A Turn in the South (42 page)

He was from Mississippi. “I was a fourth-generation Mississippian. My family homesteaded in Mississippi about 1790, I’m thinking. In the frontier, Mississippi was a territory. It was part of the Louisiana Purchase. A territory, not a state. And citizens from states like Georgia could migrate there and stake a claim to a section of land if they intended to live there. The land belonged to the federal government. Pretty soon it was cotton. The whole economy in Mississippi was cotton for a long time. Six hundred and forty acres of land—that’s a lot of land for a family. But say a family had ten children. You divided that. Sixty acres. Still, in the nineteenth century a family could make a living on that. But divide it again—that’s how the families separated and scattered.”

Will Campbell was chewing tobacco while he spoke. It was something he was known for; and from time to time he spat into a spittoon. I had never actually seen anyone use a spittoon. In various places in the South I had seen big billboard advertisements for Granger Select chewing tobacco: “Meet Up with a Cleaner Chew.” The Granger slogan had been puzzling until someone had told me it was really redneck language, “meet up with” meaning “get to know,” “become friendly with.” I asked to see Will Campbell’s tobacco. It was Beech Nut, licorice-flavored: “Balanced and Better, Softer and Moister.” In its pliable foil pouch, it was aromatic and tempting.

“My family was a family of landowners in Georgia. One of the boys got in a fight with a friend in a barbershop and killed him. And the judge said to the father, ‘Your only chance is to move to one of the
territories.’ So they packed up, the whole family, and moved with wagons until they got to this particular area in southwest Mississippi. They might have had a mind of going on further west. But in the morning, when they were starting to move on, they heard a rooster crow. So they knew there were some other settlers there. They went and talked to these people—if the Indians were hostile, and what the land was like, and what the winters were like, and what they grew. And to me the most interesting thing is that where they settled was precisely like where they had come from. If you close your eyes and then open them again you wouldn’t know you had left Georgia.

“By the time my parents were grown there was no room for us on the land. My family was rooted there, in that rural community, which made it illogical for some people to say—when I began to work for the civil-rights movement, as a troubleshooter for the National Council of Churches: some people said it was trouble
maker
—that Mr. Lee Campbell’s son, who is all mixed up in that nigger mess, is an outsider. Which in a sense made it more dangerous. I’m not trying to romanticize this—it didn’t take much to make you a radical in those days. The only thing worse than an outsider is a traitor, and I was seen as a traitor—to the Campbell-Webb-Parker-McMillan family. My grandmother’s family were Webbs. It was the Webb family who came and homesteaded there.

“My grandmother, on the trek from Georgia to the Mississippi territory, remembered—when money ran out—seeing her father identify himself to a settler in Alabama as a Mason. They gave the secret Masonic grip, the secret Masonic passwords; and the settler gave some money. Ten dollars. Worth perhaps a thousand dollars today. My grandmother remembered that all her life.”

It was a beautiful and touching picture. I said so to Will Campbell.

He said: “This oral tradition had an effect on the tenacity with which they hung on to all the old ways of doing things—and this meant segregation, among other things. ‘Will, you weren’t raised this way.’ Which again makes you a traitor. To them segregation was a Christian way. God created races. And I couldn’t explain to them that it wasn’t God who created races. But God created people, and some of them would go to the Northern countries and lose the pigmentation of the skin, and some would go to the hot countries and develop the heavy pigmentation. To them God created white people—and Adam and Eve were white. And when he put the curse on Ham, the curse was to be
black. But they were and are deeply religious people, and it was important to have a religious sanction for everything.

“Let me say something which appears to negate what I’ve been saying. When I’ve been saying ‘they’ I am referring to the community at large. My immediate family had no vested interest in a segregated society, because they were not slaveholders. They were yeoman farmers. The further historical truth is that ‘my people’ also came to this country as indentured servants. An awful lot of the yeoman farmers came as indentured servants. And later we had black slaves.

“I’m not denying that I had, and grew up with, racial prejudices. It wasn’t something you discussed—black people didn’t marry or date white people. They worked with them on farms. In the fields there was equality. We were even playmates. When we were small we played with black children. But at a certain point you knew that they were black—the time you started school. You accepted that.”

He said he had written a song about that. He took the guitar that was near and began to sing. I wasn’t prepared for this. It took me by surprise; and the effect of the singing and the guitar, filling the small cabin, was hypnotic. I surrendered to the emotion of the singer and his absorption in his song.

The song was long, a ballad, with much recitative. It was about a black boy and a white boy growing up together on a farm in the South, until they were separated according to the racial customs of the place. The black boy’s father worked for the white boy’s family. The black family lived in the smokehouse; the white family lived in the main house, which was not much bigger. When the Depression came the black worker was laid off, and he and his family went to Memphis. Then the white family lost the farm and they too had to go to Memphis. There one day the white boy, now a man, met the black boy, also a man, and they became friends again.

Parts of the song were true, Will Campbell said; and parts were made up. His family didn’t lose their farm; and they didn’t migrate to Memphis. So what was sentimental about the song, what made it a fable, gave it a moral, was the made-up part.

“The male members of my family were not bigots. Prejudiced, but not bigots. I remember one day in Campbelltown—all the Campbells lived in one place, within a mile of one another—and this thing happened. An elderly black man, John Walker—he lived in the neighborhood; he had recently been released from the state penitentiary for
stealing some corn from his landlord—he came walking down the dirt road. And we were playing in the ‘stomp.’ Not the lawn. There would be the house, the yard, the picket fence; and beyond the picket fence would be a grassy area, like a meadow, and that was called the ‘stomp.’ It wasn’t where crops were planted, or even pasture; it was more like a playground. Inside the yard there would be no grass. That would be swept down with a dogwood broom. If you had grass in your yard that was a trashy thing to do. And we were in the stomp, and this black man walked down the dirt road, and we taunted him: ‘Hi, nigger! Hi, nigger!’ To which he never responded. The local mores would not permit him to respond to white children.

“And afterwards my grandfather called us all round him. And he was sitting there on this tree stump. He called us all ‘hon.’ And he said, ‘Hon, there’s not any niggers in the world.’ And we said, ‘Yes, Grandpa. John Walker is a nigger.’ We could still see him disappearing down the dusty road. And he said, ‘No, all the niggers are dead. Now there’s only colored people.’ And that was his way of explaining to us that the Civil War was over.”

(In
Brother to a Dragonfly
there was another version of that story. The corn John Walker had stolen was “a sack of roasting ear corn.” And he hadn’t been to jail for stealing the corn. He had been beaten by some men, and he had told about the beating in a humorous way—which had partly encouraged the taunting from the younger boys. “Yessuh. Dey got me nekked as a jaybird. Took a gin belt to me. Whipped me till I almost shat.” The story Will Campbell had told me in his cabin—with the black man silent and enduring—was more in line with contemporary sensibility. The version in the book, with the black man making a joke about the beating, and perhaps also about the theft, felt truer.)

Will Campbell said: “My grandfather was a man only with a second-grade education. He could write his name and I suppose could read. But his use of the language! I always hoped that the preacher would call on him to lead us in prayer. We were Baptists. I remember the old man concluding one prayer, ‘And when at last we kneel to drink from the bitter spring of life …’ And by that, ‘the bitter spring of life,’ he meant death.…

“So these were and are the dominant influences in the life of rural white Southerners—this sense of place, coming out of displacement, indentured servants, migrations, and the finding of this sense of place
in the farms, the homesteads, the community. And this sense of place became sacred.

“There was a threat to that sense of place by the racial changes that were taking place. And it
was
a threat. To know suddenly that things you thought were stationary and would last forever would never again be the same.

“And I used to try to explain to my colleagues—non-Southerners in the movement—that, when white people said that to desegregate the schools was to wreck the schools as they knew them, they were saying something that was fact. I used to use the example of Abraham and Isaac. People would say to me, ‘You are asking me to sacrifice my children on the altar of integration built by the Supreme Court.’ And my response was, and is, ‘I’m only asking you to be faithful to the God you profess. As a Christian there is God beyond the idols we have built: place, community, public education—which indeed we may be sacrificing. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child. We put our child on the altar of integration, we put the sticks of justice beneath. But the child was not sacrificed—by Abraham. Finally the child was saved.’ ”

Will Campbell said, “Maybe that analogy breaks down. But it held for me at the time.”

He began to talk about his civil-rights work; and it was possible to detect the ways of thought that would later lead him, as a churchman, to resist being used politically.

He said: “Our cue wasn’t the Supreme Court decision of May 1954. Our cue was far more basic. Supreme Court justices change. It’s already changed in our day. The motto of the liberal movement was law and order. But by the time Mr. Nixon and others discovered Middle America, the term ‘law and order’ became synonymous with ‘nigger.’ And then it was the other side that was saying, ‘We must have law and order.’ So that Martin Luther King, Jr. and others were seen as troublemakers, and consequently a threat to law and order.”

He talked of the paradoxes and ambiguities of the success of the movement.

“I think that, the way I grew up, my chances of becoming free and open-minded about race were much greater than when my children grew up. Because when I was a child there were assumptions made that were never discussed. You didn’t discuss whether black people would serve on juries or go to school with us or live with us. But every child born after May 1954 has heard black people discussed pejoratively. So
now you have a generation of people who are full of hatred and in a position of being able to implement that.

“I do think it is extremely dangerous, because you can never again have the kind of nonviolent resistance that you saw under the leadership of Dr. King and others.”

In the old days, he said, if you saw five thousand blacks marching around a courthouse, and you asked them why they were marching, they would say they were marching because they weren’t being registered as voters. If you saw black people demonstrating at a lunch counter, they would tell you it was because they weren’t allowed to eat at lunch counters. There was no trouble at all about the cause then.

“Today, how would a nonviolent, passive resistance work? The issues are not as clear. Today, if you saw five thousand blacks marching, the only thing they can say is, ‘We are marching around the courthouse because we are still niggers to you.’

“I remember a song that was sung in our taverns: ‘Move Them Niggers North.’

Beginning with simply speaking the words, he was soon yielding to the lilting rhythm, and half singing.

He said at the end, “I remember hearing it once in a recently desegregated roadside café in northern Alabama where I had stopped with a black friend. It was on a jukebox. This song was clearly directed at us. And when we left my friend said—my friend was hurt—‘I guess there’s no law against playing a jukebox.’ And I said, ‘Not yet. And I hope there will never be.’ ”

He repeated the response he had made to his black friend. I missed the point Will Campbell was making here; and it was only later that I learned, from his own article, “The World of the Redneck,” that the song was a Klan song. It was in this imprecise way that he introduced the subject of the Klan and redneck deprivation and tragedy, and his years in the “liberal wilderness.”

He was sitting on a stool at a high desk or table, with the spittoon at his feet. There was an old barber’s chair in a corner of the log cabin, near the air-conditioning unit. There was also a rocking chair; a settee
against one wall; a carpet on the floor; and a settee table with a polished or varnished tree-trunk slab as a top. A banjo or ukulele hung on a wall; and there were photographs and drawings and originals of cartoons. On a high ledge was an old tin advertisement:
Say Goo-Goo. A nourishing lunch for five cents. 5c.
Goo-Goo was the name of the candy that was still advertised on the “Grand Ole Opry” radio program. And it was that old tin advertisement that made me start seeing the apparently haphazard assemblage of objects in the log cabin as a collection of things of the people.

Will Campbell said: “I went full circle. I grew up in a fundamentalist background—it wasn’t called that then. Everyone was Baptist. In that world view to be a Christian meant don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t mess around on Saturday night.” But he wanted more from religion; and his faith developed with his studies. “I was interested in ethical matters.” This led in the South directly to the subject of race, and his civil-rights work. “I am still against wars and segregation and paying workers bad wages. But I began to see that I had traded one legalistic code for another. The liberalism of my middle life served me no better than the fundamentalism of my earlier life. The Christian message is that we are created free, and no one has the right to exact more of us than Jesus did. And Jesus had no creed or particular ideology. I found that the social liberal creed was as doctrinaire as the fundamentalist religious creed had been. Jesus asked us to be mindful of the one near at hand.”