I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace . . . they may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred.
—W. Somerset Maugham
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, in the early nineties, I was successful, prosperous, and well loved by friends, neighbors, employees, board members, donors, agency directors (even the Boy Scout exec!), the newspaper (where I wrote a weekly column), the pastor and my fellow elders at First Presbyterian, and the many earnest and sincere, sober members of the Badger Recovery Group. Ten years later, and three years into policing, I found myself asking how on earth did I end up here, on the meanest streets of Mobile?
Nancy has been asking that question in countless ways, verbal and otherwise, for nearly two decades now. She began asking well before I quit Mobile’s United Way to become one of Mobile’s finest, to tangle with thugs like Finest. And the longer I’m here, the more I find myself wondering the same thing. We have now lived in the Azalea City longer than either of us lived anywhere else, including St. Louis, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Louisiana (where I spent my first five blissful years in Luling, just upriver from New Orleans).
It’s no great mystery, really, why I left Waukesha: I hated the Wisconsin weather. The cold was brutal: 20 below was not unusual. Hard even to breathe in that cold. A deep breath of frozen air burns in your lungs, freezes your snot, and makes your nose run when you get back indoors. But worse for me than the stinging freezes was the Great Gray. To me it was palpable. It seeped into everything. The absence of sunlight, the short days and long nights, the six or more interminable months of winter, year in, year out. It hung on me, pulling me down, like heavy, damp, itchy wool. It demanded my attention to things I didn’t want to think about: fabrics, and layers, and thermal insulation ratings and chill factors and hat hair and wet gloves and earmuffs and neck scarves and windshield scrapers and snow shovels and protecting my boots and my car’s undercarriage from rock salt damage, and allowing time for battery charging, engine warming, tire chaining, defrosting, and icy creep-along low-viz-blizz road conditions complicating every simple outing to the grocery store for a quart of milk, or to a movie, or to visit a friend across town. There’s not much spontaneity in Wisconsin in the winter. And in Wisconsin it’s always winter.
Even worse for me than the burden and confinement of the cold gray was the chilling, plodding dullness of the visual gray and the human gray. It’s the pale gray that is the universal color of all human activity and interaction, the absence of color spectra in people, in personality, in perspective. It’s the absence of color, not just in the chromatic sense, but as you might read in a guidebook, in the phrase “colorful indigenous populations.” Color that comes from difference, from eccentricity, variety, passion, and agitation. Wisconsin’s dull gray is the color of sameness, uniformity, homogeneity in all measures: education, race, ethnicity, income. It’s the dull grayness of the spirit, of the plodding upper-Midwest German/Norwegian culture of dogged duty, conformity, discipline, predictability, safety, planning, and good orderly progress in all things. The complete deliberate elimination of surprise, serendipity, risk, whimsy, color.
There was exactly one black guy in Waukesha: guy named Spraggins, head (and sole member?) of the Waukesha County NAACP. He lived around the corner from me, did something with the state board of education. (Coincidentally, he was a native of Whistler, Alabama, a village near Prichard, a suburb of Mobile.) When I told Spraggins I was thinking of moving to Mobile, he lit up. Told me with visible pride that Mobile had, unlike much of the South (especially in Alabama), avoided overt racial strife. The kind of thing that is synonymous with Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham. Spraggins was walking, talking proof of the Mobile difference: he was in the first integrated graduating class of a Deep South university—Mobile’s own Spring Hill College—even as Governor George Wallace made his infamous schoolhouse stand. (It didn’t dawn on me to ask Spraggins how or why he had ended up in the most lily-white dull gray Republican county in Wisconsin.)
Waukesha did have a small cluster of Hispanics—enough to warrant a United Way–funded agency, La Casa de Esperanza, and its doggedly pedantic executive director whose mission was to address the unique challenges and needs of the descendants of migrant farmworkers who had harvested the county’s crops for generations before La Casa was established to harvest the county’s Nordic guilt. As agricultural work became automated and corporatized and clusters of McMansions sprung up in the former rolling cornfields and tidy pastures that had been home to the contented bovines of stolid dairymen, I guess the Mexican workers had to learn new trades, and having brown skin and foreign accents and not much education or money, they had hardships in 95 percent white Waukesha County, where the median household income exceeds $70,000, the median price of a single-family home hovers around $300,000, and more than half the population has at least a few years of college.
All was not dark Lutheran bleakness: ice fishing, snowmobile racing, cross-country skiing, tailgating at Brewers and Packers games, Sven and Oley jokes—all good clean hardy, wholesome fun, to be sure. Proud community spirit was amply manifest in generous philanthropy, quality education and health care, extensive parks and recreation infrastructure, a history of progressive politics, strong family bonds and genuine neighborliness, a cozy tavern with Pabst on tap at every corner. Though you had to search hard as a charitable fund-raiser to find scenes of poverty and despair for the annual tug-at-your-heart-and-wallet campaign video, it was really a pretty easy gig. “Giving back” having long been such a big part of the upper Midwest culture, it’s relatively easy there to raise ever-higher campaign totals, rust belt economies notwithstanding. The affluence, homogeneity, education, and universal values, while wholesome, and good for fund-raising and community building, are nevertheless mind-numbingly dull for a self-indulgent, somewhat decadent slacker like me. I was at once successful, somnambulant, and stricken with a deep ennui.
A mere twenty-minute jaunt to the east on I-94 lay the menacing black urban ghettos of Milwaukee, seething with crime and poverty, referred to in national media as among the top-three hyper-segregated communities in the nation, just behind Detroit and Chicago. Now that, I figured, would be something I could really sink my teeth into. Only on a smaller scale, and in a warmer clime, with a tastier cuisine, funkier music, and more eclectic cultural currents.
I had long nurtured idealized childhood memories of Luling and New Orleans: the warm, sunny, friendly, easygoing Deep South. Steeped as I was on Mama’s sleepy-time readings of Uncle Remus stories, my own visions of moss-draped live oaks, the brassy jubilant sounds of the music and maskers of Mardi Gras, and the soothing soft singing of Essie, who cleaned our house and changed my diapers. The cliché about the difference in race relations between the North and the South must have been originated by someone from the Deep South: northern whites love the black race but hate the individual Negro (with whom they refuse to live), while southern whites love the individual Negro (with whom they live cheek by jowl) but hate the race. Which is worse? Both are deplorable, but to me it seemed that the southern attitude lacked the self-righteous hypocrisy of the North.
I do know what it means to miss New Orleans: I could still see fields of tall clover, almost waist high to a child, through which we’d make intricate mazes, all paths leading to the giant live oak with the vine-covered branches dripping thick coils of Spanish moss, branches that would hang so low they would nearly touch ground, like a father bending down to scoop you up in his arms. We’d construct multilevel, multichambered tree houses and forts in these live oaks. I remember Mama taking me into town, to Luling’s sole barber, Claude, whose shop was in a converted boxcar on a side spur a block from the river road. There was a Kool cigarette penguin sign on the front door: “It’s Kool inside,” Mama would read to me each time from the penguin’s word balloon. Blueish white icicles hung from “Kool.” The small one-chair shop was frigid compared to the humid blanket of Louisiana summer. Claude was a garrulous older fella with a mustache, brown skin, and a funny—but common—accent that I would recognize years later as Cajun. He would set me on a special seat across the chair’s armrests and pump the chair up high. The buzzing tickle of his shears around my ears would give me goose bumps. Then he’d set me up for what he called the “coo-day-grah,” extolling the virtues of his famous Lilac Vegetal aftershave, which would give me a cold jolt as he slathered it on my neck before dusting me with a fragrant white-bristled brush. Then he’d pump the chair back down and sweep his barber’s apron off me with a flourish to shake my shorn locks to the floor, declaring to my mother, “Dar he be, Miz Johnson: Eee-ree-sistable! De plu’ beau p’ti’ garcon dis side o’ Noo Awwwlins!” Claude’s shop was near the part of town where the colored people, including sweet Essie, lived. I knew even at that tender age—without ever entering their tiny, unpainted shotgun shacks—that they were way less fortunate than I, that they had somehow been screwed by somebody or something. It wasn’t fair.
As for me, my early childhood was filled with nothing but happy sweet memories of the weekly shopping trips with Mama, starting with a car ferry ride across the expanse of the Mississippi, which looked to me like an endless flow of chocolate milk. The ferry boarded at a dock just over the levee across the River Road from the entrance to Daddy’s plant, which was marked by a big sign on which the “Lynall doggie” resided—which was my description, never having seen a lion, of the mascot logo of the Lion Oil Company. After the ferry crossing, the next stop would be the Morning Call in the French Market: steaming, aromatic, chicory-laced café au lait for Mama, chilled orange juice for me, warm sweet powdery beignets for both of us. The houses in N’wolins were older, taller, all built up higher and narrower, but much fancier than the identical modern ranch homes in Luling built by the company for managers. In the city, the houses had hardly any yards, but they were enveloped by blazing jumbles of viney flora sprouting out of every window box, hanging from the arches of every gallery. Roots of towering palms and ancient live oaks heaved up sidewalks making even foot traffic, much less cycling, an adventure. In the late afternoons after a full day of shopping and visiting, Mama would always stop at the Frosty Top drive-in for root beer in chilled mugs. On the roof of the Frosty Top’s kitchen was a giant rotating, illuminated frosty mug. Then we’d head back to Luling, requiring a return river crossing, this time not by car ferry but by the Herewego, which is what I called the Huey P. Long Bridge. It was high and scary and thrilling. Built tall enough to accommodate Mississippi River traffic, with a long gradual ascent and equally stretched-out descent to accommodate the shuddering, chugging freight-train level just beneath the automobile level, it was always choked with thundering truck traffic muscling its way over the river in its narrow lanes, which had low side railings and a view that gave me tingly shivers every time, a view that took in countless puffing smokestacks of trains, ships, and complicated chemical and oil refineries, the low-slung cityscape of all New Orleans, the snakey bayous and low-lying swamps flooding thick and tangled spooky spikey trees sticking up right out of the waters, waters in every direction, waters filled with alligators and garfish and slithering snakes and nutria and crabs and crawdads and Cajun men on long flat pirogues, still waters of Lake Pontchartrain on one side, the muddy, churning working waters of the mammoth industry-choked Mississippi beneath us, including the tall stacks and huge round tanks of the plant where Daddy worked in the distance, and finally the wide endless waters of the Gulf and then the ocean to the south. From the top of the Herewego I could see to the very edges of the world.
When I could stand the cold gray of the upper Midwest no longer, I interviewed for the top post at the United Way in Baton Rouge, and had there learned (the hard way) not to raise any questions about race relations or poverty. The search committee couldn’t hustle me back to the airport fast enough.
I had approached Baton Rouge with the same tried-and-true technique that had worked for me before. In advance of the formal meetings with the search committee, I would plan enough time to do the following: hit a local recovery meeting and afterward talk to the folks about the town, visit a couple United Way-funded agencies (such as the Salvation Army and maybe an Urban League or women’s shelter) where I could gather a little intel on local social services, and, if possible, look up any local acquaintances. Failing that, I would study the local newspaper in order to gather a few local names and pick up on current points of civic pride or contention. Then I would sort through all this and pick out the most interesting and obscure tidbits to sprinkle into the interview process. It had wowed the search committee in Waukesha when I had casually mentioned the mayor’s name, praised them for their progressive public school system, which I had learned hosted recovery meetings for youthful addicts in local high schools, and demonstrated a decent grasp of the local racial, ethnic, and economic demographics.
Upon arrival I called the Baton Rouge recovery hotline and requested somebody to take me to a meeting. A rough-looking fella with missing teeth and a fine mullet flowing out of the back of his greasy tractor cap picked me up in his battered rebel flag-emblazoned GMC and took me to a meeting on the west side of the river, in what he called the “Free Republic of West Baton Rouge Parish,” where a colorful collection of outlaw bikers and backwoods Cajuns shared their drunkalogs and stories of recovery. Then I looked up an elderly retired Lion Oil executive, a friend of my dad’s, whose second trophy wife was mildly intoxicated when I got there and flirted with me, while he (apparently oblivious or indifferent to her coquetry) liberally (but apologetically) used the N word to describe the major challenges facing his beloved hometown.
I had a cab driver (who grilled me about Milwaukee’s then-infamous homosexual cannibal serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, as if by coming from the same area I could explain it) take me to a United Way–funded homeless shelter in a rundown part of town, but the night manager there, speaking through a cautiously cracked door, eyed me suspiciously and denied me admission, refusing even to talk with me. He insisted I make an appointment with the director if I wanted to talk about the agency or its mission or its relationship with United Way.
In spite of this discouraging start, it had seemed to go really well with the search committee, in the beginning. They appeared to think I was a perfect fit. The local foundation exec, who was an ex officio member of the board and chair of the search committee, told me over lunch at the penthouse Petroleum Club that he personally had selected me as a finalist from among the numerous applicants because he recognized and appreciated my prep school education. He was a preppie as well, he confided, and, though not from the South, had found the prep school experience invaluable in grasping and navigating the sometimes tricky social subtleties that he had learned are so important in the Deep South. A matronly socialite, also a member of the search committee, whose assignment had been to drive me around the grandiosely pillared and galleried subdivisions from among which I would no doubt choose to quarter my family, was convinced I was a true son of the South.
“You really understand our little river town,” she declared, beaming. I had just recited a florid declamation (not unlike the preceding) of fondness and longing for Luling, where “my daddy” (a consciously selected term) had been the plant manager of a petrochemical plant—the likes of which were of course the primary economic engine of Baton Rouge (after LSU).
“We really feel like you’re one of us,” she had declared midway through the final interview with the search committee. Other heads nodded in agreement around the table. The committee of about eight prominent business leaders, plant managers, bank presidents, and the like had been inquiring about my philosophy and experience in fund-raising, consensus building, community needs assessment, donor cultivation—the usual United Way stuff.
Having satisfactorily fielded the committee’s questions, they then had invited me to ask any questions I might have about their United Way, their hometown, their way of life. All I did was to observe that the only black people I had met over the course of my visit to their ethnically fifty-fifty town had been the porters at the airport, the taxi driver, and the housekeeper at the hotel, and to wonder aloud why. There was confused silence in the room. I felt compelled to explain my question, though it should have been obvious they had understood it all too well. I pointed out that unlike their demographically diverse community, as far as I could tell there were no black United Way board members, or even agency executives, and there didn’t appear to be any funding allocated to an Urban League or similar kind of minority-focused program or community center in the shamefully rundown parts of town I’d had my taxi driver show me, which were but a stone’s throw from the proud and pristine campus of LSU. The matronly socialite’s brow furrowed tragically, and the foundation exec, chair of the search committee, and fellow preppie had scowled and reddened, sputtering, “I take issue with the implications of that question!” and gone on to point out that the Reverend So-and-so, a most outspoken and vigorous leader of “that community,” is on the board, though he was unavailable to serve on the search committee, and that the chamber has been trying to clean up that part of town for decades but has been actively resisted by its residents, and we can certainly all agree that no understanding of any depth can be obtained by simple head counts and sweeping generalizations based on a few hours of sightseeing and conversations.
And bam! It was over. I was whisked directly to the airport, hours before my flight’s departure.
I read in a trade newsletter a month later that they ended up hiring a black female. Go figure. At first flabbergasted, I quickly figured it out: my profound insight and the fearless probity with which it was delivered had so shaken and traumatized the search committee that its ultimate decision to select an African American female was an act of shame and contrition. I had done Baton Rouge a big favor.
So when I was invited to interview in Mobile, I was a lot more circumspect and cautious. Arrived a full day early, at my own expense for the extra hotel night. Took my time. Rented my own car and drove around town myself, starting with an alternate route from the airport, not the way they had directed me to get to the downtown hotel. Arbitrarily picked Old Shell Road, instead of Airport Boulevard, to approach downtown Mobile, simply because the name conjured the white, oyster-shell-packed surface of the cul-de-sac of company housing I remembered from Luling. Starting way out west by the University of South Alabama, whose small, new, raw-looking campus bespoke earnestness, humility, unself-consciousness—and didn’t even look like the same species as that shrine to southern pride, LSU—Old Shell took me through the heart of Spring Hill, the stately tree-lined neighborhoods of homes large and small, which I later learned were the homes of “Old Mobile” families—not at all like the starkly ostentatious, newly built, uniform subdivisions of the petro-plant oligarchy I had toured in Baton Rouge. These places were tasteful, lovely, gracious. And then, in the blink of an eye, Old Shell took me down a hill, under an interstate, and I emerged into block after block of shotgun houses. But nothing like the dilapidated, littered and peeling, dangerous-looking crack shacks of Red Stick’s “colored town.” These were almost Victorian in appearance. Gaily painted, some of them, most charmingly tidy albeit older, modest homes that appeared to be occupied by a mixture (!) of friendly middle-class black and white folk who cut their grass, kept up their cars, and swept their front porches.
I stopped and called the local recovery hotline, explaining I was from out of town, somewhere on Old Shell Road, and is there a nearby meeting anytime soon?
“Theyah sure is, honey” came the deliciously southern reply. “If ya hurry, you’ll catch the bettah part a the ’leven o’clock Sunshine Group at the Old Shell clubhouse. It’ll be ohn ya right if yuh comin’ from the ayuhpoaht, a green house with the numbers ten-oh-fahv above the front poahch. Ya just go ohn ’round back to pahk, go ohn in the back doah, poah ya’self a cup and find yase’f a chayah, sugah. It’s a goo-o-d meetin’, the Sunshine Group is.”
And it was. Black and white, male and female, young and old together. Jittery newcomers with tattoos, flitting eyes, and court papers to be signed, wise and wizened old-timers who spoke gentle truth and hard experience.
A block away from the Sunshine Group was the Salvation Army. As I had at the agency in Baton Rouge, I stopped in unannounced, explained I was visiting for a United Way interview, and asked if I could look around a little. A genial staffer gave me a quick tour of the busy facility, offered me lunch, which was just being served (generous portions of tasty red beans and rice among the offerings), and introduced me to clients, kitchen crew, and professional staffers alike, all of whom were friendly and treated me like some kind of visiting dignitary.
Wow! I was home! So I made damn sure not to blow the interview. I asked no accusatory questions. Instead I charmed and soothed and flattered and painted word pictures and told amusing anecdotes on myself. In the end, before I left town the search chair told me that I was her choice and confided that it had come down to a young man from United Way of America (the office of the national association of U’Ways in Alexandria, Virginia) who was about the same age as me and had the same number of years’ experience, but his was mostly at the Alexandria headquarters rather than local United Ways. He had a broader view and a more analytical approach because of his perspective from the national office. “Ah told the committee, as Ah see it, it comes down to a choice between a technician and an artist. On the one hand we have a theoretician, a statistician, an expert in best practices from all across the country. But in you we have more of an artist, with soul and passion. And I made it cleah to them which of y’all I believe is right for our little Mobile.”
The search committee’s choice (though not unanimous, I was later told—local labor volunteers had received a less-than-unqualified endorsement of me from their union brethren in Wisconsin) was decidedly in my favor.
When they made the offer, it was a no-brainer for me, though Nancy took some convincing. A lunch with a local Jewish couple finally assured her she need not fear cross burnings on our front yard. We didn’t learn until a few months after settling in that as recently as 1984 there had been a random lynching of a young black man on a street corner downtown. (Spraggins hadn’t mentioned that.) Despite this unsettling discovery, when I came across the following a few weeks later, it seemed to speak for me:
Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle . . . among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Or did I just will it to speak for me?