If we stop for a snack, the locals turn to stare at this woman and her two sons who don’t belong. Even so, I like the way perfect strangers act as if they have all the time in the world when you ask them a question. No one seems tense and hurried, like city people. They address Mother and me with “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir.” The South sugars everything: watermelon, grits, iced tea, even its language.
I learn about my region by listening—which I’ve always preferred to talking. Southerners have perfected the art of storytelling, and by remaining quiet I get an earful. Everyone seems to have a relative who shot a cousin for messing with his daughter, or knows about a Pentecostal preacher who slashed her drunk husband with a pair of scissors. Whatever happens of interest works its way into a story.
Visit a clinic for advice about a skin rash, and you may hear the doctor’s account of someone in the next county who showed symptoms similar to yours. “This one woman, she had blisters like that all over her backside. And I mean all over. Lord, have mercy! She was big as a queen-sized bed—we could hardly get her dress unzipped—and I couldn’t for the life of me figger out how she got somethin’ that looked like poison oak back there. I called a specialist over at Grady Hospital and asked him if he’d ever seen the like…”
The juicier the story, the better. “You read in the papers about that guy who killed both his parents? Beat all I ever saw. Must’ve been the drink got to him. He was so bad to drink that his wife left him—I don’t know, five, six times—but she always come back. Well, one night he took hisself a gun and up and shot both his ma and his pa. He laid down and slept ’til about noon. When he woke up, he tried to make it to look like a robbery and called the cops. They smelled a rat, and got him to confess. Imagine, doin’ that to his own people. What’s this world a-comin’ to?”
I listen from another room as my mother’s best friend tells about her sister–in-law, who headed up a hospital’s anesthesiology department. “She was a lesbian, even though she was married to my brother. She’d been to an asylum once for some sort of treatment. Anyway, this one guy—everybody knew him, the town drunk—he came in a-cussin’ up a storm. She told him if he didn’t stop she’d sew his mouth shut. And by God if she didn’t do just that. She put him down and took a needle and sewed both his lips together.”
She pauses for effect before continuing. “Well, you just cain’t do somethin’ like that, I don’t care who you are. The hospital hated to lose her, so they gave her a choice: either you go back to the asylum for more treatment, or we’re gonna take away your medical license, there’s no two ways about it. She didn’t show up for work the next day or the next. On the third day a cleaning woman at the hospital smelled somethin’ funny and opened a closet and there she was, dead as a doornail. She’d given herself an overdose—they found the needle. The family was mad as hornets because she willed everything to her woman lover.”
I soon understand where country-music songwriters get their material—just by listening to raw Southern life.
Religion comes up all the time. I go to the grocery store with my mother and the checkout clerk asks in a nasal voice, “What church y’all goin’ to, honey?” Everybody goes to some church—although when one of my relatives becomes a Mormon, the others react as if he’s turned Communist. I twist the radio dial and count twelve stations playing hymns or sermons. Billboards and barns are painted with various religious slogans. Prepare to meet thy God. Christ died for you—can you not live for him? He loved you so much it hurt (this one has red paint, like blood, dripping off the letters).
Death ranks right at the top of what people talk about. A relative falls ill and the countdown starts. “They cut him open, and they was nothin’ they could do, so they just sewed him up. He looks like graveyard death already. When I touch him, his skin feels clammy as a toad. He won’t last long—I give him two weeks, a month at most.”
The other end of life gets equal notice. Joining Mother on one of her visits, I sit in a living room where toddlers seem to be the chief form of entertainment. Conscious of being the center of attention, a child runs around tossing a ball and hitting his little sister. The women seem captivated by the drama playing out before them, which to me looks very ordinary. “He’s a wild child, that one, the spittin’ image of his daddy. You think you’re somethin’, Billy-John, don’t ya? You sweet thing you—come over here and give Meemaw a kiss. Give me some sugar.”
I learn from these conversations that, from birth to death, people matter in the South. They are the main topic of concern, not the economy or foreign policy or scientific discoveries. Somehow I know that if our house burns down or we run out of money or I get hit by a car, this would be the place to live. Southerners look after their own.
* * *
—
In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement gathers steam and now nearly every conversation circles back to race.
As a true son of the South, I am born and bred a racist. My grandfather tells me that an ancestor, William Lowndes Yancey, led a group known as “the fire-eaters,” who called for the South to secede and thus helped start the Civil War. “Yep,” he continues, “and until Emancipation my own granddad kept a few slaves on a plantation someplace called Rough and Ready, Georgia. I’ve still got the official letter ordering him to set ’em free.”
This fact makes a heady impression on me, a kid from the slums. He also tells me that, after Emancipation, some of those enslaved workers, who had no surnames, took on the name Yancey. That night I thumb through the Y pages of the Atlanta phone book, searching for Black-sounding names like Willie Mae and Deion, wondering if my ancestors used to own theirs.
I’ve been taught in school that most slaves lived contentedly on the plantation. After all, why would an enslaver mistreat the very workers he depended on for his livelihood? The Children of the Confederacy published a sort of catechism that asks, “What was the feeling of the slaves toward their masters?” Good Southern kids parrot back the answer, “They were faithful and devoted and were always ready and willing to serve them.”
Each Christmas as we sit at my grandmother Yancey’s table, Black employees from my grandfather’s truck-body shop appear at the back door. They knock and then stand there awkwardly until my grandfather gets up and drops a couple of silver dollars into their hands as a Christmas bonus. Some of them I know, such as Buck, an illiterate blacksmith with webbed fingers, who signs his name with an “X.” Leroy, the muscular foreman, always gets the biggest bonus. He stands on the back porch shuffling his feet, and says, “Jes’ come to wish y’all a Merry Christmas, Mistuh Yancey.” Grandpop smiles and goes inside to retrieve six silver dollars, one for each member of Leroy’s family.
We’re relaxing in the living room at the Yanceys’ one night when the TV news covers a civil rights protest in Atlanta, which leads my grandfather to reminisce about the race riot of 1906. “I’d just turned eighteen. Some rumor spread about Black men raping white women. Well, a mob of white folks got together and started a big riot downtown. I think they lynched several dozen Black men. Some of the rioters cut off fingers and toes as souvenirs.”
I haven’t heard this story before and don’t know how much to believe. “Were you there in person?” I ask.
He nods. “I saw it with my own eyes. My dad told me to stay away, but I disobeyed. I rode the streetcar downtown the day after the biggest riot. Bodies were still hanging from the streetlamps—Negroes had been strung up live and used as target practice. The gutter was red with blood. I’ll never forget that sight.”
Nobody knows what to say until my uncle Winston, who has been listening, speaks. “And they want you to believe everything has changed. Our family doctor is the highest-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. Everybody knows it, though of course he never mentions it. He was a high school classmate of your dad’s. Heck, you wanna see the power of the KKK, you can drive right now up to Forsyth Coun
ty, just north of Atlanta. You’ll see a sign posted at the border: ‘Nigger, don’t let the Sun set on you in Forsyth County.’ And they mean it.”
I flinch at the N-word, forbidden in our house. My aunt Doris, like many polite Atlantans, carefully avoids it, too, though just barely. “I got me a little Nigra to fix my roof,” she says. Or, “I don’t know how old that patient was. It’s kinda hard to tell with Nigras, you know.”
Uncle Jack proves to be the most racist of my relatives. After Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he packs up his family and moves to Australia, which at the time has a “whites-only” immigration policy.
* * *
—
To my surprise, my Philadelphia relatives are no less racist. My uncles warn of “darkies” buying a row house a few blocks over. “They’re already invading the parks and swimming pools,” my uncle Bob grouses. “Soon they’ll take over this whole part of town.” He says that when he served in Korea, even with his eyes closed he could tell when a Black soldier walked into a tent. “They smell different. That’s why dogs don’t like ’em.”
On our car trips to Philadelphia, I wonder where Black people eat, use the restroom, or spend the night. In Southern states, we never see whites and Blacks in the same restaurant or motel. That would be illegal. Mother assures me they have their own places—The Negro Motorist Green Book lists them all—but I see very few “Colored Motel” signs along the highways.
Apart from visits to Miz Henley’s school, I rarely come into contact with Black people. We play in segregated parks, go to separate barbershops, and attend different schools and churches. By law Black kids cannot swim in a white swimming pool, and a Black doctor or nurse cannot treat a white patient. Some pet cemeteries even have a separate section for the cats and dogs of Black people.
Atlantans share the same overall space, but without touching, as if on an invisible checkerboard of black and white squares. Tall buildings downtown designate one elevator for Negroes, freight, and baggage; the nicer ones are reserved for whites. Public buildings usually have three restrooms: White Women, White Men, and Colored. Drinking fountains are labeled White or Colored, often with cold water available only for the whites. A friend of mine from church told me that as a child he kept twisting the knob for the Colored fountain, expecting colored water to come out.
Rich’s, the city’s most prestigious department store, sells clothes to Black customers but won’t allow them to try on the clothes, so as not to offend its white patrons. The store also bans Blacks from its restaurants. During my seventh-grade year, Martin Luther King Jr. joins a series of student sit-ins, forcing Rich’s to change.
The route to my grandparents’ house takes us through Black neighborhoods. I stare out the car window at the streets and front porches teeming with life. Old men sit in rocking chairs, chewing snuff and spitting the remains into tobacco tins. Women sit beside them shelling butter beans or quilting. The sidewalks, where any exist, are a playground for hopscotch and jump ropes, or form the boundaries for street ball.
I breathe in the smells: barbecue, fresh grass clippings, cigar fumes, and also one acrid burnt smell I don’t recognize. “It’s hair,” my mother says. “They’re using heated metal combs and pressers on their hair to make it straight, like white people’s.” On bus trips to downtown Atlanta, I start noticing ads for skin whiteners and hair straighteners. “A clear, whiter skin is the stepping stone to popularity, love, romance, and business success” reads one.
My own hair has never been straight, which attracts the ridicule of my schoolmates. “Hey, where’d you get those curls, huh? You got some Black blood in you?” It’s a serious matter. According to state law, based on the one-drop rule, a person with a tiny fraction—just one drop—of Black blood is classified as Negro.
Black people give us someone to look down on and feel superior to. My family has lived in government projects and in a trailer park. We may qualify as “poor white trash,” but at least we are white. Even compliments have a racist undercurrent: “He’s right smart, for a Black man…She’s real pretty, for a Black girl.”
Every few months Mother hires a woman named Louise to help with chores, such as cleaning the stove and defrosting the refrigerator. Imagine, someone lower on the ladder than us! Mother treats her well, but Louise never eats with us. She insists on taking her lunch break while standing up, in the kitchen. Once, Mother went to Louise’s home for dinner, and even there Louise ate in a separate room. She explained, almost apologetically, “Ma’am, no offense, but I ain’t never ate at a table with a white woman before.”
* * *
—
Only later will I learn another side of the South, which the child-me missed. I read eyewitness accounts of slavery by Frederick Douglass and others who describe a cruelty I can barely comprehend. I wince at Civil War soldiers’ descriptions of corpses rotting in trench mud, of limbs sawn off with nothing to dull the pain, of a Georgia prison called Andersonville in which more Union soldiers died of starvation than had died in the North’s five bloodiest battles combined.
Something seems to crumble inside me as I read these accounts, which stay with me like an afterimage. The Confederate army no longer seems so honorable, the Lost Cause no longer so just. The war may have loosened the shackles of slavery, but more than a century later the spirit of racial hostility lives on. I feel engulfed by a sense of revulsion, not only at what I once believed to be true but also at myself. Growing up, I swallowed the myth.
Guilt denied never goes away. The South casts the war, as it casts almost everything, in religious language. Historian Shelby Foote tells of a Confederate monument in his hometown dedicated to “the only nation that lived and died without sin.” On one of my childhood pilgrimages I visited the Richmond grave of Jefferson Davis, which has this inscription carved in stone: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That is the myth of the Lost Cause that I believed as a boy and through my adolescence.
General Grant, who had seen the worst that war has to offer, expressed a different view at Appomattox—sadness “at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which people ever fought.” As a Southerner, coming of age for me included a dawning awareness that we were living with a story that was self-deceiving, a lie. The resulting tension planted something deep in my soul, a nagging sense of betrayal.
I couldn’t put together the contradictions of my homeland. A religion-soaked place with so much gossip about cheating friends, child abuse, rape, drinking, and violence. A friendly, hospitable people who viewed outsiders with suspicion. An honorable people who defended that honor with violence. A defeated people who took out their anger on a race even more beaten down.
As I grew older, a crack opened up in what I had always been taught to believe, the first of many cracks to come.
They, certainly, did not think themselves unusual, in their own eyes; they were like everyone else, and their conduct seemed to them, so far as I can judge, highly natural, just what anyone else would do under the circumstances.
—Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
CHAPTER 11
PHILADELPHIA
At the end of every summer we drive to Philadelphia to visit my mother’s family, the Diems. There, I gain a glimpse of my mother’s life and upbringing.
The drive takes two days, and Mother constantly worries about traffic. “We haven’t hit any yet, but wait till we get to Richmond…. Well, that wasn’t so bad, but wait till we get near Washington…”
On the trip, we splurge by eating in restaurants. “You can choose anything you want,” Mother says, taking out an envelope full of cash she’s been saving all year. Marshall orders his favorite dish, veal cutlet—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The day’s highlight co
mes in late afternoon, when we search for a motel within Mother’s budget. Marshall and I lobby hard for one with a swimming pool, and sometimes we win.
In the motel room, Mother drops our bags, heads to the bathroom, and removes a paper seal that reads, “Sanitized for your protection.” We change into swimsuits and, after a dip in the pool, retire to the room, shivering in unaccustomed air-conditioning, and climb under the covers to enjoy the luxury of television. This is living!
As we near Philadelphia, the view outside the car windows gets uglier, but also more thrilling. Refineries belch flames in the air. Crossing rust-colored bridges, we peer down at the ships lined up in the dark water, waiting to touch land. We dip into tunnels coated with exhaust and shoot out the other side into blinding sunlight. Susquehanna, Schuylkill, Tinicum, Passyunk—the names on the highway signs sound foreign to our Southern ears.
* * *
—
For a kid from the leafy suburbs of Atlanta, southwest Philadelphia, where the Diems live, might as well be a foreign country. Each block looks like every other block: a line of two-story row houses, with front yards so small you can stand on the porch and spit a watermelon seed to the sidewalk. Pavement covers almost everything—the street, the sidewalks, the front steps—and the only trees I see are two-inch seedlings poking their way through cracks in the sidewalk. The streets have numbers, not names—70th, 69th, 68th, rather than Peachtree Street or Meadowlark Lane.
Around Labor Day those streets feel like molten lava. How, after driving two days in a northerly direction, could we have ended up in a place even hotter than Georgia? We always visit at the most miserable time of the year, because of a weeklong missionary conference at Mother’s home church, Maranatha Tabernacle.
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