A Turn in the South (7 page)

A radio show had been taken to Forsyth. A very famous afternoon-television talk show with a witty black hostess had gone to Forsyth, and a program had been recorded in a local restaurant. Hosea, applying equal passion to the safe cause as he had to the brave one, had picketed this show, because only Forsyth residents were allowed to have a say, and they of course were all white.

Hosea had managed to be arrested, to add to that record of his—105 jailings at the time his
Who Is Hosea L. Williams?
pamphlet had gone to press. According to the Atlanta
Journal
, Hosea had shouted as he was being put into the police van, “This is Forsyth County! This is what you see!” And Hosea’s married daughter, who was with him, had shouted, “My daddy! I want to go with him!” And she too had been put in the van.

Tom Teepen hadn’t been able to arrange a meeting with Hosea when he had first told me about him, because Hosea at that time was in jail for a few days. And Tom couldn’t find Hosea when he came out of jail. But then, late one morning, Tom telephoned me with the news that if I hurried to a certain building I might see Hosea. He was being arraigned on another charge at a federal court at eleven-thirty. It was almost that already, but Tom said that these affairs usually ran a little late.

I took a taxi. It was driven by an African, a man from Ghana. It was a short run for him; in almost no time he had set me down again. An open paved forecourt, the big building set back; a security doorway; an elevator to the sixteenth floor. Hardwood doors, low ceilings,
a brown-carpeted corridor, neat nameplates: formal, without drama, safe, even cozy. But the hearing was over. And in a room that was like a small lecture room or classroom there was a little group in one corner, like the subdued group that sometimes stays behind after a school examination to talk over the questions.

In the little group I recognized Dick Gregory, gray-bearded and white-suited, a man grown old in the wars, and now really looking quite saintlike. And there was a squatter man with a bigger beard who could be none other than Hosea himself. Even in this moment of stillness in the courtroom his eyes suggested bustle—a man with many things to do and little time to spare. He had a toothbrush in his top pocket—a man ready to go to jail.

He also had a press officer with him, a slender brown woman. She had a handout “for immediate release.” And it seemed from what she said that my chances of meeting Hosea and having a heart-to-heart talk with him were not good. Hosea and Dick Gregory were going to fly to Washington that afternoon to picket the CIA. After that they were going straight off to Europe, to London and the Vatican, to do some work about apartheid. The handout from the press officer was about drugs: Hosea was saying that certain recent incidents were being used “to defame black leaders,” and that the Mafia and the CIA were the ones most involved in the drug trade, which was “destroying our children and the future of our nation.” That, in fact, was why Hosea and Dick Gregory were going to picket the CIA.

And suddenly, before I could fully take in Hosea’s eyes and beard and toothbrush, the little group had gone.

Four or five minutes had passed since I had arrived, no more. And to add to the randomness of the occasion in Court No. I, there was my encounter with someone who, when the little group had gone away, had been left behind, like me. He was a reporter, quite young. He too had come too late for the arraignment. He too was new to Atlanta and didn’t know a great deal about the affairs of the city. In the courtroom, in the brown-carpeted corridor, and in the elevator, we talked about his time in England. He had gone there to study the ancient Roman walls, Hadrian’s Wall and the later Antonine wall. I had never seen those walls and was interested in what he had to say.

We separated downstairs. When I was going out of the front door of the building I saw a small group around a bearded man. It looked so much like what I had seen upstairs that I thought the man was Hosea,
giving an informal interview. It was only when I was almost in the group that I saw that the talker wasn’t Hosea, was blacker, differently dressed, without the toothbrush, and that he only had the big stiff beard.

T
HE CONVENTION
business was important to Atlanta, and there were many big hotels in the center of the city quite close to one another. It was hard to think that these hotels could all be full at the same time. But it sometimes happened. A girl in the Ritz-Carlton dining room told me one day that an important convention was in town. What was this a convention of? Dry cleaners. And they were important because there were so many of them—as there had to be, if you considered how many dry cleaners there must have been all over the United States—that they had filled the Atlanta hotels.

No hotel gave off such a company-holiday or convention feeling as the Marriott Marquis. And none was so overpowering. To enter it was like entering a gigantic, hollow, twisted cone. It had an atrium forty-seven stories high: gallery upon curving gallery, following the twist of the cone. That twist was unexpected; the eye was always led upwards. Great red streamers, like something from a Chinese festival, hung down the middle space. And all the time, like fairground conveyances, tall glass-walled elevators, their ribs picked out in lights, slid up and down the atrium wall.

But the black man who worked for the Hilton (atrium-style there too, with the internal galleries, but not so sensational), with whom I had a talk one evening about the hotels of Atlanta, thought that I had done well by going to the Ritz. He said, “That’s where the ’lite stay.”

As if in confirmation of this, I heard one day (with what truth I don’t know) that Gloria Vanderbilt was staying in the Ritz and had been seen in one of the elevators.

She was in Atlanta to do a promotion. Two weeks or so before, in New York, I had caught her on a talk show. She was talking about her life and about the way a woman is defined by the men whom she loves. And I assumed when I heard she was in town that she was here to promote her book. But there was much more to this promotion. “The Enchantment … The Heritage … The Prestige … 
MACY’S
Proudly Introduces
GLORIOUS
by Gloria Vanderbilt.… Only a truly
great fragrance has the power to stir our emotions. Glorious by Gloria Vanderbilt … Gloria Vanderbilt will autograph a complimentary photograph and any Glorious purchase.”

That was going on in Macy’s, just across the road from the Ritz, on the morning Anne Siddons came to the hotel, to talk to me about growing up in the South. She was as intense and intelligent as I had expected; and though she was a little withdrawn (because of the book she was writing), and though the promotion she was doing for her publisher (on a different scale from Gloria Vanderbilt) was a further depletion, she spoke with a full heart, offering me a little of the experience that was her capital as a writer.

She was Southern and Georgian, and almost Atlantan. She was born in Fairburn, twenty miles south of Atlanta. Fairburn was an agricultural and railroad town. Her father was a lawyer; though they were not rich, they were comfortably off. Her father was the first of his family to go to college.

“We came down from Virginia around 1820. Our branch of the family farmed the same piece of land for seven generations. It makes me feel wonderfully rooted. But at the same time I feel it can be a yoke. I feel that we Southerners can be too deeply and narrowly focused into that land.”

I told her about my trip to Howard’s home town and what I had seen there of black farming families.

She said, “It’s one thing Southern whites and blacks have shared. We have both been landowners since abolition.” And she told me what Howard and his mother had told me: that land had been given or bequeathed to black people by the white men for whom they had worked. Some decades ago, she said, it had come out from a study of oral history that this giving of land had been seen by black and white as a benign aspect of the master-slave relationship.

I asked, “In what way can the land be a yoke?”

“We don’t tend to lift our sights to get a broader vision.”

People settled too easily for staying on the land. They tended to say or feel, “Our sort don’t go to college. We are farmers.”

Anne Siddons said: “I was a bright only child in a grammar-and-high school dominated by children from the surrounding farms. And everything I was naturally, I felt ashamed of. I spent twelve years trying to hide the fact that I was a bright child. Intellect has had no
place here. The people who came to lead us obviously had intellect. But they had other things as well, to make it go down more easily. They had great charm, for instance.”

When we had first met she had said, “We are a colonial people.” She made the point again. Southerners, she said, were uncertain of themselves.

“I am talking about white people. At the time I was growing up, the white Southerner in the rural and small-town South felt threatened by the blacks. You don’t hate what doesn’t threaten you. As long as somebody was below you, you knew you had power. It was all about power, really. We were a conquered and occupied people, the only people in the United States to be like that. And this—our attitude to blacks—was the only way we could feel or exercise our power at all. We were a poor agricultural community, and we had bone-deep memories of real conquest and occupation and total humiliation.

“We were untraveled people, the bulk of us uneducated. The only way we had of coping with change was by pretending it wasn’t there. When the civil-rights movement was beginning, though it was just there, in Alabama, we could pretend it wasn’t there. And when change did come it was brought to us right to our door by those black hands, which we hated and feared more than anything else in the world. These feelings are here still. What thoughtful Southerner couldn’t know they are still there? This would be the background of a lot of thought.”

“Isn’t it fatiguing for you, always to be with this idea of race?”

“A lot of us find it almost too stifling to live in.” That is why, she said, many Southern intellectuals had moved out of the South.

I asked about racial protest. Hadn’t it become formal, almost ritualized? There was the affair of the marches at Forsyth. It was clear, from the newspaper accounts, that only the very first protesters had risked anything. After that, the mood and tone of protest had changed. It had become the popular cause, the protected cause; some commentators had become self-righteous.

“Of course the idiocy up in Forsyth needs to be dealt with. But the response can—and did—become banal.”

She had been shocked by the first news from Forsyth. But then she had had to acknowledge her own personal limitations as someone over fifty, someone who could now wake up in the mornings with the knowledge that death was going to come.

“Active revolution is romantic for the young. The problem is: how
do you deal with passion in middle age, when you must hoard passion? There can be no resolution of this problem, or at any rate not a neat one. And, aside from media notice and marches, I don’t know how to deal with it. The form of the protest has got to be a cliché—Lord knows, Americans will protest anything.”

But race as an issue—it couldn’t be avoided. “I deal with race in some form in every book I’ve written. It’s my great war, I guess. I write to find out where I am now, what I think, to make order and simplicity in my own world. It’s an impossible task. You can’t simplify that. You can only clarify bits of it.”

I talked of the oddity of slavery in the New World, of the two far-removed races it had brought together, African, European. Now there was a common language and even a common religion.

“I tend to think that they have enriched us more than we have enriched them. Perhaps we do on some deep level realize how very similar we are.”

She said a little later: “I feel very guilty about the civil-rights movement. I didn’t march, back when marching would have been passionate and real and spontaneous. I was a young woman newly come to Atlanta and still deeply caught in that web of what is seemly and what is not.”

When was that real and passionate time?

“I think the great marches in Selma were about 1965. Although I got into trouble for a column I wrote for our student paper. I was at a small college. This was when Autherine Lucy entered the University of Alabama. And there were cavalcades from all over the state going over to heckle those two poor blacks, heckle and worse. Nobody went from my college. It was because they were lackadaisical, really. I wrote a column praising the noninvolvement and made a few of those simplistic and sophomoric statements about race and about whatever—”

“ ‘Whatever’?”

“How we must keep calm, and this had to be a good thing. And I got hauled up before the dean of students, asking that I reconsider and not submit the column for publication. Which I would not do.”

I wondered how, coming from her background, she had arrived at that position.

“I recall in high school a little epiphany. We were in something to do with black and white. It was an American-history class. I can’t think what it might have been. But I remember feeling very strongly: this is
wrong
. I had never had that feeling before. And I blurted out, ‘That is
not right.’ And one of the great big gangling country guys, who must have been twenty years old at that time, got up and called me a nigger-lover. Of course I had heard it all my life, but I had never been on the other side of it. I just remember the profound, simple shock of that moment.

“My consciousness was raised a little. But not totally. I was still interested in fraternities and dances. You see, we were raised to be belles.

“We all knew—nobody ever told us, but we knew with a deeper wisdom than words—that the highest we could aspire to was capturing a husband who would then provide for us. And we believed that. At fourteen I was constantly in love. Our mothers and grandmothers believed it was the best they could give us, the protection of a man. I have a theory that Southern madhouses are full of gifted women who were stifled.”

I said, “A pastoral or country society surviving in an industrial world?”