by Paul Theroux
“How bad was it there?”
“Real bad. Next-door neighbor’s girlfriend died and he went crazy. He moved a woman with kids into his trailer. She was a meth-head and always fighting. It was a crazy drama because of the weed and the meth. All this time he’s trying to kick her out. She’s a druggie. She has five kids and all of them do drugs together, mom and the kids.”
“That was your home?”
“Until I left,” he said. “That’s where Brandy’s living now, with the dude.” He sat quietly for a long while, smoking. “I worry about Reba. She’s everything to me, but I only see her once a week. I want to protect her, but my wife is being real hard. She says to me, ‘Someone stole your tools’—power saw and the other stuff. Why would anyone steal my tools and nothing else? The dude sold them, I know. Then it was ‘Someone stole the wedding ring’—it was my mother’s ring. I know what happened to it, and it makes me mad.”
“Jesse, mind my asking—did you ever do drugs?”
“I done drugs, but I gave up when I realized I didn’t want my daughter to see me the way I saw my father. She would see me as stupid. I know that because I started doing drugs with my father when I was twelve—weed, cocaine.”
The image in my mind, like the one provoked by She has five kids and all of them do drugs together, mom and the kids, was of a ghoulish tribe gathered in a ritual of drug taking; but it was more likely a miserable family quarreling and smoking in the confines of a house trailer.
“It was when he got divorced,” Jesse was saying. “He snorted coke at night. Thinking of Reba, I remembered what my dad did—smoked weed in the car when he was driving. Me, I usually smoked a joint in the morning before I went to school.”
“How old would you have been then?”
“Twelve or thirteen. And I kept doing it.” He nodded, seeming to guess that I wanted more details. He said, “I got some felonies. For growing weed. Just a few plants. They were trying to get me twenty years. I wound up doing sixteen months. I was twenty years old. My dad died of cancer when he was fifty-three.”
“That’s tough.”
“This separation is worse. I said, ‘I’ll kill you, Brandy’—I didn’t mean it. But that’s why I don’t have a gun in the house, and I always had a gun before. She got me a TRO. From her and the dude. Incredible.”
I said, “My only advice would be, try to suppress the urge to kill her.”
“Oh, yeah. I don’t want to do something that’s going to wreck my life,” he said. “And I still love her. I love my daughter. I want to go back to the way it was.” He thought a moment, and his face creased in pain. “When we was a team.”
“Where do you live now?”
“I’m back with my mother in Athens. It’s awful. All my stuff’s in the trailer. I went there for my tools. Brandy says, ‘They got stole.’ I asked for the wedding ring back, ’cause she warn’t wearing it. She says, ‘It got stole.’ Just those three things got stole—my power drill, my power saw, and the ring. No money, nothing else got stole. It’s all fishy.”
He picked up the sledgehammer.
“And the dude is living there, in my trailer, with my wife, with my daughter.”
He raised the heavy hammer and turned away from me.
“All I care about is my daughter. I live for her, that’s why I’m trying to do the right thing and not kill the dude or Brandy. I don’t want her to look at me the way I looked at my father, who gave me drugs.”
And he brought the hammer down on the edge of the granite, smashing off an irregular corner and sending it flying.
Buddy Case: “You Couldn’t Say Nothing”
Buddy, the man Massoud called his redneck butler, was a lanky, friendly, soft-spoken man who called himself a country boy. He was in his early sixties and had fought in Vietnam. “Butler” was typical Massoud hyperbole. Mainly Buddy was an arranger, driver, handyman, and errand runner. He had Massoud’s back, and he had certain interests in common with Massoud—guns, for example.
Soon after I was introduced to him, I mentioned Massoud’s AK-47, hung on the kitchen wall with the pots and pans and the spice rack. I’d said something like, “I suppose you’ve got a gun.”
“‘A gun,’” Buddy said satirically, mimicking me. “I got me forty-five guns.”
Later we talked about Vietnam. He’d fought there in 1969, the longest period he’d spent out of Elberton. He was still friendly with the guys in his unit. He said, “We have a reunion every two years in Pigeon Forge.”
Pigeon Forge was over the Great Smokies near Knoxville, Tennessee. Recognizing that the South had produced so many army vets, the town put on a celebration every August, Celebrate Freedom Month. The weekend was themed “Pigeon Forge Celebrates Freedom—A Welcome Home from Vietnam.” One of the events was “The Parade They Never Got,” with motorcycles, marching bands, and the flypast of a UH-1, the Huey helicopter gunship, emblematic of battles and evacuations in Vietnam. There were concerts too, including Smoky Mountain Opry’s special Salute to Patriots.
“This show is about Remembering the Sacrifice of those who gave all,” in the words of the prospectus. “This event was created to honor our Vietnam Veterans; to hail them as the heroes they are. It is an opportunity for families, friends and citizens to salute them with pride; a chance for a grateful nation to say ‘Thank You.’”
Buddy told me about this, saying how he looked forward to it. He described the parades, the music, the fanfare, and the reunion, the Southern food and friendship.
“Must be good to see the guys again.”
“It’s great.” He nodded and lit a cigarette. “Sit around. Have some beers. Then we look at a Google map of our air base, on a hill in ’Nam. Try to figure out what happened to it.”
“So you must have been a high school student in Elberton in the sixties?” I asked. “Was the school integrated then?”
“They tried to integrate it in ’67,” he said. “I was a sophomore at the time. Four black students showed up—two boys, two girls.”
“How did that turn out?”
He squinted, as though at a grim memory, and said, “One particular thing I remember. We had assembly in the gym every morning. But there were hundreds of students, so there weren’t enough bleacher seats for everyone. Lots of kids had to sit on the floor. You know the way kids sit on the floor?”
Buddy placed his cigarette in a saucer and showed me how, leaning back, his hands splayed out behind him.
“You prop yourself up like this—hands back, sort of resting on your hands.”
“I get it.”
“The four black students was on the floor, and they hands got stepped on, all of them, by the students walking behind them.”
I could see it, the white students looming over them, treading on their outstretched fingers.
“No one said nothing,” Buddy said. “I’m sure some felt sorry for them. You couldn’t say nothing, though. They couldn’t take it, nor the harassment neither. All of them finally left. In ’68, more came. More harassment. And more in ’69. But by then I was in Vietnam.”
Later that night, in a bar in Elberton, I met Ivy, a local woman about Buddy’s age, and asked her the same question.
“I didn’t go to the high school,” she said. “I went to Samuel Elbert Academy. It was a private school, all white. It started in the sixties, when the stuff happened.”
I thought hard about Buddy’s remark “You couldn’t say nothing.” He meant: It was impossible to defy the school and take a moral stand on racism. This was what many people said in the South, of the moral dilemma. They said it of Strom Thurmond: Not really a racist—after all, he slept with his black servant and he sent money to his black child. Give him a break, he was merely espousing racist views in order to win votes. It was an echo of what Bill Clinton said of Senator Robert Byrd’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan: “He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected.”
You think I’m burning this cro
ss and forbidding you to go to school here and covering up this lynching, but hey, I’m not a racist, really. I’m just trying to get elected.
Buddy had a sense of the wrongness of it all when he was trying to fit in with his friends all those years ago; he still remembered the racial abuse and the hurt. I was struck by his retelling of the painful day, thirty-seven years before, when the four black students got their fingers stepped on at the school, and how he had been silent. “I could a stayed if I wanted to,” Huck Finn says when Colonel Sherburn denounces the lynch mob, “but I didn’t want to.”
Bill Clinton had more to answer for. He was still repeating the twisted Southern political logic: because taking a moral stand, defying the racists, was an obstacle to electability, you had to pretend to be a racist. He was saying: We had to step on their fingers. We had to claim it was the right thing to do. We needed the votes. You have to get elected no matter the moral cost.
Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That’s why the true heroes of the civil rights struggle were never politicians. They were humble folk on a mission, enduring sit-ins and organizing marches and debates. When they began to succeed, the politicians, seeing an opportunity, followed them.
And that was the reason why, in the end, Rosa Parks was elevated to the status of a heroine, and why she is celebrated today by people who seem to be atoning for doing so little, seeking forgiveness from a woman who was far braver than they were. Her stubborn courage, refusing to give up her seat to a white man, was a gesture of ethical belief, a clinging to truth, that no politician in the South had dared to demonstrate, because—as Clinton said in his shameless apology for Byrd—of the risk of being defeated in an election.
For many white Southerners, pretending to be racist was permissible, perhaps necessary, in a political campaign, and forgivable. You had to be a Southerner to understand this reasoning; it was a cultural thing, a way forward for Southern politicians, who believed, like Buddy, “You couldn’t say nothing” or your friends wouldn’t like you. They had that belief in common with many awkward adolescents, morally muddled, who crave to be popular.
Alabama Traditions: The Segregated Sororities
Crossing Georgia after Atlanta and the state line, I repeated my previous trip along the back roads of Alabama, staying off the superslab of the interstate, to Talladega and Childersburg, Columbiana and Calera, Montevallo to West Blocton to Cottondale. I did not drive fast—no one could on these country roads. That was part of the enjoyment, and the other part was the plowed fields and the woods and most of all the odor of the hot roads, like industrial damnation, bright black tar blisters and tar bubbles, especially in the new smears and patches on the sun-heated surfaces, an aroma like the tang of hot pitch and the smell of my childhood summers.
Finally Tuscaloosa again, and the university, which was at war with itself over a contentious issue. Fifty years into the civil rights movement, the white sororities were in the news for refusing to admit black women students who had indicated they wished to join.
“This isn’t new,” Cynthia Burton told me when I visited her the next day.
Seeing her again was a pleasure, but she was ailing: she’d been in a car crash two months before and was in a routine of physical therapy. Added to this were her other ailments: diabetes, high blood pressure, and bad knees. She still used a walker. Yet she did a full day’s work, finding housing for the poor of the Black Belt and overseeing the many people who showed up at her office and, under Reason for Visit, wrote “Food” or “Utilities.”
“You should look up the name Melody Twilley,” she said, and told me what I needed to know. “It was ten or twelve years ago . . .”
Melody Twilley was from the small Black Belt Alabama town of Camden, in Wilcox County. “Wilcox is the poorest county in Alabama,” Cynthia added, and Camden was about thirty miles south of Selma. Melody’s father was a successful businessman in the timber trade. Melody had shown such early promise that she was sent to Mobile to attend the Alabama School of Math and Science, a high school with a predominantly white student body, where she graduated with honors.
She was admitted to the University of Alabama in 2001. She excelled in science, she sang in the choir, her grades were high. She was eager to join a sorority, not to make a political point—though there were no black women in any of the University of Alabama sororities—but because she said she wanted to have the complete university experience. And asked about this ambition, she explained to an inquiring journalist, “My feeling was, if they got to know me, they’d like me.”
With its traditionally all-white fraternities and sororities, from which black students were excluded, the University of Alabama was one of a kind, the last university in the South where this exclusion was the case. Melody visited—rushed—a dozen sororities, but only one, Alpha Delta Pi, invited her back for a final interview.
Melody was hopeful, but in the end she was rejected. Race had not been a factor, the sorority said. She simply wasn’t chosen by the sisters. She graduated from the university without any sorority connection; she could have joined a black one, but didn’t.
“There’s something at the university called the Machine,” Cynthia said. “A secret group of people that keeps things as they always were, and that means some stuff is still segregated. Poor Melody Twilley. She tried—Lord, she tried.”
This situation of racially segregated sororities existed until, by coincidence, the month I was in Alabama, when eleven African-American women attempted to join sororities, in much the same way as Melody Twilley in 2001—rushing the houses, hoping to be accepted. This was now mid-September, and the student newspaper, the Crimson White, had just published a piece saying that the fraternities and sororities (fifty-six altogether) were almost completely divided along racial lines, and that the Greek system was the “last bastion of segregation on campus.”
Though two black women had succeeded in gaining initial acceptance to white sororities, they were, in the end, rejected. This time there was an outcry. Pressured by indignant students, including many women from the sororities, the president of the university, Dr. Judy Bonner, held an emergency meeting behind closed doors with her board of trustees and sorority advisers. The following day the president stated that “our Greek systems remain segregated,” and she pleaded for tolerance.
To their credit, a few days later, several hundred students and faculty, including Dr. Bonner, gathered at the university’s Gorgas Library and marched to the Rose Administration Building, carrying signs.
Some of the signs alluded to the confrontation, fifty years before, when Governor George Wallace went to the campus and positioned himself before the auditorium door to prevent two black students from entering and joining the student body.
“It was a staged event, more or less,” Charles Portis said of Wallace’s defiance, in an interview in 2001. Portis was a reporter in Tuscaloosa at the time of the event. He continued, “The outcome wasn’t in doubt. Those black students were going to be admitted to the University of Alabama. Wallace had been meeting with Robert Kennedy and Nicholas Katzenbach, and he wanted a big show of federal force there, a lot of marshals, when he made his defiant speech—which reminds me of Leander Perez, that segregationist boss down in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Earl Long said to him, ‘What you gonna do now, Leander? Da Feds have got da H-bomb.’” Of the Alabama confrontation, Portis commented wryly, “Some of it was the Civil War being replayed as farce.”
In contrast to Wallace’s obstinacy (or grandstanding), the present Alabama governor, Robert Bentley (an alumnus of the university), in response to the sororities’ segregation, published a statement urging tolerance. Yet his was a cry in the wilderness, and a weak message of “Can’t we just get along?” None of the university administrators, nor any Alabama politicians, took a moral stand. The force for change came from the stu
dents, who organized protests, wrote letters, and marched carrying signs. It was clear that the majority of the students were not racists and wanted to see more fairness. Though Jesse Jackson showed up and gave a pompous speech, the students were driving the issue and explaining its importance. In a university with one of the top law schools and business schools in the country, it seemed weirdly backward and unjust that some important aspects of university life were still blatantly segregated.
“You should see this for yourself,” Cynthia said. “Go on over there.”
So I went to the campus and walked around and talked to students. Some kind of sorority ritual was taking place near the stadium. Hundreds of sorority sisters were gathered in groups and running and laughing—and, as part of the game, which had the look of a scavenger hunt, they took turns climbing onto the fifteen-foot bronze statue of Alabama’s football coach, Nick Saban. This phase of the game seemed to be a competition to see how many could cling to the statue at one time—eight or nine seemed to be the limit. They clung to Saban’s head, sat on his neck and shoulders, swung from his arms, hugged his legs, sat on the pedestal—shrieking, frolicking girls with dimpled knees and faces reddened and damp with exertion, all of them white girls.
They were happy to talk to me, and the dozen or so I spoke to said they were in favor of integrating the sororities. They had black friends, they said; they wanted them as sisters; they hated the bad publicity.
“I’m in a sorority, but that’s not why I chose Alabama. I came here because of the football,” one of them said.
“Football brings out the camaraderie,” her sorority sister said.
“And maybe the drinking and the mayhem?” I said.
“Oh, yeah, all of that!”
“We don’t have a problem with black girls joining our sorority,” another said in response to my direct question.
“Then why are they still segregated?”
“The alumni don’t want it,” several said, calling out, competing with one another to convince me.
