ON THE GOVERNMENT This section aptly demonstrates that Brown wrote with a sense of the original version of the U.S. Constitution in mind. The framers of our most significant governing document were forced to a compromise between Northern and Southern states’ moneyed interests. On the issue of taxation, they finally agreed that African American slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Even though slavery was eventually outlawed and the “three-fifths compromise” overturned, the spirit of the law lived on, kept alive by the practices of Jim Crow. For Brown, this legacy of a fractionalized existence was particularly disturbing. He was especially troubled when the Carnegie-Myrdal Study emerged with its infamous thesis about “victimized Negroes” and Negro culture as little more than a pathological condition of the general American culture. Brown set about refuting all of these claims. His “Jim Crow Journal” was intended to present a number of “entries” that, when collected, would present an entirely different version of reality from the prevailing one in American thought. In providing a collective portrait of black life “behind the veil,” Brown presents a much broader racial portrait—one demonstrating rather remarkably the strength, courage, philosophical wit, and wisdom of a people.
Although not schematically drawn, much of “Jim Crow Journal” falls in one of two categories: humor or horror. “V for Victory,” for example, recounts Brown’s chance meeting with two Northern white naval cadets. Ironically, as the conductor kicks the cadets out of the Jim Crow railroad car, one flashes Brown the “V” sign. “Jim Crow Snapshots” and “Fats” come closer to the humorous tradition found in Brown’s poetry. “Jim Crow Snapshots” appears almost tomfoolery in plot. The train conductor is the only white person in an overpacked car of African Americans. Behind his back, two blacks, forced to stand because of the overcrowded conditions, speak in a humorous double entendre. The unsuspecting conductor’s discomfort rises as the misunderstood comments increase. He departs not knowing that he’s been artfully manipulated by the skillful orators. “Fats” is very nearly out of the American tall-tale tradition made famous by Mark Twain. The Jim Crow railroad car is transformed into a performative environment, and Brown becomes the “greenhorn” or outsider whom the master liar Fats plays on and educates. In each of these instances, the exercise of humor becomes the exercise of control over the Jim Crow situation.
Counterbalanced by the humor, though, is Jim Crow at its worse: its potential for horror. In “A Harvardian Goes South,” Brown creates a fictional version of himself to relate an incident that no doubt actually occurred. As the Southern white gas attendant pours gasoline over the car and Brown’s shoes, the reader is forced to contemplate the frightening display of power that held black life to be dirt cheap. Black life is also treated as tenuous in “Georgia Nymphs,” in which Brown and his guide are forced to acknowledge that their lives hang in the balance between a group of flirtatious white girls and a group of suspicious white men. In 1944, a black man expressing the smallest hint of interest in white women was, of course, sufficient cause for a lynching in this backwoods Alabama town. At the same time, any hint of reprisal at the jostling both experienced as they descended the stairs from observing night court would have provided enough incentive for their lynching, too. The feeling of powerlessness Brown re-creates here is matched only by the emotional intensity expressed so poignantly in his masterful poem “Old Lem.”
In this setting, though, African American love does exist. Originally titled “Romance in the Dark,” “Words on a Bus” is a poignant story of flirtation and courtship. “Separate but Equal” points to the efforts of black railroad workers to unionize and therefore improve their working conditions. Published originally as a short story, “And/Or” is a piece of reportage intended to highlight the tenacity of one man’s efforts to register to vote. The first selection presented here, and one of the most hopeful pieces in this collection, is “On the Government,” which concludes its discussion of Greene County in Georgia with “restoring the land, restoring the people.” It affirms how the federal government, through its Farm Security Administration, can intervene in and improve the lot of poor black farmers, whose lives have been wracked by boll weevils, soil erosion, and poor farming techniques.
ON THE GOVERNMENT When Eugene Talmadge campaigned in Greensboro, Georgia, his stock assault on the Rosenwald Fund was peculiarly ironic. Other sections of the state had profited from Rosenwald funds in education, but Greene County had an added debt. A Rosenwald fellowship enabled Arthur Raper to complete Preface to Peasantry, a thorough study of the county’s possibilities and needs. This book attracted the attention of Will W. Alexander, a director of the Rosenwald Fund, and led to his interest in Greene County as Administrator of the Farm Security Administration. Because of this interest, the county has been “on the government” for four years, and all of the demagoguery in the world cannot destroy the facts of its progress.
Arthur Raper has written three works on Greene County, his doctor’s thesis (1931), Preface to Peasantry (1936), and Tenants of the Almighty (1943) which traces the county’s social history. Greene County was once fertile and prosperous, but concentrating on cotton after the Civil War, it slowly declined in fertility and wealth. Dairy farming in the early years of this century brought back something of prosperity, but another war, bringing in forty-cent cotton, returned the county to cotton farming and trouble.
Tenants of the Almighty ran weekly in the Greensboro Herald-Journal as Greene’s Going Great, a careful, frank but sympathetic account that seemed to me to be unusual in Southern journalism. Raper’s prose is familiar, close to the language of the region, studded with anecdotes. Prosperity meant: “Trace chains and mule collars, axes and hoes, bull tongue plows and scooters, overalls and brogans, meal and molasses, fatback and salmon, moved off the shelves faster than ever before. There were more sales for bedsteads and split bottom chairs, for guitars and phonographs, and for moonshine liquor, too. . . . Sally, those folks at Greensboro have convinced me I’m a rich man. Let’s have fried chicken everyday.” But though the boll weevil came to Greene a few years later than to neighboring counties, the land still wasn’t “weevil proof.” A shower was all right, but two or three cloudy days would mean additional young cotton squares on the ground. The cotton bubble burst. The small farmers’ hopes of becoming owners were knocked out; it would not be easy for newspapers or a government agency to restore them. Thousands lost their farms; the chief export of the county was its people, and often the better educated of the people. Bermuda grass, crab grass, and weeds took the fields first. Then came the waving broom sedge. And then through the matted sedge came a million, million little pines, silent and green. The best soil washed away. Before the Civil War, one observer, standing on the Oconee bridge when the river was in flood, said, “See there goes Greene County under the bridge.” “Yes,” was the answer, “and it’s too thick to drink and too thin to plow!”
The loan companies took thousands of the barren acres. About one-eighth of the county’s acreage was forfeited for taxes or to creditors. Efforts were made to stem the tide of ruin. Goobers were introduced as a substitute crop, but soon that attempt failed. Marketing the thousands of rabbits shot and trapped in the broom sedge and pines brought in some money, and then a blight killed the rabbits as the weevil had killed the cotton. Sawmilling flourished briefly until a half century’s timber growth was gone. The little pines kept growing. Distilling of bootleg liquor became big business and then government raids broke that up. An article on Greene County in Collier’s called “Devil in de Cotton” was resented locally for “parading our poverty” and condemned by the grand jury as “scurrilous, unwarranted and unnecessary.” But there was no hiding the collapse of cotton farming in this county.
One of the assistants to the farm management supervisor is a Negro, James Gay. He is a graduate of Georgia State College and for several years has been demonstrating and teaching scientific farming. He was solid, chunky, built like a football guard or tackle; he didn’t talk much, but what he said was bluntly to the point. He was raised in this section, but he told me he knew a mean cracker when he saw one: “But nobody has known me to cut any corners yet.”
Though busy (it was his afternoon for candling eggs), he was willing to drive me around to see some of his members of the project. All were not doing equally well, and he selected good, indifferent and bad samples. He talked to the people easily, familiarly, and they responded in kind. At the first home the four women folks were apologetic about the way they looked. But they were canning, and their pride in the gaily colored jars overcame their dismay at being mussed and sweaty. A few words of praise emboldened one of the sisters, who told us how hot it was working over that stove. Of course they all wanted to fill their quota: “But you know, Mr. Gay, I ain’t had no vacation since Lawd knows when.”
Gay told me as we drove off how strict FSA had to be for people unaccustomed to steady, incessant working. Some of the folks just would not keep up even with the minimum requirements, and after reasonable trials had to be dropped. Most, however, measured up well. In one house, a woman showed us happily a dresser she had just bought, with a large mirror. “You know how I bought that, Mr. Gay?” she asked, timidly.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll bet you bought it with that money you made selling sour cream.”
“I sho’ did.” She was tickled, she had profited by Gay’s advice that selling sour cream was one way to provide the little extra money that they needed for the things that spelled home. He told her now to scrape the old flecked mirror with a razor blade to make it seem new again.
Gay pointed out to me instances of foresight, saving, ingenuity: pieced together chicken houses and hog pens; carefully designed garden plots; porches decorated with all sorts of pots, holding flowers.
“As soon as they get a feeling of belonging,” he said, “they start fixing up. It’s being on their own. They do things they never would think of doing, living on someone else’s place, just cropping for someone else.”
They dread having to move. One woman whose loving care was evident in her front yard, with two struggling peach trees and flower beds, her spotless quilts, her kitchen so clean it seemed polished, was unreasonably worried about having to move. “Don’t let ’em move me away from here, Mr. Gay,” she said. “I been drinking out of that spring for nigh onto thirty years.”
The pressure cooker is called the “precious” cooker here with good reason. It is perhaps the best loved of the innovations, symbolic of the new life. Canned goods were strange to these people before they were urged to buy the new contraptions. They once put up little of anything, now they put up everything possible. Gay told me that the quota was between eighty-five and a hundred jars for each member of the household. At one home, the buxom mother of a brood of ten had put up eight hundred and fifty jars, and was working toward a goal of a thousand. Some of the men complain good naturedly that the jars are running them out of the houses, but they know how in the lean months of winter and early spring the food in the jars will stick to their ribs. A few of the men are expert themselves at canning. The pressure cooker, for all of its highly scientific action, works simply, and is just about foolproof. There have been few accidents; a steam whistle blows the warning when the pressure rises too high, and though the young ones may enjoy the whistling, they know the danger of the exploding steam and obey instructions with care.
The glass jars, filled with green snap-beans, butter-beans, cabbage, okra, peas, turnip greens, green-yellow succotash, yellow corn and squash, golden Georgia yams, brown slabs of veal and beef, and red tomatoes, are admired not only as a store of food, but also for their gay decoration of the bare shelves and walls. They are arranged with an eye to color symmetry. I was surprised to see the slabs of meat, even more so to see the jars labeled Irish Potatos. One favorite was the colorful vegetable stock for soup consisting of corn, peas, lima beans, string beans, okra, and tomatoes.
There is keen rivalry in filling or surpassing the quota. One good housewife hid half of her filled jars under the hay in the barn, out of sight of her neighbors, until the final day of reckoning. She was Miss Tortoise outsmarting all the Miss Rabbits. In 1941, the champion canning family was that of Dock Miller, a Negro, whose record was 1,202 quarts. Negro families averaged 416 quarts; white families averaged 345.
At first, Gay told me, the canning was done because the supervisors urged it, not for eating. Canned goods weren’t exactly to the taste of people whose food habits, enforced by need, were hard to change. For instance, these people, born and bred in the county, had to learn to eat spinach. Some had never, and most had seldom drunk any sweet milk. Milk was taken to mean buttermilk, which some of them got for churning at the landlord’s home. But now the diet was picking up: squash, beans, corn, vegetable soup, beef, veal and pork, butter and eggs, and chicken.
At least one cow, some pigs and a brood sow were provided at the beginning for each family. Wheat is raised for flour; many of the farmers haven’t bought a sack of flour since “going on the government.” A dozen laying hens were also provided at first. Then baby chicks were brought in by the thousands, and kerosene lamp brooders were built in the vocational shops of the schools. The chickens introduced problems. There was resentment when the supervisors sent trucks for the cockerels in order to apply some money toward settling the purchase loan. Loan or no loan, chickens had been part of the family, sort of, before. One woman said: “I asked ’em not to give me them chickens ’cause I knew I’d get crazy about ’em. But they said they was mine. . . . Now they tell me to cotch up all my roosters ’cause a truck’s a-comin’ for ’em. If they come here after my roosters, I’ll give ’em the pullets and the brooder, too. I don’t want none of ’em.”
Another problem arose from the conflict in the old and new ways in the raising of chickens. The brooder chickens, turned out to forage, did not know what it was all about and merely ran around after people hoping to be fed something to eat. Hen-raised chickens scratched for themselves. One woman said, “I ain’t as proud of these brooder chickens as I am of my own. They didn’t have no mother to teach ’em to scratch, and they ain’t got as much sense.” They were scorned as “government chickens”—there had to be some way of telling them from real chickens. But the moral of the story is not of the Horatio Alger variety: those “real” chickens that scratched for themselves laid only a few eggs, while the brooder-raised, mash-fed chickens laid eggs throughout the year.
Gay was all for the new scientific farming, but he taught indirectly. He asked one of his best managers, “Dog days? Do you believe in dog days?” When the woman murmured defensively, “Well, all the old folks say so,” he showed surprise and pointed out how already the woman had improved on the ways of the old folks. He showed by doing as well as teaching; it was the only way to allay suspicion of the book farmer, he said. In the evening, after his duties at headquarters and his supervising, he worked in his own thriving truck garden. I watched him feed his pure-bred hogs and chickens; he discussed the various mashes and prepared foods with learning and affectionate respect. He talked to me about the Log Cabin Community in nearby Hancock County, originated by Zack, Benjamin, and Moses Hubert, and named the Camilla-Zack Country Life Center after their parents. Here on holdings of about 15,000 acres, seventy-five Negro families are successfully farming, and over half own their farms of from 50 to 150 acres. Gay’s wife was then teaching at the Log Cabin Summer School. I ought to see that place. By all means, he said. He gave high praise to Tom Roberts, one of his teachers at Georgia State, now connected with the Agricultural Department in Washington. Roberts had been a regular fellow as well as a thorough teacher, relishing a good joke but quite able to lash out at sluggards and shame them into studying, an enthusiast for improved farming who had opened a new world to the Georgia boys who had come to college disliking the drudgery and hopelessness that the farm had meant to them.
He drove his dusty and worn car expertly over the winding, hilly roads. His talk showed me that his immediate trust for these people was in the project. It was a long way from perfect, but it was working. He praised the people. No trouble, he said, no drinking, no fighting. The girls did have babies early, he admitted; that was about all the sinning that went on. A few of the men were sorry and shiftless; one man took every excuse to ride to town, to get a Coke, to stand around talking, leaving his wife and the large family of young ones to tend the garden. But the churches and the school were giving good community service.
The next day Arthur Raper drove me over the county. He was full of the anecdotes and information that he was packing tightly in his new book. And he talked with the good, pungent, homespun quality of his prose. As a truck, hauling logs, careened madly toward us on a narrow road, he told me of the coming of the sawmills to the county. They had come in answer to the demand for cash, but they left the county poorer. In less than ten years the timber growth of half a century had been used up. There were still a few “coffee-pot” mills running and the truck that had just gone along hell-bent-for-destruction was serving one of those. There were plenty of pines left, but most of them were the “boll weevil pines, hardly big enough to saw.” The pines, he told me, came by the millions: “They were not chosen, but were among Earth’s greatest commoners.”
Raper grew eloquent about the tragedy of the land. The “old” fields, once cotton acreage, had been abandoned to Bermuda and crab grass, the seedling pines, and the waving broom sedge, which was the county’s greatest crop. Setting fire to the sedge and underbrush had been the farmer’s improvident way out. To clear up a small plot, he often did not seem to bother whether he set the countryside afire or not. We passed several chimneys where cabins had once been that told the story. Careless and ignorant tilling of the soil had caused wide-spread erosion; on the red lands and the white, galls in the hills had deepened into gullies. He gave me a fine lecture on the value of proper terracing; he positively beamed as we passed fields that showed that the farmers had learned the art. Erosion had also been fought by the introduction of legumes such as lespedeza, and of the huge leaved kudzu, looking so much like earth-bound grape vines. I told him of some farmers who had feared kudzu; even if it held the soil, it was dangerous to buildings on which it got its tenacious grip. It would knock a house down like lightning, once you let it get on, they had told me. Raper laughed. It would pull a house down, he admitted, but you can keep it off of houses. The main thing is that kudzu will actually go across a gully and stop it.
Raper was soberly enthusiastic about the success of the unified farm program. There had been and still was local hostility. The clients of the rehabilitation program were first called “Rehabs” and then “Arabs,” and some of the derision has stuck. Many of the better off people of the county complain about the difficulty of getting wage hands and domestics now, and blame WPA and FSA for spoiling the labor supply. Some of the “government farmers” grumble at the new-fangled budgeting, planning, paying bills, and book-farming. Some just don’t understand; one farmer likening himself to “a blind dog in a meat house about this program.” Only twelve families, eight white and four colored, are Tenant-Purchase families, buying their homes and land over a forty-year period. The others are on an advance-rent basis; the landlord signing over a part of his rent for a five- to seven-year period. This amount is applied to improvements. That explained why, instead of seeing new houses, rural complements of urban housing projects, I saw so many old houses being used. But these had been renovated into sturdiness and comfort. Over half a million dollars have been loaned to FSA families in the county, but it had to go a long way in many directions. It is not such a huge sum when one realizes “how far back on the hog” so many of these families, white and Negro, had been.
It seemed to me to be a first-rate investment when I heard Raper talk of the improvements in crops, stock, soil, housing, diet, health, and education (for adults as well as children), of the basic human needs met by the program. Now these Arabs do not need to be wanderers and outcasts; they belong to something and something belongs to them.
One of Raper’s most respected friends in the county, a sort of Exhibit A of the “good husbandman” is an independent Negro farmer named Jim Brown. He has made it on his own. Jim met us in his clean-swept front yard, before a comfortable white-washed home. There was a huge wisteria vine there, gnarled and twisted, the strong withes bound together forming a sort of summer house. Its thick roof of vines and leaves was not to be pierced by even the sun of Georgia. “That vine is older than you is,” Jim told me truthfully. It was nearly a half a century old. Here Jim rested after his dinner, in the heat of the day. He was proud of his farm of one hundred and thirty odd acres. He even now owned two acres of an orange grove in Florida. It had meant work to get this land and keep it. “I worked hard as a hired hand with nobody driving me.” He had raised a fine crop of children, too, fourteen of them, and sixty-six grandchildren. He had taught them to have manners, else there was whipping in the house. And he had taught them farming.
“The white folks living over there where that chimney is said to me, ‘Jim Brown, you’ll perish on that o’ land.’ ” That had been long years ago. Now there was nothing over there but a chimney in a waste of brambles and broom sedge, scrub pines, and sweet gums. He had stuck it out here.
Raper pointed out to me that the huge bell on a tall pole, a relic of the old plantation of slavery days, was symbolic to Negro owners. They all seemed to want one. There was no need of it now, however, to call Jim’s sons in from the fields. Jim’s handsome reddish-brown face saddened when he told us that of thirteen of his children, whom he had raised on the place, only one remained to help him farm and hold these one hundred and thirty acres. Most of the boys were on “public works.” “There is just nothing to hold them to the farm,” Raper said briefly. “They want to go to town, to see a moving picture, to see young people, to get about the world. It is so all over the country.”
Jim showed us proudly over his fields. He was a good farmer, one could see that. His cattle and mules were sleek and well kept. The manure seemed a foot deep in the barnyard; Jim certainly was not going to need much of the factory-made stuff.
Jim mentioned the ease with which he got credit at the banks in Greensboro. His dealings with the banks stretched back even before the days when they “went dead” in the depression. He had many white friends. They had even now told him that if he wanted to, they would let him vote. But he didn’t vote. “Tell us why not,” Raper asked. The old man was disturbed; he finally said, “You know why. You can tell me.”
His sons might have deserted what he had planned and near about slaved for, but as he stood there, ruddy and erect for all of his years, I realized that he was far from beaten. There was meat in the smokehouse, flour in the bin, chickens and turkeys running around the yard, and fields of fertility unusual in his section. And after a hot morning’s work, he could sit beneath the cool shade of the wisteria vine, dreaming perhaps. Still I knew that he would like to toll the big plantation bell, and see his tall sons heading toward the house.
“I’m sho’ glad you all come by to see me,” he said. I was glad myself.
On the roads I had seen occasionally one of those signs reading, “You May Meet God Around the Next Curve” and “God Is Your Only Help.” Raper told me how many of the people on the project linked God with the Government: “I don’t know what would have come of us by now if it hadn’t been for God and the Government.” Proof of this feeling came from the last home we visited, that of Louisiana Thomas. Mrs. Thomas is something of a character on the project; a hard working wife and mother who writes poetry in her few off hours. Raper took the title of his last book, Tenants of the Almighty, from one of her poems.
She was out when we called upon her; she was doing some washing for a neighboring white farmer. Her home was a typical blue and white old house, set up on slabs of some kind of sandstone. Before the house there were broadly sweeping fields of corn and sorghum cane, and lines of trees. It was a good vista for a poet. Far off we saw a woman coming toward us with a shock of fodder under her arm. We hoped it was Louisiana, but it wasn’t. It was a younger girl, black and handsome. Josh stared at us as we stood there talking with Mr. Thomas. He didn’t know when Louisiana was coming back. He took us through the house; two of the beds were old fashioned, one bedroom suite was modern. On this bed there was a black cat doll with beaded eyes glaring. In the fireplace there was a Black Sambo game for children. On the unsealed walls were several pictures, one by James Montgomery Flagg, with a football player on whose jersey was a huge “P,” talking to wasp-waisted, long skirted belles carrying Princeton pennants; two of the others were pictures of Jesus. Mr. Thomas was proud of his home; they had bought the new furniture since going on the government.
Raper showed me several of the poems that Louisiana Thomas had written. One of them had these lines:
Uncle Sam is my shepherd
And I shall not want
He don’t make me lie down in green pastures
He lead me down to the tin warehouse
And give me a cotton mattress.
He restoreth my cow and pigs
And chickens and some eggs . . .
Yea though I walk through the valley
And shadow of death to stay here
But as long as Uncle Sam hold everything
No evil will I fear.
And a second tells that “a brighter day has dawned.” It closes:
The houses was falling down
And barns had long since gone
Now stands in its place
A beautiful little white home.
We are tenants of the Almighty
Entrusted with a portion of his earth
To dress and keep
And pass on to the next generation
When evening comes and we must fall asleep.
Riding back to Greensboro, Raper told, out of his deep knowledge of these people, of his great hopes for them, for the South, and for America. Restoring the land, restoring the people. From slaves and sharecroppers to self-respecting, independent human beings. “Straws in the wind,” he said briefly. “Yes,” I said. I found myself hoping that the wind would come up soon. And strong.
V FOR VICTORY The first coach of the Dixie Flyer is divided into three parts: a long Jim Crow section; a cubbyhole which is the Jim Crow smoker, consisting of two seats that face each other on each side of the aisle; and a long section for whites.
The Dixie Flyer was hurtling through central Georgia. It was late at night, and alone in the smoker, I had snatched a doze when their voices woke me. They were in the khaki of naval cadets. I could tell from their accent that they were from the North.
They were criticizing the famed hospitality of the South. They had wanted to sit together, but nobody in the coach behind would move to another seat. A couple of fellows had refused a direct request even though they would have to sit beside a stranger in any case. Maybe the passengers detected that Yankee twang. So the cadets had come up to the Jim Crow smoker. One was dark-haired and short, looking a bit Jewish. The other was a tall blonde. As they scoffed at the local folk-ways, I ventured my question, “Where are you fellows from?” New York and Newark, they told me. I was just through an irritating experience at the Atlanta bus station and was hot and dog-tired. “God’s country,” I said.
“Where are you from?” the blonde asked.
“Washington.”
The blonde told me that he had attended George Washington University. He answered my question, yes, he knew where Paul Pearlman’s was all right; he bought all of his books there.
The chap from Newark wanted to know what I was doing down in the South. They were frankly curious. When I told them I was a teacher, they pretended deference, but I disarmed them by joking about my occupational questionnaire. There wasn’t a solitary service listed, I told them, where I could be useful in the war effort. We got quite friendly. They were proud of their branch of service and their chance to fly. They talked a while of the war, and then they got on the race question. I think I started it by telling them, “They’re not going to let you ride in here long. The conductor has already moved some fellows out.”
“They’re not going to move us out,” the fellow from Newark said.
“Wait and see,” I said.
They became explosive about race prejudice. George Washington wanted to be fair, after Newark had bitterly denounced the injustice. George Washington had been looking around. Apologetically he said that Southern Negroes seemed shiftless to him; they wouldn’t take advantage of schools and things.
I told him a little of the lack of chance and incentive. They were unwilling to believe some of the facts I dished out about the schools. They said that I seemed to know a lot about those things; I told them I was working on a book. George Washington disclaimed prejudice. There was a fine colored couple working for his parents in New York, he said, but the Southern Negro did seem shiftless to him.
Newark admitted that the North wasn’t much better for Negroes. To his knowledge there weren’t many job opportunities: “But at least they recognize the Negro as a man, and don’t herd them off.”
He told me of a friend and schoolmate of his in Newark, a good athlete and piano player. He couldn’t think of his name right then, but he had remembered that this friend got his license to fly before he did. I told him that I probably knew the fellow. “It must be Jimmy Plinton,” I said.
“That’s the guy!” he burst out, and together we said, “It’s a hell of a small world, isn’t it?”
Jimmy Plinton was his good friend. When had I seen him? I told him I had met him only recently at Yates and Milton’s Drugstore, a sort of crossroads in Atlanta like Seventh Avenue and 135th Street in New York.
We talked of the Tuskegee Flying School where Plinton was stationed. They were deploring with me the scant opportunity of Negroes to learn to fly when the conductor entered.
“You fellows will have to move,” the conductor said.
“What for?” Newark spoke up quickly.
“This here is the colored coach.”
“We’re satisfied,” said blonde George Washington.
“Don’t make any difference whether you’re satisfied or not. You’ll have to move. Colored and white can’t ride together down here.”
Newark burst out, “I think it’s the most narrow-minded thing in the world the way you people down here kick Negroes around. Here we’re in a war for democracy—”
The conductor’s face turned red, but he spoke slowly, and quietly, “It’s the law down here.”
The New Yorker said, “We’re not going to move.”
“Oh, yes, you are,” the conductor said. “It’s the law in Georgia.”
Surprisingly the New Yorker seemed to think his next words carried weight: “You can’t move me; I’m a citizen of New York.”
“Well, you’re in Georgia now,” the conductor drawled. That was unanswerable, but they continued arguing.
Finally the conductor, breathing heavily, his face flushed to his white hair, pleaded, “Listen fellows. I didn’t make the law. I just have to enforce it. And the law says that colored and whites just can’t ride in the same coach.”
The cadets finally surrendered. They swung through the door grumbling, but hardly had the conductor got to the door when I heard a noise and they were back. They had come back, they said, to tell me good-bye. Each held out his hand. The conductor looked uncomfortable as we shook hands.
They scribbled their names on an old envelope, with the address of their flying field in Florida. Then they wished me good-bye and good luck. “Send us a copy of your book when it comes out,” George Washington said. “We’d sure like to see it,” Newark held up his fingers in a “V” salute as he turned to the white section of the coach. The conductor stood by helplessly. He looked as if he thought something should be done about such carryings on: “A Negro.”
JIM CROW SNAPSHOTS The conductor had ordered all the Negroes who were deadheading to go on up to the head car. Still the coach was packed and jammed when the trio got on at Waxhaw. It was Sunday night and they were chirped up by liquor and their togs. They looked all around the coach, and then pointedly at the conductor who was taking up two seats with his tin box, bag, papers, and tickets.
“Well,” sighed one dolefully, “I suppose we’ll have to sit on the floor.”
“I didn’t pay my fare to sit on no floor,” said another.
The first one got a seat by squeezing in beside an ample woman who lifted her child to her lap. His luck pleased him and he started agitating, “You’ll grow tall standin’. Little man like you is.”
The big fellow looked hard at the back of the conductor’s head. The conductor was busy rustling papers, obviously getting ready to check out at Monroe.
“Ain’t you done yit?”
The conductor turned around, but the big fellow was studying the water cooler.
“Wanna drink of water?” he asked the third fellow.
“Yes, I’ll just take a sit,” the other answered. “Kyah, kyah.”
“Only sit you’ll get on this train.”
“Oh, no, let me pour hit for you,” the big one said with mock courtesy. “You gets service on this train. I hopes you are enjoying your ride.”
The third fellow took careful aim and threw his paper cup, only half emptied, on the already sloppy floor.
“I done paid my fare. And I done stood up ten miles.”
“Oh, don’t leave yit. Get every bit of your trip. You got a little mo’ ways to stand.”
The conductor rose, and stooped over to pick up his papers. The third fellow went into swift pantomime. Head, shoulders, arms all made the pose of a football player about to punt. It wasn’t lost on the rest of the coach. Some, including the agitator, laughed aloud.
The conductor looked around sharply, and saw only bland innocence. Red-faced, he grabbed his tin box and was gone. As he went out the door, one fellow tiptoed down the aisle, stalking him like an Indian.
The big fellow sat down hard, banging his feet in the seat opposite.
The third fellow came back. “Pardon me, but do passengers sit in this here seat?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You will like hell.”
The fellow sat down with ceremony.
A HARVARDIAN GOES SOUTH He could not help speaking with the Back Bay Accent. He had been bred in Boston and educated at Harvard, majoring in the classics. Inevitably, of course, in order to get a job teaching he had been forced to come South. He was a good-looking, brown-skin fellow, slight of frame and rather aristocratic—Harvard-Yardish—in bearing.
So the odds were strictly against him when he stated to the gas-attendant that he had been short-changed fifteen cents. A Yankee was bad enough, but a brownskin Yankee was hated at compound interest.
The gas man, over his first shock, said to a loafing kid, “Hand me my blackjack.” Then waving the ugly weapon, he said, “You get out of that car. Now unlock your gas tank.” The loaded blackjack hovered, ready.
The gas tank was full. The attendant turned on the stream of gas, played it over the gas tank, over the rear of the fenders, over the spare. Some few drops struck the Bostonian’s well shined collegiate shoes. When the figures on the meter read fifteen cents the hose was turned off.
“Now, nigger, you get in that car and get the hell away from here. The next time you say anything like that to a white man you’re liable to get killed. Now get!”
Down the road, one of the fellows in the car said, “Prof, I sure believe in prayer. I was praying to God that if only he would keep you from saying another word to that cracker. And praise God you didn’t.”
SEPARATE BUT EQUAL I had heard some low-pitched talk between him and the conductor, and then he came over to me. “Could I sit here with you?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Help yourself.” I slipped my briefcase to the floor.
He was a meek looking fellow, probably in his sixties. As he sat beside me, a man and a woman, loaded with suitcases, got in his vacant seat.
“Did you hear what the conductor said to me?” He sounded aggrieved. I told him no. “Well, he came and said, ‘I told you to move before.’ I said he did not tell me to move. ‘I told you to git up,’ he said. ‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘You must have meant to tell me.’ ‘Well, I’m telling you now. You move over there by that man (meaning you) and let these people have this seat. That man (meaning you) ain’t got no right to all that room.’ ”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I don’t want more than my share of room.”
“Don’t you bother. Look back there in the coach. See that long seat back there? Ain’t nobody in it. A body could lie down on it if he wanted to. That’s seven seats a person could sit down in. But he did not tell me to move. This crowded train has just got him excited.
“The more we keep silent-mouthed,” the old man confided to me, “the further back they put us.” He was riding on a pass, he explained, deadheading. But that wasn’t no reason why he had to be put upon. He had been railroading over thirty years. He was an officer in his local of train porters. As soon as he got up in his union, they had been picking at him.
“Looks like they think all we ought to say is ‘Yessir, yessir.’ All they can say is ‘Do as I say, do as I say.’ My blood is in the Army; I got a son fighting the Japs in the Pacific. I got the same right to talk as anybody else.
“Besides taking care of our coach, we got to do everything the conductor can think of. Take for an instance my last trip. I had to move all the conductor’s stuff: a crate of eggs, his bags, and his big tin box. This porter today gotta take the conductor’s grip around to the conductor’s room when he gets to Salisbury, before he is considered off duty. Seems like they think that’s in the trade. All we get is thank you, if that. But our beholden duty is to keep these coaches clean and make these people as comfortable as they can be.
“I been railroading a long number of years. I’m a big man in our union. I can give you a lot of information.” Except for my briefcase I saw no reason why he thought I was seeking information.
“I see you got a scratch pad there. Let me have it.” I took a notebook out of the brief case. He thanked me, and then painstakingly, mysteriously, with half glances over his shoulder, he wrote out for me the following:
I wishes that your would. report anniething you see. I thing here is a smoker and the ant a thing to spit in—This is a though train to Washington.DC—It should be cuismedo in the colored Smoker. there is just one. Of caus we are In war & we are trying to win it and we must win it and Just think from Washington to Atlanta.Ga. and from ATLANTA to Washington, D. C. that ever Passenger get on your train would spit on the floor. In the Smoker. It would be Dangers for Annie one to go In the Smoker. Thank if you would look in to this at once for my Race.
Address to Mr. ______ Vice President
Southern R. R. Co. Washington, D.C.
I could not help looking at the floor. It was splashed with water; here and there were orange peels, apple cores, cigarette butts, and paper. At my feet were the ashes where I had knocked my pipe out a couple of times.
“You see?” the old man said triumphantly.
FATS The two fellows in the box of a smoker on the Georgia Central Railroad looked up when I came in, glancing distrustfully at my brief-case, and stopped talking. But after I had passed the time of day with them, with a word or two about the weather and the train, they opened up. One tall, fairly well-dressed chap went on with his complaining: “They tell me the Army is like a convict camp. Course I ain’t never been on no chain-gang, so I wouldn’t know. I wanted to be a Pullman Porter, now Sam is calling. I don’t mind going, but I don’t want it to be like no convict camp. One thing sure, if I ever get to be a free man again, I’ll never live in the South anymore.”
Several railroad workers got on at a flag-stop on the edge of Atlanta. They were too many for the box which had only two long benches facing each other, divided by arms into four seats each. Two of them tried to squeeze in one of the seats, with a lot of laughter. It was Saturday; the weekend off had already started; some were already feeling their liquor. They were riding a fellow they called Scrap-per, who wasn’t taking it so well.
Scrapper and his buddy, Blackie, according to the way I pieced out the story, had been drunk and noisy on a bus. The driver had put Blackie out of the bus and started off, leaving him there raising hell and threatening. Scrapper suddenly went up to the bus driver and asked him, “Please, suh, can I get off this bus?” The driver had said, “Okey dokey,” and opened the door. But the bus hadn’t come to a full stop, and Scrapper fell off the bus. His buddy’s gun he was carrying to him, to back his big words, fell out of his pocket. Then Scrapper tried to calm his buddy down and lead him away, but “you know can’t no drunk man lead no drunk.” So the law had come up and both Scrapper and Blackie had to serve time for disturbing the peace and carrying concealed weapons.
Scrapper insisted that it wasn’t no such lie. His tormentor, unafraid of the growl in his voice, kept asking him, “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that the law didn’t take you and Blackie up for all that hell-raising?”
Scrapper didn’t want to talk about it. “Well, that’s the way I heard it,” said his tormentor, as persistent as a horsefly.
It was a rough crowd, relishing the “dozens.” They were curious about me. I had a sort of buffer next to me, a man whom I had given a pipeful of tobacco and a light for his pipe. I knew, however, that I was being watched, and when two fellows after some slipping talk about the women, grabbed their knives, clicked the switch-blades out in a flash, and rushed together, I knew they were putting on a show for me. I just laughed and they laughed too, and sat down again.
“Man, I coulda cut you three times all that time you took to get that knife out.”
“That thing you got there ain’t no knife.” Several showed off their oiled switchblades, and praised their fine points. I was properly curious, and impressed.
“Oh my Gawd,” yelled one of them, “here’s Fats.” My buffer friend said to me, “He’s the biggest liar in the state of Georgia.”
“In the whole United States,” said another.
Fats beamed. He was pushing two hundred fifty pounds, I reckoned. He was dressed in a trainman’s cap and khaki; his shirt was soaked with sweat. He had a pleasant boyish face. “Anybody believes that, stand on his head,” was his entering speech.
“Man here it starts.” They wanted to hear the old stories, and by nodding, called his attention to me, the stranger, to start him off. Fats waved one of the younger laborers off the seat and sank his bulk down heavily. How his hindparts got in that confined space was a wonder.
Fats didn’t need much prodding to tell his lies. Naturally I couldn’t use a notebook, so a good part of them escaped me. But I remember his boasting of a hog that he raised that was “so fat it couldn’t stand in this here smoker. It would bust the sides out. If you wanted to move him, you’d have to back him out.” Then he once had a bull with an enormous whang; as he told the bull’s exploits, the compartment roared with laughter, and the conductor who was walking by, looked in. Fats waved to him familiarly.
A farmer living near him had a famous breeded cow, a beautiful cow. Her barn had white walls and white floors. She was tended by white men only, no colored, and these white men all had to wear white suits and white shoes. Her calves were delivered in a hospital, by a doctor, a whole lot more service than a whole lot of people got, whether colored or white. Thousands of pounds of butter a season. Milk her three times a day. My gawd what a beautiful thing she was, after they had curried her down and washed her clean. “Someday I’d like to live in a house as clean as that cow’s barn,” Fats sighed.
“I’d like to live in that barn right now,” suggested a hearer.
Fats told a story about an accident, which comes jumbled from the memory. One night he drove his Ford into a long pole extending from an Army truck: “Six inches lower, it would have killed everybody in the front seat; a little bit more, everybody in back. I got out to see the damages, and saw all those soldiers. I thought it was the law. They were all around me asking if I was hurt. I told them of course not; I wasn’t scratched. They turned me loose. Man, I lit a rage, I mean I flew. I woke up in the Savannah Hospital. They said they didn’t see how I lived. That pole had caved in my skull.”
One of his hearers roared, “If I had a belt I’d hit you good for telling that big lie. You old lying scoundrel!”
Fats grimaced, “The truth is cowed. A man come in telling you God’s truth and you say it’s a lie. But you know good and well I’m a man of truth.”
Fats hasn’t missed a day on the railroad for three years. He has twelve children: “I got so many behind me a man have to keep at it. Ain’t that right, friend?” He boasted, though, that everybody on the job works harder than he does.
He told of a brotherly meeting at church. Everybody had to give testimony, to get up and express themselves. Fats got up and said to the preacher, “You asking us for back dues. You say you want $7.50. And here I am without a pair of drawers to back into. And all my children without a sign of drawers.”
The people at the church cheered him on, as did our crowd in the smoker. Fats said the preacher got mad and told the whole congregation to go to hell.
Fats went on, “I got so many children I don’t know when they’re all in at night. I just tell my wife to cook for them as long as they keep coming. I ain’t sure how many children I got. They was twelve when I left home this morning. There’s supposed to be a new one in tonight, maybe two, I don’t know. I saw the sack wiggling, but I cain’t tell.”
The butcher came in with fruit. Fats looked at the deep red plums: “Those plums shore look purty. Sure would taste good this hot day.”
They were fifteen cents for an envelope of two. I bought ten plums and passed them around. Everybody got one. The one that was left over I gave to Fats, for being the best liar in the state of Georgia. The crowd cheered, and made up over the gift as if I were a Rockefeller. Fats accepted his prize calmly as his due. “You ain’t heard nothing today,” he said. “But Fats ain’t no liar. They is just some people cain’t recognize the truth.”
WORDS ON A BUS The first one who got on was a little girl with a market bag half as large as she; then came a sturdy urchin, rubbing his eyes, pushed along by his young, small mother, carrying bundles and a sleeping baby. An old man, having told the driver he was just helping his daughter with her things, started stowing away a big suitcase. Fortunately the couple behind me got off at Fayette and a seat was vacant.
As this family entered, one of the wits in the Caucasian front of the bus had said, “Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!” Some of his mates tittered. He even looked back to our section for appreciation.
It was not long after the patch of light had left the old man standing there at the culvert that the talk began. Most of us were a little beaten by the jolting and grinding of the bus; many had drowsed off, waking only when the driver clicked the lights on at Lorman, Fayette, the culvert.
Before the lights went off again, however, one man had come up and sat himself on the arm of the chair opposite the mother and her brood. He asked her where she was going. She told him that she was hoping to get off at the bottom of a hill near a gas station and soft-drink place just before the bus got into Natchez itself. The bus driver, He, had told her that he didn’t know whether he could let off there or not, he didn’t know the place that she was talking about and that she’d better go on to the Tri-State bus depot in mid-city. But she hoped that she wouldn’t have to go there; she didn’t want to have to carry all of that luggage and those children all that way. Not with them sleepy and crying. But if she could get off at the foot of the hill, it wasn’t nowheres at all from there. Not nowheres, hardly.
The man told her that he knew the place, and promised to pull the string when they got there. “You ain’t living where you used to, then?” he asked.
“Who is you?”
“You don’t remember me? I remember you.”
“Ain’t you Amos?”
“Yeah, I’m Amos.”
“Lordy, I ain’t seed you for so long a time. Well, I declare. No, we moved from the alley. We live up on the hill, behind that big ole house where Mis’ Fletcher live. Nowheres hardly from where I git off, do I git off.”
“I’ll see that you gits off, all right. All these chil’ren yours?”
They were that, she bragged proudly. And then followed some talk of the family. But my eavesdropping was stopped by the lights clicking on again, the bus’s stopping, and the exit of one of the whites into the engulfing blackness of the Mississippi night.
“How is Lowrie?” she asked, tentatively, I thought.
“Watchu asking me for? I don’t know how she is.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. I mought as well ask you. You know I ain’t seed Lowrie for two years.”
“You mean she and you ain’t livin’ together no mo’?”
“She left me a year and two months ago, lacking four days.”
“Well, I do declare. I always thought you all were gonna do better than that.”
“Warn’t no you all. It was her.”
“That’s what all you men says.”
“Hit’s the truth. She up and left me.”
“Where the chil’ren?”
“Wid me. Where’d you expect? For going on two years. No mother in the house.”
“What was the matter?”
“I rightly don’t know. Lowrie, she disliked it so much down here she kep’ on talking about how she wanted to see her people up North. She wanted to go so bad I bought her a ticket and gave her a trip to St. Louis. When she come back, she was mo’ dissatisfied than ever. I did all I could for her, made her a good livin’. But she disliked it here.
“But I never knew what was up. Went out to work one morning, came back and found the house empty. She had taken all her clothes and gone. No word, no good-bye nor nothin’.”
“What did she do with the chil’ren?”
“She had sent them over to my mother’s for the day. I went over and got them. They told me that she had been all packed up even while I was eating breakfast. No sooner had I gone than she left too.”
“Looks to me that they would have told you.”
“She had made ’em promise not to. Said she was coming back soon. Sent me a postcard the first Christmas and some things for the chil’ren. That’s all I done heard from her for nigh onto two years.”
“Well, I declare that’s a shame.”
“So don’t you say you all. It was her.”
“Yas. Ain’t no kind of mother to leave her chil’ren.”
“No. But if she wants it that way, she can have it. If she don’t think no more of her own flesh and blood than that, I ain’t gonna go runnin’ after her. Or beggin’.”
“Where do they stay?”
“Home with me. They see my mom sometimes in the day. My boy is working; he weigh over a hundred pounds now. The little girl cleans and cooks nigh about as good as ever Lowrie did.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ to worry about then. Good riddance.”
“Not much. I don’t irk my mind thinking about Lowrie. But,” the arch whisper came over the back of my chair, “I do git tired sleepin’ in the bed all by myself.”
“You can git yourself another wife. Never knew you to have trouble findin’ a woman.”
“I don’t know. How you and Tom making it? You still wid Tom?”
“Indeed I is.” Laughing embarrassedly, “I loves Tom. He’s a good man to me and a good father to my chil’ren.”
“How many you got? These all?”
“These three and the biggest girl. I left her back in Fayette with her grandma.”
“I always thought you was too good for Tom.”
“No indeedy.” She laughed gently, a bit coquettishly. “He too good for me.”
“Stop that. You the kind of woman wouldn’t run away from her husband. Now ain’t you? You take care of the house. I know good and well you wouldn’t leave your chil’ren behind you in an empty house.”
“I’d die before I’d ever leave my chil’ren. I just couldn’t do that.”
“You de kind of woman I needs. I wish I could git me somebody like you. I got me a girl, but she don’t seem to take to the chil’ren, or to house-keeping. Is Tom doin’ all right by you? I didn’t think you and him would been together this long.”
“He doing fine by me. Anyway, hit wouldn’t do you no good if I wasn’t wid him. You know you and I is kin.”
“I knows that all right. Yet and still I didn’t know, till you tole me, that him and you was still together.”
The lights clicked on. Two whites left the bus. The driver craned, looked in his mirror, turned around. “Can’t you sit down in the seat and get off the arm,” he spoke sharply. Amos slid into the seat. They talked a little more until he pulled the cord for her to get off at the bottom of the hill. I listened no longer; the romance was done for anyhow.
GEORGIA NYMPHS Ed and I had been talking to J. C. all morning, and at noon he asked us to have dinner with him. He wanted to put the big pot in the little one for us, but we had agreed beforehand not to take advantage of J. C.’s bounty. It wasn’t only or chiefly that his ailing daughter and her young ones needed the fat meat and the greens in the little pot. It was rather that J. C. didn’t have a well, but filled his old wooden bucket from a spring. And on this side of the track the type of community planning seemed to be: house, pig-sty (where pigs were occasionally owned), privy, and then in the dip at the bottom of the draining slope, the common spring.
I had been told in Atlanta to drink no more spring water in the back country than I had to. Ed and I had been guzzling all the various Colas of the brood sired by Papa Coca until we felt natural off the water wagon. We told J. C. that we had messages for Widow Thompkins from her son up in Fulton Tower, and while he was suspicious and jealous, he remained the old Southern gentleman that he truly was.
In her own right, Mrs. Thompkins was nearly as much of a character as J. C. Her son was doing a little time in Fulton Tower for fighting—“he was a good son, jus’ easy misled”—and I had carried his mother’s message to him, and some cigarettes. Mrs. Thompkins was not doing so badly for herself. For doing the white-folks’ laundry and odd jobs, she was allowed the use of a three-room clapboard cabin, with a little front yard where she had flowers growing in plots and tin cans. A flowering tree, I forget the name, sprinkled its blooms on the hard, cleanly swept yard. Under the inevitable chinaberry tree there was a bench where the widow could sit in the cool of the day, taking some sort of ease, remembering. In her larger backyard, fenced in with wire, she had a small garden: onions, collards, tomatoes, and more flowers. The red land up to her place was bare, gullied, untilled. The plot allowed her for washing and ironing was strictly defined.
The widow seemed to take her lonely living well, fortified by her belief in herself, and by the fact that in the six months of schooling in the community she boarded and slept the teacher. Teacher’s room was clean and neat (as was the whole house); there was a colorful counterpane on the large bed, and pennants (Spelman, Lincoln, Prairie View) on the wall. Teacher had left many of her things there, even two photographs on the dresser.
But now, with teacher gone and not due back till October, loneliness was setting in, the widow told us, in happy gratitude at our visit. Both she and the white lady whose husband owned the place were afflicted with loneliness. So they would sit on the bank of the pond and fish. Sometimes they would talk, but often when the widow would say something out of turn, like praising “the culluhd,” or when something wasn’t just right about the laundering, or when things were unsettled up at the house, they would just sit on the bank a yard or so apart, two lonely women in bitter silent conflict, casting sidelong glances at each other or short words intended not for conversation but for belittling. The widow’s speech grew salty at the remembrance:
“She think cause she washed-out white folks, she kin lord it over me. I tell her I knew her when.”
When one of the Professors from Atlanta University came down in his long Buick, which had trouble in turning around in the gullied road that ended at the widow’s house, the white family had come out staring. “They ain’t got nothin’ but a Chevy,” Widow Thompkins said. “And that don’t run good. The doctor—he was one of those learned doctors, not a medical doctor,” she said. “Son, is you a doctor? You ain’t? You look smart enough to be one.” This doctor was a light brown-skinned man, with a goatee, a poise and accent learned in New England and Europe, really distinguished as all hell.
The white woman was as nonplussed as her young ones who were clasping her about the knees, peeking out at the stranger. The next day on the fishing bank she asked the widow: “Was that man in the big car a nigger?”
“I flew right off. I had been a-lookin’ for her to ask about him, but that word nigger done it to me. ‘You hadn’t oughta call nobody nigger,’ I tole her. ‘You know good as me what the Holy Bible say. It say we all kin to each other. We all cerzins. That’s what.’ ”
“‘Yas,’ I said. ‘He’s a culluhd. You know,’ I said to her same as I talking to you, ‘there ain’t nothing white folks got, that some of the culluhd ain’t got, somewhere.’”
The widow told how afterwards they had sat for hours, almost to sundown and suppertime, not speaking, the white woman sulking, she gloating. She told of her gusto when one of the fish she hooked outweighed those being caught by the white woman: “I pulled in one big old cat and tried to land it right smack in her lap. Got our lines tangled. Wish it had been a eel. I kin catch mo’ fish than she kin any day God sends.”
The pond where they fished looked like it had been scooped out of the red hills. Reeds stuck up around the edges and even out in the middle of the reddish brown water. A piece of a pier, a few boards nailed on cross-scantlings and short posts, extended a dozen or so yards into the pond. Georgia pines shaded the bank; cushioning pine needles made it comfortable sitting. The pond was nothing more than an oversized swimming hole. They caught eels there, and the widow said there were many snakes.
This day the widow was glad to see us. The sun, directly overhead, was blazing, and our first act was to drop our bottles of Coke and our cheese and crackers on the front porch, and go around to the well in the backyard. Cokes or no Cokes, we wanted some of that cold, sweet water from the well.
When we reached the well we hard chattering and splashing in the pond. We looked over. Five white girls were there. A couple were in what might be called regulation swimming suits, sleek, shining dark sheaths plastered against their bodies. The other three were in brassieres and shorts, their pink and suntanned midriffs bare. Two were jumping up and down in the water; three stood on the pier. They were having a ball.
They saw us as soon as we saw them. Then they started: they whooped, yoohooed at us, laughed, and waved their hands. One of them yelled, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” The girl nearest to her said something to her, and laughed aloud. They tried to push each other in the water, wrestled on the planks, tottered, and then both hit the water with a smack. Cheers and jeers rose, and young girls’ laughter. It wasn’t a pleasant sound to my ears; I was certain the noise could rise up from that clay saucer and flow back into Federal City.
I looked at Ed; Ed looked at me. He was scared too, I could see. He shook his head. There was a drawn expression about his eyes and mouth.
“Yoo-hoo,” they called. “Come on in.” They had us where they wanted us, right in the middle. If we had stirred a hand it would have been too bad.
We didn’t bother about the water. We let the bucket clatter back into the well; the clanking wheel spun. Without a word we went back to the front porch. We couldn’t see the pool from there.
Mrs. Thompkins heard a yell, and went to the fence between her place and the pond. When she came back, she was flustered.
“Y’all will have to go out back,” she said. “They’re coming in here to change they clothes.”
We walked on back. We didn’t look, but we heard them coming, their chatter and laughing high-pitched and shrill.
We heard them moving about and talking in the house. Some piece of furniture went over with a bang. The largest, probably the oldest of the five, came to the back screen door. She was a strapping buxom blonde, in a scanty pair of trunks and a heavily packed brassiere. She looked us over coolly and then put on her act: a home talent variant of a Mae West grind, gentle bump and all. She tossed her head and rolled away with a curt laugh.
Only two put on their clothes; three carried them in their arms. They walked up the rise in the rocky clay road, laughing and looking back. The buxom one walked last, switching and swaying, still in her swimming garb except for her high-heeled shoes, her print dress in one hand away from her body, her towel knotted around her hips. At the top of the hill she said something to her companions, turned around, looked boldly at us, wiggled and laughed. The others chimed in with girlish laughter, enjoying the joke.
There was only one road in to the pond; only one road out. We didn’t want to go skipping out, certainly not behind five sparsely clad young Dixie belles. We were uncomfortable. The Coca-Cola had got warmish; the crackers and cheese were dry stuff. Mrs. Thompkins was uncommunicative, a bit ashamed. There would be no good talk that day. . . . She said little of anything; she did work up to saying “them hussies.” But she caught herself, looking at us to see if we had heard. We let on we didn’t. “They use this house to undress and dress in,” she apologized. “This is the onliest place where they can go swimming.”
After an uncomfortable half hour or so, we started up the road. When we got to Federal City proper, what we had figured on seemed true. The town had heard about it. It was way past lunch time but the workers at the small basket factory were lining the wall. We walked side by side on the shoulder of the pike close to the concrete. I could feel the tension in the air: the shimmering heat before the likely storm. We did not look to left or right or at each other. I don’t know how they looked, but I knew they were there, waiting for, begging for, one word, one swaying off the road’s shoulder, one bodily contact, anything to give them a chance. All they asked was one good excuse. We walked the chalk-line back to the gas station–grocery store. We left the bottles and got our deposit. At first I felt glad to be in the store; but that didn’t last. The dealer had been civil in the morning, passing the time of day. He was grim-lipped now and slid our deposit over at us. We were glad to get across the track to J. C.’s—glad to see the old gray-haired patriarch. His cackling talk was good. It was a sort of hiding ourselves in the bosom of Abraham. After all, he had lasted for over ninety years.
J. C. calmed us a bit. We had come down in order to see Night Court and we decided that we would stay to see it. The night story falls elsewhere in the book. What belongs to this story, however, is the curiosity that our presence in the court room summoned. We got there early, since J. C., as chairman of the precinct, was a stickler for punctuality. There weren’t many people there. After awhile some crackers of the dangerous age (anything from six to sixty, of course, but these were in the lower brackets) glimpsed us over the heads of the “criminals.” After some pointing and staring a couple of young Paul Reveres whisked out. When they came back a crowd came with them.
As we saw the sickening court session draw to a close (told of earlier) I said to Ed: “We’ve just a few minutes left to catch our bus. Let’s go. Goodbye, J. C., we’ll be seeing you.” Ed and I stumbled over the feet of some of the Negro “criminals” and started out. The gavel of the town’s Mayor banged as we got to the head of the stairs. We were caught in the white crowd. The other Negroes sat there, waiting their turn, in the order of things. Going down the narrow stair-case, wide enough only for three, Ed and I were jostled back and forth. It was a variant of the old high schools game, “Get off me.” From one or the other we were pushed. I kept my elbows out, and fell rigidly from one pusher to the other, concentrating, making sure that my feet were hitting the steps. Again they were hoping for some excuse. . . . We gave them none.
At last we got to the bottom. I looked out. In the cone of light from the high swinging lamp, I saw a ring of faces, long, sallow, and cruel. I said to Ed, “Let’s go.” And arms akimbo we forced our way through the ring. I stepped off the curbstone into a mass of mud; I yanked my foot out. Luckily my shoe stayed on, though the goo sucked at it. Our pace was between a run and a walk. A frank run would have been invitation; a regular walk was too much to expect of us. My heart was going like a riveter’s drill. But we got away. The bus had to be late. We stood at the curve on the pike, across from the gas station grocery, under the blue arc-light. One car carrying one of the Negro woman defendants and her friends back to Atlanta pulled up at the pike and then with a grating of gears was gone. We heard the rest of the Negroes as they went across the tracks; their whoopings farther and farther away. It was past eleven o’clock so none were due to come to the part of town where we were waiting. A few whites walked by and looked at us; then a Ford car, crammed with crackers. They stopped a few moments, and then drove on.
We stood in the blue cone of light. Gnats swarmed about it. Cars zoomed by occasionally, their tires snarling on the curve. No bus came. The gas-station operator put out his last light. Night settled deeper, and the quiet seemed ominous. But we felt a bit safer.
Soon the night court crowd was scattered. The risks were over, we thought. Then from nowhere, two little white boys stopped by the gas tank. One picked up the rind of half a watermelon. He took out a piece of the meat still left and put it in his mouth.
“Whatcha doing, Larry?” said the other. “Don’t you know a dog or a nigger could have been eating that watermelon? You get sick picking up stuff like that and putting it in your mouth. Look, here’s something we can do.”
He split the rind and put both pieces about the width of a car’s wheel base on the highway. A car coming around the curve might run over both of them. And there we stood. If a car were to hit them, I thought, and skid into one of the brick posts of the gas-station, here we are, two strange Negroes, the culprits. If we hadn’t put them there, still we should have moved them. If we moved them, we’d have the two kids to whip and then a whole town to fight. A car zoomed around, missing both rinds.
“Shucks,” said one kid.
A wavering set of lights, a lighted body, and then letters on a car front: “Atlanta.” Ed and I saw it at once. “There it is,” breathed Ed. “At last,” I said.
We got on the bus; Ed headed to the back seat. I was so glad to see the bus driver that I wanted to say something to him. “How much is the fare?” He told me shortly. “I’m a stranger here,” I said. He wasn’t interested, but looked contemptuously at me.
This year, on my way to Alabama, I watched out of the car window to see Federal City stream past. There is a sign there: “While here be sure to see the Lakes.” Maybe they’ve fixed them up now as something worth seeing; maybe they’ve cleaned them out and dredged them. Maybe. But not for me. I saw all I wanted to see of them one hot August day a few years ago. All I wanted to see, and more.
AND/OR For safety’s sake, though he is a lieutenant in the Army now and may never come back to the South, let us call him Houston. He was short and frail, with a dark brown, sensitive face. I first met him at the FEPC hearings in Birmingham when, on short acquaintance, he revealed to me how he was burned up by conditions in Dixie. To judge from his twang, he was Southern-born, and he was Tuskegee trained, but he had the rather dicty restaurant on edge when he went into his tirades. The brown burghers, some of them a bit jittery anyway at FEPC and especially at the influx of a bunch of young “foreign” and radical Negroes into dynamite-loaded Birmingham, eyed him carefully over their glasses of iced tea.
I ran into him again in the small Alabama town where he was teaching. He was still quite a talker, in his high-pitched voice with a quaver in it—though he didn’t quaver in other respects. He was brimming over with facts and consequent bitterness, deeper than I expected in a graduate of Tuskegee. To him, as to so many college men, the Negro’s great need was the ballot. He had made a thoughtful study of the disenfranchising techniques and political shenanigans of Alabama in general. He laughed sardonically at the Negro’s being asked to interpret such “constitutional” questions as “What is non compos mentis when it is applied to a citizen in legal jeopardy?” But he knew also how deeply engraved was the symbol at the head of the Democratic column on the official ballot used in all elections in Alabama: a rooster with the words “White Supremacy” arched over its head, and the words under it: “For the Right.” White supremacy was well symbolized by the rooster, he thought; and he was afraid that Negro purposefulness was too well symbolized by a chicken. And a chicken with pip, lethargic, gaping, and trembling. He was determined to vote himself, and he told me with gusto the tragicomedy, at times the farce, of his experiences with the county board of registrars.
Knowing the ropes, Houston’s first strategic step to get the vote was to buy a radio at a white store and charge it. This was his first charge account in the town, but it meant a possible white sponsor to vouch for him when the polls opened. Two weeks later he applied to the Board of Registrars. He was asked, “Do you have three hundred dollars worth of taxable property?”
Houston said no, but added that he understood that the property qualification was alternative to the literacy qualification. He was told that he was wrong: he had to have three hundred dollars worth of property or forty acres of land. That seemed to end the matter as far as the Board was concerned. Houston waited a few minutes and then asked if he would be permitted to make out an application. He was granted permission with the warning that the Board would have to pass on his case, and that as he did not have the property qualification, the chances were against him. He was also told that he needed two residents of the town to vouch for his character. He named the merchant from whom he had bought the radio and a clothing merchant.
When approached, the first merchant said that he would be glad to go over and sign, but that he couldn’t leave his store just then. He would go over late that afternoon. Houston thanked him. The next day he telephoned the merchant, who hadn’t quite managed it the day before but would try to get over some time that day. Houston thanked him again. The next day the merchant hadn’t seen his way clear, either, things being so busy, but he gave his word that he wouldn’t let the polls close on Houston. Three days later, the merchant told Houston that he had just got tied up and the polls had closed. A week later, Houston went to the store and paid the balance on the radio. The merchant said that he was sorry; he just hadn’t been able to get around to doing that little favor, but he gave his word again that he would be glad indeed to go over when the polls opened again. Yessir, glad. That would be just the next month, Houston told him.
When the polls opened the next month, Houston called the merchant, who made an appointment with him for “about 2 P.M.” At the store on the dot, Houston was told that the merchant was out of town. Yessir, a quick trip.
Houston then applied to the second merchant, with whom he had had even more dealings, but on a cash basis. The runaround here was also efficient. He didn’t know Houston well enough “to take an oath about his character,” but he promised that if men at the Post Office and Bank said O.K., he would vouch for him. Every time the Post Office superintendent called, the merchant was out. Finally, the banker caught him, and the appointment was made.
“I understand you have an application for R. T. Houston, who has been working out at the school for the last three years or so.” The board informed the merchant that investigation showed that Houston did not have either three hundred dollars worth of property or forty acres of land. The merchant said, “Oh, I don’t know anything about that.” He wanted to get out of there quick. Houston stated again his understanding about the alternative literacy qualification.
“It doesn’t make any difference whether you graduated from Harvard. If you don’t have the property, you can’t register,” the merchant offered. Houston remembered that he seemed to cheer up, saying it.
The merchant and Houston left the office, Houston thanking him for his time, and the merchant saying jocularly, “Well, you got to get your three hundred dollars worth of property or forty acres of land somewhere. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to register,” said Houston. “There is a provision in the Constitution for having your qualifications determined.” Houston was partly compensated for the long runaround by the look of amazement on the merchant’s face.
With two other colleagues, both acquainted with the law, Houston approached the Board again to thresh out the matter of qualifications. The registrar, a woman, stated that somebody else had asked the same question and that she had “marked it in the book.” She was told that the property qualification was an alternative.
“No,” she said, “you must have the property.”
“When was the amendment passed making both qualifications necessary?”
This question was ignored. In triumph, the registrar read the second qualification: “owner or husband of woman who is owner . . . of forty acres of land, or personal property or real estate assessed . . . at value of three hundred dollars or more,” etc.
She was then asked to read the first qualification. She complied, hesitantly. Another registrar horned in: “This board will have to pass on you, and we register who we want to register.”
The first qualification set up the requirement of “reading and writing any article of the Constitution of the United States in the English language . . .” and of being “regularly engaged in some lawful employment the twelve months next preceding the time they offer to register . . . etc.” The word linking this to the second qualification is or.
On being asked what the word or meant, the registrar said that it meant in addition to, based on an interpretation from the Attorney General. Houston and his colleagues asked for this ruling, but it was not produced. Instead the three troublemakers were shunted across the hall to the Probate Judge’s office. The Judge was asked point blank if or in the state constitution meant and. The Judge replied point-blank that it did. “You must have both the property as well as the literacy qualification,” he said. The registrars got their ruling from the Attorney General; the Judge knew nothing of any law that had been made. Questioned closely on whether all the list of voters owned three hundred dollars worth of property, the Judge hedged. He complained that his questioners were only trying to get him into an argument with the Board of Registrars.
“What steps should we take to get an interpretation of the disputed passage?” was the straw breaking the camel’s back.
“Find out for yourself,” the Judge yelled, and stormed out of his office.
A few hours later, while preparing papers for an appeal to the Circuit Court to clarify the problem of qualification, Houston learned that the Board of Registrars had been busy telephoning him. Another call, unidentified but “from someone in touch with the Judge,” informed Houston that he would get his registration papers.
When he walked into the office, there was a decided stir. One of the women on the Board said, “Here he is now.” The spokesman of the Board was polite. “We decided to let you register,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” said Houston. The certificate was signed and dated as of the preceding day, when the Judge had ruled on “And/Or.”
Houston was told that it would be wise to get two good people of the town to vouch for him.
He named colleagues of his at the school.
“We mean white people,” said the registrar. “Don’t you know two good white people?”
“Nossir,” said Houston politely. “I don’t know two good white people . . . to vouch for me.”