The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  The correspondence with the draft board must have triggered something in his mind, because while he was in Nairobi, he had that nightmare again, the one where he was slaughtering his high school classmates with a machine gun. Only this time it was more vivid than it had been in Sweden. He woke in the predawn darkness, half expecting to find himself in a bloody classroom in Americus, and realized that he was in Africa and had only been sleeping. He was more than relieved; the anger and desire for vengeance that had followed him from Georgia seemed to lift in one cathartic moment.

  After half a year in Kenya, Greg told Friends World that he wanted to see the Middle East. The college forwarded $500 and instructed him to rejoin the class three months later in India. He flew to Khartoum, took a riverboat down the Nile, and hitchhiked into Egypt through the Valley of the Kings and past the tombs of the pharaohs. It had been less than a year since Israel humiliated the Egyptian military in the Six-Day War, and feelings were still raw. Thumbing a ride outside Cairo, Greg was surrounded by a group of teenagers who heckled him and threw rocks. For a moment, he felt like he was back in Americus. A kindly young man in a suit and tie took him by the arm and led him to a police station, where an officer explained the reason for his predicament: “They thought you were an Israeli spy.” The constables allowed him to sleep overnight in the station and brought him breakfast the next morning.

  Greg pressed on to Alexandria, Cyprus, and Beirut, where he befriended a Dutch couple who had a Mercedes and invited him to ride with them to India. Border guards wouldn’t let him into Syria, where Americans were considered suspect after the war with Israel, so he flew to Turkey and rejoined the couple, and they made their way into Iran and Afghanistan, sampling the native hashish as they went. They sold the car in Kabul and hitched across the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, where four Frenchmen in a VW van picked them up and let them sit on the roof rack as they drove into Kashmir. It was the most enchanted place Greg had ever seen. The snowy mountains and deep valleys were so extravagantly scenic that you didn’t need to get stoned to enjoy it, but they did anyway.

  As he entered India, Greg realized that he had taken so much time wandering that he was in danger of missing the rendezvous with his Friends World class in Bombay. Running low on money, he thumbed a ride on a watermelon truck and then bought a third-class ticket on a train where he shared space with goats, sheep, and pigs. It was hot and stuffy, so he followed the lead of other passengers and climbed atop a railcar, ducking whenever they passed through a tunnel. He arrived in Bombay just in time and found the address of the Friends World contact, where a woman answered and gaped at the sight of the unwashed vagrant in the doorway. Greg understood her reaction after she showed him to the bathroom and he saw in the mirror that coal soot from the train had completely darkened his complexion. He looked like Al Jolson in blackface.

  It was the spring of 1968, and as Greg reconnected with his fellow students, he caught up on the news from home. The war in Vietnam wasn’t going well, with American casualties reaching their highest level during the recent Tet Offensive. Greg didn’t think the United States should even be there. The most upsetting news came in April when he heard that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot to death in Memphis. Greg was not surprised, knowing his country’s racial demons as intimately as he did. He remembered seeing King speak in Albany, being swept up by the excitement and possibility swirling through the church that day. Now that voice was silent.

  In a nod to conventional higher education, Friends World students were required to choose a theme for their studies. Greg elected an appropriate topic for a minister’s son: a comparative investigation of world religions. He had already seen a broad swath of Islamic culture; now he wanted to explore Hinduism. He spent six months in India visiting Hindu ashrams, learning yoga, and taking field trips to Nepal and the Himalayas. Buddhism was next on his agenda. He left for Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Japan, where his class reconvened in Hiroshima, which had become a mecca for peace activists in the years since the atomic bomb annihilated the city. As part of his study of religions, Greg stayed for a month at a Zen Buddhist monastery, where he practiced meditation and experienced the excruciating liberation of mind over body that comes from holding a cross-legged position for hours. Whenever his form was lacking, a monk would whack him with a long stick like a stern schoolmarm. No one spoke English. Meals consisted of a rice and vegetable porridge. It was like a graduate course in endurance. When he wasn’t meditating, he had ample hours to himself and filled some of them by reading the Bible for the first time from beginning to end. He thought it was pretty good, although not to be taken literally.

  During his stay in Japan, Greg received another letter from the draft board in Americus. It was good news. The board had recognized Friends World as an accredited educational institution and had given Greg a student deferment. He was no longer AWOL and could finally go home without fear of arrest.

  ____________________

  He took his time. In the spring of 1969, Greg left Japan for Vladivostok and boarded the trans-Siberian railroad for a weeklong trek across the Soviet Union to Moscow. Then he traveled to Leningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Luxembourg, and London, where he tarried for a month. He didn’t return to the United States until midsummer, around the time of the moon landing, and like the Apollo astronauts, he felt like he was entering an alien atmosphere. It had been almost three years since he left the country. Everything seemed foreign to him after he touched down at JFK airport and checked in at Friends World on Long Island. The cars looked so big. The people sounded so boisterous (and he could actually understand what they were saying). The food seemed so excessive, especially after the rice and vegetable regimen at the monastery.

  The years abroad had altered Greg. He was no longer the reticent farm boy who hid inside a hard shell to protect himself from the emotional battering at school. He had opened himself up to the world and learned firsthand that there was much more out there than the claustrophobic black-and-white obsessions of southwest Georgia. With distance and perspective, he now regarded Americus as a blip in the bigger scheme, a receding image in the rearview mirror.

  Margaret Wittkamper noticed the changes in her son when he arrived at Koinonia in late July. It wasn’t so much his appearance, although he was twenty-two now and wore his hair longer than he had when he left as a teenager. It was more his way of being. Greg seemed more assured, more inquisitive. “He grew in a lot of ways,” she said. “He never was much for reading before he went.”

  Koinonia had changed as well. For one thing, there were more residents. Communes were becoming fashionable, and the farm was beginning to draw young people who recognized its version of Christian life as countercultural. “It was starting to look like a hippie commune,” Greg said. Among the newcomers were a family who had been there before, Millard and Linda Fuller and their children. After visiting that first time in 1965, the couple had indeed redirected their lives away from the pursuit of material success. They gave their wealth to charities and moved to Mississippi, where Millard raised money for Tougaloo College, a small, historically black school near Jackson. He never forgot those soul-searching conversations with Clarence, and after a couple of years, he contacted him and asked what was going on.

  The two of them got together and imagined a new vision for Koinonia, something they called the Fund for Humanity, an ambitious plan to help poor people with no-interest loans for farming, business development, and better housing. It was that last idea that lifted off. A few months before Greg returned, Koinonia started building houses on its property in partnership with local families. In the coming years, the Fullers would refine the concept and expand it in Americus and beyond. Habitat for Humanity, the organization that grew out of Millard and Clarence’s brainstorming, went on to build hundreds of thousands of homes in a hundred countries around the world. In the summer of 1969, Greg could see the first four of them under construction at Koinonia. David Wittkamper, who had graduated
from high school that spring, was among the volunteers working on them.

  Greg’s younger brothers had taken a winding path through secondary education, trying to avoid replicating his struggles. Danny, the youngest, refused to consider Americus High and started eighth grade in Tallahassee, Florida, where he lived with a family that had spent time at Koinonia. David’s odyssey was more convoluted; it took him six years, three schools, and two states to earn a diploma. Like the oldest Wittkamper son, Billy, David couldn’t stomach the treatment in Americus and left the high school after one year. He moved in with an uncle and aunt in Indiana, where he repeated a grade, and returned to Georgia two years later to finish at Sumter County High, the black school on the north side of town, where he and Lenny Jordan, Clarence and Florence’s youngest, integrated the student body. The white kids got a much better reception than the first black students at Americus. “We were treated like kings,” said David, who went out for the football team and joined an interracial rock band called the Knockouts. Sometimes he rode to school on a Harley-Davidson Sportster, long hair flowing, arriving with the honk of a horn that sounded like a braying ass, and the students would laugh and say, “Here comes Jesus on his donkey.”

  Greg noticed another thing that had changed at Koinonia: his running buddy Collins McGee was gone. During the farm’s lean period, Clarence had considered putting him in charge of operations but thought better of it, probably because Collins, always a hard worker, was also a hard drinker. He had married and moved to Atlanta. In place of Collins and his hooch, Greg found that a new recreational substance had roosted at the farm. While he was there, his mother dug through one of David’s drawers and found a stash of pot.

  “Is this marijuana?” she asked. “Now, David, you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s addictive, and it leads to other things.”

  Greg, now seasoned in herbs, came to his brother’s defense. “Mom, let’s get serious,” he said. “Coffee is a drug, too. If you’re really that concerned about our health, we’ll make a deal with you: if you give up coffee, we’ll give up pot.”

  Margaret thought that sounded fair. The next morning, when the boys awoke to the aroma of brewing Maxwell House, she conceded the point.

  Greg stayed at the farm a couple of weeks. One day he rode into Americus and thought everything seemed about the same, down to the hulking form of Sheriff Chappell, a sight that still made him tense up involuntarily. Beyond appearances, though, the town was finally beginning to evolve. More blacks were voting and two had been appointed to the city school board. Americus had even hired a black police officer, which would have been unthinkable a few years before.

  Greg was most startled by his alma mater. When he drove by campus, he couldn’t believe that at least half of the students he saw were black. In the four years since he had graduated, many white families had fled the city system and were sending their children to a private school started after Americus High had desegregated, the aptly named Southland Academy. All across the region, academies like Southland were popping up like dandelions after a downpour. Greg wasn’t the least bit surprised that some people were going to such trouble and expense to avoid having their children rub elbows with black children. Still, it was surreal to see so many black kids walking the grounds where, not that long ago, the presence of just four of them had caused a small riot.

  ____________________

  One afternoon toward the end of his stay, Greg was listening to Clarence and some of the other adults debate some point of religion. It was a typical Koinonia discourse, preacher talk. As a teenager, Greg had never joined such discussions because they seemed over his head. But now that he was an adult himself and had seen something of the world and its many faiths, he spoke up and volunteered his conviction that affiliations didn’t count for much, that you didn’t have to call yourself Hindu or Muslim or Christian to be religious.

  Clarence looked displeased. “Well, you have to be something.”

  “Why?” Greg challenged him. “I think labels can divide as much as they can unite.”

  Greg had been rethinking his religion for some time. He no longer believed in a traditional deity who ruled creation like a monarch from a throne. He no longer prayed because he thought any God worth praying to already knew what was in everyone’s mind. Nevertheless, like countless young people of the time, he felt a yearning for spirituality. That yearning didn’t necessarily lead to a pew looking up at a pulpit; it could just as easily lead to a Buddhist monastery or a Hindu ashram. Greg still shared Koinonia’s beliefs in brotherhood and living for the collective good, and he definitely shared its distaste for materialism and violence. But he wasn’t persuaded about the core of the faith, the beliefs that meant everything to his parents. Christianity, for him, had become more of a starting point than a conclusion.

  Not that he articulated all that to Clarence as they sat on a porch at Koinonia. If the opportunity ever arose, they could talk about it later.

  Greg soon left for New York and Friends World accompanied by David. They worked at the college late that summer repairing roofs, passing up an opportunity to attend a rock festival near the upstate village of Woodstock so they could earn some money. In autumn, they set out on a cross-country driving trip to California, where they sold their car, bought a motorcycle, and headed south toward Mexico. They took the Pan-American Highway into Central America, looking a little ridiculous in World War I helmets they purchased on the fly so they wouldn’t violate local riding laws. They camped and found itinerant work along the way. They were in Nicaragua, helping fishermen throw nets and sleeping in a cabana on the beach, when David had the strangest vision one night. He saw Clarence standing before him crying what appeared to be tears of joy. “Keep it up, boys,” he said. “Keep it up.”

  Greg told him he had been dreaming.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” David said, “Clarence was standing right here.”

  A week later, a letter from home found the brothers in Panama. Their mother broke the news: Clarence was dead. On a brisk October afternoon in 1969—perhaps on the day David had his vision—he was holed up in the shack he used as his study, working on his “Cotton Patch” translation of the Gospel of John, when a young woman who was living at Koinonia stopped by to visit. After chatting for a short time, Clarence reached out to give her a parting hug. She felt his body shudder and his head fall limp. A heart attack. He was just fifty-seven.

  Will Wittkamper took it hard, throwing himself over the body and praying, “Please, Lord, take me. Don’t take Clarence. He’s a young man. I’m old. Please, take me.”

  Americus treated Clarence no better in death than it had in life. Millard Fuller couldn’t get the coroner to come to the farm to certify the death, so he and another man loaded the body into a station wagon and drove it to the hospital in town, where an autopsy was performed. Once the remains were released, they were taken back to Koinonia, laid in a cedar crate, and buried beside the pines on Picnic Hill, a spot Greg and David knew well from so many outings during their childhoods. Clarence Jordan had returned to the soil he loved, to the land he refused to leave.

  A plaque memorializing Clarence and Florence Jordan and their oldest daughter

  was erected years after his death.

  chapter 12

  Growing Up

  While Greg trekked the world bumming on beaches and meditating with Buddhists, several of his former schoolmates who would one day write to him were taking journeys of their own. Their travels may not have been as exotic—they involved other states, not other countries and cultures—but they were enlightening in their own ways. There was so much to learn, and unlearn. They were proud sons and daughters of Americus who had grown up in a system that suddenly and tumultuously became anachronistic as they were entering their final years of high school. Navigating adolescence is tricky under normal circumstances. Doing it in the midst of a social revolution was even more confounding.

  ___
_________________

  For Joseph Logan, the key to the journey was discovering which parts of his heritage were worth honoring and which deserved to be left behind. Joseph came from one of Sumter County’s oldest families and esteemed his connections to its past. One of his grandfathers was mayor of Americus, and a great uncle was a prominent physician and mayor of Plains. He was also related to the most tragic chapter in local history; his great-grandfather, Alonzo Josephus Logan, was a Confederate clerk at Camp Sumter, as the POW stockade at Andersonville was officially designated.

  Joseph knew the site well from summers he spent with an aunt who was postmistress in the nearby village. He would wander the grounds of the park that commemorated the thousands who had perished and catch crawfish in Providence Spring. According to legend, the spring was miraculously created when a lightning bolt struck the ground and water gushed forth in answer to the prayers of the desperately thirsty Union prisoners. One of Joseph’s uncles thought that was hooey. “You mean to tell me that God sent lightning to bring fresh water to a bunch of Yankees?” he told his nephew. “That ain’t so.” Joseph, in his youth, viewed the prison camp differently from the Koinonia children who were visiting on day trips around the same time.

  When he looked back years later, Joseph cherished his small-town upbringing: the neighborliness, the easy pace, the Protestant assuredness everyone seemed to share. He was the second of two children born to an insurance salesman who taught Sunday school at First Methodist Church and his wife who stayed at home with the kids. “All the Logans were Methodists and drove Chevrolets,” Joseph remembered, chuckling at the insularity of it all. “I was in my twenties before I realized Catholics were Christians.”