A Turn in the South (11 page)

“I finally got the name of the martial-arts guy through a newspaper. I called the guy. ‘My name is Hosea Williams. I offer you my help.’ He was overwhelmed. He said, ‘I know of you. Before I accept your help I want to talk face to face with you.’ But I wouldn’t drive to Forsyth that night. He said, ‘I’ll drive down to Atlanta.’ I was afraid of him. I didn’t know who he was. He might have been from the Klan. I staged a meeting in the lobby of a big hotel. He drove down that same night, he and his father-in-law. He said, ‘I know you. I know your reputation. I know you’re a tough man. But I tell you one thing. If you come to Forsyth and march with me you ain’t gonna leave that place alive.’

“I know how tough Forsyth is. But I thought he was being too pessimistic. I called a press conference. I announced that we are leaving from Dr. King’s grave at nine o’clock and we are going to Forsyth. I didn’t think nobody was going with me. Black people are afraid of Forsyth. They know the reputation. Black people don’t even like stopping for gas at Forsyth.

“Dean Carter, the martial-arts man, said: ‘These people are ignorant. They are told to keep niggers out, don’t care what it takes. They are taught from the cradle to the grave to keep those niggers out. You do whatever you have to do—you beat them, you kill them—to keep
niggers out of the county. It’s like their culture.’ That’s what Dean Carter said. ‘It’s like their
culture.’

“I thought I knew how bad the place was. I didn’t know how bad it really was.

“The next morning there was about thirty-five to forty people.

“I sensed, going up, that these people had a deep frustration. I got up and taught and talked and taught and talked and preached all the way up there. When we got there, there was about thirty or twenty people waiting to join us. One or two was the Ku Klux Klan waiting to infiltrate. But at the same time there were about fifteen hundred people all around—the papers say two hundred, but I say fifteen hundred—and they were having a Ku Klux Klan rally and they were shouting, ‘Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers! Run the niggers back to the Atlanta watermelon field.’ Fifteen hundred. All around.

“The sheriff tried to discourage us getting off the bus. I said: ‘We are Americans. Marching is a matter of free speech.’ I wasn’t going to let anybody stop us marching.

“Those people all around were so souped up they were diving and running over four-foot fences like Olympic hurdlers, shouting, ‘Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!’ ”

When I had seen him in the courtroom—doing nothing, saying little—he had seemed harassed, agitated. Yet now, though he was walking around my chair and acting out his story, stamping his feet, jabbing his fist down, he seemed lucid. His talk didn’t seem exaggerated or quirky. And what increasingly came out was how practical he had been. Like the Indian mahatma, he knew how to organize things, how to use the institutions of the society: the law, the press.

The opponents of the march had also organized. According to Hosea, they had laid by stores of missiles.

Hosea said, “The press kept coming up to me”—odd, this description of a dangerous march, with the press on hand: how had he got them there?—“The press kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Is this bad? Is this bad, Hosea?’ And I said, acting, ‘No, it ain’t so bad.’ And one of my own staff members came and said to me, ‘Reverend, it’s
bad.’
And he was right. It was bad.

“One man, one of the Forsyth crowd, was running up to the front of our bus and then to the rear of the bus—the bus that had brought us to Forsyth, the bus I had rented—running back and forth trying to
get to me. I realized what he was doing. He seemed to be a leader, and I thought I would try to communicate with him through the eyes.” (I remembered what Howard had told me: in moments of street danger avoid eye contact. It was Howard’s rule for avoiding trouble generally; and I saw it practiced all the time by black waiters in Atlanta.) “And when he came back up to the front of the bus, I smiled at him. He went berserk. He started screaming: ‘The nigger smiled at me! You gotta kill these niggers! I don’t want these niggers march. But the nigger
smiled
at me!’ ”

The sheriff then asked Hosea to get his people back on the bus.

“I got the people on the bus and take them down a lil ways, to give him a chance to contain the Ku Klux Klan.”

Hosea drew up the bottom of one trouser leg and showed the dark-red bruises on his pale-brown shin and calf. He said the bruises had been caused by a brick thrown during the march.

That was the end of the march. On the bus going back to Atlanta a thought came to him, and he began to smile. His son asked why he was smiling, and Hosea said to him, “I feel like I’ve really celebrated Dr. King’s birthday.”

It was his storyteller’s way of rounding off the story, which had begun with his strictures on the false ways people, and black people among them, had begun to celebrate the birthday of “Dr. King”—which was the way Hosea invariably referred to Martin Luther King.

Hosea said, “On the bus coming home I told my son, ‘Them’s some of the baddest white folks I’ve ever seen.’

“I’ve faced mobs before. But they usually were older white males. If there was any women they was only one or two and they was quiet. But at Forsyth, oh God, they had a large number of women, many holding little babies in their arms, and screaming all kinds of vulgarity, especially hatred. ‘Kill the niggers! The niggers get AIDS!’ The number of young people, the teenagers! I thought: ‘Oh my God, we got sixty more years of that kid standing over there.’ ”

After that first march, Hosea said, some newspapers had reported that he had been run out of Forsyth County. That had encouraged him to organize the second march. Forty thousand people had marched then. The newspapers said twenty thousand, but he thought forty thousand.

“Racism is coming back, man. Just like it did after the Civil War.

They described that then as the ending of the Reconstruction. Well, we’re now at the ending of the second Reconstruction.”

But the Forsyth issue was dead now, as the sheriff had said. Had anything been served?

Hosea thought that, though no black had moved to Forsyth, a lot of good had come out of the affair. He offered a list of the good things. One: the good white people up in Forsyth had been able to stand up to the Klan. Two: the fragmented civil-rights groups had come together, in a way they hadn’t been together since the death of Dr. King.

“Three: Forsyth kind of forces so-called leaders to stop jiving and
lead
, not to wait for things to happen naturally. Forces leaders to go out and initiate and provoke confrontation. Four: the greatest thing. It proved that Dr. King’s strategies didn’t become obsolete with his death, as other people say. They say to me, ‘Hosea, you’re just a battle-fatigued old general. It’s time to stop demonstratin’ and start negotiatin’.’ They’ve taken the movement out of the street and into the suite. Out of the street and into the suite. That’s what they spin around doing. But they have to come back to my position and admit that the street is where it’s happening.”

“A primary force”: that was how Tom Teepen had described Hosea. But I hadn’t seen it like that. I had seen him more as a performer, acting up to the public character he had created for himself. I didn’t think so now. The City Council politics he was engaged in required him to be a showman; but through his showmanship—now, in the privacy of his office—I was aware of his lucidity and goodness; and I felt that the mahatma himself—with all his own awkwardness—might have radiated something of that quality.

As it happened, among the books on a bookshelf against the wall there was one with
Gandhi
on the spine. And when Hosea had to go out of the office to talk to someone who had arrived, I went and looked at it. It was a paperback. It wasn’t the mahatma’s autobiography, as I had thought; it was the screenplay of the film
Gandhi
, and on the fly leaf there was a dedication to Hosea from the writer, Jack Briley: a dedication that said it was (if I remember rightly) from a man who wrote words to a man who took the blows. The dedication, it seemed to me, did honor to both men, and hinted at one explanation (out of many) of the extraordinary power of that film. And the story Hosea had told (and I was an audience of only one), the energy he had given
off, added a new meaning to the big photographs on the walls: the mule carts and overalls, and the young Martin Luther King, whom Hosea honored and adored.

When he came back to the office a little of the energy that had come to him during his telling of the Forsyth story had gone away. In its place there was authority; he was now in my eyes absolutely lucid.

I asked him about his recent campaign about drugs, and his picketing of the CIA.

He said, “The drug thing, it’s bad. Drugs are destroying our people more than anything—segregation, racism—since slavery. The fear of the drug-traffickers, the fear that results from the drug-trafficking, is worse than the drug. Nothing have they feared like those drug people. I was born in the streets; I was raised in the streets; I still live in the streets. And even I have just discovered how bad the drug business is.”

So there was logic in his behavior, as there had been in the mahatma’s, the switching of reforming attention from public issues to private, from the external foe to the internal. And the impression he gave of being a very practical man was added to when I asked him about the building where we were. Was it his political headquarters in a “neighborhood,” or what? He said it was his business place. He made chemicals. This was unexpected. I must have read about it somewhere, almost certainly; but it hadn’t registered.

He said, with as much gentleness as pride, “Come, I’ll show you.”

We went out into the corridor and went past the desk where, ever since I had come, there had been two young people, a young woman and a young man, as still as students, serving some purpose in Hosea’s affairs. At the end of the corridor Hosea pushed a door open, and there, attached to his office building, was a warehouse with barrels and on one side stacks of cardboard that would fold into cartons.

“I make janitorial chemicals,” Hosea said. “Floor-cleaners, window-cleaning fluid. Everything to do with janitorial cleaning. I had to make myself independent of those people downtown.”

He employed twenty people. The business was bigger than I thought; and in this business side of the man there was again, and more than ever, something of the Indian mahatma, who had started his professional life as a lawyer, was scrupulous about accounts, was careful about things like newspaper presses, and in South Africa in the 1900S, for this very purpose of independence and Ruskinian virtue, had started a farm. Strange fulfillment sixty years later of the mahatma’s
creed, and perhaps the achievement here had been bigger than the mahatma’s in India: the winning of legal rights, against a background of slavery and violence, for a people long humiliated and disenfranchised.

He took me outside, to wait for a taxi. There appeared to be none. He said, “I will stop someone I know and make him take you back.” But no one he knew came along. In the end he asked two of his people, waiting in a shabby van, to drive me back. “Give them something for the gas,” he said. And, driving back along Highway 20 to Atlanta, in the company of these followers of Hosea’s, poor people, in their littered van (the radio turned on), I felt myself in another atmosphere, and felt the distance between the people Hosea led or spoke for and the setting, the towers of central Atlanta appearing in the distance above the freeways.

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impressions (and really more from stories of Shango and Shouters in Trinidad and memories there of black street-corner preachers and beach baptisms) I had thought of black-American religion as the religion of ecstasy and trance. I was not prepared for its formality or its communal-social side, as in Howard’s home town. I was not prepared for its purity, as in Hosea. Or, later, in Robert Waymer.

He was a handsome man of forty-nine; formal clothes became him. He was on the Atlanta School Board. He came from a black South Carolina family. There was a family farm of fifty acres—not big, but it had maintained many of the family. And the family had been well known in South Carolina, in Orangeburg, for three generations. “Maybe four.”

I told him that family continuity like this had formed no part of my idea of black life in the American South.

He said, “It was a secret.”

“Secret?”

“You don’t tell white people everything.” And this was so strange from him, in the paneled lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where he sat confidently, fitting the setting.

He said: “They were hostile. People who understood their circumstances and took pride in doing something for themselves knew that if you were black you were living in a hostile environment.”

He told me about his extended family. “There was quite a resonance in the extended family. And from that resonance and cooperation my father’s two eldest sisters married brothers who were tobacco farmers, cattle farmers, general truck farmers. It was from that beginning of farming we came. And we were quite ingenious people, I think. There were sixteen of us. My mother was the oldest daughter of an A.M.E. minister.”

He told me about the initials. African Methodist Episcopalian. The church had had its two hundredth anniversary that year, he said. African? Did it have something to do with Africa? No. It had been established by an ex-slave, Richard Allen, when he found that he was shut out of the white churches. And that was Bob Waymer’s theme: the solidarity that had come to black people from being shut out, the necessity that had driven them to found their own institutions—and the breakdown that had occurred with the ending of segregation.

His father was the eldest son of a farmer. So there was a tradition in his family. And yet there was a certain modesty.

“We’re really not leaders. Really not. You and other people haven’t had an opportunity to learn about blacks the way they really are. My family doesn’t consider themselves outstanding. We are good committed people, committed to helping each other. A kind of dedication that started with my grandfather and continued with my mother.