Safe town, safe town
The shiny surface binds
Dig down underground
What do you think we’ll find?
—“Dangerous News in Safe Town”
(Thornton/Andrew)
WE MOVED TO A LITTLE TOWN OUTSIDE OF ELDORADO DOWN IN THE southern part of Arkansas. There was a paper mill there that made the whole town smell like shit all the time. One of my memories of that place happened during the time when my brother and I had mono, which we got real young—I was in the second grade and he wasn’t even in school. There was a big storm coming, and it was just pissing down rain. The lightning was the kind that lights up the whole fucking world and you can see everything at midnight. Something happened outside the house, and my dad went to check on it. There were all kinds of people milling around our front yard, and I’ll never forget going out on the porch in my Roy Rogers pajamas, me and my brother Jimmy. We weren’t supposed to go out there, but when you’re a kid you’re curious. It’s like, “Daddy went out in the front yard, what’s going on?”
We lived right next door to the elementary school, and there was a ditch out by our front yard in the road there. A guy had gotten hit by a car, and it killed him—cut his head half in two, and he was lying over in the ditch. We couldn’t see him very well because it was pouring rain, but it happened so close to our house that people were walking across our yard to get a better look.
Jimmy and I were standing out there in the rain in our pajamas watching this when some guy walked by and said, “Aw hell, it’s just some nigger.” When people heard that comment, all of a sudden they weren’t really interested anymore. That was the first time I realized, wow, some people don’t think black people are as important as white people.
We didn’t have black people in Alpine. We didn’t know anything about black people or segregation until we moved from there. Up until I was twelve or so, we had separate drinking fountains in public places, and when you went to the doctor’s office it had different entrances—a regular entrance for white people, then on the other side of the building you had COLORED ONLY.
After that, we moved to Malvern. It’s about forty miles from Little Rock, which is about an hour and a half from Memphis. My dad got a job coaching at a little school called Rural Dale, in the town of Lonsdale, which was right outside of Malvern. This was in 1963, so I would’ve been in the third grade when we moved there. I thought it was funny that the school was called “Rural Dale” but the town was called “Lonsdale.” I always wondered how it went down during the school-naming meeting:
What should we call our school?
Fuck, I don’t know.
Hey, our town is called “Lonsdale,” so why don’t we name the school “Rural Dale”!
Yeah!
Rural Dale it is. Meeting adjourned.
Malvern had a population of about ten thousand people, so to us that was like going to Paris. It was one of those typical Southern towns—in fact, it’s actually the town I wanted to base Jayne Mansfield’s Car on. The town we shot in, Cedartown, Georgia, is very much like Malvern was. For a town that size, Malvern had a crazy number of bands, which was great for me, because I loved music, even at that age. I met my writing partner, Tom Epperson, in Malvern. He was our neighbor.
I saw segregation in Malvern and that separation of races was most noticeable to me at the Ritz, our one movie theater in town. I loved movies, and I would go to the Ritz Theatre as often as I could. Sometimes they’d have a food drive for “the needy”—that’s what they called the poor then—and you could see a movie for bringing canned goods and nonperishable food. In those days, on Saturdays, they would almost always show a double feature, so you could go and see a movie, stay and see a second movie, and they didn’t kick you out. You didn’t even have to pay to stay and see the double feature again if you wanted to. We would stay all fucking day Saturday and Saturday night if it was something we wanted to see. We’d sometimes see a double feature three times in one day.
When you went to the Ritz Theatre, the white people came in through the front by the popcorn stand and the black people went in another entrance in the alley that had a staircase going into the balcony. When you watched a movie, there was this whole white audience downstairs and this whole black audience upstairs. And black people were very vocal—especially in horror movies. White people didn’t say much, but black people were like, “Girl, you better not go in that basement, he’s gonna kill you like he killed that other girl!” You’d hear all that extra commentary going on up in the balcony during movies. So our experience with black people, up until they integrated the schools, was pretty much when we would hear them talking up there in the balcony.
The thing is, when you’re a kid, you don’t know all this shit. You don’t understand that Doctor So-and-So is having an affair with the real estate agent’s wife or any of the other goings-on in town. You think all adults are responsible people who take care of shit while the kids just run around. It seemed weird to me that black people and white people were separated, but as a little kid, you didn’t sit around and dissect all this. You just lived your life and did your thing, and I was a kid doing my thing. I liked everybody.
Part II
Growing up in Arkansas in the fifties was not unlike growing up in apartheid-era South Africa. The racism against black people was out in the open. It was proud and it was smug and it was ugly and it was defiant. It dared you to say something different. I knew from an early age that it was wrong, but nobody around me (and I mean not one person) seemed to agree with me, and I learned then a very important lesson: never take anybody’s word for anything. A single person can be right, and a whole society can be wrong. Indeed, society is probably usually wrong.