OLD BUCK The section titled “By Way of Autobiography” creates in the reader an expectation that Sterling A. Brown will present a picture of an examined self—a view not provided elsewhere in his voluminous writings. However, instead of the familiar autobiographical focus of self-discovery or of creative or imaginative engagement with the past, Brown’s self-construction is more akin to memoir, where greater emphasis is placed on the self in relationship to past events, persons, and places. As this section reveals, the context created of facts, dates, and (re-)collected experience admirably locates Brown within a historical world crucial to understanding the motivation, the structure, and the methodology of A Negro Looks at the South, in its entirety.
Brown’s review of Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South implies that an appropriate methodology for such investigation is based on what folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin earlier termed “folk-say,” a folkloric theory capturing people talking, doing, and describing themselves. Though Botkin intended this theory to denote the untitled, the anonymous, or “the people farthest down,” Brown, for this collection, modified the notion to encompass black people of all stations representing themselves through talk. “Old Buck” and “Old Man McCorkle” present this spectrum.
Through his recounting of earlier personal experiences with Buckner, Brown retraces memories of his own life at Lincoln University, from 1926 to 1928. Buckner was then a student who not only studied under but also served Brown as an entry into the world of “The Foot,” a section of a Negro neighborhood in Jefferson City held by some to be unsavory or undesirable. It is here that Brown was introduced to Old Man McCorkle, often called “Preacher” or, in a name preserved by Brown in a memorable poem, “Revelations.” As suggested by his name, McCorkle was reputed to be odd, if not downright mentally ill; nevertheless, Brown found his view of the world to be incisive and his storytelling ability masterful.
“Bus Station” and “Club Car” carefully delineate two modes of transportation Brown used extensively on his tours of the South. Significantly, the bus and the train became for him centers of performance where passengers (re)enacted their various responses to “separate but equal” transportation modes. In these groups, where the drama of real-life Jim Crow was staged, Brown witnessed and chronicled the strength, the endurance, and the love of a people, whose representation by nonblacks often denied these powerful features. As a complement to transportation, “Roommate” adeptly recalls one such living arrangement to which Brown often had to accommodate himself.
Because Brown said comparatively little about the genesis and background of his poems, “Return of the Native” is especially poignant. Arguably, it frames Brown’s personal, intellectual, and cultural-hybrid approach to art. Ostensibly, this title reminds the reader that Brown’s trips to rural Louisiana were numerous and that the one recorded in A Negro Looks at the South was done expressly for this text. In five memorable poems in the “Frilot Cove” section of his No Hiding Place, Brown finds another venue for recording his aesthetic response to this milieu by alerting us to the specialness of Cajun and Creole life, as found in their language, customs, and mores. But the use of “Return of the Native,” although muted, suggestively invokes an aesthetic legacy that has shaped Brown’s theory and practice of art. Like Thomas Hardy’s novel of the same title, Brown’s “Return of the Native” resonates with a nuanced depiction of pastoral life; however, the world Brown represents differs from the Wessex don’s in that the relative harmony of Louisiana rural life is disrupted by intrusive racism. So committed was Brown to the people of Frilot Cove that he made their quest for an African American priest into a cause célèbre.
OLD BUCK Buckner telephoned the day after Christmas; he was on his way to New River, North Carolina, for boot training as a Marine, and he had a short layover. Yes, naturally, he would be right out.
I had not seen Buck for fifteen years. When I was teaching at Lincoln University, in Missouri, Buck needed money to get through school and I needed somebody for odd chores. The rambling old house that I had rented was not easy to keep straight, especially since I had started my hobbies of collecting theme papers, books, and phonograph records. Buck liked the records and was a curious reader of whatever books looked interesting. He was probably most indispensable, however, for the yarns he spun and the characters he guided to the front door. The two most startling madmen were Revelations, the garrulous preacher, and an escaped patient from Kankakee, Illinois. The latter told me a pitiful tale of how his foot had been purposely broken in the hospital. He talked so coherently that I had no suspicions of him; later I learned that he had been captured across the river and returned to the asylum as a dangerous lunatic.
Buck made the fires in the numerous stoves needed to warm the dark house. Saturdays and Sundays he insisted on cooking the breakfast and serving it to my wife and me in style. He was waiting evenings at the Hotel Jefferson, and he put on the dog as well as the sparse silver of newlyweds permitted. We soon discovered Buck’s true reason for the weekend cooking. He always cooked too much, and student friends of his would drop by who were welcome to the extra food, to keep it from wasting. We finally caught on, but we were grateful for the unfamiliar luxury of breakfasting in bed. One morning my wife gave Buckner a bill and told him to go to the store and buy stuff for a real breakfast for his clan. Buckner returned loaded down with porkchops and potatoes, and the wolves descended.
After that, the porkchop breakfasts became something of a rite. It hurt the budget, but, I am certain, they helped my classroom teaching. All of these fellows had a sense of honor: they couldn’t eat a man’s porkchops Saturday mornings and flunk his tests on Mondays. So they even tried to master Emerson’s Nature and Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” But I was repaid in better coin. They were a grand lot as I remember them: Reuben Benton from Kansas City, with wits sharp as a needle, a track man whose absolutely flat feet gave him, they said, an undue advantage in the dashes, a sort of kangaroo leverage; droll Roba Farr; “Fats” Green, the football star; Abe Lincoln, slightly ashamed of the honored name he bore, but coincidentally tall, stoop-shouldered, morose-faced with high cheek bones overhanging sunken cheeks; and Nathaniel Sweets, who never got his diploma since he hadn’t paid any money to get through college, and couldn’t be so inconsistent at the end to pay for a diploma. “A foolish inconsistency in the hobgoblin of little minds,” he misquoted loftily, abusing my teaching of Emerson. All of them liked porkchops and potatoes for breakfast, even cabbage, until I laid down the law about that.
They dropped by in the evenings too. I had a Brunswick portable phonograph with a full tone for those days. The fellows shared my zeal for Bessie Smith and Clara Smith and the jazz which was then getting righteous. Fats told me of a blues singer named Ma Rainey who sang up and down the Mississippi River Valley bringing the people out in droves. Roba and Reuben told me of a joint on Twelfth Street, Kansas City, where there was a piano player named Pete Johnson, famous for his walking bass. Not to be outdone, I mentioned casually that I had gone to high school with Duke Ellington (a slight inaccuracy, as we went to rival high schools, but it served). Our tastes ranged wide in the good records of that time: we liked Whiteman’s semi-classic arrangements of “Among My Souvenirs,” “When Day Is Done,” and “Washboard Blues,” as well as Jim Jackson’s “Kansas City Blues.” I believe our taste was right: there was a trumpet passage on “Mississippi Mud” that we would play over and over; somebody would lift the needle arm and precisely locate the passage, until I begged them not to wear a groove in the record. A dozen years later I learned that the trumpeter had a name, that he was the great Bix. Fats swore by two colored trumpeters named Charlie Creth and Louis Armstrong; and I brought out Duke’s “Washington Wabble” and “Creole Love Call” as my exhibits A. But the blues got us all, without argument, and when Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues” came out in that bad flood year of 1927, we solemnly agreed that this was the best.
“Back Water Blues” started a series of tales about floods. Fats knew the country along the Mississippi River and its tributaries—“The Big Muddy,” “The Little Muddy,” “The Osage”—and he was full of memories. “As long as those people can make three crops a year on that bottomland, they aren’t going to move away, river or no river. ‘River missed us one time, may miss us again’ is their attitude,” Fats explained. All of the boys were good yarn-spinners. Fats had worked on road-building gangs and knew many work-songs. He would holler in a voice high-pitched for so stocky a fellow:
“Pay day,” Captain, “ain’t got no soap!”
or chant:
“Says to my Captain, Captain my hands are cold,
Goddam yo’ hands, let de pick and shovel roll.”
Abe Lincoln did not talk much. But I shall never forget one story he told in his stammering drawl of a lynching he had seen in Waco. He had been standing in a drugstore in the Negro section of town when the mob brought the body of the Negro there and burned it on a heap of packing boxes doused with kerosene. “There are some things you just can’t forget, Mr. Brown,” he said. “But talking about ’em don’t do no good.”
Buck and Sweets would tell stories of their experiences in hotel work. The Hotel Jefferson was the chief stopping place for the “white quality” folks who visited the capital city: governors, the warden of the penitentiary, drummers, politicians, racketeers, professional men, and high-class women of the oldest profession were among the many guests. Buck and Sweets kept their eyes and ears open. They were tickled when they read what Emperor Jones said about little stealing getting you in jail sooner or later, whereas big stealing landed you in the Hall of Fame, quoting with relish: “If dey’s one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman ca’s listening to de white quality talk, it’s dat same fact.” Eugene O’Neill had something there, they agreed.
They told of greenhorn waiters and busboys run up a tree, of captains and headwaiters with itching palms and finagling tricks to get theirs, of chefs with tempers as hot as their ovens. The best tale teller of the hotel crew was named Slim Greer, and they told me a fantastic yarn about his experiences passing for white, though he was plenty colored. These fellows had to scuffle, waiting tables or busing dishes or hopping bells for long hours, yet as they told their yarns the hotel seemed less a bustling, rushing, prosperous establishment than a comic gallery. Buck told an anecdote of his bell-hopping. In “rooming” the people, he failed one day to provide soap for a bathroom. A woman rang the desk, raising Cain. Buck went up to the room, tapped on the bathroom door. “Madame, here is the soap,” he said, and opened the door only wide enough to get his hand and the soap in. “Bring that soap on in here,” the woman said. “You’re nothing but a nigger.” Buck obeyed. Buck said he kept his eyes averted from the woman in the tub, but he knew that she was just daring him to look. He got out of there fast.
I was remembering some of all that when the cab door slammed. Buck ran up the steps, breezed in, and took over at once. The cab driver had carried him over half of Washington, he suspected, delivering the other passengers. Washington cab service reminded him of the jitneys in Chicago and Kansas City, only not so good. At the Union Station all the Diamond Cabs had driven past him. “Not going your way, buddy,” the drivers had said. Finally a Harlem Cab rescued him and the other marooned Negroes.
I looked at Buck, and he looked at me, and we knew the years had gone by. Buck’s head of black curly hair had gray in it; the hairline had receded slightly. He was paunchier. But he was good enough for the United States Marines, he reminded me, and I know what the Marines ask for. He hadn’t seen the gang for a long time. Reuben was in the Army; Fats was the principal of a school in a small town in Missouri and had several dependencies keeping him out of the Army; Sweets was the rising young man of St. Louis in politics, and editing a newspaper.
On the trip across the continent he had tasted another brand of democracy from that dished out in the nation’s capitol. He had traveled in a tourist Pullman with a carload of white sailors and soldiers just back from the South Pacific. Soldiers were at the fore and sailors at the back end. Buck had the last bed, but it was uncurtained and definitely part of the barrack-like arrangement. Since Buck was not in uniform, they all wanted to know what he was doing in their Pullman. When Buck told them he had been inducted into the Marine Corps, they would not believe him until he flashed his cards, which he offered, I am sure, with a flourish. None had ever heard of, much less seen, a Negro Marine. He became the attraction of the whole car.
He told us how some of the boys would sit staring out of the window for miles on miles. We had the radio turned on to the Bears-Redskins football game. The announcer advertised that the game was being heard by our armed forces all over the world. “That’s not what those fellows told me,” said Buck. “They didn’t mention listening to the radio. Just told me about sitting in muck, afraid to slap at the mosquitoes, just sitting there waiting. They were a good bunch of kids, tough as hell. They were willing to go through what they had gone through, but they just didn’t want any ragtime.” Ragtime, Buck told me, was a sailor expression, meaning the run-around, a lot of lies, gassing to fool somebody. “This guy’s got more ragtime than an admiral” would be said of a scheming talker.
Buck said it gave him a funny feeling when the train would jolt and hang in the night and several of the fellows would jump out of bed grabbing for helmets that weren’t there. One sailor from Tennessee came down to Buck’s bed and talked a long time after the other fellows had gone to bed. “Said he just couldn’t sleep. He had been on submarine duty at Pearl Harbor when the war started; he was a first-class Petty Officer now. He was a Southern boy, he told me, born and bred in Tennessee. ‘You ever been in Tennessee?’ he asked me. I said, ‘No,’ which was a lie; I’ve been all over Memphis, and to Chattanooga as well, but I didn’t want any ragtime.” Buck said he had been giving a lot of thought to the way Negroes had to live in the South. Had never thought about it much before, but after seeing Negroes in Hawaii and the islands of the South Pacific, he had a different opinion of Negroes. He had seen them all around, none in combat troops, but in engineering and labor battalions, hard working, uncomplaining, good men. He had been struck by their bravery in bringing up ammunition. Buck explained, “I never got it clear from him where he saw this. Now he was worried about something he had been used to all his life. Really worried. He was a right guy.”
Buck ran into a little ragtime, he told me, waving his fingers as if strumming a banjo, at Union station, where gents told him that there was no accommodation available for his governmental first class ticket to New River. I suggested that this was the Xmas season and that all space might be taken; but Buck said that inductees had priorities and he did not believe any train to North Carolina was full of nothing but service men. “Uh-uh,” he said, and laughed. “I believe it’s a little ragtime.”
Plenty had happened to Buck in fifteen years. After graduating from Lincoln, he had gone into school teaching. He had been principal of a Rosenwald County Training School in a small town in the Arkansas cotton belt. Several of the Negroes there owned their places; a few had big farms, hiring their own help, and in the off-season selling milk to a creamery in Kansas City. But most of the Negroes were tenants on two big plantations. The superintendent of the school was a Negro, getting up in years. He didn’t have many up-to-date ideas, Buck said, but he surrounded himself with people who did have. A good politician, he had powerful white friends in Little Rock, and he secured some Rosenwald and county money to get materials for two brick buildings to supplant the old one-room school. Negroes of the community, in spite of only a smattering of skill and experience, put up two adequate buildings. One contained classrooms and a good auditorium; the other was a Home Economics and Industrial Building for serving, cooking, canning, blacksmithing and other vocational subjects. “The superintendent had a cannery bug; he was always preaching to the people that they should can their food. He was in the Booker Washington tradition of letting down your buckets where you are. He wanted to teach the people to own their own property, to raise their food and can it, and to get hold of cash so that they could stay off the credit books. Reared in the South, he knew how to get things out of white folks. He wasn’t any Uncle Tom; he got things without Uncle Tomming, but still he didn’t put that Northern pressure on.
“Well, the old man built up something from nothing. At one time he had four or five buses running all over the county, bringing the kids to the school. Then the county white people, especially the plantation owners, got jealous and watchful. They accused him of stealing government property. Just as in all such cases, they found a few cans in the old man’s home. He was judged guilty. He fought the case in the courts, and lost his school and all of his money fighting. They crushed him all right; the last I heard of him he was working on a WPA project.
“I was teaching the same things the old man stood for, things I didn’t think were dangerous at all. I also added higher education. There was one boy fourteen or fifteen years old who had a wonderful mind. I told him and some other promising students how easy it was to work your way through school, if you really wanted to. I told them they ought to get away, if it was nowhere but to Little Rock, and get started on a real education. I told them they could make it if they would try. I was much younger than I am now, and I would blow my head quite a bit.
“Well, the school was near to two big plantations. I never went there, but I could hear the bells ringing at four-thirty in the morning to feed stock. They didn’t want anybody on the plantation who could read or write. In cotton season the man from the plantation weighs the cotton in, tells the Negro croppers how much, and always steals off what he can. Then the things they buy on credit in the off-season are figured in at the pay-up at the end of the year. And the croppers always ended up owing something. The plantation bosses didn’t want any figuring Negroes; they would figure for them.
“So one day a young white fellow, just about my age, he was educated somewhere in the midwest, Kansas, I’m not sure, dropped past the school. He didn’t come to me rough, but rather friendly. He didn’t want it known that he had come to see me. He said, ‘You know, you seem like a smart fellow. Well, if you want to teach school down here, teach school. And keep your mouth off of what doesn’t concern you.’
“This young fellow died that same year. His father, a big man in the county, was really knocked out by his death. They held the funeral at a small church near the school. A lot of plantation Negroes were sitting on the fences around the little church when the funeral procession came out. The old white man looked at the Negroes and said, ‘All of those niggers. Not one of them would have been missed and God had to take my son.’ I wasn’t there, but I heard the story over and over in about the same words from Negroes who heard it and I believe it is the truth. At any rate, that was the attitude toward the Negroes that I found in that part of Arkansas. Not one of them would have been missed.”
So Buck left his principalship. He had been promised seventy-five dollars a month, but was getting only sixty, the top pay then in 1932. This pay was always in scrip, except for a couple of months. When he made up his mind to leave, a well-to-do colored woman of the neighborhood who had people working for her told him, “You need money. I can pay my taxes in scrip; the county issues it and the county has to take it back.” She gave Buck the full value of his scrip; that was the first time he got it.
Buck returned to his native Hot Springs and became a chauffeur and house boy for one of the big men of the town. This was the middle of the depression and his pay was seven dollars a week and board. Buck went to the government-supervised bath house schools, and shortly after was employed as packroom helper and then bath attendant. Because of government supervision of the bath houses, Buck explained, Hot Springs is a piece of the North set down in the heart of Arkansas. Big shot whites and Negroes from all over the country come there; there is a racing season for thirty days every year and money gushes like the springs. After his apprenticeship, Buck preferred to work at the remaining Negro bath house: “An old time Negro can work in the white places. Mind you, I’m not saying all of those working there are old timey. Not at all. Laura Jones worked in a government bath house. She is one of those colored women who gets respect even in the South. When she walks in a bank in Arkansas, they all say, ‘Mrs. Jones, yes, what can we do for you?’ She was fired from her job and the government official insisted that she be rehired. Told the white man, ‘She has forgotten more about bath house work than you’ll ever know.’ But as far as I was concerned I knew that in the summertime the Southern whites come for their treatment and you’ve got those insults and slams coming to you, and it takes the fight out of you.”
In the off-season Buck worked as a Pullman porter or as a dining car waiter. He got over the country quite a bit: “I got to know all kinds of people. In Chicago, for instance, I knew everybody from the big shots in the First Ward to the hoodlums around Twenty-Second and Wentworth.”
It was always Buck’s way to keep in touch with the big shots, colored and white. He still had numerous anecdotes about them. He knew Andy Kirk when he was at the outset of his career playing in Oklahoma City with a young band. He remembered Basie before he became a Count. Basie had played the organ for a whole winter at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Little Rock, because the Moten band of which he was pianist had gotten stuck. He knew many Negroes from Oklahoma on whose places oil had been discovered. One of these, whom Buck knew well, had run through fabulous sums of money in a short time; his friends had to take up money to bury him.
Well, the time came for the National Defense. “It happens that I like to pick up everything I can,” said Buck, “and I took a course in welding. The teacher was a colored boy named Chester. He had been working for an old whisky-head who took him out on jobs. He was a better welder than the boss, but in Arkansas a Negro couldn’t join the union and so he couldn’t go out on his own. So the white man and his partner set up a three-way partnership, with Chester as the third partner. Then he became an owner working and the union couldn’t bar an owner. They were fond of Chester, but they made him a partner not because of that, but because he was a welder. When he took the examination he passed the highest government qualifications. He taught every welder, white as well as colored, who came through that school.
“I took the course, but didn’t finish. When I had my first Army exam, the board knew that I had been to welding school and had a good record, and told me I could go somewhere and work in a shipyard. The school gave me a recommendation as a tacker. Tacking is sticking something together until the welder comes along to weld it.
“I went out to Richmond, California. The United States Employment Office refused me a job as welder. A young fellow about twenty-four years old with a tongue as smooth as a Philadelphia lawyer gave me a soft story. ‘It’s awful, in times like this that the union won’t let you in. Maybe when the war is over, unions will be done away with. They ought to be now, refusing you a job.’
“I went into the yard as a shipfitter’s helper. When I told my story to the welder quarterman he had me transferred to the welding department. After my transfer and after I joined the union, I went back to that employment office and straightened that fellow out. In the meantime, he had given my brother the same spiel. I joined Boilermakers 513; they didn’t have an auxiliary then; three or four months later they set up the Negro auxiliary.
“I got along fine. I told them about my school back home and showed them what I could do. I was the only colored on the gang. They all seemed to like me. I told them a lot of tall tales. Sixty days after I started tacking I was eligible to take the journeyman’s test. I went on for four months, my salary increasing five cents an hour every sixty days.”
When he left, he was getting the top salary of $1.20 per hour. Buck explained the three shifts: the day, the swing, the graveyard; the vacation with pay at the end of 1,200 hours, though workers are asked to continue at work.
Buck went on to tell the following story:
It takes good eyes, watching that puddle of steel. The work isn’t hard, but nerve wracking. And it can get cold out on that bay. You may have to lie flat on your belly, or in a knot with your knees all up in your face, watching that puddle of molten steel all the time. If there’s any welding to be done on the outside of the ship, they have a little rigging to let you down. If it’s raining, you have your tarpaulin over you. When the ship rocks, you rock. You’re out there sometimes with the waves licking at your feet.
If you’re the least bit leery, you don’t have to do it. Our gang was proud of its record and would go anywhere. I held back only once. They sent me to the crow’s nest on one of those LST boats, one of the invasion barges. When it’s rolling the least bit down here, it’s swinging plenty up there. I had to climb straight up a little ladder about a foot wide. I thought I’d see what it was like. That crow’s nest took such a pitch, I pulled on my line and came down from there.
I never worked on an all Negro gang. I asked to be changed from my first gang when they put a West Virginia white fellow in as leaderman. He would always put me off by myself. I had been working with white girls; we all got along fine. Perfect camaraderie. One girl was of Mexican-Chinese descent. Another girl was from southern Missouri. They were as good buddies as any colored girls I’ve ever seen. I never had any trouble because of the women. It was “Gimme a cigarette, feller,” “Hello, Buck.” I was strictly business with them. No social stuff. We’d laugh and talk but I never got personal with them. With the West Coast girls it wouldn’t have mattered; a colored man was just another man to them. That wasn’t the way with the Southern girls, though.
Well, this West Virginian never pushed me around openly, but you can tell when you’re being pushed. I’d always find myself set off on some job by myself. So I went to a leaderman I knew. “I’d like to work on your gang,” I told him.
“Fine,” he said.
My old leader raised Cain and tried to get me back. But I wouldn’t go. He never spoke to me after that of his own accord. Sometimes we worked on the same ships. We lived in the same housing project (no, not the same house; colored and whites live in separate houses). Sometimes I’d get devilish and make him speak to me.
There was another Negro on this gang, named Herby. The gang was mixed: people from Minnesota, Arkansas, Wyoming, North Dakota, Missouri. I had all kinds of experiences. None of those fellows ever knew I was from Arkansas. The first question a white Southerner want to know is, “Where do you come from?” If I had said Arkansas, he would have started, “Arkansas, well I swar. You know I used to know a lot of good darkies from down in Arkansas.”
So I always answered snappily, “Milwaukee. Ever been there?”
“Uh-uh,” they would say. That Milwaukee lost them. They knew I knew Arkansas, though.
Those Arkies and Oakies are despised by the West Coasters. They never call Negroes Arkies and Oakies, though. When the Bay Area opened, and wages were five or six dollars a day, there wasn’t any strong union. The Arkies and Oakies, living in tent cities, would sign up for three or four dollars a day. So the tradesmen and labor men hate them for bringing down wages. Then they don’t like the twang of their voices, and their noisiness. It seems to me that people from the South, white and colored, make the most noise on the buses and street cars. Seem to want to make themselves heard.
I didn’t have any trouble. One day an electrician said to me, “I got a good story I’d like to tell you, but it’s about your people and you might get mad.”
“Yeah,” I said; I knew from his twang that he was from the South. “I might. I get mad easy, and I’m hell when I’m mad.” He didn’t tell me the story and we were good friends from then on out. Another day a pipe-fitter yelled at me: “Hey, boy, come here. I got some tacking I want you to do.” I pulled my line up to him. “Say, pipefitter, what part of the South are you from?” I said.
“I’m from Texas. How’d you know I was from the South?”
“Because in the South, colored people never grow up,” I said. “They’re always boys.” From then on he always called me Welder. But some colored people from the South wanted to fight all of the time on the least excuse. They got so angry they couldn’t do their work.
Buck told me another story, this one of a white shipfitter from Duluth with whom he was on a job:
One day he came in just laughing. He laughed all the morning until about eleven o’clock. When you’re working with a man who’s laughing all the time, you wonder what’s wrong with him. Think he might be off his nut or something.
“What you keep laughing at? You batty?”
“Something happened on the bus this morning. I’d like to tell you about it, but you might get mad.” I told him I wouldn’t get mad.
“Well, can I use the same words they used?”
“Sure,” I said. “Shoot the works.”
“Well, the bus was crowded this morning. I was in the back. A big red-faced Oakie or Arkie, I don’t know which, walked in, and stood in the aisle, looking around. Then he said, ‘Ain’t none of you niggers gonna get up and let me sit down?’ Nobody paid any attention to him, so he repeated it two or three times. ‘Where I come from, niggers don’t sit down where white men are standing.’ A big Negro jumped up at that, with a grin on his face. He scraped and said, ‘White folks, you want to sit down?’
“ ‘Sure, nigger, of course I want to sit down,’ the Oakie said.
“The white fellow sat himself down. Then the Negro’s expression changed; he pulled out a big knife with a shiny blade: ‘Now you got a seat, and now I’m gonna get me a seat.’ And he sat down on the white fellow’s lap.”
The shipfitter could hardly tell the rest for laughing: “The colored fellow held the knife against the Oakie’s neck. He cursed him all the way from town to the shipyard. He sounded like he was crying. ‘All this kind of thing’s gotta stop,’ he said. It looked like tears were running down his cheek.
“Two or three white men started toward the back of the bus. The colored fellow said: ‘You tell those fellows if they take a step further, I’m gonna cut your damn head off.’ He held his knife around that guy’s neck, sitting on his lap (he was a big fellow, too) until we got to the yard gates. He walked off the bus, holding the knife against the fellow. I got off right behind them. Then he said, ‘Now let this be a lesson to you,’ and disappeared in the crowd.”
And then the guy from Duluth started laughing all over again.
“On a job like that,” Buck continued, “somebody’s always dropping out, going to the Army. Our leaderman joined the Seabees. The other Negro, Herby, a combination electric and acetylene welder, had been trained by the NYA. He was a good welder, but I could never get him to take the certified test. Well, they gave the job of straw to a white fellow named Joe who wasn’t as good as Herby or myself. Joe was from Arkansas, but I never met a fairer fellow in my life, certainly not from Arkansas. He knew what Herby and I could do. Herby was disappointed, I could see that. If he had come into that yard a white fellow with two hundred hours of electrical and gas welding, maybe he would have got the job. Or if he could have talked more. Herby was from Oklahoma, and a lot of those boys don’t have much to say. I don’t mean they won’t talk up; when they get mad, they will raise hell. But I mean they won’t assert their rights without blowing their top.
“There are some colored men there who are ship’s engineers, walking around with blue prints in their pockets and white collars on. But I never saw any Negro leadermen over mixed crews in the skilled crafts. Herby took it hard. He didn’t say anything, but he went over to the graveyard shift almost as soon as Joe was made leaderman. He just said he wanted to make more money, that he had a wife and a couple of kids. Yet he had worked eighteen months on the day shift, and had always told me he liked the day shift best.
“They treated me fine after Herby left; Joe was O.K. One thing that stung me, though. Every fellow in the gang who left for the Army or Navy got a present, except me. We’d take up ten or twelve dollars, get a serving kit or little bag or shoeshining outfit. I’d always chip in. But when I left, they didn’t give me a thing. Said they were sorry I was going and all that, but no present.” Buck laughed. “It didn’t make me feel bad. I’ve learned from experience what to expect and what not to expect.”
Buck found that Filipinos and Chinese were just a little above the Negroes in chances to rise; they don’t get to be leadermen much faster. He found the Filipinos cordial. They held his hand, teaching him the fine points of welding, which Buck likened to Palmer penmanship. They taught him how to hold the rod close to the puddle so as not to make “wasp’s nests,” one of the flaws in welding. Buck found that most of the Negro welders wouldn’t teach another Negro a thing; they were “too high up on the hog for that.” Buck didn’t know as he blamed them; some of the Negroes didn’t want to learn from Negroes. Buck passed by a colored girl one day, dropped his hood down and said, “Say, pal, you’re doing it wrong. Try a downhand with your machine a little cooler; you’ll get along better.” “I know what I’m doing,” the girl snapped at him. Buck had merely wanted to be helpful; he knew what he had come through.
Buck found that whites, even Southerners, will come to anybody to show them how: black, green, white, red, it makes no difference. “I can’t get my machine fixed. Can you help me?” (The trick in welding, he told me, is getting the machine fixed, to get good penetration.) Oddly enough, Buck found the Chinese to be snooty. Once when he had gotten a “flash” in the eye, a dangerous exposure to the fierce light, he had gone to a Chinese nurse, who acted up and didn’t want to give him the first aid service.
Buck found many Negro workers satisfied, but one group quite militant. Most welcomed the FEPC as a righter of discrimination. “Being from the South doesn’t mean you accept discrimination. As a matter of fact, many of the workers from the South are ready to start cursing and squabbling. Then a lot of others like to cut them down easy.” Kaiser is tops with the men personally; he pays top prices. He isn’t blamed for the inside stuff that Negroes and many whites don’t like. Kaiser just wants to get the ships out.
Buck praised the CIO because it had no auxiliary unions. “If you’re a member, you’re a member. But the CIO was slow in getting to the West Coast, and found itself tied out.” Buck belongs to the Committee Against Discrimination in the yard, a committee open to anyone opposed to discrimination and in sympathy with the effort to break up the practice of Negro auxiliaries in the Boilermaker’s Union. The Boilermaker’s was the largest offender; the committee figured if you break one, you break the others. Buck used to carry around petitions. A Negro counselor in the yards, employed by the company for morale, was hot against the petition. “Stirring up trouble,” was what he called it. Buck didn’t think much of the counselor. He had got his job because “It’s not what you know in the yards, it’s who you know.” This counselor would tell the Negro workers, “You’re making more money than you ever made before, you know that. You get to fooling around signing those petitions, you’ll find yourself without a job.”
“Ragtime,” said Buck, pretending to be strumming a banjo.
Buck’s wife was director of recreation in one of the housing projects. Negroes and whites lived in separate apartment houses but all in the same project. The big hall and the small club room were for everybody to use. Across the street were the new dorms built by the Kaiser Company; they had no provision for recreation. A hillbilly band was organized there by a fellow named Tex. One night Tex and his band and a group of white people wanted to dance and asked to use the dance hall without authorized permission. Buck’s wife refused and closed the building. She had her orders. The supervisor upheld her. The next day a delegation of the whites met with the supervisor.
“Last night,” they said, “you took sides with a colored person against white people. We’re from Arkansas; we’ve been trained that their place is in the kitchen and the field.” The white supervisor, a woman from the midwest, flew all over them. From then on, Buck’s wife has had no difficulties to speak of. Tex, the hillbilly bandsman, always calls her Mrs. Eden. Some, however, Buck admitted, won’t call her anything; they just say, “May we have the ping pong set? May we have the basketball?”
Buck also mentioned that there is no racial line in the poker pool. This game is played by using the serial number of your check as your hand. Thus 22414 would equal two pairs. Zeroes are wild. Five numbers are considered; if the serial number has six or seven figures, the first one or two are cancelled. If hands are equal the pot is divided. Any gang can organize a pool; sometimes they run to twenty-five or thirty in the same pool. It was a very useful pastime, Buck found. He had been fairly lucky. But it was really unskilled gambling.
On two calls to the Army, Buck was deferred because of his welding job. Then the third call came.
“I got to figuring,” he said. “Bud was dead in Sicily, and Jesse was in the South Pacific, dead or alive I didn’t know. So I decided I was going in.” Both were old buddies. Bud was a younger fellow whom Buck had looked out for in Hot Springs. “He was a well liked old boy. I tried to give him the kind of help I got all along the road, at Lincoln, for instance,” he said, looking away. “Bud used to come to me when he was in trouble or need. ‘Lemme have four dollars, Buck, I want to get a pair of shoes.’ That boy really hated to go to the Army. He wrote me from down in Florida. They were being trained to tear into the swamps with cats and bulldozers, dig in, and have a airfield ready when the airplanes got there. I got a V mail letter from him in North Africa. Then the news came home that he had been killed in action. Invasion of Sicily. Before Bud went to Florida I guess he hadn’t been farther from Hot Springs than Memphis.
“And then Jesse. Jesse was a fellow I met on the coast who went into the Navy. Last time I saw Jesse he was telling me of a racket he had. Jesse was a born gambler. He had a buddy on the shore patrol, or whatever is the same thing in the naval barracks. When Jesse was winning and wanted to leave the game, he’d go to the window and sneak out a signal. Then his buddy would break into the barracks and yell, ‘Break it up, fellows. No gambling.’ And he and Jesse would split the winnings.” Buck didn’t know what kind of ship Jesse was on: “He isn’t a mess boy. I believe that he’s an able seaman. I hear they’ve got colored seamen on everything now from an ocean-going tugboat to a battle wagon. Of course, that may be ragtime. Anyway, nobody has heard from Jesse for a long time.
“I could have got another deferment but I handed it back to the man. I went down to the office and they asked me what branch of the service I wanted. I told them the Marines.” He tried to sound casual, but pride was in his voice. “And here I am on my way to New River.”
When Buck left the house, I kidded him about the tough boot training he was about to face. I reminded him that he was no longer the young man he was at Jeff City. “Well,” he said, “working in that shipyard wasn’t any bed of roses. I can take it; it’s all in the knowing how.” And he swung down the steps.
I guess that soon they’ll be having Buck sing:
From the Halls of Montezuma
to the shores of Tripoli.
He will sing it with gusto, I know. The only thing that he will ask, I figure, is that they leave out of it all traces of ragtime.
OLD MAN MCCORKLE It was over ten years ago that he stalked out of the past up the walk to my house. He wore a greenish “jim-swinger” coat, pipe-stem trousers a bit too short, large heavy-soled shoes, a piece of cloth folded around his neck, and a crushed old felt hat. His dark brown face, fringed with gray, had what some would call an aristocratic cast. He looked a little like Jefferson Davis. His hair was frizzled gray; his slightly receding mouth was nearly toothless. In gestures and manners he was truly aristocratic. He walked so erectly that he seemed to be about to topple backward.
He had come to Missouri from far away North Carolina. We soon got to be friends. He announced himself as “an arrow in the quiver of Lord God Jehovah’s power,” and he was eloquent enough for such. After we had won each other’s confidence, he did not resent, he even welcomed, my taking notes on his talk. He ate heartily for all of his near toothlessness, stripping a pork chop with ease and neatness. He was a great drinker of strong coffee.
He was eighty-four years old. He boasted that long before freedom he could read, learning partly from his mother whom his memories reconstructed into a superior person, partly from the questions in the catechism, partly from the grandson of the McCorkles, who were “kind to their colored folks.” Most of the other slave owners whom he recalled were hardly “rickommendable.”
He enjoyed telling us of how his family worked at night for themselves, hoeing up patches in the woods for gardens, making baskets of splits. Church was five miles from their cabin, and in order to get there, they had to take a “bateau” over the river. He chuckled remembering how, when they were stealing back after the long nightly meetings, they woke up the man who ferried the bateau.
Most of the people were kind to him, because even early he had the gift for speech. His master used to send him for apple brandy. “Maybe,” he chuckled, “because I wouldn’t uncork the demijohn.”
The leading question, as inevitable from Negro youngsters hearing his tale as its converse from whites, brought a start to him.
“Was they ever cruel!” he repeated indignantly. “They was always cruel,” he said simply. His voice sank low when he talked of cruelties; he never lingered long upon them.
He did tell of Uncle Logan. “Uncle Logan,” he spoke with satisfaction, “was a great man for praying. The man he belonged to was a sinner, and told Uncle Logan not to pray. But Uncle Logan would pray anyhow. So the white man strung up Uncle Logan. Buzzards soared over the spot until white folks and colored folks found him and cut him down. Though nearly done for, Uncle Logan survived and lived to have children. But his master one day put a big pistol to his head and blew out his brains.”
Whether Uncle Logan’s was a true tale or a derivative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or part of the folklore by which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was sustained, there is no doubt of the simple sincerity with which the old man recounted it. To him it was an instance of “the dispensation of time.”
There was no overseer on the McCorkle place. “Our people would not have stood for it.” The Negroes on the McCorkle place and on the Schiffer place were upstanding fellows. Overseers he called “no account.” The patterrollers were hard boys to get around when you got caught without a pass. One patterroller, a poor-white named Ike, wanted to come between a slave named Munday and his wife, but without much success. As a matter of the truth, Munday’s wife laughed at Ike and told Munday about him. So the patterrollers were very hard on all of the males of the Munday family.
No Negroes were ever put in the jail. That was the place for poor whites. If a Negro got caught stealing he was given forty-and-nine with a leather thong, or thirty-and-nine with a braided cow-hide with the end loose. They wouldn’t put a Negro out of commission when they beat him anymore than they would a horse. If the skin split they would wash the openings in brine. Always at our expressions of distress he would carefully explain that salt and water kept mortification out of the wounds. When a Negro got too bad they would put him in the drove and send him down to Alabama, Mississippi, and New Orleans. Speculators paid good money, especially for a good woman.
A poor white named Bartley overseered one time on a neighboring farm. He came from across the river where his large poor white family lived in a peeled pine, mud-daubed cabin “worse’n we slaves lived in.” Mr. MacDowell, the owner of the place, left to practice law in Mecklenburg. At harvest time Bartley abused the Negroes, who forthwith left.
“How did they get away?”
“Oh they had ways and means. They got away all right. And some for good.” Bartley lost his half of the harvest. And Bartley’s mother with her brood of children across the river went uncared for. Mr. McCorkle seemed satisfied.
“Po’ whites always the worst enemy nigger got,” was one of his dogmas, based on kind memories of the McCorkles, Abernethys, MacDowells, and Schiffers. “Po’ whites never would work with niggers. They would cut and drag ditches, split fence-rails and logs. They spised us, and we spised them right back.”
The slaves he remembered with respect did superior jobs to ditch-digging and rail splitting. “Uncle Abner could build a four-horse wagon, wheels and all. And yit he never had been taught the trade.”
“Niggers made furniture, beds and chairs, coarse furniture, naturally, not like these fancy chairs we setting on now.” They also were great makers of coffins. The coffins they made for the white folks were made of walnut or cherry and painted or varnished; those for Negroes were pine, stained with a dye made from maple-bark. They were all right nice coffins.
One of his stories was about a bright-skinned coachman, one of the best servants of the neighborhood. The daughter of the household took a hankering for him. He drove her, wherever she wanted to go, on long rides over the countryside. They loved each other. When she got in a fix, the white folks wouldn’t mob him, but they sent him away. The child was put out to nurse a long ways off.
He seemed to relish informing us that this wasn’t so scarce a happening. That is how come the “free ussues,” he said. “Some folks calls them the ‘gray eyes.’ If a black man and a white woman have a child it’s born free: free issue. If a white man and a black woman have a child, it ain’t nothing.”
White families gave free issue kinfolk something, a horse and saddle each, something like that, never much. They were lucky of course to be given anything. But there were more of them than you might figure on, back in the old days.
He told the same stories over and over again, remembering new details sometimes, never altering the main facts. He told them simply and eloquently, relishing the rapt attention of my family and friends, a seemingly forlorn but really proud walker out of a far land and time. He was a good dramatist. He must once have been a first-rate preacher.
He had no praise for the past of slavery, no special blame, but a horde of memories vivid and sure. He had very little, however, for the present and for the younger generation to do, always excusing us. We sympathized with him, especially since we knew where he was living. It was a poor rooming house in the section well-called “The Foot.” We hoped the landlady would respect him as a man of God, but the place was unsavory.
It turned out badly for him. He came to the house one day, breathless, sputtering, his eloquence, his sway-backed dignity, his calm pride gone. He was pitiable, denouncing the scarlet women of the house and their drunken men. They had not seen in him a man of God but a funny-looking old fool in mutt-legged breeches and a green jim-swinger. They had scorned him. “Eyes have they and they see not,” he mumbled. We did all we could to quiet his wrath. When he left us he left his blessing with us. I remember him after long years, stalking down East Miller Street, still so erect that he was leaning backwards. He was one of the best teachers I have ever had.
BUS STATION The bus for Macon was due to leave at 2:45 P.M. I had been unable to get a cab; Frank finally picked me up and by driving his Pontiac like a red ball through hell through all the back streets and alleys, he had got me to the depot at 2:43.
The station was white, new and cheaply imposing. I ran up the steep incline to the colored entrance, swung through the glass door with its chromium bars, and wove through a crowd of folks to the barred off ticket window. There were two lines ahead of me, one of Negro employees of the company, and the other of passengers.
A lanky, ruddy-faced clerk was taking his time, cashing the checks of the employees. When the fellow abreast of me came up, the clerk scrutinized him with gimlet eyes.
“What’s the matter, James?”
“I been sick, Mr. Doyle. That’s the reason I didn’t make much time. I had to lay off two days.”
Doyle grunted suspiciously, looked at the back of the check, and paid out a few dollars.
The white woman waited on the last customer before me, and then was long gone. I don’t know why; maybe it was because I had a suit and a tie and was smoking a cigarette. But she turned away as I got there, and rushed to the white folks’ window which we could see through the office.
The lank clerk had business with a lot of stubs. I waited. I watched the electric clock jerk its hands, 2:47, 2:50. The room was close and sweaty, packed with soldiers, some asleep, and a number of mothers with their babes in arms and little children.
I waited, staring at the clerk’s sweaty back. Finally I said, “I’d like a ticket for Fort Valley.”
The cracker turned sharply and glared at me. In spite of being weak-mouthed, he tried to look stern.
“Is the Fort Valley bus supposed to go at 2:45?” It was 2:52 then.
“Yes,” he snapped.
“Has it gone yet?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like a ticket for Fort Valley,” I said, pulling out my wallet.
“Somebody will wait on you as soon as they can.” He looked at the cigarette drooping from my lip, a curl of smoke winding through the bars toward him. I didn’t move it. He returned to counting his stubs, slowly, laboriously. It seemed too big a job for him to be doing, all that reading and adding.
I spoke to the soldier next to me. “They announce the buses when they’re ready, don’t they?”
The soldier looked unhappy. “I reckon they do. I don’t know much about it myself.”
“I’ve got to get to Fort Valley, and I heard this is the last bus. I can’t afford to miss this one. I’ve been waiting here all this time—”
The tall cracker snapped his head up and glared. A whine and tremble entered his voice. “I tole you once,” he said. “I’ll wait on you as soon as I get done what I’m doing.”
“Well, I don’t want to have to wait so long that I’ll miss the bus. I was told it was to leave at 2:45.”
“It’s still about there. By rights it should have gone before you got here. You came to the window after leaving time.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I was here in time, if I could have got a ticket.”
He threw his face forward and glared at me; the soldier looked surprised too. I knew he wanted to come through those bars at me. Well let him come, I thought. I tried to play it cool, and I looked squarely at him.
He went back to his reading stubs and ciphering.
“Can I pay on the bus for my ticket?” I persisted.
“No. You got to buy your ticket here.”
“So that’s that,” I said to the waiting room.
The loudspeaker announced departing buses. I couldn’t make out the words. The bus company is trying hard to play choo-choo, with parking and loading places marked “track eleven,” etc. The loudspeaker imitated the railroad announcers’ fog-horn jumbling. “And Chatthooga,” blared the brass. Well, that one wasn’t it, anyway.
Finally a floridly pink woman, reddish haired and husky, came over to the window. I started, “I want—”
“He wants a ticket to Fort Valley,” said Lanky.
While she trotted away, I asked him, “If the bus has gone, and if this is the last one, can I get my money back?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “But it ain’t gone yet.”
Ticket in my hand, I rushed out to the platform. I nearly ran into a white woman and her child who were bouncing about. A Negro porter, sweeping up, threw his eyes up in mock horror as he saw me throw on brakes. Then he winked solemnly. But I was shaken in nerve; the ticket agent’s anger hadn’t troubled me, but rather stimulated; however, knocking against a white woman and child was something else again.
Mine was the bus for Miami. A swarm of white people were about the door. There were a few farmers, a large number of soldiers. About eight of the Negroes stood on the fringe of the swarm. The doors finally opened. The swarm of whites more than filled up the bus; the back seat, our only chance for riding, was taken over by soldiers. A few white people were left out and of course all of the Negroes. The doors closed, and the bus slowly rolled off.
They obviously didn’t want me and mine on that bus. We Negroes looked at each other. Somehow I felt relieved; I remembered momentarily the many tales I had heard of Negroes being thrown off of buses and beaten within inches of their life. This was the time of rising tension in the deep South; Talmadge had warned white women to be on guard; and strange, foreign, trouble-making Negroes were supposed to have descended on the South like locusts. When I saw those sunburnt red-clay crackers troop into that bus—the soldiers looked full of devilment and the ordinary travelers looked just ordinarily mean—I did not fancy being cooped up in that crowded space for four or five hours.
I looked over the crowd, packed and jammed on the loading platforms. It was a hot, steaming day. A few Negroes huddled together, but the crowd was mainly Aryan. Most of them seemed poor and harassed. A few girls, flaunting finery, got off of incoming buses; some of them told the drivers goodbye sentimentally, affectionately. There were a lot of kids. A few of the people seemed fresh and spruced, but most of those who came in after long hot rides seemed beaten out.
I waited for a long time for the second section that, it was rumored, would take the overflow. The dispatcher knew nothing of such an extra section. I finally returned to the ticket window to get my money back.
There was another woman there, as indifferent as the first.
“Have you tried to get on that special they’re making up? There’s another section. You try to get on that. It’s an extra fare bus though.”
“Do I pay that here or on the bus?”
“You pay the steward.”
I wove back through the crowd. The dispatcher knew little about it—maybe in fifteen minutes. I went back into the station and asked the colored girl behind the soft drink counter for smoking tobacco. She didn’t have any. “You go through that door, you can get them at the white newsstand.” I stood there ten minutes waiting. “I’d like some tobacco,” I said. The white girls kept their backs to me; I know they heard me.
I rushed back to the platform. The bus was ready. The people got aboard slowly, paying the extra fare to the steward, a big-nosed fellow. A little colored girl was ahead of me. He looked around her at me. He couldn’t quite make me out. If I had been a white gentleman I should have stepped in front of the girl. Maybe I was a Yankee, though, not used to the Georgia way. He said to her brusquely, “This is not your bus. Your bus will be along later.” I smelled the rat then. As I handed my ticket to him, I said, “I was told that I should pay the steward the extra charge.”
Fumbling for my change, I said casually, “I’m colored. Do I ride this bus?”
He stared at me, confused, as if he had been wronged. “Wait a minute,” he blurted.
He called a fat burly man, who, in his dark gray shirt and dark breeches with a stripe down the side, and black puttees, made me think of Mussolini. He had the Gibraltar jaw and the pout and the bugged eyes all right, but instead of the Caesarian dome, he had cleanly parted, plastered black hair.
“This man says he’s a nigra,” Ciano reported to Mussolini. “Can he . . .”
“No, he can’t ride this bus,” said Il Duce.
I took my ticket back. The young one said, “There’ll be another bus along.” They clambered on board the bus, slammed the big door, backed out of track 3, swung around, and roared away. They were in a big hurry; the bus was only two-thirds full; there were many special seats for me empty at the back. There could have been a quarantine region of about three seats between me and the whitefolks.
A Negro sitting on the rail said to the young girl and me, “He just talking. Ain’t no more buses to Macon today.”
I went back to the ticket window, told the man, a new one now, that I’d been told that if I couldn’t get on the bus I’d be able to get my money back.
“When did you get your ticket?”
“About two hours ago. Around three o’clock. They wouldn’t let me on the limited section.”
He didn’t seem surprised.
“You were going to Fort Valley, huh?”
“That’s right.” (I was going to die before I said “sir.”)
“Who’d you get it from?”
How do I get out of this? I wasn’t going to say lady, not then; and to be honest, I wasn’t going to say woman, either.
“From—I don’t know her name.”
A woman came up, saved my face, and redeemed the ticket. I didn’t say “thank you.”
I went over to the counter to get a drink, and bought a couple of swallows of ginger-ale in a paper cup for a nickel.
One of the white newsstand girls was standing there, querulously talking about some matter of book-keeping.
The colored girl’s voice was taut. “Yes, if today was Tuesday. But it’s Monday.” She was slow and calm.
“That is raght,” said the white girl. “It plum slipped my mind. So you’re raght about it after all, Ellie.”
“When you get through with my book, I wish you’d be kind enough to bring it back to me,” said Ellie evenly.
Ellie sort of inspired me. I told her my troubles.
“They’re getting awful,” she said. “They always fill up with white folks first. Any seats left, the colored can ride, sometimes, on some buses. No real telling. They just don’t want the colored to ride on these buses. You was lucky to get your money back. Most often they make you write to the management up in Chicago. They figger won’t many colored people do that. So much red tape. You be glad you got your money back.”
CLUB CAR It was a slow train through Northern Alabama, stopping, as a fellow traveler put it, “at every pig path.” I got on at midnight, and had at least an eight-hour trip to Atlanta. There wasn’t to be any sleeping I discovered: the porter and brakeman saw to that by continually slamming the door between the baggage compartment and the Jim Crow smoker. They had to work; why should anyone sleep? This wasn’t a Pullman anyway.
I had the choice seats, the two facing each other on the side with the toilet. The conductor’s “office” was across from the toilet; in the two other seats, one of which had been turned, two fellows sprawled facing each other. I put my feet up on the opposite seat and smoked myself into a semi-daze. I caught a few phrases from the talk of the fellows who were less curious about me than I was about them.
One fellow gave his name as Young. His little daughter was asleep in the first seat of the main part of the Jim Crow coach. She came into the smoker once for a drink of water. Ever so often Young and his fellow traveler would get up and go look at her.
Young was just crazy about that child, he told the coach. Her mother was dead now. Died when she was a baby. He had taken out a good insurance. “So if I peg out, she won’t want for nothin’.” Every pay day he put so much money in the bank for her education. He hoped to send her to some good college, like Spelman in Atlanta. She was real smart now, leading her class. She asked a lot of questions about things he didn’t know anything about. Then she answered them.
The other big fellow got up and looked through the glass of the door. “She still sleep,” he said in awe. “Purty as a pitcher. Jes’ look at her.”
“You’re doing a fine thing, sending her to that Spelman,” he stated profoundly, as he sank down in his seat. “Yassuh, a fine thing.”
Young had a quart bottle of whisky in a paper bag, in his carefully packed suitcase.
“Mmm-uhm,” said the other fellow. “Mr. Boston Bourbon. Now that’s whisky.”
“I won’t drink no rot-gut stuff,” said Young. “Tear yo’ insides out.” They got paper cups and drank to each other, solemnly. Young admitted that he liked his whisky, that is good whisky. And a little sport too. Every now and then, that is.
The other fellow grew talkative as the drinks circulated. “Anytime you come to Anniston you ask for me. Just ask for Big Red. They’ll all tell you they know Big Red. ‘A big red nigger with a black spot between his eyes,’ they’ll say. That’s me. They all know me in Anniston.” He pointed, rather proudly, to the black spot on his forehead between his eyes.
Young spoke of some people he knew in Anniston. One was some kind of cousin to his wife. He didn’t recall her name and not much else other than that she was a spare-made woman. Finally Big Red worked out who she was. “Man,” he suddenly yelled, “you’re just about in my family. Talk about a little world!”
It developed that this woman often visited his mother, in fact she would probably be coming over to his house that morning, shortly after he got home.
“Man, man. Put it there.” They shook hands and took another drink together.
Big Red had found a new friend. “Man, I’m going to call you up Tuesday, after I see your cousin. There’s a phone in the office that they let us colored boys use. Let me call anywhere, just so I pays. I’m going to call you Tuesday at lunch time. Let you know what she says when I tell her as how you and I done met.”
When Big Red got off at Anniston in the early dawn he told Young to be sure and come to see him. “I’m going to find you some real sport. And you take care of the little girl.” His voice was warm because of the bourbon and the new friend and his proud certainty that everybody in Anniston knew him, “the big red nigger with a black spot between his eyes.”
The porter was kept busy. He had put on light blue pin-stripe work overalls over his porter’s trousers, a dark blue bandana around his neck and a dark blue cap. He would go into the baggage car and bang the freight around, just before the short stops. Then he would swing off the car, unload the baggage, wave his lantern, and as the train puffed under way, he would be back again. It was getting near to daybreak: the people in the coach behind were mostly asleep, contorted in all shapes. I looked down at Young’s little girl, curled on the seat and peacefully asleep.
There was a rough comradeship in the smoker. The conductor was sorting tickets in the first seat, which faced a wash bowl and the porter’s pressed uniform coat on a hanger. The brakeman occasionally sat beside him. All of us, the porter, the brakeman, the conductor, Young and I, threw conversation about. The porter, whose name was Jerome, generally played lead.
The conductor was to be off the next night, and told of a fish fry he was going to. “I’m not going to bed tonight,” he said. “Going fishing on the river. We’re going to fry them right where we catch them. That’s the way I like my fish, right out of the river, not off the ice.” He walked out of the car, as the porter wished him luck with his catch.
The porter was going to be off too, but he was going to sport some that night. He wouldn’t guarantee that he was not going to bed. Expected that he’d end up in bed all right. His round dark face split into a grin.
The brakeman cackled, “You’re the godammedest lahr I ever did see anyway, Jerome.”
The porter seemed a bit taken aback, with Young and me listening in, though it was evident that the rough kidding was an old habit. He started pulling off his overalls, and squeezed in front of the brakeman at the washbowl.
“This here soap is too strong,” he said, jabbing the plunger in the soap container sharply.
“You’re using it,” said the brakeman.
“Well it don’t hurt to use it one time,” Jerome said, “but it’s too strong. It’s like lye.”
“I reckon you want some kind of perfumed soap,” said the brakeman. “What kind of soap you want the railroad to put in here?”
“I use Palmolive,” said the porter. “You know. You been in my house.”
“Palmolive ain’t strong enough to cut that grease you got on you,” said the brakeman, getting up to go.
After the door slammed, Jerome confided to us, “He’s all right. He’s a good fellow. He’d go back there now and mop up for me, but it’s too close to Atlanta. He’s willing to help me out, and I helps him.”
An hour or so after daybreak we rolled past the shanties and factories on the outskirts of Atlanta. Young poured a wakening snort for himself and Jerome and the brakeman. The conductor entered during the ceremony. Young asked him, “Will you have one, Captain?” The conductor didn’t care if he did. They offered me one, but I begged off; I needed some breakfast in my stomach, I told them. They all drank out of the paper cones. Then the mail clerk, a gun on his hip, came in. The conductor, brakeman, Jerome, and Young were smacking their lips and drinking chasers of water.
“Have a drink,” said the porter. Young held out the quart bottle.
The mail clerk hesitated. “Aw, go ahead and take a drink. Everybody’s done had one.” The porter caught his quizzical glance in my direction. “He’s all right,” he said. “He just can’t drink in the early morning.”
The mail clerk held out his paper cup.
The Jim Crow smoker took on, for a moment, the guise of a club car. Three whites and three Negroes and the remnants of a quart of Mr. Boston Bourbon.
Later, discussing some of the taboos with a member of the interracial commission, I mentioned the episode.
“Whose whisky was it?” I was asked.
“A Negro’s.”
“That’s it,” I was told. “If whites need a drink and a Negro has one, they’ll drink with him. But if the whisky had been theirs, they wouldn’t offer him a drink.”
But I wasn’t sure, and I’ve heard from many others since, that such does not invariably have to be so.
I suspect that if any whisky is drunk in the mail-car or baggage or smoker of that train, Porter Jerome is going to get his snort.
ROOMMATE The director of the Negro USO at Columbus, Ga., had called up the Y.M.C.A. and arranged for me to get a room. The old decaying shambles of a building seemed deserted. There was a dim light over the counter, but nobody to check me in. I waited awhile, then started exploring. One door led to a pitch-dark, damp smelling hole; I learned the next morning with a postponed scare, that the swimming pool, full of green water, was just a few yards from where I had groped in the blackness.
Finally, the old man who was in charge came in. As we mounted the steps he told me that he was really looking out for me, that my room had a bath. We climbed the shaky stairs, and then he knocked on a door. I heard a grumbling “Who’s there?” and a click. Through the transom I saw a light come on. I was surprised at having a roommate; I was more surprised when he flung the door open and stood there.
He was a little old fellow, reddish bronze, with walrus moustaches, looking mean and mad. He resented being aroused from his sleep. From his looks and speech I suspected that he was a down-home farmer, but he was wearing the latest style jockey shirts and shorts. He looked funny standing there, a bandylegged little old farmer, caricaturing the magazine advertisements.
He was short in his talk, until I parked my bags and went out to get something to eat. I brought him back a chicken sandwich and a couple of bottles of Coke. He stripped the chicken bones neatly and practicedly. Then he warmed up.
He was a farmer from Waynesboro, Ga., and had ridden all day on buses to get to see his boy at Fort Benning. He was proud of being a good farmer. His son had been a good farmer too. Right after the draft, he had told his boy he’d buy him a mule so that he could go to farming on his own and stay out of the Army. But his son wouldn’t pay him any attention. Then Uncle Sam sent him the letter.
“He came to me crying. But what could I do when Uncle Sam wanted him?”
His son didn’t like it at Fort Benning. Too many men with pistols over him. He made it seem like a prison camp.
He talked on and on, welcoming the audience of a stranger in a big city. He farmed his own land, wasn’t beholden to no man; had stopped cropping for others years ago. Everybody around Waynesboro, white and colored, respected him. He didn’t gallivant around; this was his longest trip away from home.
The night was sweltering, and bugs of all sorts were flying and singing about the electric bulb. I was dead tired, and finally mentioned that I guess I’d put out the light so we could get some sleep.
“What for,” he said, “we paying enough fo’ hit.” We were being charged $.75 each for the room. And his slow but intense autobiography continued. I was a new type for him, with a briefcase and magazines, and now that his suspicions had proved unfounded, he seemed to think it imperative that he tell me his story.
But finally he ran down. I got up and said I believed I’d put up the window for a little air. I didn’t want him to think I disapproved of his sleeping arrangements, but I had to get some air in that stifling room. He said, “Go ahead. But hit won’t do no good. Hit ain’t no pane in it. The sash was down; what I had thought was a window pane was night air.”
He woke me before daylight by clicking on the bulb. I watched him putting on a new crinkling green suit over the incongruous sporty underwear.
“Did you rest all right?”
“Too good,” he said. “Nearly overslept myself. I guess I’ll get me something to eat and go over yonder.”
He had traveled a whole day to reach Columbus; he figured on seeing his son for a couple of hours or so; then back on the bus to Waynesboro. I told him not to rush so, to take a day off; if somebody had taken care of his stock the day before, he’d do it today too. Everything would be there, safe and in good shape, when he got back.
It was an idea that hadn’t struck him before, and he thanked me much. Maybe he would. Maybe he would take in one of those moving pictures.
I told him maybe they’d let his son come in from camp and go with him.
No, he thought, that would be too much to ask. But he walked jauntily when he left me, a little bandy-legged figure of a man, with bristling moustaches in an ill-fitting, country-store suit, a big straw hat, and yellow, stub-toed shoes that all cried out their newness.
RETURN OF THE NATIVE When I got out of the car that had brought me there from Baton Rouge, Gus and Abe and Alan ran down to the gate to greet me. They all talked at once: Abe about the hunting I had missed, Alan about his new family, and Gus about the gatherings and sports that had been his welcome home. The yard was full of children of all sizes and ages. Near the porch, in barrel-stave swings and comfortable chairs, on benches, on the steps, were the grown-ups, and every now and then another would appear out of the rambling old house. I asked Gus later how many of his kinsfolk had been at this gathering; he was never certain, but counted up near to forty. All close relations were there except two sisters and their families.
The clan had gathered because Gus, the second son, the junior, had come home. Over a score of years ago, a tall, green youngster, their hope, he had left Frilot Cove for Tuskegee. He returned home after his graduation, but had been away now for over fifteen years. Most of the relatives, his young nieces and nephews and cousins, he had of course never seen, but they had heard all about him. The youngsters tumbling around and yelling, the older sisters and brothers and cousins and in-laws chattering away, were mostly fair in complexion; nearly all of them would have been taken for white; some were olive-colored, some blonde, one in-law was a fiery red-head. A few were light tan—French, Spanish looking; only two were what could be called brownskin: Gus’s stepmother, Indian-like, with coal-black straight hair, and Abe’s wife, a recent addition to the family. Gus himself looks like a Frenchman.
Père Auzenne, an old patriarch with long moustaches, a sly twinkle in his eyes, a staunch set to his jaw, was sitting on the porch in a rocker, monarch surely of all he surveyed: his sons and daughters and the grands. I paid my respects to him, and then to his dignified, quiet wife; they both courteously welcomed me to what, by rights, I had no business barging into. And then the younger ones claimed me. I too was of that strange outside world where Gus had been so long, and they wanted to know me. I had made a couple of trips to Opelousas and Frilot Cove before. The old man and I struck it off well; I had got through his crustiness because I was Gus’s friend. On one visit Abe had driven his father and me the few miles out to the old home place. The drive was long from the gate marking the beginning of the Auzenne property to the house where the eldest son Raleigh lived. The house was old but sturdy, spotlessly clean, the typical home of substantial farmers in St. Landry Parish. Of the old French planter style, made of cypress, it was not wide but ran to length; additions to the house recorded the additions to the family, though the long years now made it seem all of one piece and time. In the front yard were the usual cedars and holly bushes, and abundance of flowers. The womenfolk of the household had a hand for making beautiful things grow: there were princess plumes, roses, bridal wreaths, and what were locally called “little violets,” unlike those I knew. Fat grunting hogs took their ease in a watering pond; a dirty ram strutted before several meek, inquisitive ewes. A band of geese and ducks and chickens rattled away. In a nearby pasture a few well-kept, wide-horned cattle were grazing. Tall bright cane rippled in the sunlight as the wind swept over it. The cotton was deep green, a good stand. Most of these long flat acres, extending to a fringe of woodland, were under cultivation. Raleigh was a tireless farmer and manager, but running this place was certainly full time work for him, his family, and the six tenant families who lived on the place.
Tall and raw-boned, with a yellowish brown—what the natives call chatin—handlebar moustache like the old man’s, Raleigh showed us around, explaining to a greenhorn as well as he could. He showed me the old fashioned but serviceable cane mill and the pans for boiling cane. Raleigh ground and boiled cane for the entire community; the cans he has sent me prove that he turns out a good product. In a dark shed, he found a bottle of cane bière, from which he offered me a drink.
The yellowish and oily liquid did not look appetizing, but since I was under scrutiny, I took a couple of gulps. I gasped as it went down. I thought I had sun-stroke. In that summer heat, with an early afternoon sun glaring down on the top of my head, I realized that drinking cane bière wasn’t smart. The old man and his sons, however, tossed down good swigs of the stuff, and laughed at my misery.
On a small phonograph in the front room Raleigh played a few of his records. Most of his favorites were Cajun songs; they seemed to me to be hillbilly songs translated into French. Hearing them I thought of the musical oddity of French melody with Cajun words to Negro or hillbilly ragtime and Swiss yodeling thrown in for good measure, but my analysis may have been influenced by the cane bière. The singing was mournful. I bought a few of these records in Opelousas, where they were as popular as their hillbilly cousins in other parts of the South; even in the juke boxes in Negro places, Cajun bands jostled Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers.
We talked about farming, the threatening war, the South, Louisiana, and Gus. “You be sure to tell my son, Gus, now, to come back to see his old father,” the old man ordered. “Tell him it is a long time now.” He tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his heel. “What kind of Tobak you smoking?” he asked. I offered him my pouch. He looked at the mixture that was then my pride. “Humph,” he said, scornfully. “Cocktail tobacco.” He filled his pipe, and smoked contentedly.
I got to know Abe and Alan, the middle brothers, best. Abe took me on long rides over the parish: over the Teche Country, the Evangeline Country, from Washington to Lafayette. I got many views of the Big Teche and the Little Teche; sometimes at night when the still, black water seemed sinister; sometimes in the daylight, when I could see the flowers, too lush, too beautiful, too perfumed, covering the oily, poisonous-looking blackness. The gloomy, ancient trees dripping moss were too often the roosting places of carencros. On the way to St. Martinsville I saw sun-swept rice fields and heard an obliging colored Creole farmer explain the methods of irrigation and drying. One of the sights of St. Martinsville itself was the Evangeline Oak. Local tradition has it that Evangeline and Gabriel finally met at this moss-hung live-oak; but, harsher than Longfellow’s poem, the tale goes that Gabriel had found another love in those long years, and Evangeline became grief-crazy.
Folktales that I heard of the Cajuns convinced me that Longfellow’s gentle peasants had also altered for the worse; I heard of the cracker-like prejudices of Villeplatte particularly, and when we drove through that town we gave it the once-over lightly. I was disabused of the prejudice that “crackerishness” was an Anglo-Saxon monopoly, for according to the tales I heard, poor-white Acadian French hated Negroes in the same manner and degree as did the poor-white Scotch Irish.
A dozen or so miles from Lafayette, we noticed the lights of a car weaving across the road, coming toward us lickety-split. Abe swerved to the shoulder of the road; the careening car struck our rear fender and wheels and went into the ditch. Abe stopped within about fifty feet and went back. A runabout Ford was on its side in the ditch. The road seemed full of Cajuns, jabbering their patois excitedly. There were ten of them, nobody badly hurt; the girls were in fluffy party dresses, the fellows in ordinary clothes. Soon several cars drove up and stopped. The Cajun spokesman, a ruddy blonde with crimpy hair, gestured and fumed, but in the glare of the headlights the slanting course of his wheels across the line to the ditch was unmistakable. Alan talked for us; he looked more like a Cajun than any of the rest, and he knew the tongue. The Cajuns, living near Lafayette, just coming home from a dance, were given lifts by passing motorists; soon they were all gone. We looked at the runabout; the rumble-seat was full of empty bottles of a cheap, native wine.
The highway policeman was kindly disposed to Alan and Abe, who were clearly in the right. He nodded his head when he saw the bottles. He was a strapping fellow, brunette and swarthy, like Abe. In his report, he said, he would certainly absolve Abe. He mounted his motorcycle, waved friendly to us, and was off.
Abe’s car was unusable; the wheels had been knocked out of line. We pushed it to the shoulder, dangerously close to the vine-covered ditch. Abe and Alan decided to stay by the car; the rest of us were to get to Lafayette where a bus would take us along another road to Opelousas. A passing truck gave us a lift; I stood on the little step serving for a running board, with the wind beating my face, and watched ahead as well as I could to gauge the curves. All in all it was a wild night for me. In Opelousas I had to find and wake up Henri Lemel, an auto mechanic and a friend of ours, go with him to the house of his boss, and get the keys for the repair truck. We got no answer from ringing the bell, so we walked around the large yard calling. The watchdog, overlarge and overfaithful, charged us dangerously close, barking every time we yelled. Finally we got the keys, got the truck, and went to Abe’s home. His people were to call Abe’s and Alan’s bosses the next morning to explain their absence. The mother came to the door, shading an oil lamp with her hand. She was sick with worry: the boys had been due back hours ago. She told me, plaintively, that she had been watching the clock; that first when she saw the little needle on two and the big needle on twelve, she had confused them, and then she heard the clock strike the truth: two o’clock. She blamed me somewhat, I knew, for their making the long trip, and though I told her that nobody was hurt, she was unconvinced. She knew something would happen to her boys that far away, that late at night.
Dawn was graying when our truck reached the place of the accident. When day cleared, we had the car hoisted ready for towing. Over a slight rise the road-cop appeared. He looked at Henri, who is light brown, and at me, then closer at Abe and Alan. He became curter, more officious than he was the night before. He went back to the runabout, muddy and rusty, its radiator jammed in the vines. “He’ll never drive that again.” He had said that he had been thinking about the accident and asking questions. Maybe our lights had been too bright. At any rate, we wouldn’t get a penny if we sued; the young fellow driving the runabout did not have a quarter. Alan pointed out the slanting tracks and was inclined to argue. Henri said that Abe’s car was badly damaged. The cop stuck his fingers in his black belt. “You’d better let the whole thing drop. It was good luck that didn’t nobody get hurt.” And he roared off on his motorcycle, authoritative, ponderous, martial in his gray uniform, leather belt and puttees and holster, one of Huey Long’s proud cossacks.
I remember one other thing, however, quite as vividly. As we sat there, digesting the advice from the officer of the law, a Cajun farmer appeared across the road as if from nowhere. We could not see any house around. He walked slowly and carefully. As he came closer we saw that he was bearded, long-haired, roughly dressed, a typical poor farmer. He had a cup of coffee in his hand. He offered it to us, to pick us up, to keep us going. The cup was heavy pottery. All four of us drank a sip of the coffee, which was muddy, black, and oversweet, with a lot of chicory in it. It was not hot; in the trip from his invisible house it had cooled somewhat; but it was warming to the stomach and to the heart. I can still see old Frenchy brushing through the cane, on which the morning dew sparkled in the sunlight like diamonds.
Later I offered to pay Abe part of the repair bill. He flushed at the suggestion, and told me impatiently that I was his guest and that I had nothing to do with it. I could not get through his pride, though. I felt guilty that I could not. Both he and Alan, and from all I learned, the whole family, were proud and sensitive. Good, swift, Gascon pride. Alan’s quick was probably most exposed. When I left, he shook my hand, looked away, and said, “Now you’re going off just to make fun of us in your writing.” Nothing was further from my heart and mind, but he couldn’t know that.
Now after four or five years, I was back. They were warm in welcoming me to the family reunion for Gus. Much water had flowed under the bridge. Abe was now the district manager of an insurance company; he was married to a brownskin girl named Anita; definitely darker than any of the other in-laws, but a live-wire if ever there was one, charming, ambitious, and hard-working. The family had got over their color-prejudices in her case. Alan was the father of a bouncing family, and was therefore bouncing himself. The youngsters had grown up; one was in a Beaumont, Texas, shipyard, another was soon to go into the Navy, where Abe also is now serving. Gussie, the youngest daughter, had grown into a deep-eyed, beautiful young woman.
My schedule, like the train and bus schedules, was running late; I was a day overdue. I had missed an outing on the Atchafalaya River, where the men of the tribe had caught an amazing number of carp, barbus patasa, and a Louisiana trout. The hunting trip had been called off because of my lateness. They didn’t like this; they bawled me out; they wanted me to bear witness to their angling and shooting skill in this country noted for fine game and fishing. But they made up with their fish stories, big ones, as expected. Gus described the river outing with descriptive detail unexpected in a public accountant. The way he spoke of the luncheon of courbillion cooked in moss made me hungry.
Well, I had missed out on the fishing trip, but Gussie and Anita heaped a plate with barbecue, potato salad, spicy tomato and celery salad, country bread, topped off with a mountainous slice of coconut cake. The old man watched me eat with complacence. In spite of my deficiencies it looked like I could put away a man-sized meal, anyway. He sat there rocking, clutching a squat bottle of King’s Ransom Scotch whisky in his arms like a baby. It was one of the presents Gus had brought. The vieux pulled out the cork and let the younger men sample the aroma, briefly, then he corked it again. None of the young whippersnapper’s brigands would even get to taste his treasure, he told us. It was a good day. Rolls of film were used up; the younger ones posing grotesquely, the old man posing like the handsome old codger he was, the little mother, sober-faced and tense, facing the camera as an ordeal. There were races; relay teams with each member running about a hundred yards from one end of the barnlot to the fence and back again, the young girls swift and graceful as gazelles. Nelson, one of the in-laws, stumbled on the uneven turf and fell, and the crowd whooped with laughter. When my team won I got no credit as the anchor man; my legs were so long, they told me, I ought to be able to run well.
As we walked to some of the fields near the house, the old man gravely discussed his problems: it was hard to get farm help; most of his sons had left the land. From the looks of his Poland China hogs—he snorted when I mentioned Berkshires which my father had raised—and his corn, cane, yam, and cotton fields, it seemed to me that his yield would certainly be a good one. But no; he had his worries and he wanted to talk with someone about them. His heart was in his land, but the hearts of most of his sons were not there.
Toward sunset, the kinfolk hugged and kissed Gus, shook hands all around, and wished me Godspeed. When the last young one was found and safely stowed away in the cars and the large truck with chairs in the bed, they drove off, with great yelling and blowing of horns. Gus’s homecoming party had been a rousing success.
Gus took me around later to talk with many of his kinsfolk who had not been present at the homecoming. Way back off the main road we visited his Aunt Vèronique. She was old now, but there was little gray in her heavy black hair; one could see that she had been striking looking; she looked like a Frenchwoman. And of course she was. She and Gus were overjoyed to see each other. She had taught the pure French to Gus as a lad, not the Creole distortions, and Gus was a Dumas enthusiast because of the hours she had spent reading The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo to him in the original. The glow from the lamp was not bright, but I could see and feel the fine old red bindings on the small library of French classics that she had there. With the two of them talking away in French, Gus less sure, Aunt Vèronique fluent and precise and musical, with the lamplight glinting on the highly colored crucifix and Catholic emblems on the white clay walls, it was easy to imagine that I was in a farm home in France rather than in the American South. I could only isolate a word here and there, my French of Williamstown and North Adams not serving me here. When Aunt Vèronique looked at me for response, I feebly said “Yes” or “No.” I knew when they talked of me, however; I heard Gus advertise The Negro Caravan and heard him speak of this book that I was working on. She murmured, “Ah, des Noirs, Des Pauvres Noirs.” I was glad to hear her express such sympathy, but Gus told me later that she felt sorry for the victimized Negroes in America, but, true to the attitude of the older Creoles, certainly did not identify herself with them. She was speaking as a humanitarian outsider.
I also met an uncle, who was a character. Regretful at his lack of schooling, he had taught himself to read, and with some of the proceeds from his cotton had bought a set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica from a traveling book agent. He had read it from cover to cover. Naturally, he could talk well on any subject, and he had memorized much of the teachings of the experts. He had laid this massive pile on a foundation of common sense and peasant shrewdness. His wife, however, quarreled with him because of his intellectual searchings, and he was forced to read his beloved Encyclopaedia in an outshed, by the light of a farm lantern. Father Hyland, one of the best-loved of the priests, had held him up to the people as an example. “If Jimmy Auzenne can do so much without a single day of schooling, how much more should you accomplish with schools and teachers available?” he would ask his laggards. But they considered Jimmy a sage and a miracle.
Jimmy’s wife’s hostility to learning was not peculiar to her. Père Auzenne agreed in a measure. He was not enthusiastic about his younger children’s going farther in school than the Holy Ghost High School in Opelousas. The older children had gone to normal school or college, and they had left the land. I saw evidence of the tug-of-war, the old patriarch stubborn, the young ones in grim though not open-voiced rebellion. Gus was their ally, but the old man clung to his point. Gus did not know. Had he not been the first to leave the land? A young woman, now, had no need for college education; she should get married, keep a clean house for her husband, raise up strong sons to keep the ancestral fields joined together.
The old ones refreshed Gus’s memory of the history of Frilot Cove, and he passed it on to me with the fervor of a research student.
Of the propertied Creoles in Opelousas, Gus singled out the story of Simeon Birotte. Birotte owned considerable land near the town and along the Bayou Teche, which tenant farmers work on halves. In addition, Birotte ran a dairy and a livery stable, but his chief source of income was a thriving store in the heart of the town. One late afternoon, Birotte dropped dead as he was closing the store.
The story then follows familiar lines. Birotte’s right-hand man was Auguste Crouchet, a poor white of Cajun stock, with a shrewd eye for the main chance. He had started as a handyman around the barnlot and as a wagoner, but as Birotte’s enterprises increased, his position improved. Birotte’s widow, against the advice of her brothers, kept the store open, and Crouchet became manager. Shortly after, the Crouchet family, once humbly housed, erected an imposing dwelling. A few years later the Birotte store closed, but Crouchet opened a quite elaborate undertaking establishment and a livery stable. Even after the store failed, however, Madame Birotte still had large land-holdings and wealth. In her will she named Crouchet as executor of her estate. She wished first “que toutes mes honnêtes dettes soient payées.” The substantial residue of her property, she be-queathed to her close kin. But they never got it. Instead, all of her property, both real and personal, was sold at auction. None of the heirs ever knew how much money was realized at this auction. None of them received a cent from the estate. Certain prominent townsmen offered their aid to force a settlement, but the matter was left undercover. But the descendants of the original heirs know the history and are rankled by the trickery and robbery committed with what they firmly believe was connivance of the law.
The people were glad that Gus had come home so they could express some of the thoughts and feelings with which their minds and hearts were brimful. They might accept an outsider like me as a friend, but their sensitivity to criticism kept them on the defensive about the church, the school system, the law. But Gus was bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; he would never misunderstand; he knew what had conditioned them; he shared to a degree their prejudices and preferences. He had made good in the large outside world; he had a position of high responsibility; he had the power, then, and the knowledge to set about getting the long-wanted changes. Older men who had taught Gus how to ride a horse, shoot a gun, grow cotton, and grind cane, came to him humbly as to a father confessor. They told him what they would not tell their priests, even. And they expected him to do something about it.
So Frilot Cove and Opelousas were not as Gus remembered them; they had changed, and he had changed. Opelousas was still a drowsy, apparently peaceful town, but the sleep was not a good one. There were too many signs even more glaring than the “white” and “colored” on the drinking fountains and park benches, for instance; the streets and sidewalks where the colored people lived were never paved. If whites and Negroes lived on the same street, generally the whites lived on the side where paved walk was, or more accurately, the town paved the walk on the white folks’ side. Even the few homes of the better-off Negroes, the doctor, the small shopkeepers, the artisans, were on unpaved, undrained streets, dusty in the dry season, treacherous in a slight rain, sloughs in a heavy downpour.
The only Negro school for the town was a two-story tinder-box, with a fire-escape from the front porch stressing the danger rather than seeming to be a protection. The school board rents an annex from the Colored Odd Fellows, but the school is still so packed that it should burst at the seams anytime. A small homemade drinking fountain with six pipes sticking out of what resembles a watering trough furnishes water for the hundreds of school children. “A good place to suck up septic sore throat,” said the Jeanes teacher.
Charles S. Johnson and his associates had just published their findings on the Negro educational facilities in the Louisiana Education Survey. It was an objective, unanswerable report of a bad mess. Copies were not easily available, but Gus got hold of one, and pored over the shameful record with rising anger.
Gus went to work to prepare a supplementary survey of the educational situation at Frilot Cove. His summary was as follows: Frilot Cove is a community of seventy-nine heads of families who own their property and pay taxes. There are 132 children of grade school age whose educational facilities are a two-room schoolhouse and two teachers. Of twenty-seven pupils of high school age and preparation, only nine attend the high school in Opelousas, fifteen miles away, and three of these use bicycles for the trip. The forebears of the people in Frilot Cove were the original owners of the land. For nearly a century, the people of Frilot Cove have paid taxes to the State. They form a homogeneous, law-abiding community, with no members ever indicted or accused of any crime or misdemeanor. In six decades the total appropriation made by the Parish to the physical improvement of the public school at Frilot Cove had been less than $500. Yet, according to Gus’s careful estimates, some individuals at Frilot Cove have paid taxes amounting to nearly $400 annually, and averaging taxes per head of families at ten dollars a year over six decades, the people have paid approximately $50,000 in taxes to the state.
Gus found the church situation also unsatisfactory. There was no church at the Cove. Father Cooney used the little school house, built chiefly at the expense of the community and by its labor, to celebrate mass on Sunday morning. Contributions are compulsory, and if no money is forthcoming, commodities must be. The people feel that their gifts are being used in Opelousas, fifteen miles away. Three miles nearer Opelousas, at Andrepont, a church has been erected for the white Catholics, who are outnumbered by the Creoles of Frilot Cove. Father Cooney accedes to many of the regional practices. In paying the colored teachers at the Holy Ghost School in Opelousas, for instance, he had the checks delivered by a boy student; on the envelopes there was only the first name of the teacher. Upon questioning, Father Cooney stated that he thought that the teachers preferred to be called by their first names, and without any title, and he refused to alter the practice.
One shocking revelation was the story of Father Carmen George Chacheré. Gus told it in cold anger, his usually rapid speech slow and restrained as if he did not want me to miss a detail. The story’s ending was almost unbelievable. But a field investigator for the Carnegie-Myrdal study had written it up from an interview with the bedridden Papa Chacheré. Face to face with death, Papa Chacheré had probably brooded over his shattered hopes, and he talked frankly for a man whose long years had been obedient and faithful to the Catholic Church. Gus had pieced out the story from nearly whispered confidences here and there; he was certain that the interviewer’s story from the dying bed was true. I could not have got the story, Gus told me; for all of my acceptance in the community, the people were wary of seeming to criticize the Church to one not of the faith. A friend of mine, however, teaching at Lincoln University, has heard the story, substantially the same, told by a student from Opelousas. It was part of a hidden local lore.
George Chacheré was an altar boy in the Opelousas Holy Ghost Catholic Church and the smartest youngster in the school. Papa Chacheré had high dreams: his boy George was going to be a priest. The Creole neighbors were skeptical: that was a good dream now, but so far from their experience. They had never seen a Negro priest themselves.
The family worked hard for their dream. The final money before George left for the Seminary came from the sale of two hogs and a mortgage on the small farm. While George was studying Papa Chacheré sold his farm and moved to Opelousas; from a farmer and landowner he became a butcher’s helper, and Mama Chacheré took in washing for the whitefolks. They and the younger ones lived beside the railroad tracks off of Market Street, desperately poor. But for all the shabbiness of the clothing that the Chacherés wore to morning mass, Papa Chacheré was as proud as anyone there. His son was doing fine at school; it was like a miracle.
When George traveled to Rome to be ordained at the hands of Pope Pius himself, Papa Chacheré’s happiness was boundless. Mama Chacheré rebuked him for showing off; a priest’s father should be dignified, she thought. But there was great excuse. George, now Father Carmen George Chacheré, toured Europe with fellow priests; they were greeted by cheering crowds of the faithful, even in Nazi Germany.
America, however, was different. Though notified, no priests greeted Father Chacheré on his long trip home to Louisiana. But the young priest bothered less about Jim Crow than he concentrated on his sturdy hopes: he would have a clinic for the sick ones, hot lunches for the students, a nursery for the little ones. Like St. Francis, his ministry would be among the poor and the weak and the outcast.
The white priest of the parish was not among the excited Creoles and “American” Negroes and Cajuns and American whites whose curiosity and local pride brought them to the little Opelousas depot. It was said that the father was sick, or out of town; in either case he was very sorry. But the muttering of the people went on: “It was a damn shame de Good Father couldn’t greet de only colored Priest dey ever had.”
The people that confided in Gus were bitter about Father Chacheré’s first direct snubbing. Reporting to Father Long at the Parish Home, he was kept waiting for forty minutes. There was no room at the Parish Home for him as yet, Father Long told him; he was sorry but it was irregular for the Parish Home to have a colored occupant; of course Father Chacheré wouldn’t mind staying with his parents in their little home. So Father Chacheré went to live along the railroad tracks.
The real shock came on the day of Father Chacheré’s first mass. From all over the parish, afoot, or riding mules or horses, or in wagons, trucks, and cars, the people came to see and hear their son hold his first mass.
The young priest’s happiness was sharply cut across. At the church entrance, Father Long was demanding from the crowd that all who wanted to witness Father Chacheré’s first mass should have their quarters ready. In amazed anger, Father Chacheré asked that no more money be collected, that in the name of St. Francis, his poor friends might be allowed to worship with him at his first mass without the extra toll. He was ordered to go to the altar; the matter of admission was not his province. Those who had no quarters Father Long turned away.
Father Chacheré’s first mass was held on August 6, 1939; he died at his home August 15, 1939. The doctors said his death resulted from a heart attack. The people say that his heart was broken.
Gus showed me a prayer for the dead young priest that Father Long printed. It was a folded square bordered with heavy black; on the front is a picture of Jesus and Mary standing over a dying man. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints,” reads the legend, taken from the Psalms. On the second page there is a photograph of the dead Priest. He seems light brown in color; his hair is close-cropped and curly, his eyes are deep set and brooding; the face is that of a melancholic, meditative boy, seeming younger than his thirty years. On the third page is the prayer: “In your charity pray for the soul of Rev. Carmen Geo. Chacheré, S.V.D.” The last page is given over to De Profundis, beginning, “Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice.” The people say that Father Long sold the prayer at the funeral for ten cents a copy.
I saw a snapshot of Papa Chacheré holding a picture of his son. The old fellow is handsome, sturdily built, but stooping slightly. He holds the picture as something precious. He is staring at the camera; the expression on his face is quizzical and sad. The young Creole who took the picture has written on the back: “Papa Chacheré ain’t so gay as he used to be. Sometime he just stand and look quiet-like.”
In telling Gus about all this, in overcoming their usual caution and timidity concerning the Church, his kinfolk had stressed that there had been good priests as well. Gus wanted me to know this, too.
When Gus’s brother and sister saw him take the plane for Washington at the New Orleans Airport, they were saddened. They may have seen the roaring plane carrying their brother back to the North, back to his job, as a long farewell. But I knew that he had been upset; that he would be back; and that he was geared now to work for his people at Frilot Cove.
As he said later, “This is a matter more important than anything I have ever undertaken, and I cannot afford to fail.” He has put at my disposal a stout black notebook in which his voluminous correspondence about Frilot Cove and Opelousas is carefully filed.
His first efforts were on behalf of the schools. He prepared a digest of twenty-five pages of the findings on Negro schools in the Louisiana Educational Survey and sent copies to interested parties, or parties that should have been interested. He wrote letters to Governor Sam Jones and to the Director of Public Schools for Negroes in the state of Louisiana, enclosing copies of the digest. He received no reply from either one; it’s possible, he said, that the communication to the governor never reached his desk. After a conference with Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel of New Orleans, he wrote him a letter expressing the belief that “the officials of the St. Landry Parish have systematically and continually ignored the educational needs of the people of Frilot Cove, in spite of repeated requests and their status as tax payers.” He mentioned an earlier Rosenwald project to erect a school at Frilot Cove, to which the parish officials would not agree. In the past year these officials had required the school to raise forty dollars for the U.S.O. and the Red Cross, yet the total value of the equipment of the school would not exceed fifteen dollars.
But his efforts seemed to run up against a stone wall. After about a year of correspondence and a conference in Baton Rouge he heard from the state superintendent of schools: “I wish to assure you again that I appreciated your calling. We sincerely hope to bring about improvements not only in the Frilot Cove community but throughout the state as regards the status of education for children of the colored race.” A representative of philanthropical agencies interested in rural education in the South promised to look into the situation at Frilot Cove. Not used to the kid-glove technique in handling state departments of education, Gus informed the state superintendent of the proposed visit. The representative felt that this jeopardized his usefulness. “To make it appear that I was coming to Louisiana in order to investigate the Frilot Cove situation is putting the matter in a very different light and I am sure now that somebody else could be much more useful to you in this matter.” In spite of rebuffs here, indifference there, the necessity for “diplomatic dealings” that a novice in interracial techniques cannot understand, Gus remains doggedly hopeful.
His second determination was to get a resident priest for Frilot Cove. Since the state was so slow to act, the church, as it had done before, might aid educationally as well as religiously. He wrote letters to the Rt. Rev. Monseigneur Fulton J. Sheen of Catholic University; Father Lafarge, noted for his interest in Negro welfare; Saint Mary Frances, Dean of Xavier University in New Orleans; and Father Hylan, his friend of long standing. Advised to go through the proper channels, he wrote a letter to Bishop Jeanmard, of Lafayette, in whose diocese Frilot Cove was located. He told the bishop of a boyhood memory of one winter night when his mother lay on her deathbed and his father rode on horseback fifteen miles to Opelousas to get a priest for the dying sacrament. Today, he wrote the bishop, the condition has not materially changed: “Coupled with poor and inadequate school facilities, it has resulted in stagnation among the people of the community and to a great extent aroused a sort of suspicion of their faith in the Catholic Church. I say this with no intention of alarming; but there is no vision, very little hope, and above all, no leadership.”
The Bishop’s first letter advises Gus not to be so exercised: “There has been a great improvement in the educational and religious facilities offered to the people of Frilot Cove.” At the school, for instance, mass is said once on Saturday, twice a month on Sundays. The Bishop points out that the priest found fifty-two, not seventy-nine, families in the community and “At no time did these good people make any move to build a chapel for their own accommodation.” The Bishop sees no grounds for Gus’s complaints; the fact is, he writes, “the colored people within the limits of the ecclesiastical parish of Opelousas have more priests designated to look after them and are receiving more attention than the white people.”
Gus showed himself ready to argue about the number of families, and stuck to his guns in general, making use of Pope Pius XI’s condemnation of racism. His people “had but two supports, the good earth (of which they owned little) and more important, the deep wells of Catholic faith. . . . Small wonder that the toll of time has made their land sterile and parched considerably the wellsprings of Faith. . . . There is very little that anyone outside the community can tell me about these people, their faith, the educational facilities, and the mission of the Catholic Church in our community.”
Bishop Jeanmard replied that Father Cooney, who has charge of the people of Frilot Cove, would gladly undertake the building of the chapel, if the money could be found for this purpose. Frilot Cove, he believes, can contribute very little, $200 at most: “The Sunday collections bring between three and five dollars a Sunday, scarcely enough to pay for gasoline and the wear and tear of the car.” The Bishop and Father Cooney wanted to know how much money Gus could collect toward the building of the chapel: “I beg you to believe that we are doing the best we can with the limited means and the limited number of priests at our disposal. All in all, Frilot Cove is faring much better than most communities of its size in the diocese. I must try to be impartial and give priority to those whose need is greater, as long as conditions do not permit me to provide adequate care for all.”
In a sympathetic letter to Gus, Father Lafarge also urged the financial difficulties of the missions. Nevertheless, Gus believed that he had found a solution. He was confident that he could raise sufficient funds for the construction and equipment of a chapel. But a resident priest must be secured. The amount of local support would increase if it were known that there would be a resident priest; he would himself be reluctant to undertake the responsibility of raising funds to build a church unless the Cove was assured of one. He deplored the shortage of priests, but since the war had closed many foreign mission activities, he knew that several communities of priests had turned their resources to missions of the South. He quoted Pope Pius XI: “Why should the native clergy be forbidden to cultivate their own portion of the Lord’s vineyard, be forbidden to govern their own people. . . . For since the native priest, by birth, temper, sentiment, and interests, is in close touch with his own people, it is beyond all controversy how valuable he can be in instilling the Faith into the minds of the people.” Fortunately, Gus wrote, he had found such a native, one of the few colored students preparing themselves for the priesthood.
To Gus, the logic was simple and clear. Frilot Cove stood in great need of a resident priest; a native of the section could perform the best service; and a native priest would be available. But the Church Fathers did not see it so simply, as Father Hylan wrote Gus. By this time, Gus realized that he had to step carefully.
Bishop Jeanmard informed Gus that various religious communities were assigned given territories, and that Canon Law does not permit him to introduce a priest of another community in their territory without their approval and consent. To ask this consent could be interpreted as a reflection on their zeal and devotion: “In view of this I feel that it would be a loss of time and effort on your part to try to secure the services of a priest of another religious community for the Cove.” If permission could be obtained, however, from the Provincial of the Holy Ghost Fathers, who were in charge of Frilot Cove, the Bishop promised not to stand in the way.
After a conference with the Father Superior of the Most Holy Trinity where the young colored priest was completing his studies, Gus was convinced that Father Superior would assign the priest to Frilot Cove, if he was invited. Gus then applied to Father Collins, Provincial of the Holy Ghost Fathers, telling him of “the native son from our own people who will complete his studies during the coming year.” He requested an interview. Gus was much struck by the congeniality and broad-minded democracy of Father Collins, who listened with interest and left no question with Gus that he would willingly cede the territory to another mission if assured that it would be in good hands. Father Collins visited Frilot Cove afterwards, most cordially, according to letters that Gus received from home.
And then the well-laid plans somehow went astray. Father O’Keefe, Vicar of the Most Holy Trinity, wrote that his investigation revealed that “the mission of Frilot Cove was canonically assigned to the Holy Ghost Fathers,” as Gus had known all along. Father O’Keefe had not intended to give the impression that he would appoint a “native son” to the work of Frilot Cove: “We could not promise to appoint any particular priest to the work.” Furthermore, it “would not be right for us to make any advances toward, or consider any proposal for, placing one of our priests there. . . . The record of the Holy Ghost Fathers, particularly in this instance . . . speaks for itself. I am sure that, in God’s time, your prayerful hopes for Frilot Cove will be realized. In accordance with the above mentioned decision, I have notified the Provincial of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Father Collins, that we could not further consider the matter. While this may be a disappointment to you, I trust you will try to see it as the will of God. Our work always is to seek and submit ourselves to that will which is made manifest to us through the Authority He has constituted in His Church. Be assured that we shall keep prayerfully mindful of you.”
But for all his strict Catholic upbringing, Gus does not see this decision as the will of God. To him it smacks more of an ecclesiastical runaround. He is still determined, as he wrote to Father Hylan, “to provide the Cove with a spiritual center—a powerhouse—something they have always esteemed but never possessed—a Chapel of their own with a resident pastor and father of his flock.” They were good people, his people, and they had been too long deprived. “If it’s the last thing I do,” Gus said to me solemnly, “I’m going to straighten that thing out.” Meanwhile, the war has scattered one generation to all corners: in Texas and California shipyards, in the Army and Navy training stations, and on board ships sailing to places like Reykjavik and Buna that were not in the old geographies. When these young ones come back to Frilot Cove, if they do, they will have much to say about what goes on there.
Finis . . .