I did my real growing up in East Brewton, Alabama, a small town across the creek from Brewton, once called America’s richest little town. We moved there in 1955, when Dad was finished with his ministry serving the church in Daphne.
People in East Brewton, where we lived, didn’t own much. I know we didn’t. The sister towns were separated by Murder Creek. In the 1800s, legend and history say that a group of settlers traveling west—and supposedly carrying a lot of money, were ambushed, robbed, and murdered on the banks of this creek by three bandits, two white men and an Indian. The solid citizens of Brewton let you know in no uncertain terms and as often as possible that if you lived in East Brewton, you lived on “the wrong side of Murder Creek.” I found that this didn’t bother most people in East Brewton; it had always been that way. Mother being a school teacher, and Dad a minister, I was in contact with people on the “right side” of Murder Creek, but I quickly learned where my place was. It struck me more forcefully, no doubt, because I had come from outside. My family, as explained, was a bit unusual anyway, and we would, after all, be moving on in another three or four years. Also, we may have been on the wrong side of the Creek, but we were closer to the coast and our delicious oysters.
In the meantime, I began to learn consciously about race and class. I started to work for “King Tut” Edwards who ran a little country store. He hired me to wait on customers, clean the store, and deliver groceries to our “charge” customers. One day, after an old black couple left the store, Mr. Edwards said to me with a worried look, “You can’t do that, Bob.” I asked what I had done wrong and was told that I had said “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” to the old people who had just left and not to do that if there were white people in the store at the same time. I was puzzled, and told my boss that my daddy and mother had taught me to be courteous, especially to old people.
“Well, that’s right,” said Tut with a pained expression, “and I’m sorry to have to teach you this, but you can get in trouble saying yes sir and no sir to a colored person, and I can get in trouble, too. They all know I’m a Unitarian, so I’m in enough trouble already.”
King Tut got his name when he worked in the brick yard in Brewton, and he was always covered in red brick dust. This was around the time that King Tut’s dusty remains were dug from the tomb in Egypt. He taught me about the state of Alabama being run by the “Big Mules” for the benefit of the rich people. He told me that Huey P. Long was the greatest politician of all time and that he would soon unite all the poor people, including the colored, to kick out the Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, which owned most of the state. Tut repeated that Brewton was the richest little town in America and East Brewton was the poorest.
Then he told me about the bloodlines and how the rich families—the Bloedels, McGowins, Millers and MacMillans had intermarried for generations so that they could own everything in sight—the T. R. Miller Company, a huge lumber outfit, and the new Bloedel and MacMillan paper mill. Most of the timber land was owned by them along with TCI (which later became United States Steel). The Robbins and McGowins and Hainjes owned the department stores and the Luttrells owned the biggest hardware store in south Alabama and with the L&N railroad here, “they shipped all over the state.”
I asked Tut what he meant by “Big Mules” and he said it was like the way big mules, being taller and stronger, ate the hay off the wagons being pulled by the little mules. He said the image came from former Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, a Montgomery Kluxer. Then I was even more confused and told Tut I thought the Klan were bad people. He told me, “They are, but politics makes strange friends sometimes. It will take some time before you understand any of this, Bobby. I’m not sure I understand it myself.” The best I could make out, at my young age, was that populism was good and the idea of poor whites and blacks helping one another was good, but difficult and unlikely to happen—that the rich guys liked to keep poor white and black people alienated. Where the Klan fit in, I was not at all sure. I knew that my daddy had left them and that our family was happy about it. The fact that I was even thinking of this, at age fourteen, was a testament to the passions and teaching ability of my improbable mentor, the Unitarian King Tut Edwards.
When I was in high school, my Dad was moved from the East Brewton Methodist Church to the Broad Street Methodist Church in Mobile, where I had lived for that summer with Aunt Peg and Uncle Doug. I know that Daddy was happy about the move and Mom was glad to be close to “The Seven Z’s,” our little cabin in the woods across the bay from Mobile. Daddy called our little homemade house the “Seven Z’s” because there were seven of us Zellners.
If East Brewton had set me on a path of discovery concerning race and class, our sojourn in Mobile proved pivotal in leading me toward the emerging civil rights movement. It also seemed that the pace of life suddenly picked up. My new high school was so big that it had sororities and fraternities. I pledged the first fraternity that asked me. Mercifully, I have forgotten its name. One of my new friends was Tommy Adkins, “Mr. Everything” at Murphy High, Mobile’s only public high school—for whites. Tommy’s dad owned United Fruit Company and many of his ships made port calls at the Mobile docks.
I guess it was ironic that the Klan would contact me at the same time I am hanging out with the offspring of the local ruling class, but that is what happened.
All the high school boys who could afford it were getting souped-up jalopies and killing each other drag racing and playing chicken, or going at top speed over thrill hill up on Wolf Ridge. The point was to make all four wheels leave the ground at the same time. Some cars ended up upside down in the kudzu or wrapped around a loblolly pine.
The mayhem caused the city fathers to institute a nightly 9 p.m. curfew applying to everyone under eighteen. When I had just turned eighteen, Daddy had helped me buy a canary yellow Dodge convertible, sporting a raccoon tail and a shrill wolf whistle. Daddy was a Chrysler man his whole life. He made me promise not to use the whistle, explaining that the sound was produced by cold air hitting the hot motor block when the string was pulled. “You can bust your block like that and it would cost more to fix than this thing is worth,” he warned.
Soon after the curfew was imposed and I got the car, I was hanging out at Johnny’s Drive-In eating a burger and talking to girls. Suddenly a bright light hit the girls hanging on my door and they parted to reveal a TV cameraman and someone holding a microphone. There were giggles and gasps as the reporter stuck his mike in my face and started firing questions about the curfew. Television was so new that I had seen my first telecast just two years before and we had gotten our first set just the last Christmas, a gift to Mom and Dad from the church.
I was flattered to be questioned about the curfew and it happened so unexpectedly that I did not have time to be nervous.
“What’s your name young man?”
“Zellner.”
“What school and what grade?”
“Murphy, Senior.”
“Is it a good idea to have a curfew for young people in Mobile?”
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why?”
“It seems to be arbitrary—what if someone is seventeen and a half? Do they still have to be home by nine?”
“Any other reasons you oppose the curfew, Mr. Zellner?”
“Yes. If sixteen is old enough for a license and some boys are able to get in the Navy at seventeen, why do they have to be in by 9 p.m.?”
I figured later that the TV reporter had picked me because of my yellow convertible and not because I looked particularly intelligent. But that may have been one way I got on the KKK’s screen.
Anyway, the bad guys picked me up one night to go for a ride with them. Ralph and Clyde, a couple of my fraternity brothers, were in the car, so I was not overly concerned. They said they wanted to show me their friend’s car, a green 1955 Pontiac which they assured me was fast and powerful. Both the boys were also in Demolay with me, the junior version of the Masons—Daddy was a 33rd degree Mason and Mom was active in the Eastern Star.
The two older guys in the front seat took turns talking to me. The driver said he thought I had “leadership” potential. I asked why he had that opinion and he said, “We have our sources. We’ve been hearing about you.” The other one hinted that I “might better join them.”
“Join who?” I asked somewhat belligerently.
“But first,” he said, “you have to pass the test.”
“What test?” I asked, not feeling very well.
“Don’t ask so many questions.”
One of the boys in the back with me was putting together something that looked like a long fishing rod, fitting it piece by piece.
“Here comes one,” the driver yelled. “Get ready and really let him have it!”
Before I knew what was happening, my “friend” Ralph hove the rod out the back window just as the car swerved to the left side of the dark road. We were in Prichard, a mostly black town on the outskirts of Mobile.
The protruding rod struck something in the darkness with a stomach-churning thud. Inside the speeding car we lurched to the left as the driver swung the big Pontiac back to the right, throwing up a hail of gravel. My “friend” held the pole tight, I realized, in order to deliver the maximum blow to the midriff of an old black man walking in the opposite direction. I barely glimpsed his startled face as we hurtled by.
The glee was instant and sickening, as if the guys in the car had experienced a sudden release of almost sexual tension.
“I’ll look for another one,” the driver sang out. “Get that stick to Bobby and let’s see if he’s any good.”
Clyde hollered, “Bob, quick, change places with me.” I was shunted to the right side of the back seat as Ralph tried to shove the disjointed rod at me. “Put this back together and whack one on that side.” I clasped my hands in front of my chest and said, “No, sir, that’s not for me, you moron.”
“You got to,” Ralph hissed, leaning past Clyde in the middle.
“I ain’t got to do crap.”
“You most certainly do,” Clyde said into my ear. “These fools don’t play. They might kill all three of us.”
I was really weary by now and not willing to play their game anymore. “What do you mean us, man?” I asked loudly. “I am not one of you, whatever the hell you are. You can let my ass out now!”
“Y’all having any trouble back there?” It was the older man in the shotgun seat. I had already silently nicknamed him “Green Teeth.” His tone was low and menacing, and he did not look around.
“No, it’s all right,” Ralph tried to explain. “He’ll do something even if I have to kick his ass.”
“Okay, look,” I said, “I’ve got this biscuit that I saved from supper. If it will make you happy, Ralph, I will try to hit somebody with it.”
Clyde chimed in, “Biscuit?”
“A biscuit,” I said, showing them the small piece of bread I had saved to eat later. “That’s the best I can do, but I will sacrifice my biscuit for the cause. If that won’t satisfy you and your unknown friends up there, then I guess we’ll all have to die.”
With that I rolled the window down and tossed the scone in the direction of the next pedestrian walking toward us. A muffled whump seemed to give my tormentors some relief, so they delivered me back to the vicinity of my comfortable little convertible.
I often remember that night of testing—testing to see if I had a violent-enough nature to be good Klan material. If things had not been moving so fast, I might have acquitted myself more honorably. But I really make no excuse, because I failed on two counts—I washed out as a future Klansman because I was not mean enough, and I flunked as a decent person because I failed to stand up to the criminals in that car.
In spite of my somewhat cowardly response to the Klan overtures, I had disagreed with my peers on matters of race and segregation prior to that incident, and some of us tried to witness whenever we could. During my junior year, on February 3, 1956, Autherine Lucy enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Alabama, and the demons of race hate descended. That is when the nightmare began.
On the third day of classes, Autherine Lucy faced mobs of students, townspeople, and even groups of outsiders. There were students behind her saying, “Let’s kill her! Let’s kill her!” She needed a police escort to get to class and crowds chanted outside constantly. Lucy was suspended from the university with the board stating that it was for her own safety. The NAACP filed a contempt of court suit, but Lucy’s expulsion took place anyway. In 1988, Lucy re-entered the University of Alabama to earn a master’s degree in elementary education, and in 1992, both she and her daughter, Grazia, received degrees.
I am not sure exactly what made me follow Lucy’s story so closely in 1956, but I remember being fascinated with what the “adults” would do to keep her out. Before the actual event, I was with a bunch of students were standing and sitting around the red brick stoop leading up to the main building of Murphy High School—band members and football players and our after-school prayer group. I played second trombone in the marching band. We were discussing the ever-hot topic—the integration of the University of Alabama.
Someone hollered, “If Autherine just wants to get an education, she wouldn’t be trying to go the university—she knows she can’t. They’d close it before integrating. She knows she should go to one of her own schools and not try to destroy ours. It’s a shame that nigger girl wants to destroy our state university.”
When I said I thought she had a right to go to any tax-supported school in our state, Sam Culpepper, one of our star football players with a neck as wide as his head whispered to me, “Don’t let anyone hear you say that.”
“Why do you think she wants to explode the university?” came another question.
“Maybe she just wants to get an education,” I said.
An angry rose color spread up Sammy Culpepper’s thick neck to his screwed-up face. “Be quiet, because they will hurt you.”
“Who is they?” I shot back. “Will you hurt me, Culpepper?”
“No, hell, Bob I won’t hurt you. I know you are crazy, but they don’t have the slightest idea how screwed up you are, and I’m telling you they will put the hurt on you. Let any of them hear you talking that mess, and I can promise you that I ain’t going to help you when they get on your scrawny little ass.” Culpepper, all 285 pounds of him, paused and took a huge breath. “Zellner, you know I am planning on playing pro ball, you idiot!”
It was kind of fun, the image of Big Sammy helping me in a fight with the Klan boys, but I pressed the point. “Culpepper, I know you are planning on going to Alabama to play college football, and I know how important it is to you, but you don’t need to be so fearful. The University will still be in Tuscaloosa next year when you get ready to go.”
“Fearful? You little shit, I ain’t fearful of nothing on earth that moves.”
“Yes you are,” I pointed out. “You just advised me to keep quiet or get hurt.”
“Well for your information, I just think it is my duty to protect you from your own stupidity if you believe in something as far out as integration. I’m telling you these old boys will whip you till your ass won’t hold shucks. People just don’t go around talking like that. I myself ain’t got to worry, because I think segregation is just fine. But even if I didn’t, I certainly wouldn’t let people know.” Sammy spun around and skulked off looking around to see if any of the in group had taken offense at him talking to the alien.
I called after him, “I’m not scared of anything either, Culpepper, I refuse to live that way.”
Sammy and I had been going at it so intensely that others in the group weren’t able to get a word in.
Jamie Cecil, my girlfriend and the leader of our little prayer cell, admonished me for being so argumentative with Sammy. “We’ll never make converts beyond the six of us if you don’t learn to be more diplomatic. You put people on the defensive.”
Our “cell,” as we called it, met after school once or twice each week at Dauphin Way Methodist Church, where Jamie and her best friend Glenda Johnson were members. Dauphin Way was high church. Their minister had a “Doctor” in front of his name and he had served the congregation for thirty-five years. My Aunt Peg and Uncle Douglas were members, and they were the richest people among our kinfolks. The Reverend Dr. Adkins liked to fly in Uncle Doug’s Piper Cub and to fish with Uncle Doug on his cabin cruiser, The Flour Peddler. Until he shot himself with his own pistol, my Uncle Doug made a good living as a flour broker, servicing Gulf Coast bakers. We were never clear about the circumstances of the shooting but believed it was an accident while he was cleaning the gun.
Our prayer circle met sitting on the carpet in an upper room at the church and we liked to think of ourselves as special disciples of Jesus, hiding in the catacombs. Periodically we would sally forth and do battle with evil. I liked that part best and considered racism and segregation to be among the worst evils. My best friend Ray Powell, a frat and Demolay brother, and Gordon Tatum, a member of my dad’s lowly working class Broad Street Methodist Church, were not as enthusiastic as me on the race question. Fastidious Gordon was embarrassed with Dad’s slogan blazed on the church marquee—“The Working Man’s Church, Rev. James A. Zellner, Pastor.” Race was taboo and class was too. Most of us in the cell were Murphy High juniors.
By my senior year, 1956–57, our little prayer cell grew to a dozen or more regulars. I was brought up short one day when my French teacher congratulated me on being chosen to be a graduation speaker. I tended to think of myself as a struggling student because of the rough start I had in Slocomb, Alabama, with dyslexia, and not learning to read or spell until third grade.
I thought they had made a mistake. It turned out that the selection committee at Murphy had simply listed the top one percent of the fifteen hundred or so graduating seniors to be speakers. Since those amounted to over a dozen students they announced there would be a speaking contest to select the best four to share valedictory duties. Jamie said that I should enter the contest and try to land a spot as a speaker. “You need to represent the church youth.”
I told her that I had no idea I was up for such an honor and besides, I always got sick to my stomach if I had to make a speech, and, I finished, “I actually think they’ve made a mistake in picking me.”
She wagged her finger and lectured me about going toward the things you fear. I knew she was reading Ayn Rand, so I asked Jamie if Rand was the one who said, “If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger.”
“No, genius, it was Nietzsche that said something like that.”
“Not true,” I kidded her; he was misquoted. What Friedrich actually said was, “That which doesn’t kill you can really mess you up real bad.”
Well, she talked me into entering and helped me write my speech. The whole cell got in on the project and Gordon, one of the smartest boys in school, came up with the idea that worked.
“The students are going to vote after hearing all of you ‘stars,’” Gordon said. “The ones who make it through the first cut will be the ones the audience will remember. If it’s alphabetical, Bob, you will be last and that will help. But what will clinch it is that the students will remember the speeches that are funny and not boring.”
So, to make my speech funny, I decided to describe a typical day in the life of a Stone Age teenager. Predictably, instead of driving his jalopy to school, as we did, Clyde, my mythical teen, rode to school bareback on his pet pink polka dot dinosaur. With the image of fur-clad Clyde bouncing along to school atop Pinky, trying in vain to hold on to his bulking stone tablets, I had them. They started laughing and didn’t stop. They laughed at parts I didn’t even consider funny. I could do no wrong. I knew what it meant to be “in the zone!”
Needless to say, I won the first round going away. I don’t remember anything else about the contest, but I wound up in the final four. I actually do remember graduation day and the speech I made, a real snoozer, to seven thousand bored-out-of-their-gourds friends and relatives, seated uncomfortably on bleachers at Ladd Stadium. Faculty geniuses had decided it would be exciting to give each of us a verse from the school song to write our speeches around. Mine was:
In days of old when Spaniards bold were sailing Mobile Bay
A dream was born one early morn. That dream’s come true today.
Now colleges and high schools too, may have traditions old,
But none can boast the blah blah blah of Murphy’s blue and gold.
The memorable first line of my valedictory speech went something like this: “From the very beginning Murphy High School represented the very best quality, blah, blah, blah. . .” It was never explained to us how someone during the days of the Spanish conquest was already thinking about Murphy High School. It was in the song so we thought it must be true. Maybe the song writer was thinking of Bienville and d’Iberville? But no, that couldn’t be. Those founders of Mobile were French.
The event that involved all of the prayer group had occurred immediately before graduation. Growing up in small towns in rural south Alabama, I had always looked forward to graduation and the accompanying baccalaureate service. Now that I was to be a graduation speaker for this huge graduating class of some twelve hundred, I took more than a passing interest in the Murphy traditions surrounding commencement. Most of our cell members were native Mobilians, and I had only been there for the eleventh and twelfth grades, so I asked Jamie and Glenda when and where the baccalaureate service would take place.
They replied, almost in unison, “Oh, we don’t have one.”
Glenda linked pinkies with Jamie. “We said that together, didn’t we?” Glenda chortled.
What exactly is a backalariet?” Jamie asked.
“Murphy does not have a baccalaureate service in a church?” I was incredulous. “It goes with graduation. Always has,” I stated with finality. I had only been at Murphy for two years and had come from the tiny school in East Brewton to Mobile. How could Murphy High not have a baccalaureate? I got together a bunch of kids I knew from the Methodist church and we decided to petition the principal. I didn’t go to see the principal; I stayed in the background, and we got the service.
The following fall, our core group—all Methodists—were off to Huntingdon College in Montgomery, which was the church school for our Methodist Conference. In the college, our Mobile group became the backbone of the progressive or liberal forces.