Back in 1973, I spent the Fourth of July weekend upstate with my best friend Valerie and her new husband. It felt good to get out of New York City’s noise and dirt, where I lived and managed a large call center. They didn’t tell me, but her husband had arranged for his best friend to escort me for the long weekend. Luther, a delicious African American gentleman, was like me, a first-generation college graduate with a new master’s degree. He was six years older and six inches taller, with a Chevron mustache of thick hair. Smart, fine, and sincere.
After just the first evening, his moon-shaped eyes shimmered in pursuit. He and I stayed up late talking, long after his IBM guys’ Friday night poker game ended in my host’s rec room. We shared our dreams of climbing the corporate ladder with the right partner at our side, me in marketing and Luther in engineering, where he hoped to be promoted soon.
He came back each day, to teach me to bowl (a ruse to put his hands around my waist), to play badminton with me at an afternoon BBQ, and to show me his moves at a late-night party.
That Monday night, rather than take the bus back to Manhattan as planned, Luther drove me the three hours home. Then he turned around to drive the three hours back so he could get to work the next morning. After that, our romance was a runaway train.
We partied with our best-friends’ couple, learned to dance the rock at New York’s Copacabana night club, and went to civil rights leader Wyatt T. Walker’s Baptist church in Harlem, where talents from Broadway shows played and sang the real, real gospel music.
When the promotion he wanted at IBM didn’t come through, Luther applied elsewhere. An attractive offer was made, but it was in South Carolina. Rather than live apart, he asked me to marry him and move down there together. After six months of dating I said yes, and our parents gave us their blessing.
Our decision was still secret at work the night Luther accompanied me to my office party. We sat with my boss on wooden stools, watching the stream of red taillights inching forward on the crowded street outside while the two men made small talk. When the boss asked about his work, Luther said he was moving out of state for a better job and taking me with him. I scrunched my forehead at him, unprepared to tell yet. Not only did the boss enthusiastically congratulate us, he and Luther immediately began strategizing on how to get me a company transfer to the South Carolina office.
We took our vows under a floral arch in the church where I grew up, then moved to Greenville, South Carolina. Despite the beautiful weather and more relaxed southern lifestyle that allowed us newlyweds to sneak out of work and be together for an hour during the day, we were regularly confronted with racist situations. My new management banned me from calling on Bob Jones University because they did not want African Americas on their campus, nor, for that matter, did several other large accounts. The owner of a large car dealership who was my customer motioned for me to sit and wait while he finished a phone call. Putting his hand over the receiver, he winked and whispered, “It’s a nigger. You know they can’t afford a car.” He was only one of many to reveal what whites said about blacks behind our backs because he mistook my identity. Local blacks were reluctant, or maybe afraid, to go with us to a new “white” nightclub where we heard the prime rib was good. A gas station attendant stuck his face in my car window to obnoxiously study my skin and demand to know, “What are you?”
We only stayed in South Carolina long enough for Luther to discover his new job was not a fit. Just long enough to figure out how far “yonder” was and that the supermarket bag boy was talking to my twenty-six-year-old self when he said, “Ma’am.” In less than a year, Luther got another offer at a prominent company and I got another company transfer, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
However, when we called my parents, jubilant with the news that we both had management jobs and were moving there, they said we’d lost our minds.
Mama said it was a mistake to move that far from family, where we didn’t know anybody. Daddy said, “But, it’s the Deep South. Not the South, but the Deep South. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“It’s not as safe as South Carolina, or even North Carolina where they desegregated lunch counters without anybody getting killed. You know Louisiana was one of the big plantation states, one of them that never got over losing their slaves. Hell, it is right next to Mississippi. And you know what they did in Mississippi.”
Of course, I did. Every black person knew Mississippi was the most lethally racist place in the United States. Medgar Evers and two other black men were murdered because they urged our people to register and vote. Three young volunteers disappeared, and their bodies were found buried in a dam wall one Freedom Summer. And deep-voiced Nina Simone channeled our incredulity and disgust at such hate in her song, “Mississippi Goddamn.”
“Don’t forget Emmett Till,” Daddy said. “It’s dangerous, I say dangerous, in the Deep South.”
The ghoulish evil of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 Mississippi had been captured in a photo printed in JET, the black-owned weekly. The boy lay in his open casket, both eyes gouged out, cheeks and temples smashed in, the body swollen from drowning, disfigured nearly beyond human resemblance. He was killed while visiting from Chicago, for supposedly saying something to a white woman. Two accused white men were acquitted by an all-white jury in a sham trial. Later they admitted to killing Emmett when they were beyond the statute of limitations.
“Some of those crackers are still down there,” Daddy said.
“Emmett Till was twenty years ago,” I said. “It’s 1975. Things are different now. We’ve got the civil rights bills passed. Everything is integrated.”
“Well, daughter, since they killed that child, I get on my knees every day and thank God we live in the North.”
Luther and I figured Daddy was out of step with the times. We weren’t going to Louisiana as uneducated, disenfranchised field workers like Daddy’s family had been on a backwoods Georgia farm. They’d fled to Buffalo for a better chance way back in the 1930s and hadn’t been back to see what it’s like now. And Emmett Till was just a child who grown men could easily take advantage of. Now it was the 1970s and Luther and I both held master’s degrees. It was more than a decade since the New York Times pronounced the new 1964–65 civil rights laws the death knell of segregation. And since we expected that to be true, we went on and moved to Louisiana. We told Daddy we would watch out for troublemakers, sure, but we would be accepted on the merit of who we were.
Once the moving van was loaded and on its way to Baton Rouge, Luther flew ahead to start his position. I set out driving early in the morning to allow enough sunlight to go straight through the thirteen-hour trip across the South. I was a good enough driver to handle the trip. It was being a young black woman driving alone through former Confederate states that made me nervous. What if the car broke down somewhere in my father’s version of the Deep South, leaving me at the mercy of the crackers he said could get me?
I’d prepared to avoid all that. Changed the oil, had the mechanic check the car for road worthiness, bought jumper cables. The TripTik map from AAA was on the front seat with the route highlighted in yellow. My own food was packed so there would be no need to go into a restaurant. And if it got dark and I had to get a room, I had the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide assembled by black postmen listing places Negroes could sleep or get a meal without trouble.
On my quest to get to Luther as quickly as possible, I drove directly through South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Then, as I neared the border where Alabama meets Mississippi, I filled up my gas tank and went to the bathroom on the Alabama side, and made it my business not to stop for any reason in Mississippi.
When I arrived that same day at Luther’s Baton Rouge hotel room, after dark, I don’t know which of us was more relieved that I’d made it without incident. We talked a little, and because it was late, he went on to bed while I took my time winding down in the shower.
While hot water beat on my back, the geography I’d sped past rolled by in my mind. It was such a shame not to have stopped along the way to enjoy places in my country I would have loved to see. Across miles and miles of Georgia and Alabama, I’d longed to get out and smell the magnificently laden red, pink, and white azalea bushes and to examine the stately magnolia trees’ creamy blossoms and grand old trunks. As road signs announced the way to the storied Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, I thought how wonderful it would be to see Howard’s sister HBCU and check out what a country campus was like. There had to be a museum there showcasing George Washington Carver’s many peanut inventions, accomplishments that would have made me proud to learn about. I had slowed down but reluctantly went on past the Tuskegee exit sign. Not too far afterward, a second sign appeared, giving me another chance to see the institute. But no, I told myself, it was best to press on down the interstate as planned.
At a gas stop, I hesitated over the impulse to take the TripTik option to detour onto a longer way through Mississippi, down along the scenic Biloxi and Gulfport beach coast on the Gulf of Mexico. But I didn’t make that choice either. Those places probably weren’t for me, or any African Americans, even if I stayed in the car and just looked through the window. I wasn’t fool enough to risk getting caught in the dark in Mississippi. And the extra time it took might mean being too exhausted to get to Baton Rouge that night. No way would I sleep in Mississippi. So, I plowed on straight to Baton Rouge, missing all the sights that called to me, because I was afraid. As life would have it, there has never been another chance for me to see any of those places.
Luther and I got off to a good start in Baton Rouge, learning the layout of the town with very helpful assistance from the pleasant hotel staff. They pointed out landmarks, marked routes to our jobs on maps, told us how the Louisiana State University (LSU) football games took over the town. And they sent us down the Airline Highway to Ralph & Kacoo’s restaurant, where we were made comfortable by the smiling white hostess who welcomed us with chatty charm. That Cajun food was so delicious we went back again and again, each time eating the whole bowl of hot hushpuppies with fried fish from the Mississippi, Atchafalaya crawfish tails in thick étouffée sauce, seafood gumbo, and shrimp stew, but never the alligator bites. The famed southern hospitality we encountered everywhere was so lovely after New York’s brusqueness, we questioned what my father had been talking about.
Luther found a black colleague at the plant who also lived in Baton Rouge, and they began carpooling for the forty-five-mile commute. We were invited over to meet his wife and small children, where we were taken in warmly. It felt good to make that early connection, to know somebody black in town we could visit with, and to look forward to others they planned to introduce us to. The easy way we newcomers were welcomed as members of the tribe made the move feel comfortable.
My first day in the company sales office, I wore a sleeveless black-and-white dress and black patent pumps to make a good first impression. There would be the day in the office and later, a management dinner with higher ups from New Orleans and regional management from Birmingham.
My boss, a district manager in his mid-thirties, received me in his corner office. We hadn’t met before, so we got acquainted before he discussed my role. Then he took me on a tour of the office, introducing me to the all-white staff. Men in white shirts and ties and a few women in dresses shook my hand as we visited row after row of cubicles. A few offered their help as I settled in. In the break room, there was no way to miss the string bean of a white man in a seersucker suit and white shoes tasting coffee from the fifty-cup metal percolator. He shouted, “Who made this turkey piss?” which I learned was his ritual complaint about needing more chicory.
A tall older man with thinning black hair came to hang over the top of my cubicle. His lugubrious grin conflicted with his beady eyes. They were hard, like a rat caught in the night. “Hey, heard you was here,” he started, as lightly as an old friend. “Got a joke for you, heh, heh. What do you call a nigger on a stick?”
“What did you say?”
“A fudgsicle. A nigger on a stick’s a fudgsicle. Git it?” He slapped his thigh and walked away laughing.
People around me kept their heads down, working like nothing happened. Should I say something back or ignore an intentional insult? I’d only been on the job a few hours. I kept quiet, wondering what planet I’d landed on.
Later that evening, in a private dining room of a nice restaurant, I was seated near the ranking official from Birmingham at a long banquet table. In what was apparently another southern gesture, he presented a long-stemmed red rose to me and to the other woman attending, with a courtly grace. I’d certainly never seen such from businessmen in New York.
I introduced myself as the new sales manager to colleagues seated to my left.
“Oh my,” the other female said, and laughed. She’d tried to get into sales a few years before, the first woman to do so. But she didn’t get the job. During the interview, the man in charge told her why.
“What if we had to send a nice lady like you to call on some nigger bar?” she imitated, amused. “He was right,” she said. “Who would want to be put in that position?”
The suit and ties laughed in agreement, one tilting his glass toward her in a salute. My mouth went as dry as crumbled plaster. I wanted to tell them, with the anger I felt, about all the respectable black businesspeople I knew, the folly of forfeiting the buying power of black America, and to ask how they could disrespect me to my face.
As I stewed, those people chattered on, the moment nothing to them. The official on my right had missed the whole thing, talking to people on his other side. I rose to my feet slowly and deliberately, my face flushed. A few seats away to my right, my boss caught my eye. He searched my face anxiously, and I knew he’d heard it. His lips were parted as he waited to see what I would do.
“Excuse me,” I said, walking behind the laughing people’s chairs and out of the restaurant into the gravel parking lot. My boss was right on my heels.
“I can’t work like this,” I said, the words scalding like boiling soup.
“No, wait,” he said, and tried to explain. He said she didn’t know I was black. I was so light she mistook me. His right hand splayed open in a pleading gesture. I studied the cleft in his chin, framed by lantern light on a white fence behind him. He said after the New York boss told him I was African American, he held a meeting last Friday to tell everyone in our office there would be a black manager, so they’d be ready. These managers from other departments probably hadn’t been told, he said.
Don’t leave, he kept saying. He’d see they were spoken to. The company’s affirmative action policy would be enforced. It’s just that I was the first black employee, let alone manager, in Baton Rouge. He saw it would take some doing to get it right. “I’m sorry.” he said. “Please, come back in.”
If I did, that meant plowing through their invisible rules of white supremacy just to do the work I was qualified and ready to do. Whites were the insiders, the ones with assumed acceptability, trustworthiness, and the right to be their unfiltered selves. So, who did that make me? The exhausted outsider doing my management assignments, yoked to a team of bigots?
“If you make it clear to them that this is unacceptable, I will go back in,” I said.
The next morning, that woman called first thing. She said she wouldn’t have said it if she had known I was black. I let her know how offended I was for myself and for black businesses. She was very sorry. I didn’t believe her, but I had to accept the apology if I wanted to stay on that job. I thanked her for calling to say so, noting to myself that she as much as admitted she would have said that exact thing if I had been white.
A colleague named Donna, a put-together white woman about my age, invited us to dinner at her place. She had a lovely apartment on the second floor of a new complex in a convenient location. Over dessert, she offered the place to us. She was going to Alabama for six weeks and needed a house sitter. Would we like to stay in her apartment during that time while we found our own place?
Donna was a white southerner who not only trusted us African American newcomers with her things but also became a good friend. We were so grateful for the comforts of her apartment; the terms were worked out that evening.
Other whites were friendly, including neighbors in the building and several of my white thirtysomething office mates. I hung out with my management peers and one of them became a regular tennis partner of Luther’s.
But it was hard for us Yankees to read the racial tea leaves in Baton Rouge. On the one hand were the white friends we made and the sugarcoated southern hospitality most people heaped on their greetings. On the other was the bald-faced prejudice other whites felt licensed to spew. We decided that dichotomy was the ambiguity that comes with any changing times and changing ways. So, we would not take on the jerks but would focus on our fit with the best of the South’s progress. The proof that it had progressed was in our socializing with whites, something Daddy would never have dreamed of forty years ago back in Georgia.
On the hunt for a house to buy, I found new construction in a subdivision that buzzed with crews framing, painting, and unloading plumbing fixtures. There, a house was in our price range, with ideal size, amenities, and proximity to the interstate for commuting. The developer’s on-site salesman eagerly promoted its features to me, pointing out the wide roof overhang that blunted the searing sun, the upgraded carpeting and tile, and the extra storage in the laundry room. He opened doors for me and pumped my interest by suggesting ways to include whatever I wanted. Back in his office, he said to bring my husband to see the place. His houses were selling fast.
“Y’all going to come today, after he gets off work?” he asked.
“Yes, when he gets home, we’ll be back.”
Luther and I skipped dinner to go straight to the house that had been left open for us. We bypassed the sales office in case he didn’t like the property. That way, we wouldn’t have to go through a hard sell with the agent.
I drove slowly through the newly made streets so Luther could look around. It seemed a mini town was under construction, with everything from several pristinely painted and landscaped new houses, to the cement slab foundations of others, with piles of lumber, roof shingles, and rolls of grassy sod on many plots.
We walked through the chosen house and admired the good-sized rooms, the kitchen’s avocado self-cleaning oven, and the prospects of having a cement patio for outdoor living.
“I love how it’s all new,” Luther said. “Sparkling and state of the art. This boy from the projects is going to own a house with a lawn, backyard, and extra bedrooms.” We decided to figure out an offer and go up to the office to talk with the agent right then. We sat on the floor in the sunny living room as Luther ran some numbers on his pocket calculator. We’d seen enough houses to know there wasn’t much bargaining room in this hot market, so we decided on a strategy with a starting bid and a final bid.
We pulled up in the office driveway in the same car the salesman saw me in earlier. When I stepped out, he rubbed his hands together and smiled broadly. Then his eyes darted in alarm from me to my milk-chocolate husband getting out, then back to me.
“No, no, NO. Is that your husband?” he said, running backward into the office. He closed the door before we got there. Then we heard the lock catch. His eyes bugged out at us through the glass top half of the door. “I’m not selling to you,” he called through the glass.
“We have the money, no problem,” Luther called back.
“Naw, I cain’t sell to no niggers. If I do, I cain’t sell none of these other houses. Go on, now, git!” He yanked the shade down.
Luther’s lips stuck out, pressed together like a platypus.
“That’s illegal,” I said. “He can’t do that.”
“Of course it’s illegal. He invited you back because he thought you were white. Now get in the car, please.” He wasn’t waiting around to see what else might happen. Luther kept his eye on that office door until he pulled away. “Just forget it,” he said.
“We could sue,” I persisted.
“No, we’re not going to do that. Let’s find something else. I’m not getting into a battle with these white people down here. Clearly this isn’t New York where you might win.”
We sought out a white real estate agent to negotiate for us and bought an existing home in an established neighborhood without incident. Our neighbors were white, but right across the road was another development with all African American residents. They lived in tiny houses smaller than any I’d ever seen. Up the road was a fancier all-black development. Like where I grew up in the North, de facto segregation defined these neighborhoods. But unlike Buffalo’s redlining that kept us out, Baton Rouge had entire black subdivisions where people intentionally chose to build or buy. Because they were barred in other ways, they stayed with their own to be spared the grief of dealing with white people in their home neighborhoods, a concept we transplants had failed to grasp.