By the time I got to Birmingham, its great story was already frozen in stone. Kelly Ingram Park is a place of statues now, quiet, peaceful, unless you are one of those people to whom history screams. Old black men sit on the park benches to feel the sun on their face, and discuss whether or not that statue of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior really looks like him. It stands on ground, what many people in this city see as holy ground, where civil rights marchers were pummeled by batons, blasted with fire hoses and gnawed by dogs, on the orders of a one-eyed little man named Bull Connor. A few feet away is the venerable old Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a Klansman’s bomb killed four little girls. History might not scream to a white man here, but it whispers.
It is a yuppie town now. At lunchtime, 20th Street is a parade of black wingtips and sensible pumps. The sky has not been darkened by the steel mills for a long time. A world-class medical school, not the furnaces, defines this green and pretty city. The very name Birmingham will always be shorthand for the worst of the civil rights movement, I suppose, but when I was there, in the last part of the 1980s, the city had abandoned even the memory of men like Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, as I wrote then, “like a gun left behind at the scene of the crime.”
When I worked for the Birmingham News, I wrote a story about it, twenty-five years after that tumultuous time. I described the serenity of the park, the significance of the monuments to black people who suffered there.
“For Connor,” I wrote, “there is no memorial, no sign he was even here. If the intersection of 16th Street and Sixth Avenue North is a shrine to the civil rights movement, it is Connor’s unmarked grave.”
The night the story ran, I got a call from a man who only said: “You the one wrote that article on Bull Connor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well,” the voice said, “you can kiss my ass.” Then he hung up, like he had accomplished something.
Sometimes in this world, you don’t get the whole dog. Now and then, you have to settle for the tail.
I would have loved to have had some part in covering the events of 1963. I know few real newspeople, of any color, who would not have wanted to be part of that story. But I was born too late for it. Instead of seeing it, describing it, I am awakened twenty-five years too late by some jackass who wants to turn back time. I laid the phone back in its cradle thinking that I may as well be living in Cleveland.
But the fact is, I learned to do the big story in Birmingham. The big story is the one that anchors Page One, the one that can make careers. I wrote them and they put them in the paper, and you cannot ask for more than that in this business. I wrote about the slow deaths of coal mining towns with a business writer named Dean Barber who had a dog named Teton and would one day learn to play the banjo. I wrote about the state of Alabama’s shameful funding of social programs that allowed thousands of children to go neglected and be abused, sharing the byline with a reporter named Mike Oliver who had a good fallaway jumpshot and damned good sources. With Mike, I went into a prison to write about the ill-conceived design plan that made it a house of glass, that allowed prison employees to be trapped, stabbed, raped. I wrote about an Alabama preacher wrongly convicted of killing his young wife, and cleared his name.
The stories were important, serious, in a time when the word reporter did not conjure images of some doofus asking a woman with a ring in her nose why she professed love to a man with a giant safety pin through his eyebrow and claimed that he once glimpsed Elvis in a plate of scrambled eggs. My education in serious journalism that was born at Jacksonville and Talladega and nurtured at Anniston was, for more than three years, applied here. I did not expect it to last for long—I was a fairly liberal minded young man with a short temper, working for a conservative newspaper where at least two of the high-ranking editors considered me a smartass and a showoff—but I made it hard for them to fire me.
This was a midsize daily where many people came expecting to work out their careers and retire. Most of my colleagues came from the journalism schools of Alabama and Auburn, not Harvard and Yale. I was more at home here, even though some of them hated my guts eventually, which is the sad nature of our business. That chip on my shoulder was still there. I could feel it every time some reporter with “Roll Tide” on his breath asked me where I went to school, but it was not nearly so heavy now. I was proving myself on the front page of the newspaper every few Sundays.
I had fun. I made lasting friends. I stood up with Greg Garrison when he married Tracy from the art department, and threw a bachelor party that ended ignominously when he, drunk as Cooter Brown on the one night of a man’s life when it is more or less acceptable, bit a nudie dancer on the behind and got us tossed out of the bar by one of the biggest men I have ever seen. Greg is the religion writer. I ate enough barbecue with Mike Bolton, the outdoors writer, to kill a normal man. He got some sauce on his shirt once, and used Wite-Out to repair the damage. I admired Mike.
I rode with Jeff Hanson in a Volkswagen minibus to cover a tornado, and the wind blew so hard that the van swerved unnervingly over the highway. To keep our courage up, we sang every bad country song we had ever heard. He sang off-key, or maybe I did, but our harmony was so bad I had to keep yelling, “Shut up, Jeff, I’m tryin’ to sing.”
I had talks about the value of collard greens to the male digestive tract with a great man, a nightside editor named Ben House, who lamented the loss of the old-fashioned bathrooms that used to serve the historic News building. To hear him tell it, they were marble-lined palaces, an escape from the rigors of the newsroom. They were torn down, eventually, and replaced with bland, modern facilities. Purely because, Ben said, “some people just can’t appreciate an elegant shit-house.”
I rented an apartment on the fashionable Southside—in Birmingham, you could be pretty fashionable for $245 a month—with a view of Vulcan from the bedroom window. Vulcan was a massive cast-iron statue atop Red Mountain, the god of the forge, a relic from the days when the blast furnaces still smoked. He was supposed to point, I believe, a spear to the heavens, but a long time ago someone figured that he should hold a beacon that would shine red when there was a fatality on the highways and green when no one had died. For a while, I believe, he held a giant Coke bottle. Maybe that is just legend. I don’t know. I do know that there was talk once of dressing him up in a giant pair of blue jeans, because people in the neighboring city of Homewood were sick and tired of being perpetually mooned by a mythical Greek deity. Vulcan, it is true, had nothing on under his apron, which was all that prevented him from scandalizing the downtown as well.
I didn’t have much of a home life. I didn’t have much furniture, and for six months I made it just fine with a bed and a cast-off recliner. I never, ever cooked a meal. I had no pots. Once, I heated a can of peas in the can, and made such a mess I never turned the stove on again. I would have young ladies over and they would look with bald suspicion on the bare apartment, and I would explain that I was just too damn busy lately to shop for antiques.
This is one of those places where it would be better to lie, but the truth is that in those three years and change I was there, I was not always a nice man. I was just good-looking enough, and maybe just smart enough, not to be lonely. I spent time with very nice and smart and pretty young women who knew going in that I was a poor bet for anything permanent, and I lived up to their expectations.
I was not much better with my friends. Joe Kiefer, a reporter who lived down the hall from me, gave me a key to his apartment so I could “look after” his place when he was gone. Instead, I stole all his ice cream, one bowl at a time.
I pitched and played a lead-footed left field for the Birmingham News Softball team, and cussed out Greg, one of my own teammates on the softball field, when he fumbled a ground ball. He responded by throwing the ball at my head as the players in the opposing dugout stared in wide-eyed wonder at what was certainly the first time two players on the same team suspended play to contemplate kicking the mortal hell out of each other.
I guess I was having too much fun.
One day, after a small argument with my editor, Henderson, he sent me a simple note over the computer screen.
“Some people are beginning to say you are a prima donna,” was the gist of it. I reckon so.
The News educated me and put up with me and I will always appreciate that, just as I appreciated the editors who stood beside me at the Star in the face of such enormous pretension. But in the end I just didn’t fit in, again. I could have tried to alter my character—people do that—but I was afraid to start, because I thought it would never stop. I was too damn dumb to know that a swagger is a silly walk for a man with yet a long way to go.
I sent out résumés to several papers, and, in the end, I had some choices. The St. Petersburg Times, the best midsize paper I had ever seen, flew me down for an interview. A few days later they offered me a job, but my plans on moving there, in trying to prove myself, had to wait.
Personal reasons, family reasons, brought me home. My momma was sick, listless, tired all the time. It would turn out to be nothing serious, but I turned down what at the time was a dream come true and went home, to work again at the Anniston Star, to be close to her.
A lot had changed in those three years I’d spent in Birmingham, things I had not noticed coming home for a few hours on holidays and the occasional weekend. My momma looked washed out, helpless. It was as if, without children to raise, to provide for, she had lost her purpose, and just given up. She had grown accustomed to fighting upstream for us, for so long, and now there was no battle left. She went almost nowhere, spending weeks, months, without going farther than the mailbox. She just sat in the little house, day after day, reading the Bible, worrying.
But I was wrong about what threatened her, mostly. I do not know if there is a clinical definition for what afflicted her but I learned what it was over time. She dreaded hearing the phone ring, once again. She dreaded the crunch of tires on gravel in the driveway, once again. She was sick at heart, and scared so badly that there was little joy in living and every day just brought a new round of trouble, angst, fear, once again.
What she was, was worried half to death. She was not afraid for herself, at least not in any physical sense. Sam and I would have killed almost anyone who hurt her. We would have burned their house down and shotgunned them in the legs as they came running out. I wore a necktie, but I was not so civilized yet. Everybody loves their momma—there is nothing even remotely unique in that even in this dysfunctional world we live in. But not everybody owes their momma so much as us. We would do anything to protect her from the outside world, Sam and me.
But there was nothing we could do about this, absolutely nothing, except sit and watch and feel the anger claw away at us, inside.