Voices in Our Blood (87 page)

In a way, the code phrases Mississippi used—“state sovereignty” for its system of white supremacy, “federal encroachment” for the national pressure to change—offered an accurate reflection of the situation. The Mississippi way of life was always vulnerable to contact with national institutions—the Methodist Church or the United States Air Force or the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. For many years, though, the pressure from Washington was not much more than nominal. Federal civil-rights legislation was bottled up by a powerful bloc of Southern senators. The Presidents in office in the decade after the Brown decision, when Mississippi was doing its best to run what James Silver called the Closed Society, did not treat the restoration of civil rights to black people in the South as a national priority. Dwight D. Eisenhower was identified with the view that you can't legislate morality. John F. Kennedy seemed to consider segregation a deplorable but essentially unalterable regional situation that was inconvenient mainly because it caused embarrassment overseas. Even Northern politicians who were particularly critical of Mississippi's single-race elections would not challenge their legitimacy, as Ed King and other delegates of the Freedom Democratic Party found out at the Democratic National Convention of 1964 when they tried to get seated in place of the all-white delegation from Mississippi. Reading through State Sovereignty Commission documents did not change my view that Mississippi had been sui generis, but it did remind me that the Closed Society had existed quite comfortably for years within the society of the United States of America. When I was in Mississippi in those days, I may have had thoughts of slipping over the border, but I was in my own country the entire time.

Of the hundreds of white people who went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, committed to working for the benefit of black people, one is still at it. His name is Rims Barber, and he is one of the named plaintiffs in the suit to open the files of the State Sovereignty Commission. A Presbyterian minister from Chicago, Barber worked for the Delta Ministry for a dozen years and the Children's Defense Fund for another dozen. For the past four or five years, he has been lobbying the Mississippi Legislature as a one-man organization called the Mississippi Human Services Agenda. He works out of a ramshackle house a couple of blocks from the capitol, sharing quarters with other lingering troublemakers, like the Environmental Justice Project and Congregations for Children—the Methodists, again. One room of the old house is supposed to be the office of the Mississippi Human Services Agenda, but Barber seems to have migrated to one corner of a large conference table in what was once a living room—a room whose walls have posters like one showing a smiling little girl above the legend “The Arms Race May Kill Her. So Might Poverty. Help Fight Both.” When I walked in, he waved an arm at the disorder around him and said, “Welcome to the Freedom House of the nineties.” It did look like a Freedom House during what civil-rights workers sometimes called Freedom Summer and Erle Johnston, out of an old habit, still refers to as the Invasion. Sitting there in a rickety folding chair next to the messy conference table, I felt for a moment that we were back in 1964, when Jackson seemed full of the eager students referred to by one white woman I met as “those COFO things.”

“Why are you still here?” I asked.

“Ignorance and stubbornness,” Barber said.

Rims Barber believes that the State Sovereignty Commission files should be opened under the privacy guidelines constructed by Judge Barbour. He thinks that most of the dirt in the files was spread when it was acquired, and that the rest wouldn't make much difference at this point anyway. “I know there are lies in there,” he said. “So what? You can tell that they're lies. And they're thirty years old. I have seen some of the lies in there—one that says we paid people to register to vote. If you smudged that over, you wouldn't know what kind of lies they were telling, and if you smudged my name out there'd be no way the lie could be checked. Also, it reflects the thinking of these people. They
believed
that. It's important to know what they thought. And without names it isn't real.”

Barber first worked in the capitol in 1968, as an administrative assistant to the state's first black legislator since Reconstruction, and even then he was irritated by hints that legislators he dealt with every day might have seen Sovereignty Commission documents about him that he had never seen himself. There are now forty-two black legislators, and they form the core around which Barber tries to build coalitions on issues having to do with poverty and welfare and crime and education. Republicans dominate Mississippi politics now, and they are not the sort of Republicans that Dwight D. Eisenhower might have appointed to the federal bench. They are modern right-wing Republicans who talk about smaller government and personal responsibility and how idyllic everything was in the fifties—a period, Barber is quick to point out, in which women were in the kitchen and black people were in the back of the bus. These days, of course, there are a lot of people in Washington as well as in Mississippi talking about the evils of federal encroachment on areas of life that should be the province of the states. People around the country who refer to federal agents as “jackbooted thugs” speak of the Tenth Amendment with as much fervor as Ross Barnett and the Citizens Council once did. If all of them were united in a national umbrella organization, State Sovereignty Commission wouldn't be a bad name.

In that sense, I suppose you could say that Mississippi is now more like the rest of the country—or that the rest of the country is more like Mississippi—but not in ways that please Rims Barber. While I was in Jackson, the legislature was dealing with a measure to introduce caning into prisons and a measure to privatize certain areas of welfare. “Nobody says ‘nigger' anymore,” Barber says. “It's usually in code words.” But he sees the issues he deals with now as simply extensions of what was being fought over in 1964. In fact, he sometimes says, “The gains we made are hanging by a thread, and they want to cut the thread.” If you're talking to Rims Barber in what he calls the Freedom House of the nineties, the documents in the State Sovereignty Commission files don't seem to be about a peculiar and encapsulated era in American history.

Before I left the house, I asked Barber if he had expected the lawsuit to open the files to take this long.

“No,” he said. “But then I didn't expect the civil-rights movement to take this long, either.”

Grady's Gift

The New York Times Magazine,
December 1, 1991

H
OWELL
R
AINES

Grady showed up one day at our house at 1409 Fifth Avenue West in Birmingham, and by and by she changed the way I saw the world. I was 7 when she came to iron and clean and cook for $18 a week, and she stayed for 7 years. During that time everyone in our family came to accept what my father called “those great long talks” that occupied Grady and me through many a sleepy Alabama afternoon. What happened between us can be expressed in many ways, but its essence was captured by Graham Greene when he wrote that in every childhood there is a moment when a door opens and lets the future in. So this is a story about one person who opened a door and another who walked through it.

It is difficult to describe—or even to keep alive in our memories—worlds that cease to exist. Usually we think of vanished worlds as having to do with far-off places or with ways of life, like that of the Western frontier, that are remote from us in time. But I grew up in a place that disappeared, and it was here in this country and not so long ago. I speak of Birmingham, where once there flourished the most complete form of racial segregation to exist on the American continent in this century.

Gradystein Williams Hutchinson (or Grady, as she was called in my family and hers) and I are two people who grew up in the '50s in that vanished world, two people who lived mundane, inconsequential lives while Martin Luther King Jr. and Police Commissioner T. Eugene (Bull) Connor prepared for their epic struggle. For years, Grady and I lived in my memory as child and adult. But now I realize that we were both children—one white and very young, one black and adolescent; one privileged, one poor. The connection between these two children and their city was this: Grady saw to it that although I was to live in Birmingham for the first 28 years of my life, Birmingham would not live in me.

Only by keeping in mind the place that Birmingham was can you understand the life we had, the people we became and the reunion that occurred one day not too long ago at my sister's big house in the verdant Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook. Grady, now a 57-year-old hospital cook in Atlanta, had driven out with me in the car I had rented. As we pulled up, my parents, a retired couple living in Florida, arrived in their gray Cadillac. My father, a large, vigorous man of 84, parked his car and, without a word, walked straight to Grady and took her in his arms.

“I never thought I'd ever see y'all again,” Grady said a little while later. “I just think this is the true will of God. It's His divine wish that we saw each other.”

This was the first time in 34 years that we had all been together. As the years slipped by, it had become more and more important to me to find Grady, because I am a strong believer in thanking our teachers and mentors while they are still alive to hear our thanks. She had been “our maid,” but she taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn, which is to try to see—honestly and down to its very center—the world in which we live. Grady was long gone before I realized what a brave and generous person she was, or how much I owed her.

Then last spring, my sister ran into a relative of Grady's and got her telephone number. I went to see Grady in Atlanta, and several months later we gathered in Birmingham to remember our shared past and to learn anew how love abides and how it can bloom not only in the fertile places, but in the stony ones as well.

I know that outsiders tend to think segregation existed in a uniform way throughout the Solid South. But it didn't. Segregation was rigid in some places, relaxed in others; leavened with humanity in some places, enforced with unremitting brutality in others. And segregation found its most violent and regimented expression in Birmingham—segregation maintained through the nighttime maraudings of white thugs, segregation sanctioned by absentee landlords from the United States Steel Corporation, segregation enforced by a pervasively corrupt police department.

Martin Luther King once said Birmingham was to the rest of the South what Johannesburg was to the rest of Africa. He believed that if segregation could be broken there, in a city that harbored an American version of apartheid, it could be broken everywhere. That is why the great civil rights demonstrations of 1963 took place in Birmingham. And that is why, just as King envisioned, once its jugular was cut in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham in 1963, the dragon of legalized segregation collapsed and died everywhere—died, it seems in retrospect, almost on the instant. It was the end of “Bad Birmingham,” where the indigenous racism of rural Alabama had taken a new and more virulent form when transplanted into a raw industrial setting.

In the heyday of Birmingham, one vast belt of steel mills stretched for 10 miles, from the satellite town of Bessemer to the coal-mining suburb of Pratt City. Black and white men—men like Grady's father and mine—came from all over the South to do the work of these mills or to dig the coal and iron ore to feed them. By the time Grady Williams was born in 1933, the huge light of their labor washed the evening sky with an undying red glow. The division of tasks within these plants ran along simple lines: white men made the steel; black men washed the coal.

Henry Williams was a tiny man from Oklahoma—part African, part Cherokee, only 5 feet 3 inches, but handsome. He worked as the No. 2 Coal Washer at Pratt Mines, and he understood his world imperfectly. When the white foreman died, Henry thought he would move up. But the dead man's nephew was brought in, and in the natural order of things, Henry was required to teach his new boss all there was to know about washing coal.

“Oh, come on, Henry,” his wife, Elizabeth, said when he complained about being passed over for a novice. But he would not be consoled.

One Saturday, Henry Williams sent Grady on an errand. “Go up the hill,” he said, “and tell Mr. Humphrey Davis I said send me three bullets for my .38 pistol because I got to kill a dog.”

In his bedroom later that same afternoon, he shot himself. Grady found the body. She was 7 years old.

Over the years, Elizabeth Williams held the family together. She worked as a practical nurse and would have become a registered nurse except for the fact that by the early '40s, the hospitals in Birmingham, which had run segregated nursing programs, closed those for blacks.

Grady attended Parker High, an all-black school where the children of teachers and postal workers made fun of girls like Grady, who at 14 was already working part-time in white homes. One day a boy started ragging Grady for being an “Aunt Jemima.” One of the poorer boys approached him after class and said: “Hey, everybody's not lucky enough to have a father working. If I ever hear you say that again to her, I'm going to break your neck.”

Grady finished high school in early 1950, four weeks after her 16th birthday. Her grades were high, even though she had held back on some tests in an effort to blend in with her older classmates. She planned to go to the nursing school at Dillard University, a black institution in New Orleans, but first she needed a full-time job to earn money for tuition. That was when my mother hired her. There was a state-financed nursing school in Birmingham, about 10 miles from her house, but it was the wrong one.

Between the Depression and World War II, my father and two of his brothers came into Birmingham from the Alabama hills. They were strong, sober country boys who knew how to swing a hammer. By the time Truman was elected in 1948, they had got a little bit rich selling lumber and building shelves for the A.&P.

They drove Packards and Oldsmobiles. They bought cottages at the beach and hired housemaids for their wives and resolved that their children would go to college. Among them, they had eight children, and I was the last to be born, and my world was sunny.

Indeed, it seemed to be a matter of family pride that this tribe of hard-handed hill people had become prosperous enough to spoil its babies. I was doted upon, particularly, it occurs to me now, by women: my mother; my sister, Mary Jo, who was 12 years older and carried me around like a mascot; my leathery old grandmother, a widow who didn't like many people but liked me because I was named for her husband.

There was also my Aunt Ada, a red-haired spinster who made me rice pudding and hand-whipped biscuits and milkshakes with cracked ice, and when my parents were out of town, I slept on a pallet in her room.

Then there were the black women, first Daisy, then Ella. And finally Grady.

I wish you could have seen her in 1950. Most of the women in my family ran from slender to bony. Grady was buxom. She wore a blue uniform and walked around our house on stout brown calves. Her skin was smooth. She had a gap between her front teeth, and so did I. One of the first things I remember Grady telling me was that as soon as she had enough money she was going to get a diamond set in her gap and it would drive the men wild.

There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which such a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism. Indeed, for the black person, the feigning of an expected emotion could be the very coinage of survival.

So I can only tell you how it seemed to me at the time. I was 7 and Grady was 16 and I adored her and I believed she was crazy about me. She became the weather in which my childhood was lived.

I was 14 when she went away. It would be many years before I realized that somehow, whether by accident or by plan, in a way so subtle, so gentle, so loving that it was like the budding and falling of the leaves on the pecan trees in the yard of that happy house in that cruel city in that violent time, Grady had given me the most precious gift that could be received by a pampered white boy growing up in that time and place. It was the gift of a free and unhateful heart.

Grady, it soon became clear, was a talker, and I was already known in my family as an incessant asker of questions. My brother, Jerry, who is 10 years older than I, says one of his clearest memories is of my following Grady around the house, pursuing her with a constant buzz of chatter.

That is funny, because what I remember is Grady talking and me listening—Grady talking as she did her chores, marking me with her vision of the way things were. All of my life, I have carried this mental image of the two of us:

I am 9 or 10 by this time. We are in the room where Grady did her ironing. Strong light is streaming through the window. High summer lies heavily across all of Birmingham like a blanket. We are alone, Grady and I, in the midst of what the Alabama novelist Babs Deal called “the acres of afternoon,” those legendary hours of buzzing heat and torpidity that either bind you to the South or make you crazy to leave it.

I am slouched on a chair, with nothing left to do now that baseball practice is over. Grady is moving a huge dreadnought of an iron, a G.E. with stainless steel base and fat black handle, back and forth across my father's white shirts. From time to time, she shakes water on the fabric from a bottle with a sprinkler cap.

Then she speaks of a hidden world about which no one has ever told me, a world as dangerous and foreign, to a white child in a segregated society, as Africa itself—the world of “nigger town.” “You don't know what it's like to be poor and black,” Grady says.

She speaks of the curbside justice administered with rubber hoses by Bull Connor's policemen, of the deputy sheriff famous in the black community for shooting a floor sweeper who had moved too slowly, of “Dog Day,” the one time a year when blacks are allowed to attend the state fair. She speaks offhandedly of the N.A.A.C.P.

“Are you a member?” I ask.

“At my school,” she says, “we take our dimes and nickels and join the N.A.A.C.P. every year just like you join the Red Cross in your school.”

It seems silly now to describe the impact of this revelation, but that is because I cannot fully re-create the intellectual isolation of those days in Alabama. Remember that this was a time when television news, with its searing pictures of racial conflict, was not yet a force in our society. The editorial pages of the Birmingham papers were dominated by the goofy massive-resistance cant of columnists like James J. Kilpatrick. Local politicians liked to describe the N.A.A.C.P. as an organization of satanic purpose and potency that had been rejected by “our colored people,” and would shortly be outlawed in Alabama as an agency of Communism.

But Grady said black students were joining in droves, people my age and hers. It was one of the most powerfully subversive pieces of information I had ever encountered, leaving me with an unwavering conviction about Bull Connor, George Wallace and the other segregationist blowhards who would dominate the politics of my home state for a generation.

From that day, I knew they were wrong when they said that “our Negroes” were happy with their lot and had no desire to change “our Southern way of life.” And when a local minister named Fred L. Shuttlesworth joined with Dr. King in 1957 to start the civil rights movement in Birmingham, I knew in some deeply intuitive way that they would succeed, because I believed that the rage that was in Grady was a living reality in the entire black community, and I knew that this rage was so powerful that it would have its way.

I learned, too, from watching Grady fail at something that meant a great deal to her. In January 1951, with the savings from her work in our home, she enrolled at Dillard. She made good grades. She loved the school and the city of New Orleans. But the money lasted only one semester, and when summer rolled around Grady was cleaning our house again.

That would be the last of her dream of becoming a registered nurse. A few years later, Grady married Marvin Hutchinson, a dashing fellow, more worldly than she, who took her to all-black nightclubs to hear singers like Bobby (Blue) Bland. In 1957, she moved to New York City to work as a maid and passed from my life. But I never forgot how she had yearned for education.