred form of entertainment. “I don’t think Miz’ Beardsley ever set foot in a Woolworth’s before in all her born days,” confided one, “because she turned to me real surprised, and said, ‘Why, who’d have thought they serve coffee in these places?’ ” Mrs. Beardsley had good cause to find out that they not only serve coffee, but ply the customers with free refills; for after two hours, during which because of a temporary breakdown of organization no blacks showed up, she was heard to complain in an agonized stage whisper, “Where in the world are they? I simply
can’t
drink any more coffee—and I
must
find the ladies’ room.” Coffee drinking seems to loom large in this struggle.