The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Margaret belonged to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization that grew out of the Great War. When she was sent to El Paso, an acquaintance who also knew Will through the FOR suggested that he look her up. Will had never pursued the opposite sex much—by his own admission, he was a fifty-year-old virgin—but he introduced himself, and they began courting.

  As a couple, they seemed like a pair of mismatched socks. Margaret was bright and bubbly, a diminutive dishwater blonde who loved children and was partial to cosmetics. Will was a wiry bantam who stood five foot seven and could be rather stern and humorless about his faith. When he heard that Margaret was volunteering at a USO club, he let her know that he didn’t like the idea of her hanging out with soldiers and sailors, not so much because they were young men bursting with testosterone, but because of what their uniforms signified. He didn’t like her wearing makeup either. Their biggest difference was their age. Will was twenty-two years older than Margaret. He was born in the previous century, before radio, movies, or automobiles, and vividly remembered the first time he had seen an electric light. Mrs. Gregory was displeased that her daughter was getting involved with a man old enough to be her father, a man only a year younger than she was, and in truth, it bothered Margaret as well. But she was so taken with Will’s piety and intelligence—and his impressive crown of wavy black hair—that she gradually fell in love.

  They married in 1943 and stayed in El Paso, both of them working and living at the Mexican community house. Their first son, Billy, came two years later. Greg, their second, named for his mother’s family, arrived in 1947 when they had moved on to lead a Disciples church in Las Animas, Colorado. A third boy, David, came three years later during another pastorate in Gallup, New Mexico. While Will’s fundamentalist preaching made a fine initial impression on each congregation, he was always asked to leave. Many of the men in the pews were veterans, and they weren’t comfortable with a minister who considered military service morally questionable. Sometimes Margaret heard rumors that she and Will might be Communists.

  Their last church was in DeQuincy, Louisiana, a small town near the Texas line. It was the first time they had lived in the South, and they liked much about it, especially the friendliness of the people and the open expression of religious faith. This time, Will and Margaret committed a new affront by inviting a mixed-race family—a family of “redbones,” in the local parlance—to church. Again, acceptance curdled into opposition, and the preacher was given notice.

  By 1953, the Wittkampers were weary of disapproving parishioners and fleeting pastorates. Will was sixty and wanted to settle down. Longing for an alternative way of life, he thought back to the commune that didn’t work out in Colorado during the Depression. He started asking around and heard from a friend about a Christian community in southwest Georgia where property was held in common and everyone believed in nonviolence and the equality of all God’s children. Will began corresponding with Clarence and went to visit Koinonia for a week. When he returned to his family in Louisiana, Greg saw him walking back from the bus station, fairly skipping as he sang out, “We’re moving! We’re moving!”

  Margaret was less enthusiastic. She was a city girl, not a farm boy like Will. More importantly, as a southerner, she knew that their open-mindedness about race would go over no better in Georgia than it had in Louisiana. But she wanted her husband to be happy, and after he promised that he would plant her an abundance of strawberries, which she loved, she started packing. She figured they might stay for a couple of years.

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  It didn’t take long for the Wittkampers to feel the sting of local enmity toward the commune. Soon after their arrival, the family ventured into the Disciples of Christ church in Americus for Sunday worship services. “We were greeted warmly until they found out we were from Koinonia,” Margaret said. Once they were outed, the reception turned chilly. The family did not return.

  Will and Margaret were used to it. For most of their married life, they had been rejected because of their beliefs about race, war, and capitalism. At least they didn’t have to bear it alone now; they were among friends. Unwelcome in local congregations, Koinonia was its own church. While there was no sanctuary as such, the fellowship held daily Bible studies and weekly worship services and Sunday schools in the dining hall, under the trees, or sometimes in a barn. The gatherings were as casual as a picnic. People dressed as they pleased and listened as Will explained some passage from the New Testament, or Con read from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, or Clarence recast a parable in modern terms, turning King Herod into the governor of Georgia or the Good Samaritan into a kindhearted black man who helps a white traveler who has been mugged on the highway. Preachers and laypeople alike were free to speak; occasionally someone held forth on a nonreligious topic, like how to repair a toaster. All in all, Greg found these gatherings easier to sit through than his father’s old sermons.

  Despite the occasional unpleasant encounters with outsiders, the Wittkampers quickly grew to love Koinonia. Margaret enjoyed the children and the exuberant sense of togetherness—although she would have appreciated a few more creature comforts. For a time, the seating in the dining hall consisted of metal-rimmed barrels that left a circular impression on the posterior. She didn’t think Christianity should be a pain in the ass. The seating was eventually upgraded, barely, with revamped apple crates.

  The Spartan living conditions suited her husband just fine. Will saw Koinonia as the perfect setting to practice his austere, back-to-the-earth religion and to instill old-fashioned values in their sons. The family settled into an apartment on the second floor of the community center, quarters that Will thought were a little too cushy because they had hot and cold running water. They fell into step with communal life, which seemed to revolve around a series of endless meetings to determine everything from shopping lists to work assignments. Will tended the farm’s vegetable garden and headed the trash detail, while his wife helped take care of the children whose parents were toiling in the fields and the chicken houses. Two of the Wittkamper boys would be attending elementary school in the fall. If Margaret thought the people at church had been unfriendly, they were nothing compared to what awaited Greg and Billy in the classrooms of Sumter County.

  chapter 2

  “We Made Our Reality”

  A couple of months after the Wittkampers moved to Koinonia, Greg started first grade at Thalean Elementary School, three miles away on the road to Americus. It was a small country school in a huddle of frame buildings with little more than a hundred students, many of them from poor farm families. During his first weeks there, Greg noticed something about his new classmates: none of them were black.

  The question of educating their sons and daughters posed a philosophical dilemma for parents at Koinonia. They considered homeschooling but decided against it because they were too busy working fields and tending chickens to run a classroom. Their only option was the public schools of Sumter County, which were as segregated as any in the South. “This causes us much uneasiness,” Clarence wrote, “but thus far we have been unable, with our meager resources of money and personnel, to set up our own school system.”

  In his first months at Koinonia, Greg had become accustomed to seeing black people working on the farm and to sitting with them at the midday communal meal. He played with their children and wondered, once school started, where they went on weekdays. He began to notice some of them in the morning waiting for a bus—not the one he took, but another one with dark fenders indicating that it was for black children. Their bus headed down a dirt road to another school, while his took the highway to Thalean.

  Beginning first grade was a difficult adjustment for Greg. He had never attended kindergarten and knew the ABC’s only as the lyrics of the familiar children’s song. Spending his days in a social environment that was so divergent from the one at the commune only added to his sense of dislocation. “I felt
different the first day I walked into school,” he said.

  When he went into Americus with his family or others from Koinonia, Greg felt a bit different there as well. The “Garden Spot of Dixie,” as Americus called itself in the 1950s, was a classic cotton-belt town of eleven thousand that could have sprung from the pages of a Faulkner novel. A stone Rebel stood guard at the county courthouse, looking out at a central business district lined with handsome old brick storefronts and dominated by the Windsor Hotel, a fantastic castle-like relic of the 1890s. The principal cross streets were named for Confederate generals—Lee, Jackson, Forrest—and led south to a shady historic quarter of churches and stately columned homes built decades before with cotton money. On the other side of town, where most of the black population lived, half the streets were red clay and many of the houses were tin-roofed shacks like the ones out in the country.

  For the people of Koinonia, Americus was a convenient place to buy groceries and farm supplies, pleasant enough to visit as long as they didn’t look too closely at the signs demarcating the racial lines. Greg first noticed one at the Dairy Queen on US 19, where the farm’s children were sometimes allowed to splurge with a soft-serve ice-cream cone. The water fountains were marked “white” and “colored,” like most water fountains in public places in the South. Greg knew what that meant from an early age and understood that it represented a different way of thinking from Koinonia’s. Between the signs in town and the faces at school, he was beginning to realize that he lived in a sheltered community that stood apart, an island in a rough sea.

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  It was a strange place to grow up.

  Being a child at Koinonia in the 1950s was like being part of an exotic tribe. And the tribe was growing; it was the baby boom era, and one of Koinonia’s main crops was children. Of the sixty or so people who lived there when Greg’s family came, more than a third were youngsters ranging in age from diapers to high school. The Wittkampers added another one in 1954 when their fourth son, Danny, was born.

  Watermelon time at Koinonia, mid-1950s. Courtesy of Leonard Jordan

  There were a dozen families in the commune—Nelsons, Eustices, Atkinsons, and more—but the heart of the fellowship, the ones who stayed the longest and twined their lives with the Wittkampers, were the Brownes and the Jordans. Both families had four children at the time, the same as Greg’s, and several were close to his age and went through school together. Con Browne and Clarence Jordan were a generation younger than Will Wittkamper; Greg came to see them as surrogate fathers, people he could confide in and come to with questions. It was Connie, as Greg called him, not his own father, who explained the birds and the bees to him.

  Like most farm children, the Koinonia kids were expected to work before and after school. They milked cows, hoed peanuts, collected eggs, moved irrigation pipes. Greg started out washing dishes in the community kitchen and then helped his father in the garden, watching as he puttered along behind a wheelbarrow happily reciting scripture to himself.

  Looking back years later, the children of Koinonia usually recalled their upbringings fondly, describing life on the farm as a pastoral idyll, notwithstanding the sweaty toil and the gnats and mosquitoes. What they didn’t remember as fondly was the sense that they might be in enemy territory whenever they left the property, that they had to watch themselves at school or in town. “It was like we had two faces: one for the farm and one for the outside world,” recalled Carol Browne, Con and Ora’s second child.

  Greg the farm boy. Courtesy of Greg Wittkamper

  One of the strangest parts of growing up at Koinonia was the near absence of money. Members were expected to dispose of their resources before joining the commune, and once part of it, they rarely handled currency unless they were buying supplies or selling farm products. One of the few times the children saw cash was when they visited a nearby country store and were each given a quarter to buy an RC Cola and a Moon Pie. At Christmas, they received one gift worth no more than $10 and spent hours agonizing over the choices in the Sears Wish Book catalog. One year Greg selected a cheap radio, which he used to discover Little Richard and the rousing new world of rock ’n’ roll. Buying records was out of the question; there was no budget for such frivolities.

  For most of Greg’s formative years, the farm did not have a television. If the kids heard about something they really wanted to watch—a boxing match, perhaps—they might visit the house of a friendly black neighbor, but such occasions were rare. Going without TV was a philosophical choice as much as a cost consideration; the parents didn’t want their children binging on pabulum or falling prey to American commercialism. Billy Wittkamper had seen more TV than the others, having spent a few months with his mother’s family in Virginia. After his return, he told Greg about Howdy Doody and all the fun shows they were missing, but the Wittkampers still didn’t get a TV. Years later, when people told Greg that he resembled Wally Cleaver, he had no idea they were talking about Beaver’s big brother in a situation comedy.

  Groups from the farm would go into Americus occasionally to see a movie at the Martin Theater or the Sunset Drive-In. Not every film was deemed appropriate. Once, when word got around that Koinonia’s youth coordinator, John Eustice, was about to take a carload of kids to town to see Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock, the dinner bell rang out, summoning the adults to an emergency meeting where they debated whether such fare would be too risqué. Elvis lost, much to Greg’s disappointment. On more typical movie nights, residents would gather outside to watch dry educational films they could get for free from the library, projected onto the side of the two-story building where the Jordans and other families lived. The noisy old projector sucked bugs into its workings and zapped them into dust, which the children usually found more interesting than the films.

  Despite their limited exposure to pop culture, Koinonians did not consider their lives dull. They made their own entertainment. They packed dinners and took Saturday hayrides to a spot that became known as Picnic Hill. They held sing-alongs and told stories, especially Clarence, who fascinated the children with his tales about a three-legged dog named Old Coot. They played volleyball and took dips in a swimming hole where the water was so cold it would make them gasp. They organized an Indian club, the children making their own headbands, learning tribal dances, and sleeping out in tents. Everyone got an Indian name; Greg was Arrowhead because he liked to hunt for relics along the banks of Muckaloochee Creek. Naturally, his big brother called him Airhead.

  Once, when the kids were begging to go to the county fair, their parents said no after they found out that black people were allowed to attend only on designated “colored days.” The Koinonians decided to stage their own carnival, with their own animals and their own makeshift attractions. Greg starred in a sideshow as the Wild Man—half human, half beast—donning a loincloth as he growled at passersby from the inside of a chicken-wire cage. “We improvised,” he said. “We made our reality.”

  An important part of growing up at Koinonia was the stream of people who visited. By the mid-1950s, the farm was becoming well known in alternative religious circles, largely because Clarence was spending more time on the road speaking. As many as a thousand people a year came to see the commune—a sundry collection of academics, clergy, missionaries, peace activists, spiritual questers, and vagabond ne’er-do-wells who always kept things interesting. There were Asians and Africans, Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. “The diversity of people we met as children was mind expanding,” Greg remembered.

  Some of the sojourners were regulars. The kids particularly looked forward to the arrival of the Children of Light, a sect that wandered the back roads in wagons like gypsies and pitched their tents on the property to hold lively worship services that featured a pounding barroom piano. Another favorite was Leon the Hobo, a vagrant who usually came during the summer, promptly stripped off his clothes, got deloused, and stayed for months, spin
ning stories about traveling the country and riding the rails. A few years later, a group of earring-wearing, guitar-strumming beatniks from Atlanta frequented the farm, wooing the girls, teaching new songs to the boys, and thoroughly irritating Clarence with their reluctance to head into the fields and earn their keep. They were followed by cadres of civil rights workers and bands of hippies who thought Jesus was just all right and wanted to get back to the garden.

  The visitors brought a taste of the world in all its variety to Koinonia and gave the farm’s children an education unavailable to most of their classmates in the public schools. The gap in their experiences could lead to a certain smugness. Jan Jordan, Clarence and Florence’s second daughter, couldn’t help but feel more worldly. “I have to admit that I felt kind of superior to the other students because of all the people we met.”

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  In eight years at Thalean Elementary School, no classmate of Greg’s ever set foot on the farm, and he never went to one of their homes. Most local people were so leery of the commune that they wouldn’t allow their children to go there. On one of the rare occasions one of them did, it didn’t go well.

  Lora Browne, the oldest of Con and Ora’s children, was a year ahead of Greg at Thalean and had a reputation as one of the smartest kids in school. When she was in third grade, she asked her friend Ginger to come over and see where she lived. As they walked around the grounds, Lora pointed out a black teenager who worked on the farm and told her, girl to girl, that she thought he was handsome. “He’s my boyfriend,” she joked. Ginger was aghast. “You do know he’s a nigger,” she said.