by Paul Theroux
Julius Rosenwald, the son of German-Jewish immigrants, made a success of his clothing business by selling to Sears, Roebuck, and in 1909 became the CEO of Sears. In later life his wish was to make a difference with his money, and he hatched a plan to give his wealth to charitable causes, but on a condition that has become common today: his contribution had to be met by an equal amount from another party—the matching grant. Convinced that Booker T. Washington’s notion to create rural schools was a way forward, Rosenwald met the great educator, and thus began the Rosenwald Fund to build schools in the backlands of the South, many of them in Hale County.
“The school population of Hale County is five black to one white,” James Agee wrote in 1937 in an essay that was rejected by Fortune magazine, his employer at the time, and published only recently in book form under the title Cotton Tenants: Three Families. He continued: “And since not a cent has gone into Negro schools, such neat buildings as this [in Moundville] are possible: for white children. Negroes still sardine themselves, 100 and 120 strong, into stoveheated oneroom shacks which would reasonably house a fifth of them if the walls, roof, and windows were tight. But then as one landlord said and as many more would agree: ‘I don’t object to nigrah education, not up through foath or fift grade maybe, but not furdern dat.’”
Five thousand schools were built in fifteen states beginning in 1917, and they continued to be built into the 1930s. Rosenwald died in 1932, around the time the last schools were built, but before the money he had put aside ran out, in 1948, a plan had been adopted through which money was given to black scholars and writers of exceptional promise. One of the young writers, Ralph Ellison, from Oklahoma, was granted a Rosenwald Fellowship, and this gave him the time and incentive to complete his novel Invisible Man (1952), one of the defining dramas of racial violence and despair in America. Rosenwald Fellowships also went to the photographer Gordon Parks, the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (who later created Ellison’s memorial in New York City), W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and many other African-American artists and thinkers.
The schools built with Rosenwald money (and local effort) were modest structures in the beginning, two-room schools like the one in Greensboro, with two or at most three teachers. They were commonly known as Rosenwald schools, though Rosenwald discouraged naming any of them after himself. As the school-building project developed into the 1920s the schools became more ambitious, brick-built, with more rooms. The simple style that identified them—because they looked alike—was the result of detailed plans from a Tuskegee University study by two architecture professors, Robert R. Taylor and W. A. Hazel, who had published their ideas in a 1915 pamphlet, “The Negro Rural School and Its Relation to the Community.”
One of the characteristics of the schools was an emphasis on natural light through the use of large windows. The assumption was that the rural areas where they’d be built would probably not have electricity. Paint colors, placement of blackboards and desks, and the southerly orientation of the school to maximize the light were specified in blueprints that had been fastidiously elaborated by Rosenwald’s chief administrator, Samuel Leonard Smith, who was both an architect and an educator.
Though Booker T. Washington had died in 1915, before Rosenwald began building, his ideas were incorporated—a key one was that a school in such a remote area would be more useful if it could also function as a meeting hall, a community center, a gathering place, or an auditorium. To this end, some of the schools were fitted with movable inner walls that could be folded back to create larger rooms as needed.
The simple white building outside Greensboro was a relic from an earlier time, and had Reverend Lyles not explained its history and his personal connection, I would have had no idea that almost a hundred years ago a philanthropic-minded stranger from Chicago—white, Jewish, humble, craving anonymity—had tried to make a difference here. And by the way, through his fellowships he had helped enrich American literature with classic accounts of the black experience.
“The financing was partly the responsibility of the parents,” Reverend Lyles told me. “They had to give certain stipends. Wasn’t always money. You’ve heard of people giving the doctors chickens for their payment? That’s the truth—that happened in America. Some was given corn, peanuts, and other stuff, instead of cash money. They didn’t have money back in that day. When folks started getting paid in money, that was in the middle or late 1940s.”
Tuition was paid in kind: Reverend Lyles, who came from a farming family, brought produce his father had grown, and chickens and eggs.
“Why was your school called the Emory School?” I asked.
“The school received its name from a gentleman name of Agnew,” Reverend Lyles said in his precise way, speaking slowly, and I was again reminded that though he usually sat in one of his barber chairs when we talked, and we were next door to his soul food diner, Eugene Lyles was first and foremost a preacher. “The man Agnew was in cahoots with a man name of Tommy Ruffin. He owned land in that area. And Agnew gave the land for the school on the grounds that they would name the school for his son. His son was named Emory—he had passed away.”
“Did you know that man Emory?”
“My father did. My father and the others who were born around his time, they helped put up that school building. And just recently Pam Dorr and the HERO people made a plan to fix the school up.”
I asked him whether he’d been involved in the renovation.
“Not the renovations as such,” he said. “But it made me proud that I was able to speak when it was reopened as a community center. My father would have been proud too. My father and Mr. Agnew’s son was contemporaries, around the same age. Old folks then—my grandfather was born in 1850.”
I thought I had misheard. Surely this was impossible. I queried the date.
“Correct—1850.” So Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was younger than Reverend Lyles’s grandfather. “My grandfather wasn’t born here, but he came here. He remembered slavery. He told us all about it. I was thirteen years old when he passed. I was born in 1934. He would have been in his nineties. Work it out—he was ten years old in 1860. Education wasn’t for blacks then. He lived slavery. Therefore his name was that of his owner, Lyles, and he was Andrew Lyles. Later on, he heard stories about the Civil War, and he told them to me.”
Miss Cotton Blossom
Blue Shadows Bed and Breakfast became my home for a while in Greensboro. Apart from the semiderelict Inn Motel on the other side of town (Mr. Patel, prop.), which never had cars in its parking lot or any guests that I saw, there was no other place to stay. An older bed and breakfast, Muckle House on Main Street, had closed. The nearest roach-free motels were twenty miles south, on the bypass road outside Demopolis.
Blue Shadows was a large, squarish house of obvious pretension, set in a grove of trees just beyond Hale County Jail, on the farming outskirts of Greensboro. My room was an addition atop the garage, which suited me for its being separate from the house next door and its constantly playing theme music, the owner’s favorites, show tunes mostly.
The owner and occupier, who lived on her own, was an elderly widow and former beauty queen, Mrs. Janet May. In writing this (elderly woman, once glamorous, loner, innkeeper, big old house), I am aware that I am treading on the slippery ground of the Southern grotesque, as if describing someone out of Carson McCullers, the aged coquette in The Ballad of the Sad Café springing to mind, in which Miss Amelia Evans, living alone in her small Southern town, welcomes into her house an enigmatic hunchback, Cousin Lymon, who becomes a prisoner of her love until, in a dark frenzy, he robs her and breaks her heart. But Janet May was kindly and generous, eager to please, and without an ounce of rancor, a pillar of the Methodist church and a capable cook.
“Former beauty queen” was not her boast but my discovery: on a high shelf in a closet in my room where I was snooping, I found a trophy inscribed with Janet’s maiden name and her achievement, Miss Cotton Blossom—1949. I worked out fro
m hints dropped and events mentioned that Mrs. May was now eighty-seven years old, and her achievement was that she ran this bed and breakfast competently, without much fuss, though her manner was drawlingly effusive.
She had known a few years of glamour as a Powers model in New York City. “A junior model,” she explained. “Because I wasn’t tall enough.” Originally from Chattanooga, she’d settled here in Greensboro, her late husband’s home, and they’d raised five children in this house—Blue Shadows had been in the May family for several generations. John May had had a career as an airline pilot. He had died some years ago. Janet employed a housekeeper, Elmira, who had worked for John May’s family for many years. Janet loved Elmira and was grateful for her help, especially in the solitary days of her widowhood.
A wonderful Southern touch was related to Elmira. One morning, years back, Janet said, gushing and grateful, “Elmira, why are you so good to me?”
The elderly black woman paused in her sweeping and said, “Mr. May and me was kinfolks.”
I heard that not from Janet but from someone in town who swore it was true. And I realize as I write it that that, too, sounds like dialogue from a piece of Southern fiction.
Janet casually mentioned to me that one of her sons spent part of every year in Africa as a volunteer in some sort of community development. “Helping people.”
“Where in Africa?”
“Zambia,” she said.
Suppressing a mocking laugh, I remarked to her that parts of Greensboro—the decaying houses, the areas of shacks, the dirt roads, the boarded-up shops, the Indian-owned gas station and the moth-eaten Inn Motel, the many idle youths, the odors of woodsmoke from burning blue gums and the pong of freshly plowed land, the red roads, the lumber mill—so much here bore a distinct resemblance to places in Zambia I had seen. And this being the case, why wasn’t her son provoked to do anything in Greensboro?
“Now that’s a good question,” she said. “I wish you’d talk to him. I often think that myself, I sure do. I have no idea why he insists on going to Africa.”
I suggested that for her son’s next birthday she give him a copy of Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town.
The motives of Janet’s son were undoubtedly idealistic. Many Southerners went to Africa to proselytize: the hinterland of Malawi and Uganda, I’d seen in the 1960s, had been thick with them, usually a preacher and his wife, and sometimes a small family, living next to their small bush church that had been built with donations from home.
“Even though white Protestant missionaries were being sent to Africa to save the souls of heathen black natives,” Erskine Caldwell wrote in Deep South: Memory and Observation, his 1966 book-length essay on Southern churches—his own father was an itinerant preacher—“at home it was feared that Southern Negroes might rebel against staying in their assigned place if they became imbued with too much of the spirit of Christian brotherhood and would presume to be privileged to fraternize socially and politically as well as religiously.”
One day Janet said that the next evening there would be a potluck supper at her church, First United Methodist, in town—and really I ought to go, because the food would be delicious and I would be welcome. As it happened, I was busy that evening—I had planned to see Reverend Lyles. And that appointment inspired a question.
“Will there be any black people at the potluck?”
“Oh, no—no blacks ever come,” she said. “Blacks and whites don’t socialize here.”
“Not even at church?”
“Paul,” she said in a reprimanding tone, as though to a simpleton, and in a Southern accent a reprimand sounds especially belittling. “They have their own church.”
“So no mixed gatherings?”
Janet shook her head. “My neighbors over yonder are teachers in a black school, but I know for a fact that though they sure enough teach them, they don’t socialize with them at all. Blacks have never been in their house. I expect you’re wondering why. But that’s how things are.”
She was slow-talking and long-winded and dithery. Yet I grew to like her and found her amazing—at her age to be running this place, shopping, solving the many problems of scheduling and cooking, and apart from a little mopping and dusting by Elmira, doing it alone.
Dusting such a place was not simple. The house was sensationally cluttered, crammed with knickknacks: plaster pigs, dancing frogs, Betty Boop dolls, golfing trophies, cute signs and plaques (Shalom, Y’all was a stairwell greeting), tassels, Christmas wreaths, souvenirs from all over—New Orleans, Nashville, Disney World—movie posters, a mounted deer head, doilies, throw rugs, coasters, stenciled mugs, and a really toxic smell, the mingled aromas of mildewed carpet and air freshener.
Yet I admired Janet for her humor, her fortitude, her grace, and her independence. She was a very old woman doing a much younger woman’s work. It would have been so easy to poke fun at her, or mock her for “They have their own church,” or for her elaborate makeup, the rouged cheeks, the sooty mascara, the hot-pink lipstick. But she was from another age, even the way she stood, canted slightly backward in her haughty Powers-model posture, legs together, one hand upright, a finger on her cheek, looking slightly drunk as coquettes often do: Miss Cotton Blossom.
At times I felt trapped, but I had the privacy I wanted. I needed solitude to transcribe my notes and conversations into description and dialogue. I did not use a tape recorder. Early one morning there was a storm. It came with strong winds and heavy rain, all of it unimpeded, blowing and soaking this flat farmland, great sweeping curtains of rain borne out of Mississippi, drowning the yard of Blue Shadows, beating down the big white bushes of mock orange and rose of Sharon, the wind snatching and twisting the bare tree limbs, all this with thunder and lightning. A great overwhelming storm of water and wind clapped over us, altogether different from any storm I’d experienced in the North, more like a monsoon downpour in India, its suddenness, its drenching way of paralyzing everything. The loudness of the rain smacking the muddy yard was Asiatic. All I could do was wait, sit it out, watch it slapping at the Blue Shadows shingle sign and making it swing back and forth so hard I thought it would be torn from its hinges. I was reminded in that storm that I needed this house as a refuge.
“Ones Born Today Don’t Know How It Was”
On the evening of the Methodist potluck I was at Gene’s barbershop, talking to Reverend Lyles about the various church events in Greensboro—and I had in mind Janet May’s invitation. He held up his hand to prevent me from wasting my breath.
“I know very few white people here,” he said, without bitterness, simply stating the fact to let me know that he was in no position to judge what was happening on the other side of the racial divide, though he had lived in Greensboro for the entirety of his seventy-nine years.
As for entering a white church, he shook his head.
“We’re not welcome,” he said. “I know from experience. It was a funeral—I went because my friend wanted to go, and I was there to help him out. When we walked in, everyone turned their head. I thought, Oh, my. I said to my friend, ‘I don’t want to create any scenery.’ So I left. Forty years ago they’d fight you if you tried to go in. Less than forty years ago a man took a swing at my friend.”
“In a church?”
“Just outside the door.” He pondered this. “Everyone who lived through it remembers. Trouble came to Greensboro, the protests in ’59 and ’60, somewhere like that. And Dr. King came to Greensboro three times in ’62 and ’63, and spoke at St. Matthew’s African Methodist Episcopal, and St. Luke’s.”
“Was it secret?”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah. And there’s the Safe House in the depot area, where he hid from the Klan in ’68.”
The Safe House, one of the landmarks in the civil rights struggle, was now Greensboro’s Safe House Black History Museum. This shotgun house memorialized the efforts of the many nameless unsung foot soldiers in the movement, and the overlooked sites, such as this small wood-frame
house, and the timely rescue by passionate locals who had saved Martin Luther King from a murderous mob on the night of March 21, 1968, in a corner of Greensboro.
“The days he came we knew he was coming,” Reverend Lyles said. “We had connections. And when he spoke it was standing room only.”
“What did he say?”
“His message was nonviolence,” Reverend Lyles said. “Voter registration. Don’t fight back with guns and weapons. That’s history. But look all these years later, Hale County is still on the edge. For various, certain people there’s still distrust between the races. We just elected an African-American probate judge, and the mayor is the second African American who served in the seat. That’s JB—Johnnie Washington—he’s a contemporary of mine.”
“I met him last time I was here,” I said. “We talked. He mentioned the problems.”
“There’s a lot of division,” Reverend Lyles said. “But one of the things that you have to take under consideration is that change just don’t happen overnight—and it mostly change through generations. School integration made big changes. When kids go to school together they see life different from the ones that was separated.”
I mentioned that people here greeted each other, unlike in the North, where strangers avoided eye contact and hellos.
“You would have to live here to understand it. People are sometimes distant, but they come together with that greeting, that hello. You and I are talking, but that is different from the past, when the two races didn’t speak in particular. Remember my brother Benny?”
“Yes, he’d been in the army.” I had met him in the soul food diner, we’d eaten together, and he’d told me about his visits to the North.
