Black Like Me (11 page)

I repeated my plea that he not take me home if it meant any embarrassment or danger for his wife and child. He ignored this.

We drove into his carport, his wife stood in the shadows beside the house.

“Well, hello, Uncle Tom,” she said.

Once again the terrible truth struck me. Here in America,
in this day, the simple act of whites receiving a Negro had to be a night thing and its aura of uneasiness had to be countered with gallows humor.

What did we fear? I could not say exactly. It was unlikely the Klan would come riding down on us. We merely fell into the fear that hangs over the state, a nameless and awful thing. It reminded me of the nagging, focusless terror we felt in Europe when Hitler began his marches, the terror of talking with Jews (and our deep shame of it). For the Negro, at least, this fear is ever-present in the South, and the same is doubtlessly true of many decent whites who watch and wait, and feel the deep shame of it.

Once inside their home, the awkwardness gradually lessened. However, it was painful for me. I could not accustom myself to sitting in their living room as an “equal.”

They have a modest home, but it was a palace compared to the places I had lived in recently. Most striking, however, was the atmosphere of easiness, of trust and warmth. It came as a new revelation to me: the simple ability to enjoy the pleasures of one’s home, to relax and feel at ease. Though ordinary to most men, this was a luxury virtually unknown in my experience as a Negro.

The Easts showed me to my room and suggested I might like to wash up. I noted as another example of gallows humor that Billie had put out black guest towels and a washcloth for me.

We discussed our experiences until late in the night. We talked of our mutual friend, the literary historian Maxwell Geismar, who had introduced us by correspondence a year ago. P.D. had recently visited the Geismar home; he told me of the great help Max and Anne Geismar had solicited over the country for him.

Then East fetched the manuscript of his autobiography,
The Magnolia Jungle
, which Simon & Schuster is publishing. At midnight I took the manuscript to my room, intending to glance through it before sleeping.

I could not put the manuscript down. I read through the night the story of a native-born Southerner, a man who had tried to follow the crowd, who ran an innocuous little newspaper,
The Petal Paper
, glad-handed, joined the local civic clubs and kept
himself in line with “popular opinion,” which meant “popular prejudice,” or “keep the nigger in his place,” in a Christian and 100 percent American fairplay manner, of course.

“I glad-handed from hell to breakfast, winning friends and conning people,” he wrote. He adopted the Southern editorial policy, “Love American motherhood and hate sin” and never mention Negroes except in a manner harmonious to the Southern Way of Life.
The Petal Paper
carried local news along with short features such as “Citizen of the Week” and “Prayer and Meditation.” This latter, written by a local minister, was “aimed at those Christians who were afraid not to read any printed word about Jesus.”

For the first year, East managed to please everyone and offend no one. The paper had prospered. He had made money and he was popular among the townspeople.

East had fence-straddled all the major issues, if he mentioned them at all. At night he began to have trouble sleeping, to feel he was prostituting his conscience and his editorial responsibilities. “When I’d become aware of my state of mind, I would be frightened and snap back with a healthy smile and a hearty handshake. Such is the effect of the sweet smell of money.”

More and more tormented, East entered a battle with his conscience, his sense of decency. It became clear to him that though he wrote in his paper what his readers wanted to see, this was not always the truth. As the situation in the South degenerated after the 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregation, he was faced with a choice - either he must continue more and more to alter truth to make it conform to people’s comfort, or he must write the truth in the dim hope that people would alter their comfort to conform to it.

His editorials began to lean away from the “correct” Southern attitude. He used the word “fair” to describe his new editorial policy. “I thought honestly and sincerely that with rare exception a man could say what he wished without fear of reprisal, especially a man with a newspaper who was seeking to expand his commercial and unhappy soul in a direction that was, for a rare change, decent and honest.” His decision to be
fair
was not in keeping with the “correct” Southern attitude.

He continued stubbornly to preach justice. He said that in order to prove that the Negroes have no right to their freedoms, we were subverting the very principles that preserve the spirit of our own … we are endangering ourselves, no matter what our race and creed.

In essence, he asked for ethical and virtuous social conduct. He said that before we can have justice, we must first have truth, and he insisted on his right and duty to print the truth. Significantly, this was considered high treason.

I lay in the bed, under a lamp, and read and smoked cigarettes. Through the wall of the room, I heard P.D. snore, but in here he was much awake on the pages.

He was threatened and hounded by anonymous callers. The Citizens Councils found him worthy of their attention, after which he lost most of his local subscribers and ads. In a country of free speech and press, they starved him out for expressing views not in harmony with their prejudices.

For example, he questioned a bill proposed in the state legislature that would authorize use of tax funds to support the White Citizens Councils. He asked if it is fair to take tax money from the Negro and then use it to support an organization set up for the avowed purpose of suppressing him.

Another bill, to levy penalizing fines against a church holding non-segregated services, was, he contended, in flagrant contradiction to the First Amendment of the Constitution.

He pointed out that these were simply the old story of legalized injustice. The local state legislature (in opposition to constitutional law) insisted that whatever it decided was
de jure
law, a position that wipes out the distinction between true and false judgments. “For,” as Burke said, “if the judgment makes the law and not the law directs the judgment, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgment given.” A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the moral duty to will only that which is good.

This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed in Southern legislatures. It has produced laws of a cynicism scarcely believable in a civilized
society. Even when these have been tested and thrown out as illegal by superior courts, they have in some instances continued to be enforced because “they haven’t taken them off the dockets.”

Subscriptions were canceled. Ads were canceled. As a result of my host’s campaign for nothing more than fairness or “couthness,” as he came to call it, even his old friends, swayed by the pressures put on them by society, turned against him. He began getting telephone calls telling him he was a “goddamn nigger-loving, Jew-loving, communist son-of-a-bitch.” Wherever he went he carried a gun.

“My reaction was as it had been before and as it was to be many times in the days to come. I was depressed to the point that I went into my room at home, sat on the side of the bed and wept like a baby.”

It was an odd manuscript; in the midst of the profoundest personal tragedy, sinking into economic ruin, he wrote brilliantly funny columns. His finest attacks have been to take the “true Southerner’s” viewpoint and render it absurd, all in seeming to defend and explain it. Tragedy turned him into one of the subtlest and sharpest satirists in American letters. In
The Magnolia Jungle
the juxtaposition of the best of these columns against a background of stark horror gives a striking effect. It shows the phenomenon of a man living at his lowest and writing at his highest; a grief-stricken man who turns out monstrously funny copy. Like Monoculus, he poked fun at the devil.

His case, along with those of other “Southern traitors,” like Hodding Carter, Easton King, Ralph McGill and Mark Ethridge, illustrates the “true Southerner’s” admirable lack of race prejudice: he is as willing to destroy whites who question his “wisdom” as he is to destroy Negroes.

I put the manuscript away and tried to sleep. But the sun poured into my window. I had read all night.

I
had hardly dozed
when East came into the room with a lone cup of coffee on a serving tray. Groggily, I asked him the time. It was seven thirty. My body pleaded for sleep, but I knew he wanted to discuss the manuscript.

It was an odd, exhausting day. We spent it in the office he has at his home. I drank cups of coffee and listened to Mozart quintets and read the portions of the script he had cut out. In many instances I urged him to restore these deletions - but it was insane. I was sleepy, I was preoccupied with the magnificent music and I was trying to read while P.D. talked - a long, immensely funny monologue, punctuated every five minutes by: “Well, I’ll shut up now and let you concentrate on that. But did Max ever tell you about …” And it would be another story.

“I was supposed to go to Dillard and give a lecture Monday,” he said sadly.

“Are you going?”

“No … Dean Gandy asked me to come. I begged him to let me postpone it a while. Told him I was busy working on the book. And that understanding sonofabitch
agreed
; didn’t even insist. Said ‘Certainly, P.D., the book comes first. We can have you a bit later.’ It hurt my feelings.”

“Hell, he was just being nice.”

“Nice - hell.” He grimaced with pain. “He didn’t act a bit broken up because I put him off. Well - you just stay over till Monday and I’ll drive you back to New Orleans. I’ll drop by and see him and show him I could have been had if he’d just had the basic common decency to insist.”

We worked all day, going through his files. He piled research material, hate pamphlets, news clippings, letters and other items on my bed for me to study at night. We broke off at intervals to visit with his wife, Billie, and their young daughter, Karen, who, learning that I was from Texas and lived on a farm, called me “that rich bald-headed Texas rancher.” Except for two Jewish families, they are ostracized from society in Hattiesburg. Billie spends
much of her time fishing in a nearby tank in the afternoons - a lonely existence. Karen is an extraordinarily beautiful blond child, the same age as my daughter and much like her. She is bright, outrageously outspoken and tender. She and her father were constantly at war over the TV programs. I could make little sense of it, except that the arguments were long and full of recriminations on both sides; but the traditional roles were reversed. She did not approve of her father’s avid watching of westerns and children’s programs, and he insisted that he be allowed, by God, to view his “favorites.”

I left them around eleven and meant to fall into bed. But the material P.D. had placed on the two bed tables fascinated me so that I studied it and made notes without sleeping until dawn. It is perhaps the most incredible collection of what East calls “assdom” in the South. It shows that the most obscene figures are not the ignorant ranting racists, but the legal minds who front for them, who “invent” for them the legislative proposals and the propaganda bulletins. They deliberately choose to foster distortions, always under the guise of patriotism, upon a people who have no means of checking the facts. Their appeals are of regional interest, showing complete contempt for privacy of conscience, and a willingness to destroy and subvert values that have traditionally been held supreme in this land.

T
hough the trip
from New Orleans to Hattiesburg had seemed interminable on the bus, the return to New Orleans in P.D.’ s car was quickly done. P.D. took me to Dillard University, one of the two Negro universities in New Orleans. A green, spacious campus with white buildings, great trees streaming Spanish moss. We drove through slowly, of necessity, since the campus drives have cement ridges every forty or fifty feet that would cause your
car to bump badly if any speed were attempted. P.D. cursed these richly and made the typical “Southern white” remarks about “Did you ever see such a damn beautiful campus for a bunch of
nigras
. They’re getting uppityer and uppityer.”

He stopped deep in the campus at the cottages provided for the faculty and we went in to meet Dean Sam Gandy. The Dean, a handsome, cultivated man of great wit, had just returned from a trip. Almost before we were introduced, P.D. launched into bitter complaints, wanting to know why Dean Gandy had not insisted he give the lecture today.

“But you told me you were simply too busy,” Gandy laughed. “Naturally we wanted you, but …”

Placated, P.D. and I confided my project to the Dean and his beautiful wife. Though we had little time to discuss it, since the Dean had to be at his office for an appointment, I promised to return and share my findings with him. We went to the car, which P.D. carefully and ostentatiously pretended to unlock.

“Why, P.D., what on earth did you lock your car for here in this cloistered atmosphere?” Gandy asked.

P.D. looked shifty-eyed, distrustful, in both directions, and then in a loud stage whisper said: “Well, with all these damn nigras hanging around, you know …”

Gandy bent double with laughter and outrage. He asked P.D. how the voting situation was in Mississippi and P.D. told the story of the Negro who went to register. The white man taking his application gave him the standard literacy tests:

“What is the first line of the thirty-second paragraph of the United States Constitution?” he asked.

The applicant answered perfectly.

“Name the eleventh President of the United States and his entire cabinet.”

The applicant answered correctly.