A Turn in the South (9 page)

I said, “A kind of masque.”

She said, out of the security of her new idea of community, “It’s more like religion.”

Identity as religion, religion as identity: it was the very theme of another theology student, a young man from a background quite different, a mountain community in northern Georgia.

He said, “When I think of growing up, the two things are very much the same thing—family and church. The church was a small church, with about forty-five members, all related. Seven or eight generations ago the first member of our family moved into that area and bought four hundred acres, and we still live on that. It isn’t a plantation. There might have been slaves early on, but that disappeared pretty soon. We were a family of small farmers. My grandfather had fifteen or sixteen brothers, and their descendants all live within three miles of one another. It is very rare that anybody moves away. When you go up there you know people, and you know them as relatives.

“At the same time it is very easy for your own identity to get lost.
But I have since grown to appreciate how wonderful that is: a warm, loving, open kind of family, not just father and mother and brothers and sisters, but cousins, aunts, and uncles.

“The church is very much the same thing. Family members. The Holiness Church is a very emotional religion, and what struck me early on was how very different people were in church from what I knew of them at home. The emotion they expressed in church was different. There would be a lot of shouting. The preacher would try to work them up to the sinfulness of human nature. There would be moments during the service when people would get up and speak in tongues, and people would try to interpret what was being said. And there were times when people would get saved.”

“This religion was not a reaching out to the world?”

“This religion was a calling away from the world, an excluding of the world. I still struggle to find how I relate to all that now. The first year in college I spent alone in my room. I was scared to go out. Then I became angry with some aspects of the faith that had such a rigid view of the world.”

But now (like the Mississippi plantation, and for the same, economic reason) the mountain world was changing. “A lot of the people have to go away to get work.” They came back, it was true; they never lost touch. But: “The twentieth century is pouring over the mountain.”

Mountain family, old planter family: old ideas of community no longer served, and the descendants of those families were finding a new community in the ministry. But it hadn’t been quite like this for Frank. He grew up in a blue-collar white urban neighborhood. It wasn’t “ethnic,” and it had no sense of community. It was Southern, but the Southern history and Southern past that were bred in the bones of the mountain boy and the plantation girl had had to be learned, studied, by the boy from the city. Because he had been born into a crowd, his early ambitions had been different.

“I wanted to be an individual, a nonconformist, a person with his own rights, opinions. But at the same time I did want an identity. And I found that in the Democratic Party. It started at high school. I got into the Democratic group and quickly became a leader of the teen Democrats. It became my religion, because I evaluated everything according to the party’s success or failure. When I left school I went straight into the party organization. The party became my community. But it wasn’t a real community. It didn’t have the caring that a Christian
community should have. In the navy I had the sense of meeting Christ in reading the Scriptures, and I was touched by that. But it was isolated until I came here, which makes real on earth this relationship with God. I have found the real community here, in theology school.”

C
ITY POLITICS
in Atlanta were mainly black politics, and Michael Lomax was one of the up-and-coming black politicians. He was only thirty-eight, but it was said that he would be running for mayor in 1989. He was not from Atlanta, but from Los Angeles, and he had style. He was tall and slender and well dressed and educated and softly spoken. He was of a pale complexion. He did not have a black man-of-the-people reputation; but service to the black cause was in his family tradition. His knowledge of black writing was considerable; his hero was the early black radical William Du Bois, the critic of Booker Washington. And he was a dedicated politician.

Everything about him was considered. He had the politician’s heightened sense of the self, as I was aware when, after our talk, we walked back together for a while in the city center, and on the Macy’s side of Peachtree Street. He was known; people looked at him. He made a joke about it, but this kind of public response mattered to him.

We met in the library, for which, as chairman of the Fulton County Commission, he was responsible. The people he greeted so affably in the forecourt were architects. He said grandly, but with a smile, “I like building things.” And in the library council room upstairs there was tea: a silver service and white Wedgwood cups and a selection of pastries of small size, laid out for us by someone from the Commission, a white man, young, smiling, happy to serve his elegant chairman.

Blacks had to look inwards, Michael Lomax said. The need now was not for marches so much as for an internal revolution.

“The civil-rights movement distorted our conception of human relations. It made it completely adversarial. In an adversarial relationship there is a good person and a bad person, a victim and a victimizer. We were the good, we were the victim.” None of the current black leaders talked of black responsibility, he said.

And yet for him, with all that he had become, and all his future, there was still the burden of being black. He spoke of the burden in this way (and he might have spoken the words often before): “There’s not a day, not a moment in my life when I don’t have to think about
the color of my skin. And being black is not just about what I see. It’s about what I feel about myself. It’s as much internal as external.

“I think sometimes that an exorcism has got to happen for all of us, where you pull out all of those evil demons of race. They’re still inside us, fighting with one another.

“Ten years ago I went to Brazil. And I went to a place in northern Brazil called Salvador which has a very mixed population and where having skin the color of mine was nothing unusual. And I felt a tremendous sense of liberation and freedom. But I also felt a sense of loss because people weren’t dealing with me negatively because of my skin. That was the freedom, but I had so many expectations inside me as a black person that I couldn’t accept the ignoring of that person—it was another kind of invisibility.

“You have to confront your own demons. For me it’s confronting the fact that I am a black person and that every time a white person sees me I may be no different for him than seeing a drunk on the street. And that colors the way I think about myself. I have been angry about being black, saddened by it. And I cannot deal with the white person or the black person until I look in the mirror and accept the man I see there.”

I
T WAS
generally agreed that the correct behavior of the sheriff of Forsyth County had done much to take the poison out of the situation at the very beginning. When I spoke to him on the telephone I found him easy and businesslike; many people had been to see him. He told me how to get to his office. It was in the Forsyth County Jail, he said. And that made me think of any number of Western films.

It was about an hour away from Atlanta. The holiday setting, of woods and well-kept roads and an enormous artificial lake created by the Army Corps of Engineers, was hard to associate with the blood tensions of 1912: the lynching of a man in the jail, the public hanging of two others, the roving crowds giving notice to the blacks. And the county town in the midst of these spring woods was very American: the fast-food places, the banks looking like churches, billboards—ordinary.

A woman stepped out of her grocery shop to direct me to the sheriff’s office. Across the main town road, past the cemetery, and then on to a low brick structure. And there, in the busy little red-brick
town, it was: a new building, not the one of 1912, but still as flat and basic-looking as a sheriff’s office in a Western film; assertively labeled (as in a film)
FORSYTH COUNTY JAIL
, but with a large asphalted forecourt full of parked cars—the jail and the sheriff’s office, like the fast-food places, serving a motorized community. The United States flag and the Georgia flag hung side by side from flagpoles.

Two sets of glass doors led into the reception area, where two elderly white people were sitting on low chairs. A secretary sat at a desk with papers. And at her back, on the concrete-block wall, was a seal-of-Georgia plaque: roughly rendered motifs of civility from 1776: an arch on two classical columns, a scroll hanging loose in the space between the columns, with the Georgia motto:
WISDOM, JUSTICE, MODERATION
.

The sheriff was in a meeting, the secretary said. A man in blue jeans came in to talk about a parking ticket or something of that nature—giving an idea of the day-to-day business of a sheriff’s office. The sheriff himself came out after a while, jacketless, a paisley-patterned tie on his white shirt. He said, “Be with y’all in just a moment.”

And soon I was called into his office, where, on an old-fashioned hat-rack, at the very top, was a black cowboy hat with the sheriff badge. The sheriff said he had worn the hat only once, on the day of the big Forsyth march. Also on the rack was the very clean pale-blue jacket of the sheriff.

He was in his forties. He said he had been twenty years in the county. He had “taught school” for some time; he had been sheriff for eleven years.

Years ago, he said, Forsyth County had been isolated, and the folks were very clannish. The same thing could be said of “the entire North Georgia area.” “The liquor industry came along, and a few folks made moonshine here, because it was very isolated. And that was the only means of income.” Later there came the Lockheed and General Motors plants; and there also came the poultry industry. “The poultry industry brought our community out of its low socioeconomic situation. You began to see better roads, a great influx.” At the same time there was the Atlanta boom. “What we are attracting now is a lot of people.” Land had tripled in price. In 1970 there were sixteen thousand people; in 1986 there must have been forty thousand. “We are becoming an affluent suburban county of Atlanta. So we are in a boom growth situation.”

So, though “folks threw rocks” at the first brotherhood march, the cause of the rock-throwers couldn’t really succeed in the new Forsyth. The second march, of the twenty thousand, wasn’t a racial occasion, the sheriff said. The marchers were white as well as black, and they were making clear that they didn’t want to see violence. “The American public will not tolerate violence.”

About race as race, the sheriff said, there was nothing that could be done. “The real problem is social and economic.… There’s nothing you can do, because people migrate where they feel comfortable. They migrate to their social-economic status.” A black doctor who wanted to settle in Forsyth County might fit in. But it would be different for a lower-class black. People needed to feel comfortable with people. “If you have two sorry black folks and two sorry white folks they’re gonna fight because they can’t get along.”

About the big march itself, it had always been a media event, the sheriff said. A lot of people came to that march because it was the first march in twenty years. People who had missed out on the marches of the civil-rights movement in the old days wished to take part in one now. “It gave a lot of people an opportunity to take part in something they thought was going to be historical.” So there were these two “volatile” groups—the marchers, and the people who were opposed to them. What sort of people were opposed? “A lot of the people I deal with on Saturdays. Law enforcement deals with ten percent of the population ninety percent of the time.” This was how the sheriff talked: he was as much sociologist (and former teacher) as law-enforcement official. He made the affairs of Forsyth County seem much more manageable.

And though he didn’t say so, there came out from his talk the idea of two sets of people looking for attention. The civil-rights groups, their major battles and indeed their war won long ago, now squabbling, and looking for causes; and the white supremacists looking in almost the same way for publicity and patronage. The great Forsyth march, as the sheriff described it, was like a ritual conflict, played out before the cameras, and according to certain rules. Out of this formalizing, the issue had died. Overexposure was a very American aspect of this formalizing, I also felt. Everyone had been interviewed and interviewed; everyone, including the sheriff, had become a personality; everyone had now exhausted attention.

So, as the sheriff said: “The issue is dead.”

And the sheriff made a further point. The marchers had won, but in the three months since then no black had moved into Forsyth. The county remained all white, proving the first point: that the issue now wasn’t racial, but social and economic.

He was impressive, Sheriff Walraven. He was an elected official, and he saw himself representing the will of the American people—who had turned their face against violence. And though he wasn’t willing to play up this side of things, he was also doing his Christian duty, Christianity being a religion that taught love and peace. (Christianity, at one time, in this setting, stood for other things; the Christianity of the Ku Klux Klan still had to be taken into account. But the sheriff saw the events of 1912 as historical, seventy-five years old. He represented the current will of the American people. There was to be no violence; it was his duty to see that there was none.)

Did he see a situation where that might change?

He thought for a while and said, “If the system falls down.” But then almost immediately he added, “The system can’t fall down. Individuals might fall down.”

To meet this educated man with an almost philosophical idea of his duties was to see how far away from the center the Ku Klux Klan groups of Forsyth were. The point had in fact been made by the black mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young.