The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  The real estate collapse took much longer to resolve. When the business went into bankruptcy in 1984, a lawyer counseled Greg to offer his services as a property manager to the trustee who was handling the liquidation. It was solid advice; the trustee took him up on the offer and put him on salary. As interest rates declined and the market recovered, Greg began dealing land again and by 1992 was able to purchase almost three thousand acres from the liquidation at a bargain price. “I thought I was going to lose my house when all this came down,” he said, “but I ended up with a golden egg.”

  David said it was long overdue divine intervention.

  ____________________

  Greg visited Koinonia regularly over the years, usually to pick up or drop off his parents, who were spending more time with him in West Virginia. He would linger at the farm for a week or so and then drive back to the high country, relieved to be leaving the bugs and humidity behind. Despite the sticky climate, he enjoyed his stays. “They always treated me special.” He was touched when the community rechristened the modest frame home his family had once occupied as the Wittkamper House.

  In the years after Clarence Jordan died, Koinonia flourished as never before under the leadership of Millard Fuller and others after he and his wife, Linda, left to devote their energies to promoting Habitat for Humanity. The commune reached its peak population of about one hundred during the 1970s and then tailed off as the counterculture era faded and the enthusiasm for collective living subsided. Greg’s parents never lost their enthusiasm. They stayed on the farm for the rest of their lives, becoming beloved reminders of Koinonia’s early years.

  Will Wittkamper grew even more eccentric in his old age. In the spirit of the times, he let his hair grow long and frizzy and featured a scraggly white beard that would have made him look like an Old Testament prophet if it weren’t for the ball cap and baggy secondhand clothes he wore. He didn’t care whether anything matched; Greg once saw him with a size-11, blue high-top sneaker on one foot and a size-10, red low-top on the other. His zeal for recycling, organic farming, and natural living knew no bounds. Sometimes, in the predawn darkness, he greeted the day by trotting around the house naked, taking what he called an “air bath.” During one visit, Greg and David took their parents out to eat in Albany and watched as Will, ever the faithful steward of God’s resources, plucked the lemons off everyone’s seafood plates and collected them in his cap to take home and add to his health-shake blender. “People were staring at us,” Greg said. “We all had long hair and must have looked like the family Jesus.”

  Greg’s father never shed his distaste for money or material goods. When his sons sent him a flannel shirt for Christmas or some cash to buy something nice for Margaret, he would invariably give it all away to a poor family. Greg inherited some of his father’s uneasiness about the almighty dollar. As the value of his acreage began to climb, he couldn’t help but feel pangs of guilt. His mother, who had never been quite as committed to the ascetic life as her husband, tried to reassure Greg that a reasonable degree of success was not a character flaw. “You shouldn’t worry that you’re a little bit of a tycoon,” she told him.

  In the summer of 1980, not long after Greg and Sharon had their first child, his father died of a heart attack during a visit to West Virginia. He was eighty-seven and perfectly at peace with death, which he saw as merely the closing of a chapter. During his dad’s last full day among the living, Greg had taken him along to pick up some lumber he had gotten milled from trees on the property. Will admired the pine boards, so they used them to build his coffin. They buried him on a gentle slope within view of Greg’s living-room window. When they tried to excavate his grave with a backhoe, they struck rock and had to dig in a perpendicular line, meaning that the Reverend Will Wittkamper was laid to rest, appropriately, in a cross-shaped incision in the earth. Sixteen years later, in 1996, Margaret Wittkamper died of cancer while she was staying with Greg and was interred next to her husband—actually, he’s at her feet.

  By the time Greg’s mother died, five Koinonians were living within a few miles of his home in Monroe County, including his brother David and three of the Brownes: Charles, his sister Carol, and their brother, John. They made an odd little expatriate community. Some of them had money; others had little. Some of them struggled with substance abuse; others were clean. Even though they were the children of ministers, most of them no longer believed in God, and only one even gave lip service to being a conventional Christian. What joined them at the heart was their unique background, their shared history of joy and terror. All of them—the ones in West Virginia and elsewhere—carried happy memories of growing up on the farm and of belonging to a large, loving extended family. But those memories were counterbalanced by other scenes none of them could forget. They had been shot at, spit on, called names—all at a tender age. It left a psychic scar.

  “I wrote Daddy about how I was feeling after I had gone off to college,” recalled Jan Jordan, who went to a Mennonite school in Indiana after graduating from Americus High in 1964. “I was very restless. I couldn’t focus on anything. I’d get angry about something instantly. He said, ‘Jan, you’re just like a soldier home from war.’ And I was. We were all suffering different degrees of posttraumatic stress syndrome.”

  A few of the children who had grown up at Koinonia during the violence saw therapists. Charles consulted one after he went into a rage and destroyed a couple of chairs, and his wife told him that he’d better deal with his temper. “I found out that I have this Christian self-righteousness where I believe I’m a warrior of God and I’m just waiting to punish someone,” he said. “You know: I made it through Koinonia, bullets flying, and God’s chosen me to beat the crap out of someone who deserves it. I’d get blood in my eyes. I think it all goes back to being that little kid who felt like all the other schoolkids had done him wrong. I’ve done a lot of transference.”

  Bill Wittkamper saw a therapist as well. He had always blamed the adults at Koinonia for letting their children be cannon fodder in a battle they had not volunteered for, and it took years to untangle the knots of resentment. Greg could see the value in that kind of counseling, but he never pursued it. Therapy wasn’t his style. When he thought about high school and the terror attacks on the farm, he didn’t feel anger or resentment as much as sadness.

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  When his past came calling in the spring of 2006, Greg was a contented man. He had done so well buying and selling mountain property that he didn’t have to work full-time anymore and considered himself, at fifty-eight, semiretired. He had another reason to relax and smell the wildflowers; he had a new spouse, Anne Gardner, and they had a four-year-old daughter, Sallie.

  Greg and Sharon had grown unhappy together after nineteen years of marriage and divorced in 1999. He met Anne at a cookout soon afterward. She was an occupational therapist from Roanoke, Virginia, and was as intense and talkative as he was easygoing and reserved. She wasn’t sure they would click at first. “He looked like a typical West Virginia guy—most likely very conservative,” she said. But she was curious and accepted an invitation to have dinner at his house—although she wondered what she was getting into when it took her forever to find the place and she hit a deer on the way.

  Greg’s children, Stephanie and Stephen, were at the dinner and kept prodding him to tell Anne about his upbringing at Koinonia and his miseries in high school. “They were really drawing it out of him,” she said. “It was like: ‘Tell her about the day at the baseball field. Tell her about this, tell her about that. . . .” Anne phoned her sister afterward and described this intriguing man she had met, and her sister reminded her that their aunt and uncle used to buy candy from Koinonia and had sent books to help one of their young men go to some Quaker college. The young man was Greg.

  Anne and Greg married in 2001 and led a pleasant, bucolic life in the farmhouse he had bought in the Greenbrier River Valley. It was half an h
our but light years away from the exclusive Greenbrier resort, on a hill overlooking a pond where they sometimes went skinny-dipping. She learned much more about his days at Koinonia and about his trials in high school, and she came to understand that her husband, as well adjusted as he seemed, was still carrying a burden. She heard his voice crack. She saw him tear up. She knew there was unresolved pain.

  Then, on that cool spring morning in May 2006, it all came back when Greg drove to the post office and found an invitation to his high school reunion and the first letter of apology from his long-ago classmate David Morgan. It was like breaking a seal on his emotions. The past was present.

  While the letter was unexpected, the name on the return address was not. David was the only one of his classmates Greg had ever considered contacting in the four decades since they had graduated. He’d come close to doing it once before, when he returned from overseas in 1969. During his brief stopover that summer, he and his mother went to lunch at the house of his senior English teacher, Gladys Crabb. The two ladies had become friendly at the Episcopal church in Americus, where Mrs. Wittkamper occasionally visited. After everyone chatted about his travels and his unorthodox college education, the conversation inevitably turned to high school. Greg mentioned that David had approached him before the commencement ceremony and shaken his hand.

  The teacher smiled. “You really ought to get in touch with him. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

  Greg said he might just do that. And then he left for New York and Central America and alternative service and more travels, and he forgot about it. Now, thirty-seven years later, David was taking the initiative, reaching out the same way he had stuck out his hand in the Americus High gymnasium.

  David’s letter—and the ones that soon followed from other members of the Class of 1965—prompted much discussion among Greg’s friends and loved ones. Anne had no doubt that the writers were sincere. But some of the Koinonia expats in West Virginia and elsewhere weren’t as certain about what it all meant.

  Bill, who had been living outside Chicago for years, told his brother that he didn’t know whether he could forgive and forget, however well intentioned the words seemed to be. “You could open up a lot of stuff by going back down there.”

  Charles Browne wept when he read the letters. “It made me think about how much I still hate those guys who tormented us in school and how much of that anger I still carry with me. Those poor bastards might have changed and they might have repented, and here I still want to kill them. They might be Justice Department lawyers prosecuting Klansmen for all I know. Isn’t that the way it works? When we change, we put on a little act to convince ourselves, and eventually we start believing it. The ones who harassed me, some of them are probably still racist assholes. But I imagine some of them have changed.”

  The most skeptical of the Koinonia kids was the one who always seemed the most damaged: Carol Browne. Carol was only eight when she was visiting the Jordans one night and Jan slammed her to the floor after a rifle shot intended for her father pierced the house. She spent two years at Americus High, jawing back whenever she was provoked, and then moved away with her family. She never got over the sense of injury. Years later, she remained skittish, suspicious, ornery.

  Carol couldn’t imagine anyone going back to Americus, not after what had happened to her the one time she went back in 1983. She stayed a single night at Koinonia but couldn’t sleep because she kept thinking about bombings and gunshots and some thug roughing up her father. “I’m sorry,” she told Margaret Wittkamper the next morning. “I can’t handle this. I’ve got to leave.”

  On her way out of town, Carol stopped for gas in Americus, her nerves still frayed, and got into a tiff with a convenience store clerk who muttered something rude about the way her son looked. Carol had lived with a black musician and had a mixed-race child. “I gave this clerk a piece of my mind, and I thought: ‘Yeah, nothing has changed around here.’” She swore she would never return to Americus. When Koinonia held a fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1992, one of the planners tried to allay her fears, telling her that Sheriff Chappell was dead and they’d buried him extra deep. The dark humor did not sway her. Carol refused to go, and she didn’t think Greg should go now.

  After he showed her the first letters, she conceded that his classmates might have learned to tolerate some things because society had changed and they couldn’t afford to look like bigots, but underneath it all, they were the same people. “Leopards don’t change their spots,” she said. “If you go back down there, you’d better take every gun you’ve got.”

  Greg thought Carol was being unnecessarily dramatic, as she was wont to do, but he understood why she and some of the others harbored misgivings. He had questions himself. He picked up the phone and started calling his former classmates. He wanted to know why, after all these years, they were finally being kind to him.

  chapter 14

  Guilt and Grace

  The Class of 1965 had held at least three other reunions, but no one bothered to tell Greg about them. The graduates who had loathed him would not have wanted to see him, and the others, if they thought of him at all, might have found his presence an awkward reminder of an embarrassing part of their high school years. Since Greg was living in another state and had no friends in the class, he was easily ignored when reunion rolls were drawn up and invitations mailed. If anyone had contacted him, he would have attended—he had thought about it—but he wasn’t going to go without being asked.

  The fortieth reunion promised to be different if only because of the person who was coordinating it: David Morgan. David volunteered for the job because he had time on his hands. He had retired from his position as a loan officer with the Farm Credit System and was taking a break while he considered what to do next. The reunion was scheduled for June 2006—a year past the actual anniversary, but better late than never. David began by e-mailing fellow graduates and scouring the Internet to assemble a roster of class members. Ninety-eight of the 107 he listed were still living, two-thirds of them in Georgia and most of the rest in neighboring states. Greg was unaccounted for. David had no idea where he was living, or whether he was living, but he aimed to find out. “You don’t forget someone who was as center stage as Greg was,” he said.

  David lived in Perry, fifty miles northeast of Americus, but he still had family in his hometown and kept in touch with friends there. One of them was his English teacher, Mrs. Crabb. Years before, she had mailed him a page from the Koinonia newsletter in which Greg had written a short reminiscence about his graduation day and the student who congratulated him in front of everyone. “I thought you’d like to know that you had an impact on Greg’s life,” she wrote. David had no idea that his handshake and words of encouragement had meant so much. Looking back, he was proud of what he had done. He wasn’t as proud of some other things.

  As he thought about the reunion, David pulled out his high school yearbooks and lingered over the portraits of his classmates. There was a surprise in his freshman annual: he had scratched out Greg’s picture with a ballpoint pen. When the yearbooks arrived for the 1961–1962 term, some of his friends started scribbling on the picture for laughs, and David went along to show that he was one of them. “I guess I thought it messed up my whole annual to have him in there,” he reflected. “It was stupid. I was ashamed of doing it just a few years later.”

  David had long regretted the way Greg was maligned in high school. “It kind of gnawed at me.” In his conversations about the reunion with other class members, he floated the idea of reaching out to Greg in some way and making sure he was included this time. A couple of people advised against it, speculating that the gesture might not be well received, but everyone else thought it was justified and long overdue. When he phoned Deanie Dudley Fricks, she brought up the subject without prompting. “Have you ever been sorry for what we did to Greg?” she asked.

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  Deanie and her husband had done well for themselves in Virginia. Bill worked his way up to CEO of the company that recruited him out of college, Newport News Shipbuilding, which makes aircraft carriers and submarines for the US Navy. His wife, who was so lonely and dislocated after she moved from Americus as a newlywed, regained her equilibrium largely through religion. As her Christian faith deepened, she questioned the way so many people from her background had been raised to believe that white people were better than black people. It took years, but she eventually came to accept that everyone was equal in God’s eyes. “I wish I could say that I decided one day that I was done with prejudice, but it doesn’t go away that easily. It evolved. It wasn’t fast. I had to wrestle with it. And you’re never done wrestling with it.” She was gratified that their three children were remarkably more tolerant than she and her friends had been at their age. When their son went to the College of William & Mary, he had a black roommate for all four years, something his mom never would have imagined when she left Georgia.

  By the year of the reunion, Deanie’s husband had retired, and they were splitting their time between homes in Naples, Florida, and Albany, Georgia, a few miles down the road from Americus, where her elderly parents still resided. Over the years, Deanie had thought of high school occasionally and grieved about the way the students from Koinonia had been ostracized—not only Greg, but Lora Browne and Jan Jordan as well. She was sorry for any hurt she had caused them and their families and wondered whether their parents were still around. “Greg had been in my heart for some time,” she said. “It had gotten more intense. My conscience was really bothering me, and I wanted to make things right.”