Excerpt from audio file at the James G. Kenan Research Center, at the Atlanta History Center:
[woman’s voice] “Today’s date is June 3rd, 2005. So, please state your name, and age, please.”
[muffling as a microphone is moved into place] “My name is Jack Strouss, and I am eighty-one years old. I’ll be eighty-two in two weeks, Lord willin’ [laughing]”
[woman’s voice again, but in background] “What can you remember about being a young gay man in Atlanta in the 1940s?”
[Jack Strouss clearing his throat] “Well, we didn’t call ourselves gay back then, first of all. I don’t really remember what was the word we used, to be honest. Queer? We certainly didn’t use the word homosexual! That was so clinical! [laughing] In any event, we used to go to private house parties, and there were a few bars, or dinner clubs that we would frequent, where the owners knew us, and would kind of wink-and-nod that all of us could kind of stay in a corner. I guess the main bar we would go to would be The Lounge or Moe & Joe’s on Highland. We had a circle of friends, and looked out for each other.”
1950, Atlanta, Georgia
Since coming to Atlanta two years earlier to study at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter’s life had revolved around swimming each morning before his classes, sometimes with a near maniacal determination to exhaust himself as he strove to beat the prior day’s number of laps, followed by his engineering classes, then his research project he conducted in the university technical lab. He didn’t socialize, except for Sundays when after church he went to his great uncle and aunt’s home for dinner in nearby Virginia-Highland. His elderly aunt told him that she was concerned that this serious, brooding, young man was missing out on life, and would invite various young women from her Sunday School class to join them for dinner.
Each female guest would subsequently leave the Sunday dinner with a slight swoon following her meeting with Carter, who was always polite and courteous, in addition to his quiet confidence coupled with his large swimmer’s frame. But nothing ever more came of it, despite his Aunt Elizabeth’s near constant obsession to find him a companion. His Uncle Samuel would just chuckle to himself and wink at Carter, teasing his wife to quit parading Carter around like some purebred at the county fair. Let the boy eat his dinner in peace, Lizabet! he would chide her.
Carter had been studying one afternoon under the shade of a towering elm tree in nearby Piedmont Park, when he had had enough and decided to head home. Just as he turned the corner on Peachtree towards his apartment, the bus stopped and out popped a fresh-faced pixie of a woman, nearly falling into Carter.
“Oh! Excuse me!” they both said.
After steadying herself for a brief second, holding onto Carter’s forearm, she slipped back on her heeled shoe back onto her foot, and smiled up at him.
“My, my, why aren’t you just the sweetest thing,” she said.
“Glad to be of help,” he replied, smiling back.
“Margot O’Neill,” she said quickly extending her hand to him.
He grabbed it firmly, not shaking it, but not bending down to kiss it either as would have been the custom in another age. He smiled back at her and realizing that she had the determination to seize the moment, took a second to look at her before replying. She was without a doubt an attractive woman, young but polished and not unaware of her own beauty. Her soft blue Juliette hat had a subtle net veil that fell just above her eyebrows, and matched her immaculate velvet gloves. The effect was to draw attention to her face, and especially her eyes, which were lit with a charming sparkle. She wore a simple, yet tailored jumper dress, with a slight billowy skirt, which made her seem to be gliding effortlessly even while standing still in front him.
“I’m Carter Ridge,” he said.
“Well don’t just stand there darling,” she replied, and hooking her arm around his, started walking up Peachtree with him, “you seem like you’re in a hurry, too. What are you doing tonight, Mr. Carter Ridge?”
“I don’t have any plans, why do you ask?”
“Oh, I was wondering. A big, strong man like you must surely have had some sort of engagement for a Friday evening.”
He grinned ever so faintly, trying to placate this new acquaintance. Persistent, even a bit impertinent, nevertheless she was a strange fascination for him. He hadn’t made any real friends since he had arrived in Atlanta. The few people he knew on a social basis, other players on the water polo team, he didn’t find interesting enough to merit spending with any of his limited free time. All they talked about in the locker room was girls and beer. As they reached the corner of Peachtree and 13th, he asked her, “Where exactly am I taking you?”
She stopped in her tracks, with a look of feigned confusion, and said, “Well, I’m not sure. My boarding house is the other direction. Where are you headed?”
He sighed, rolling his eyes, and then said, “Margot, let me drop off this blanket back at my apartment, but don’t get any ideas. Nothing is going to happen.”
“Oh, darling, nothing ever happens. But something always does.”
He laughed, and shook his head.
“You’re something else all right,” he said.
“That’s the least of it,” she replied, and gripped his forearm, “you and I will get along just fine.”
The rest of their walk was a constant cat-and-mouse conversation that had vague undertones of seduction and repulsion, of magnetic opposites, but the level beneath the games seemed to be a kind of understanding between them that it was all just for fun, and soon Carter realized that he could give as good as he could receive in the innuendo and farcical one-upmanship that Margot was dishing out. He began talking to her in a variation of the same locker room braggadocio that was the common patois amongst fellow teammates, and she returned the verbal volley with amazing spin and force so that by the time that he had unlocked his apartment door they were both laughing.
“Okay, okay, enough!” he said as he threw his lawn blanket onto a nearby chair.
“Well aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” she asked mockingly.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever invited back to my apartment, it’s not like I have a liquor cabinet here!”
“Who said anything about a gin and soda? Oh, I did. Well, what do you have, stranger?”
He shook his finger at her as if she was a bad girl, then went into his galley kitchen. Opening the refrigerator he called out, “I have half a gallon of milk, three Coca-Colas, and some sweet tea my aunt gave me last Sunday. Don’t know if it’s still good.”
“Iced tea goes bad? I don’t know, why don’t we go out?”
“Out? You mean, to a lounge?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, no, but I’m not really dressed for it,” he said as he looked at himself in his navy-blue polo shirt and sport pants. “I mean, you look fine, but I look like I just came off of the tennis court.”
“Good lord,” she said under her breath, “I sure know how to pick them.” Then said louder, “You look fine! Go change into something more ‘appropriate’ and we’ll go to a place I’m sure you’ll enjoy.”
Ten minutes later they were in his car, driving back down Peachtree towards downtown Atlanta.
“Nice car,” she said as she settled in.
“Where are we going, by the way?” he asked.
“Do you know the Tick Tock?”
“The Tick Tock? No, where is it?”
“Just keep heading downtown towards the Loew’s and find parking near there.”
Minutes later they were walking in the doors of the Tick Tock diner, filled with people standing around the bar and packed into the many booths lining the wall. Margot had Carter by the hand, leading him like a puppy on a leash through the throng. The lively café was thick with cigarette smoke, loud laughter, and a barely audible jukebox played Frankie Laine through the din. As they turned the corner of the bar, Margot waved to a table of men sitting in a corner booth. One of them waved back, and as they sat down to join them, she leaned in and kissed him on both cheeks.
“Darling! You look wonderful!” she exclaimed.
“Oh this old thing?” he said with a wink.
“Bebop is spoken here, darling!” one of them sang out, in near synchronization with the song.
“Kittens, meet my new friend, Mr. Carter Ridge. Please be gentle, he’s just come out of the kiln and we need to let him cool down a bit,” she said as she pushed them both into the now packed booth.
“Well I was going to watch Randolph Scott at the Paramount in half an hour, but my word, I just might have another round of drinks, how are you doing Mr. Carter Ridge!” one of them said as he slung out his hand in a slightly fey manner to shake hands. “I’m Ducky MacNair.”
“Ducky? Why Ducky?” Carter asked.
“Don’t say something funny, and you’ll never find out,” one of them said.
“Or poke something into him, and you surely will!” another quipped.
At which point Ducky squealed in a quick blast of laughs like a duck. Everyone quickly followed.
“Rudy!” the first one signaled to a waiter walking by, “Another round of Singapore Slings s’il vous plait! Margot, what are y’all having?”
“I’ll have the same. You, Carter?”
“I’ll have an Old Fashioned, please.”
“Oh, well I hope not... too,” Ducky said.
“So, this is my friend, Jack,” Margot said as she introduced Carter to the first friend. “And you’ve already met Ducky, and this is Billy, and this handsome fella is Jordan.”
“Nice to meet all of you,” Carter said, nodding.
“Oh, Lord! I love this song!” Ducky clapped as Hank Williams began crooning to ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It.’
After the drinks arrived, the conversation centered on Carter, with the table peppering him with questions, interspersed with laughter, goading one another, and teasing, but it was Margot who was firmly in control. If the banter turned too ribald or the flirtation had crossed her line of discretion, she would intervene and steer her “kittens” back to safer territory. She held her cigarette in her right hand, regally at a forty-five-degree angle with her index finger cocked, and rested her left hand on Carter’s lap, occasionally putting her arm behind him on the top of the banquette. Margot had an opinion on every subject of discussion, and soon Carter could see how easily one could fall for her, with her combination of brains and beauty. There wasn’t a film, song, or celebrity that didn’t succumb to her withering disapproval or bask in her praise. At times it seemed as if she was provoking the table to rise in rebellion, especially when she pronounced herself unimpressed by Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride.
“I found her insipid. Although she was beautiful in that gown, I’ll give you that,” she announced as she stubbed out her cigarette to a gaggle of how could you? Oh, yes that gown! You can’t be serious!
If a query wasn’t pointed at him, Carter kept quiet, watching the spectacle from the relative safety of sitting on the aisle beside Queen Margot. Glancing back at the general ambiance in the Tick Tock, he saw that nobody seemed disturbed at their table as if they were in any way strange or too flamboyant, and he relaxed more as the evening continued.
As they got back to Carter’s cream-colored Nash, Margot said, “Let’s put the top down, what do you think?”
“It does feel refreshing out here, it was so hot in there,” he agreed, and slipped back the convertible top for their ride home. He flung his sport coat into the back seat, and slightly loosened his tie before starting the engine and turning to her. “Are you as hungry as I am?”
She smiled and said, “The Varsity?”
“Let’s go.” And off they went, the cool of the evening air splashing over them as they sped back up towards Midtown.
Once they were parked and had their orders taken by one of the carhops, he said, “Well, your circle of friends were certainly colorful.” She laughed, and said, “I hope that we are all colorful. I don’t ever want to be boring.”
“Oh, I don’t think anyone would ever mistake you for being boring,” he replied.
“Anyway I thought you might enjoy them,” she said, raising her eyebrow as she began nibbling on an onion ring.
Carter grabbed one of Margot’s onion rings and began eating it as well.
“What makes you think I would find your friends interesting?” he asked her.
“Oh, I didn’t say that you would find them interesting, just that you might enjoy them. Like this onion ring,” she said, as she took another big bite from another ring. “Didn’t you?” she added a bit teasingly.
He looked at her, bemused by this riddle of a person.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked her, changing the subject.
“Well, unlike you, I have to work for a living. So I will be busy designing, cutting, fitting, and sewing all day at Davison’s downtown. Ducky works there as well, but in a different department. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious...” he said as he smiled.
“Don’t even try it, mister.”
“What?!”
“This.” She turned her head theatrically with an exaggerated smile. “I thought you said ‘nothing is going to happen.’”
“Maybe I lied.”
“Yeah? Well I believed you the first time,” she said, and as she took one of his French fries, added “and I still believe you.”
He laughed.
As they ate their cheeseburgers and drank their milkshakes, the two of them continued their cat-and-mouse verbal jousting.
“So are you part of the Boston literary O’Neill’s?”
“No, I’m part of the Mick O’Neill’s. My daddy was a desperately poor sharecropper outside of Savannah, Georgia, and mother had seven of us children who survived past their third birthday,” she said. “Oh, Daddy loved him some Jesus, he was a strict authoritarian by day, but by night he was an alcoholic philanderer.”
She took another sip of her strawberry milkshake, and then said, “The classic story of every poor family in the South, so yes, I suppose I am a progeny of O’Neill. It was by helping Mother sew piece rate starting as a child that I learned how to become a seamstress. Last summer I caught the bus for Atlanta, and my next stop is New York City. And then the world.”
She dabbed her lips with a napkin, then turned back to him, asking, “What about you? Small-town boy studying engineering. Mm-hmmm. Right. Just Look at this car!” she said. “It costs more than how much I will make in a year sewing women’s wear at Davison’s. And you have your own apartment. No, you are more than a small-town boy. You are handsome, intelligent, sensitive, and rich. That is an extremely intoxicating combination, mister.”
“Well you are beautiful, wily, strong, and captivating. So apparently we are both something to be reckoned with.”
“So?” she said, her eyes wide open as if she were coaxing his mouth to reveal its secrets. “What gives?”
Carter rubbed his left hand through his hair, and sighed. “What gives? Okay, here you go. I grew up on Easy Street, both literally and figuratively. I spent my childhood in my own little world behind the safe confines of the walls of my parents’ estate, playing in the woods, riding my bike on the dirt paths and sandy clay roads of my neighborhood.” He looked back towards the entrance to the drive-in restaurant, and continued. “My daddy owns a big paper mill business, and apparently I’m a big disappointment to him. According to him, nothing I do is right. I was a little, scrawny kid with a stammer, and I figured out that one thing I was good at was swimming. At least with swimming, I could escape into my own head while in the pool, and not see or hear anybody but my own thoughts.”
He fidgeted and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, and stared off at the other cars lined up at their drive-in stands.
“It was at prep school that I finally gained a bit of confidence in myself. My water polo coach, Coach Garrett, is probably the most important person in my life. By far. He’s whom I still turn to when I need advice. He’s not book smart, but he knows people, how to get someone to think differently, to push themself to new goals, to be disciplined and to be audacious.”
“’Audacious’!” Margot said. “Well, I like the sound of that. I think we both might have that in common.”
He smiled and nodded.
She took another sip of her shake and said, “Tell me something about yourself that might shock me.”
He shook his head, and replied, “You go first.”
Laughing, she said, “Okay, okay, fair enough. Let’s see there’s just soooo many things. Hmmm. I can type fifty words a minute.”
“Impressive. But not shocking.”
“I know how to kill a chicken.”
“Well, you’re from the country, in the South, so again, impressive, but not shocking.”
“I’ve kissed a Negro.”
Carter arched his eyebrow. “A girl or a boy?”
Margot, laughing, “Oh, well! What if I said both?!”
“Yes, well, that would shock me.”
“Okay, your turn.”
He took a sip from his chocolate milkshake and then said, “I can swim seventy-five meters in seventy seconds.”
“Is that good? I have no idea,” she said with a blank face.
“Oh, it’s very good.”
“Well, good for you!” she said, patting his shoulder. “But it’s not shocking.”
“It should be, but I guess what might be shocking to a chicken killer doesn’t translate well to others.”
“Try harder.”
He paused for a second, and then said, “Okay. I love jazz music. Especially Nat King Cole. I have all of his albums.”
“Yes? That does shock me a bit. I had you pegged more of a classical music aficionado.”
“I also like classical music, but I was trying to shock you.”
“Well, you almost did. Next try.”
Carter mused. He felt as though she was leading him to reveal something that they both knew she already had figured out, so what was the harm in saying it out loud, to confirm her suspicions and for him to clear the air so that she understood there was no possibility of a romantic liaison between them. Unless he was completely wrong about her, not likely, but one never knew. Plus he had only just met her less than twelve hours ago. Why divulge such an intimate history to someone whom he had just met, even if there was an obvious immediate affinity? To make himself vulnerable to Margot so soon, without really knowing her was a risk he didn’t want, or need, to make at the moment.
Finally, he said, “I’ve been arrested before.”
This seemed to shock her.
“Really? Not in the bathroom at the City Library I hope!”
“What? No!” he said laughing.
“Well, whatever for?”
He cleared his throat and said, “I went to a lynching trial. It was something I had to do, for myself, for my own integrity. When I was about seventeen years old, I was riding my bike home in Aiken from the drugstore downtown. I had just finished water polo practice at school, and I saw down the way our housekeeper, Geraldine. I thought I’d ride over and say hi to her as she was walking back home. Suddenly I saw a group of four or five men, all white, stop their pick-up truck and start taunting her. I stopped my bike to watch, and I was scared. Scared for her mainly, of course. She stood there with her head held high, silent, as they threw peanut shells at her, and after a few minutes they drove off. I don’t think she saw me. But I felt powerless, and ashamed that I did nothing to help her.”
A tear formed in the corner of his eye, and he wiped it away. “A few months later there was the Willie Earle trial up in Greenville. He was a Negro who had been accused of stabbing a white taxi driver. Before he could be given a trial, a mob of whites overran the county jail and hauled him out. They took him out of town and then beat him senseless, stabbed him, and finally shot him in a ditch. When I found out about it I was, I don’t know how to describe it, but I was filled with rage. I think part of it was compensating for what I had seen happen to Geraldine, and I was needing to express this anger at the injustice of it all.”
She nodded and sat silently, letting him continue.
“My coach at school told me I should go and report on it for our school paper. So I told my daddy that I was going to go to the trial. I needed to go. He sent me up there with the family attorney, ‘on business’ he said, but it was to keep an eye on me, I know. We went up for the closing arguments, and I decided I was going to sit in the balcony, up in the colored people’s section to show that I was protesting. I ended up becoming friends with a couple of them over the course of the next two days, a couple of Negro college students. The trial was a really big deal, there were reporters from New York City, from Life and Time magazines.”
Carter went on to recount how after the acquittal he had felt betrayed by the system, and the altercation outdoors following the trial had led to his arrest.
Margot clutched his hand, and said, “That’s amazing.”
He sighed and said, “When I got back to Aiken, I told my momma and daddy all about it over dinner, and —”
Carter stopped for a second, getting choked up.
“And my daddy never looked prouder. He grabbed my shoulder and said, ‘Son, you finally showed us some manliness.’”
He wiped another tear from his eye, and then said, “Oh, and I made it in that next week’s Life magazine. The photographer that was there for the trial caught all of the drama outside the courthouse as well.”
Margot clapped, and then said, “Darling, that is the best story I’ve ever heard!”
She looked at him with genuine affection in her eyes, and for a brief second, Carter was unsure how he should respond. He awkwardly took a sip from his chocolate milkshake and then said, “So tell me more about you. Why do you want to go to New York City?”
“Well, I don’t want to leave the South, I have to leave the South,” she said. “I have to be somebody, to create, to be artistic and surround myself with intellectuals, with culture.”
He nodded.
“I’ve been working on various fashion designs for women, and I’ve created a book of my work, twenty different creations, ten for summer, and ten for winter. I’ve saved up money to buy a bus ticket, and I’ve almost got enough money to pay a couple of months worth of rent.”
She spoke passionately about how much she hated the backwardness of her family, how her life in Atlanta was better than her life in rural Georgia, but still she knew that she was being constrained by the realities of what she called the inbred provincialism of Southern culture. A culture that still lived in the past, that looked to the antebellum for inspiration, and constantly reminded the present of how limited the horizon was except for those who could break free, and flee to the North.
Inseparable. From their first meeting, Margot and Carter were always together. She would stop by his apartment, a five-minute walk, on her way to catch the 9:15 bus to downtown, with either morning pastries, or flowers, or fresh fruit and they would sit as she worked through her magazines, tearing out pages for her “idea book” and making notes, commenting that “this photo is genius” or “look at this beautiful gown” and he loved seeing the world through her eyes. He would come back from swimming in the morning, and as they had breakfast together, she helped to re-focus his mind on less weighty subjects than his engineering classes, instead letting her tell him about an exposition that was coming to Atlanta, or what she had read about in that day’s New York Times. She had made Carter get a subscription to the Times, telling him that it was the only newspaper worth reading, and while he read the first section with the day’s political news, she would immediately go to the Arts, Fashion & Style, and Theater pages. Their morning ritual would end with Carter rounding up their coffee cups, plates, and putting them into the sink, and the two of them leaving for their days, she by bus, he by foot to campus.
After work she would go back home to her apartment to freshen up and then join Carter for dinner and drinks somewhere in Midtown or downtown. She always had a rotating table of invitees, sometimes it was her Davison’s crowd, which besides Ducky included two or three other co-workers, or it was her local collection of fellow designers, or sometimes theater people, or a mix of creative types including a photographer, writer, and artist. She had already had the evening planned, so by the time they arrived they were the last, and would make an entrance, and then settle into introductions and conversation. Each night was different, a safari to a new land of exotic ideas, terminology, and philosophies. Margot was clearly in charge, navigating the discourse where she wanted to eventually take them all, and always made an effort to bring Carter into the conversation, making him feel comfortable and respecting his opinion. At the dinner clubs, on Fridays and Saturdays, she would invite the house photographer to come to their table to take photos of them seated in their booth. Other evenings they would go to the symphony, or see the ballet, or go to a play; it was her way of practicing for New York, she would say. All of her dresses she had made herself, and would watch the other women’s reactions to see what they thought, going over to introduce herself, and if asked about her gown or dress, would reply that she had bought it in New York, at Bergdorf Goodman, by a new designer.
By the time the holidays came at the end of the year, Carter asked Margot if she wanted to meet his family, to spend Thanksgiving together. For years he had closely guarded the deepest secret he had, and Margot might prove to be just the key to lock that darkest of closets once and for all. Since they had first met, their friendship had never become amorous. The romance that each of them held for the other was as a mirror, reflecting the reverse of each one into a complementary reflection, a more perfect version, a balancing of their strengths and weaknesses. Having Margot in his life might calm the pressure he was constantly under from his family to meet a girl and get married. Certainly the constant efforts of his Aunt Elisabeth playing matchmaker were at the instigation of his well-meaning mother, and presenting Margot as the girl in his life would put an end to their incessant meddling.
The six-hour car ride on the country roads and state highways from Atlanta to South Carolina was tedious, but with Margot seated beside him the conversation was brisk, outpacing the staggering monotony of pine forests and sharecropper fields, driving through the countless small hamlets and grouping of clapboard shacks that passed for towns.
“This kind of miserable life is what I escaped from,” she remarked as they drove down a barely paved road, while a haggard woman with five of her children stopped from her cotton-picking to look as their shiny convertible sped past. She said it in a way that dripped with contempt for them, as if they were guilty of some unforgiveable sin against her. The poverty she came from was a topic that she had made oblique references to, but during their ride back to South Carolina, she went into graphic detail describing the house she’d grown up in with its dirt floor, how she’d shared a bed with her brother and sister, how there had been days when she only ate oatmeal or grits, how meat was a luxury, how they hadn’t had any plumbing and used an outhouse, how she’d started to sew and help her mother when she came back from school in the afternoons, and how she saw the bone-crushing fatigue and hopelessness of her mother all of the time and that she swore she would never live like that.
“I’m a quick learner, I was always watching folks when they came and dropped off their clothes at Mother’s, and I convinced Mother to let me help her take extra work so that we could save up enough money to get a proper storefront in town,” she said, staring out of the window at the horizon. “And we did. She opened up a seamstress shop right off of the town square, and soon I started making dresses with Mother, for the rich ladies in Savannah.”
“How old were you?”
“I think I must have been around eight by then,” she mused, opening her cigarette case.
“Eight? You were making dresses and working when I was running around in my yard barefoot acting the damn fool throwing sand bombs!”
“Well, by then I had a pair of shoes, so I guess the roles were a bit reversed. Not long after that we finally moved out of the sticks and into Savannah. Not the nice part, but the poor, white trash part, just next to the Negro part of town, so my daddy felt like he was better at least than the nigras. We lived on the first floor above Mother’s shop, and Daddy found work down at the docks, loading and unloading. The money was good during the war for us, few folks could afford to buy nice clothes at Adler’s or the other stores on Broughton Street, so they would come to us where we could make them a custom dress for a fraction of the cost. I put away all of my tips over the years, saving them up in a sock under my bed mattress, and on my eighteenth birthday I bought a one-way ticket to Atlanta. I left with a hundred and twenty dollars, and I haven’t been back.”
“Do you miss your family?”
She was silent for a moment, then after taking a drag from her cigarette, said “I write Mother every Sunday, and tell her that I’m fine, and I love her. But do I miss her, or my family, or Savannah? God no. I don’t know if there is a finite amount of love a person is born with, but I think by the time I was born—I was number five, eight if you count the ones that died—she might have used it all up. She was always so tired, I don’t even remember what she looked like when she smiled.”
“You make it sound like she’s already passed away,” he said softly.
“I guess in my mind, she kind of already has.”