I don’t think Aunt Willa heard any of the talk. Her preoccupation with Little Lady had deepened into obsession, and by then even my mother had to admit that this little gilt ace in our familial hole had become as malleable and chiming and lovely and essentially brainless a little Atlanta belle as one could wish. Little Lady was a virgin of the highest and most marketable order. She could not remember her father, but she did remember, vividly, her mother’s histrionic descriptions, when they first came to our house, of the times James Bondurant had come home drunk and beat her and little Lucy, and of how he had once threatened to kill all of them with a claw hammer. Consequently, she was so terrified of the men she had been trained to please that she allowed no one to touch her beyond the obligatory dance holds, and those lightly, and so went through her immaculate debut a few years later and her dainty provisional year of Junior League, and finally to her early and brilliant wedding to bull-necked, blue-blooded Carter Rawson a virgin of vestal purity.
That she began, ever so discreetly, to sip bourbon steadily through the days and evenings soon after that grand affair did not necessarily have anything to do with any trauma from her wedding night; might, indeed, have been Jim Bondurant’s genetic legacy to her. However, as Lucy said after the first time Little Lady fell on her pretty Pekingese face during dinner at the Driving Club, “Oh, bullshit, of course it was fuck-shock. Lady always thought, until her wedding night, that you did it with pistils and stamens. Lord, I can’t abide a fool.”
Only with me was Lucy her old, flickering, will-o’-the-wisp self; me and the Negroes in her orbit. With them, especially with moody, brilliant Glenn Pickens over at the Camerons’ and dumpy, stolid ToTo at our house, who were near her own age, she was, perhaps, even more essentially herself, because she loved to give, to please, to teach, to impart information and watch it sink home, and there was little by then that she could tell me that we had not already shared. ToTo was hopeless; her response to Lucy contained, only and ever, a one-celled, doglike devotion. But Glenn Pickens’s mind leaped and flashed like a rainbow trout in sunstruck spray, and he spent hours listening to Lucy’s free-flowing fancies and odd, glinting insights.
The only times I ever saw Glenn really smile in my life, then or later, was at some notion of Lucy’s, and I think that the only tendrils of humor and whimsy he has in his complex, darkling soul today were planted there in those days by her. With him the seductress simply took herself off and the open, sunny changeling came out of hiding, and the two odd and good young minds, so far apart in the countries of birth and environment, met in a shower of sparks. Even Ben and Dorothy Cameron stopped sometimes to listen to them spar and banter, and though Glenn and Lucy would temper their talk to the adult ears, in the sun of that easy approval they would go on.
“She’s good for him,” Ben said once, walking with me and Dorothy back to their house while Lucy gathered up her books and Glenn got ready for his late-afternoon sessions with the English tutor the Camerons had found for him. “I can’t quite grab hold of it, but she does something for him all the studying we can buy for him doesn’t do.”
“It’s that she shows him a white person’s world with no holds barred and no strings attached,” Dorothy said. “She gives him all of herself and no matter how hard we try, most of us white folks just can’t do that with the Negroes. But how can we expect them to move into our world if we don’t show them what it’s really like? Or what we are? That’s what Lucy does for Glenn. She shows him what is possible.”
“Lord God,” Ben Cameron said, ruffling Dorothy’s dark hair. “Don’t ever let anybody outside us and Shep hear you say that. The Klan will start knocking crosses together before you can say ‘Jim Crow.’ You’re right, though, of course. That’s just what it is. The possible. It could open more doors than any law we could manage to get on the books.”
“Now who’s Klan bait?” Dorothy Cameron said.
“Well, let’s hope she doesn’t get bored with Glenn and stop coming,” Ben said. “I often wonder why she does. Pretty as she is, I wonder that every little thug in Buckhead isn’t camped on your doorstep, Shep.”
“They are,” I said, and though that’s all I did say, Dorothy Cameron shot me a swift look of pure compassion. She knew, of course, what Ben Cameron or any of our fathers would not have: that Lucy Bondurant was the talk of Buckhead, and why. And she knew more; knew, somehow, that the fact was a kind of obscure agony to me. I was grateful for the knowing, but it embarrassed me, and I did not go to the Camerons’ after school again when I knew Lucy was there with Glenn Pickens.
In any case, it did not matter, for Aunt Willa somehow got wind of the afternoons that Lucy spent with Glenn in the Pickenses’ little house behind Merrivale House and forbade her to go there ever again, or even to speak to Glenn, and made it so plain that if she disobeyed she would be sent away to whatever out-of-state boarding school could be found for her—“and with what I can afford you won’t like it, sister”—that Lucy capitulated without a word. She simply drew in a little closer upon herself, and clung more tightly to Martha and ToTo and me, and escalated her sexual warfare against Willa to include open smoking and covert drinking. Nobody knew about the drinking yet but me, for no one else heard her hectic giggle when she came in at night, or the clumsy stumblings at the front door, but I thought it was only a matter of time for that, too, and my silent Lucy-anguish bored deeper.
I do not remember seeing Glenn Pickens smile ever again, though, of course, he must have.
We saw the Negroes in our world, in those last tranquil days before May 17, 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education fissured the dike, in a kind of simplistic pentimento. On the surface, they filled two roles for us: furniture and court jesters. The Pinks and the Jells of Buckhead had grown up in a sea of black faces, but those faces invariably loomed over hands at work in our service: nurses, cooks, maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, washwomen, even wet nurses. They might be infinitely and boundlessly loving and patient with us, and we might revel in their warmth, but it was the warmth and comfort of old, well-padded furniture that we took from them, anonymous and belonging inalterably to our houses. Most of us were aware, on some deep and never-probed level, that we had power over them, even as small children; too many shrieks and tears and complaints from us, and the nurses and tenders would be gone back to the projects before our pink little mouths had closed. I don’t think any of us ever examined the basic horror of that power then, for children—especially the children of that time and place, and even its teenagers and young men and women—do not question the anatomy of their worlds. It is as it is. For most of us, introspection and awareness came much later, if at all, when the fire storms raging over the South could not be ignored even by us out in our Buckhead fastnesses. By then, of course, it was all academic.
When they were not providing us with comfort, the Negroes we knew entertained us. The Pinks and the Jells had a ready stable of Negroes who could be counted on to amuse and charm us endlessly with their antics, antics so redolent, in our blind young eyes, of the only kind of blackness we knew. They were those most prized pieces in our furniture collections, “characters,” and we loved and laughed at all of them, and knew none of them.
There was Blind Willie, who played wildly infectious, raunchy rhythm and blues guitar at Peacock Alley, and Snake-Eyes the carhop, who named several of his countless children after favored Jells, and mincing, transvestite Sister, who wore a Carmen Miranda turban and high heels and dispensed languid curb service at Rusty’s until a committee of indignant Northside mothers descended upon Rusty or whoever his factotum was and demanded Sister’s banishment on moral grounds. There were the incredible carhops at the Varsity, monarch among them the outrageous, androgynous Flossie May, whose singsong litanies and lightning feet provided diversion nearly as enthralling as the celebrated and utterly taboo jig shows down at the Municipal Auditorium on Saturday nights. We attended these latter affairs regularly, lying to our parents, and stationed ourselves in the upstairs balcony
, where we danced and drank beer and shouted and laughed, and rained trash and bottles down upon the dancers, and rocked our bodies to the blasting, insinuating rhythm of the Negro music that was unlike any we had ever heard before, pounding and insistently sexual. Why we were not simply set upon and murdered afterward for our insolence is a tribute to both the good nature of those dancers and the smug and muffled tenor of the times. Ten years later, we would have been.
It was one of the real dichotomies of Lucy’s character that she so openly and truly loved many individual Negroes, and yet participated with such obvious relish in the mimicking and debasing of the race itself in those awful balconies, pointing and laughing with the best of us at the dancing Negroes out on the floor. And yet I knew that even while she did, she was the only one of us who would have cheerfully and naturally gone right on home after the show with any one of them who had asked her and danced and talked away the remaining hours of the night, and thought absolutely nothing of it. As Yul Brynner said in The King and I, “is a puzzlement,” and one of the many about her I never solved.
We were, most of us, openly and casually racist, and told and laughed at our share of nigger jokes, but I think it was largely a cultural thing and had nothing in it of personal heat, like our laughing rudely at Yankees while knowing virtually none of them, or our parents’ denying stoutly that they were archconservatives, even as their chauffeurs drove them to the polls to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. But a few of the boys I knew at North Fulton were venomously and very personally bigoted, and acted—or were said to act—upon it. Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton come to mind; both were said to have stalked and shot Negroes from their streaking cars in the black nights on nameless South Georgia farm roads, and I have seen Boo, once at the Blue Lantern and once at Moe’s & Joe’s, knock a weary and smartmouthed Negro carhop to the ground and kick him nearly unconscious.
When Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, the story was all over Buckhead, in the weeks following, that Boo Cutler was actively and intimately involved in the plot, was perhaps even the finger behind the one on the trigger. There may have been some credence to it; the story still has currency today, though Boo himself is long dead of a brain tumor. I remember that I thought of that story when I heard of his death, lingering and lonely in the dreary VA hospital out on Briarcliff Road, and then thought how strange it was that so many of those eerie loners who alter history in violent and terrible ways turn out to have had blooming in their brains that hideous, silent flower. Perhaps Boo always had it. None of us were surprised when we heard.
But under the smiling, primary-painted facades of child-tenders and tap dancers, the Negroes in Atlanta were, as they were all over that America, bringing themselves to a slow and inexorable boil. Not much of it showed then. In the very early fifties, Atlanta Negroes lived, as they had for decades, along a blighted east-west axis in the southern quadrant of the city, in peeling, rat-infested housing projects and sweltering neighborhoods so wasted by poverty, unemployment, ill health and crime that no Northsider who had not actually driven through them would believe they existed. Many of my crowd never did.
On the east and west fringes of the black belt a few affluent neighborhoods of quite grand homes clustered in cloistered solitude, and on Auburn Avenue downtown, to the south of the central business district, a handful of black-owned office buildings and factories and warehouses stood. But the rest of Sweet Auburn, which served as a Main Street for the black community, was given over to infinitesimal, struggling businesses and services in appalling disrepair. In the downtown proper, and indeed, all over the city and cities like it in and out of the South, “White Only” and “Colored Only” signs flourished like skin cancers on everything from churches to train stations to restaurants to drinking fountains to rest rooms. The Negroes of Atlanta were still, going into the second half of the century, as disenfranchised and disaffected as serfs in a medieval city-state.
A few recognizable black leaders emerged, in those days, to stand for their communities and petition the white power structure for the human solutions so desperately needed, but they approached, when they did, in private and in secret, after hours and with, metaphorically at least, their hats in their hands. No wonder that deep in those black waters a great tide was rising; wonder only that it did not burst free sooner and with far greater force, and that we favored white children by all that black bounty and largesse could not, in that most transparent of pentimenti, see it building. But we did not.
Our fathers saw it, though.
“When do you think your father first realized what Glenn would be to this town?” I asked Sarah Cameron once, at the top of Glenn Pickens’s incredible trajectory.
“Probably the day Glenn was born,” she said.
She didn’t miss it far.
The great golden age of their full potency, when as the celebrated downtown white power structure the fathers of the Buckhead boys and girls would literally alter the face and persona of the city and pull it with sheer, concerted force into the mainstream of America, was still a few years away when Sarah and Lucy and I were teenagers. But the generators were beginning to hum, and the gears to be oiled and readied.
They were still young men then, in their late thirties and early forties, and for the bulk of their adult lives they had been occupied with tending family fortunes and extending personal arenas. But they knew fully, even before the city and the nation perceived them as anything more than an extraordinarily close group of wealthy men living in a northern suburb of Atlanta, that their roles would be those of catalysts, pragmatists and, most of all, alchemists. They would be required to, and would, transmute base metal into gold. I think the only thing they did not know yet, in those days, was the sheer, dizzying scope of their spheres of influence.
Literally since their births they had known each other, and moved as easily in one another’s homes and clubs as they did in their own. It was always that proximity, that mutual pool of kinship, which gave them their unique power. Its basis was always the remarkable psychological similarity of class attitudes that made them comfortable together. They were ready, but they were not yet fully mobilized. In those last quiet days before both civic growth and civil turmoil, they were largely concerned with looking around to see what they could see. Their concerted social antennae were awesome.
They saw a city stagnant since the flurry of building directly after World War II, crying out for office space and air facilities to catch the faltering torch that the railroads had dropped. Atlanta had always been a service city, a mover of goods, a branch office town, but now they saw business and money turning away in impatience, going elsewhere, because the wheels at home were not numerous or sturdy enough to take the weight. They saw business after business come South, sniff around, find little to their liking in the way of facilities or quality of life, and head for New Jersey or Texas. And they saw a formless black population, large and growing, with, as yet, no real political muscle, but with an enormous potential for it.
They were not stupid men, or shortsighted; they knew, even as they espoused it personally, that segregation could not and would not prevail, and that when it crumbled, they could either profit from it or be crushed beneath its fall—but fall it would. Being good businessmen, if indifferent humanitarians, they began to put their feelers out to the simmering black community. Far better to have the Negroes of Atlanta buying from their businesses than burning them. Far better to lure Northeastern business South with the promise of open, peaceful schools than put their burgeoning strength behind a last romantic schoolhouse-door stand doomed to fail before the first federal marshal appeared.
They were well-connected men, even in those early days; they knew what the tenor of the nation’s highest courts was, and knew that bullheaded defiance of a federal ruling on school integration would tip Atlanta squarely back into the somnolent quagmire from which it had so painfully struggled after the war. Mayor Hartsfield had the right idea, but the wrong syntax: It was not so much that Atl
anta was a city too busy to hate as that in Atlanta, organized, official hate was bad for business. These twenty or thirty men who were, to us Pinks and Jells, still only our fathers put aside their menus and began, from their tables at the Capital City Club, to reel in the lines all of them had into the blasted streets and housing projects of South Atlanta.
The lines were myriad, and went deep. Many were those of master-servant; every Buckhead family had its own coterie of black familiars among the men and women who came out on the 23 Oglethorpe buses every day to serve them, and they knew, also, families of those people. And then there was the network of blacks in service at the clubs and the restaurants they frequented, and at the labor levels of their businesses and those of their friends. Being leaders themselves, they knew personally the scattering of black leaders who were visible in those days and the still fewer ones who were not, and they were on first-name basis with the administrations of the six black schools in the lustrous, Rockefeller-funded Atlanta University complex in the southwest quadrant of the city. This may have been the most important and the most fortuitous tie of all; it was the educated young blacks who administered, as well as participated in, the civil rights movement when it came, and when it did, our fathers had their contacts, if never their agents, in place.
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