The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  She and David agreed to approach a handful of other class members to ask whether they would be willing to write letters of apology. Deanie called her friend Celia, who was working for an insurance company outside Charleston, South Carolina, while David called Joseph, who was still teaching at the community college in Enterprise, Alabama.

  David spoke to a few other classmates who said they would participate, and then he sent a general e-mail to most of the names on his reunion roster, telling them that an effort to reconcile with Greg was in the works. He did not copy the e-mail to a small number of graduates whom he suspected would not approve. “We knew a few of our classmates wouldn’t like it,” he said, “but I didn’t care what they thought. We were all grown-ups now. I told everyone I was going to do what I thought was right.”

  David and the core group debated whether to compose a single letter with multiple signatures on the bottom, but decided not to because that might smack of a committee undertaking. They wanted this to be more personal. They elected to write separate letters and mail them at the same time for greater effect.

  But first they had to find Greg. David assumed Mrs. Crabb would know where he was, or how to locate him, so he phoned her and filled her in on their plans. She was in her eighties and had long since retired from the classroom, but she remained every inch the teacher and was overjoyed to hear that her former pupils were finally tackling this last piece of difficult homework. She contacted Koinonia and got Greg’s address in West Virginia.

  That was the easy part. Now they had to write the letters.

  ____________________

  Teenagers make fun of people and sometimes, intentionally or not, cross the line between kidding and cruelty. Learning the difference between needling and genuinely hurting someone is a passage of adolescence, like dealing with acne or anxiety. Few people who went too far ever get the chance as adults to say they are sorry. Were they to have the opportunity, what, exactly, would they say without it sounding strange or self-pitying? Just because someone wants to make amends doesn’t mean that it will turn out well.

  David was mindful of the pitfalls; that’s why he labored over his letter for two days. “It was very tough. I wanted to get it right. Words are important. I didn’t want to be misunderstood.” He drafted the message on his computer, editing and refining, and then wrote it out in flowing blue cursive so it would seem more intimate. It ran five hundred words, two and a half pages:

  The first letter came from David.

  Dear Greg,

  I expect you will be quite surprised to hear from me. If you remember me at all, it will likely be for unpleasant reasons. I was a classmate of yours at Americus High School, and graduated with you in 1965.

  I don’t recall ever directly assaulting you, but I probably did, to gain acceptance and accolades of my peers. In any case, I surely participated as part of an enabling audience, and tacitly supported and encouraged those who did. For that I am deeply sorry and regretful.

  Throughout the last 40-plus years, I have occasionally thought of you and those dark days that you endured at our hands. As I matured, I became more and more ashamed, and wished that I had taken a different stand back then. I knew, even then, that it was all wrong, yet I did nothing to stop it, or even to discourage it. I secretly admired your ability to take such abuse without retaliating.

  I knew that you were physically stronger than most of those who taunted you. Indeed, you had an impressive physique. Sometimes I wished you would “clean the clock” of your tormentors. I realize, of course, that it took greater courage to hold back. In any case, had you fought back, you would have been besieged by a “mob” of bystanders, who were encouraging your tormentors. It hurts me to say that I was sometimes part of that “mob” of bystanders. Did you ever notice that you were seldom confronted unless there was a gaggle of supporters giving courage to your attackers?

  As an adult, I have read more about the origins, philosophy, and mission of Koinonia Farm. I now see that it was a noble experiment, based on sound Christian principles. Mr. Jordan was years ahead of his time, but the rural south just wasn’t ready for blacks and whites to co-exist as equals, much less live, work and commune closely together. Anything so contrary to old southern culture was quickly and easily labeled as “subversive” and “communist” in those crazy days.

  All I can do now is say that I am sorry, acknowledge the good principles behind Koinonia’s existence, and commend you for your courage. I hope that the hatred and hardship you endured at our hands has made you stronger and more resolute in your character and faith. You were right! I hope God has smiled on you for holding fast and suffering in His Name. God bless you for your pacifist courage, and God forgive me for participating in your torment.

  Your old friend, Mrs. Gladys Crabb, has remained dear to many of us. Then, as now, she was a quiet conscience, gently reminding us (without scolding) that we were wrong. She still serves as a bridge for healing the chasm between us. God bless her for many good things she taught us: by her example, as well as her valuable academic instruction.

  God bless you, too, Greg, and I wish a good life for you.

  David Morgan

  The second letter came from Deanie.

  Deanie’s letter—also handwritten—was longer than David’s by one hundred and fifty words. She sprinkled it with biblical allusions, saying that Greg’s plight in high school reminded her of the first book of Peter, in the New Testament, an epistle to early Christian churches that were being persecuted. But there was another book, by a man of another faith, that informed her thinking just as deeply when she sat down to write Greg.

  His name was Samuel Althaus, and he ran a delicatessen and catering business in Newport News that handled the receptions after a launching at her husband’s shipyard. They got to know him and his wife through work. “I was very fond of Sam,” she said. “He was so gentle.”

  Althaus was a Holocaust survivor, although he didn’t talk about it much. Deanie didn’t learn the disturbing details of his young life until she was leaving a diner in Virginia and noticed her friend’s name on a slender book for sale at the counter. It was his memoir: Where Is God? Auschwitz-Birkenau to Dachau, 1942–1945. She bought a copy and read about how his family, who were poultry suppliers in Poland, lost everything after the Nazis invaded in 1939: their livelihood, their synagogue, their friends, their freedom. The family was eventually deported to concentration camps; by the time the war ended, both of Althaus’s parents, three brothers, and two sisters had been gassed or otherwise murdered.

  “As I was reading it, I was stunned,” Deanie recalled. “It was just too much like what happened in Georgia. I’m not saying that what happened in Americus ever came close to the Holocaust. But we were on the same road and didn’t know it. I’m talking about the dehumanizing of certain segments of mankind. I’m thinking about the names African Americans used to be called, the way people treated them like they were less than human, like we were so superior to them. That’s the thing that tied it together for me. When I read Sam’s book, I saw that connection. It upset me terribly.”

  That sense of distress overflowed in Deanie’s letter:

  Greg, you have shared the sufferings of Christ as few have. “He was despised and rejected of men.” I did not despise you. You were a young man girded with courage. I have not personally witnessed that kind of courage before or since. I don’t know how you endured, but what an example of godliness with humility you have been to me.

  I have only recently discovered what Koinonia was truly about. It broke my heart that I never took the time before to discover the truth, but allowed prejudice and fear, and the things that I was told by people I thought knew the truth, to affect my thoughts and actions.

  I will never again say, “How could the Holocaust have happened—how could all those Christian people in Poland and Germany have stood by and allowed it to happen?” I’ll never need to ask
that again. . . .

  I can’t say now, “Well, that didn’t happen in my time,” or, “I wasn’t a part of something terrible,” or, “I never lynched anybody,” or, “I wasn’t in Germany.” No, but I was present with you over a long period of time, and I never once did one thing to comfort you or reach out to you. It was cruelty.

  Celia had a hard time beginning her note, but when she finished it, she felt a sense of relief, as if she had finally said things that she wished she had said decades before. She mentioned her second husband, Ron Gonzalez, a man of Spanish extraction who had grown up in New York and counted blacks among his closest friends. When she told him about Greg and Koinonia and those rocky days at Americus High, he wondered whether, with his ethnicity, he would have faced the same abuse. More than likely, Celia had to admit. She asked Greg to come back:

  I do hope that you will consider coming to the class reunion in June. My husband, Ron, and I would love to see you. Ron is a little younger than us and he is having a hard time understanding why we let this happen to you—as do I. After trying to explain it to him, I realized that there is no excuse. God has helped me deal with this, and I am grateful for the opportunity to write you.

  Joseph’s letter was different; it was essentially reportage. He wrote a two-page sketch about the confrontation behind the baseball stands after school, when a crowd of boys cheered as his football teammate Thomas slugged Greg in the face—and then fell silent as he refused to strike back. In Sunday school as a boy, Joseph had heard about Jesus teaching his followers to turn the other cheek if someone attacked them, and he thought it sounded like a dumb thing to do. But as an adult teaching his own Sunday school class, he understood the wisdom behind nonviolence and told the story of Greg and T.J. as a real-life illustration. In his sketch, he narrated the scene vividly, down to the way Greg staggered after Thomas hit him and then stuck out his chin awaiting another swing:

  The inevitable did not happen. A coach came and the crowd dispersed. Greg whipped all fifty of us that afternoon without throwing a punch! I did not realize it until years later, though.

  I saw a sermon that afternoon. Because I did, I understand the Scriptures better today—one verse in particular.

  As a boy, I, that day, went home feeling embittered about life and a missed opportunity to get even with someone I violently disagreed with. As a man, I admire a young man whose actions matched his words. I want to thank him for what he taught me.

  “Who would have ever thought I would offer you as a role model?” Joseph marveled in his cover note.

  ____________________

  Thomas’s blow was nothing compared to the one-two punch that came in the mail during the first week of May 2006. When Greg opened his P.O. box on the first morning, he found the reunion invitation and the letter from David and read them outside the post office in Sinks Grove. Those got his attention, straightened him up. On the next day, Joseph, Celia, and Deanie’s letters arrived in a flurry and practically knocked him out. He read them on the way home, pulling over to the side of the road, and was so overcome with emotion that it took him fifteen minutes to compose himself and continue.

  On the night he received David’s message, Greg looked him up in the directory and called him at home. Hearing his voice after so many years sent chills down David’s spine. He asked how Greg was doing, a nice way of trying to find out whether he hated everyone in the class; Greg picked up on the unspoken question and assured him that he had put his bitterness away years ago. After that, the conversation grew more relaxed, and they were soon laughing about the terrible names Greg had been called in high school. “Maybe we’ll write one of those on your name sticker at the reunion,” David joked.

  In the coming days, Greg phoned the other letter writers and thanked them for their thoughtful messages. He spoke with Joseph for more than two hours in a sort of therapy session for both of them. By the end of May, four more classmates had written him: Mary Ellen Smith Daniels and Shelby Jean Bradley Bowen from Americus; Linda Mitchell Thomas from Fort Meade, Florida; and Joan Rogers from Savannah. A fifth one, Jeannie Fletcher, called him from Georgia. “It was an answer to a prayer to find your address,” Linda Thomas told him. “I’ve wanted to do this for many years but didn’t know how to find you!”

  After such an outpouring of remedial concern, he couldn’t imagine not attending the reunion. He made plans to travel back to Georgia with his wife and their daughter. His brother David volunteered to come along and drive them in his roomy old Mercedes. He regarded his time at Americus High as the worst year of his life and said he could use some healing himself.

  Despite the gracious letters and the warm phone conversations, Greg was nervous about how he would be received in Americus. After all, nine-tenths of the class had not written him. Joseph warned him about one man—a friend who had played football with him—whom he believed still harbored his old biases. (It wasn’t Thomas; T.J. had died many years before.) David also mentioned the possibility that there would be people who would be unhappy to see him. Even Mrs. Crabb, when he called her, seemed a bit cautious about him returning to Georgia and facing his former classmates. All it would take to undo much of the good would be for one tongue to lash out at him. “Greg,” she said, “don’t be surprised if there are some diehards.”

  It all gave him pause, but it didn’t change his mind. Greg was going, and he didn’t think it would be necessary to pack guns and ammo, as Carol Browne had suggested.

  As they drove the six hundred miles from West Virginia to Americus, Greg and the others talked off and on about what to expect.

  “What do you think your father would think of all this?” Anne asked her husband.

  “He’d say, ‘Hallelujah! The Lord works in mysterious ways.’”

  “How about your mother?”

  “She’d say, ‘Well, this should be interesting. You boys behave yourselves.’”

  Greg certainly didn’t want to cause a scene by showing up. He just wanted to close the circle and find some redemption. He hoped that would be the way it played out, but if it didn’t, he had been through worse. Turning off Interstate 75 for the last leg of the journey through the peach groves of middle Georgia, he looked at the others and cracked a little joke: “You know, it’s not too late. We can still turn around.”

  chapter 15

  Back to Americus

  The long drive from West Virginia ended in front of a redbrick house with white shutters on West Glessner Street, three blocks from Americus High School. It was Mrs. Crabb’s residence, the same place she had lived when she was the faculty advisor for the Class of 1965. Greg and some of the schoolmates who had written him were meeting for a Friday lunch at their teacher’s home before the reunion weekend got under way that evening with a reception. It seemed like an appropriate setting for them to get together and sift through their emotions before they gathered with the rest of the graduates.

  Greg climbed out of his brother’s Mercedes, still feeling edgy about what awaited, and reached for Anne’s hand as he made his way up the front walk. David followed with Sallie, who was carrying a gift bag for their hostess and waving an old-time fan they had picked up at the Americus visitors center. Greg paused at the front door, which was decked out with an American flag, and took a deep breath. Anne pressed the bell.

  The door opened, and an elderly woman with glasses and white bangs appeared. “Goodness gracious alive, you look wonderful!” Mrs. Crabb exclaimed when she saw Greg. The two embraced. “I think I’m going to spend the day crying.”

  There was another familiar face in the entry hall. “I recognize this man,” Greg said, and shook hands again, after forty-one years, with David Morgan. Deanie stood behind him with her husband, Bill, beaming as she hugged Greg. The doorbell rang and another classmate, Mary Ellen Smith Daniels, walked in with a yearbook tucked under her arm, and there were more hugs and handshakes.

  Everyone settled into the
living room, a grandmotherly sanctuary with rockers, curio cabinets, and family photos staring from the walls and tables. Greg tried to break the ice. “So,” he began, “after all these years . . .”

  It was awkward at first. Greg had never been friends with these people when they were students. Other than their letters and their recent phone conversations, they hardly knew each other. The last time they had been together was at their graduation, when he was booed and chased off the campus by rock throwers. It wasn’t like they could reminisce about the prom or the homecoming game; most of their shared memories were not pleasant ones. Seeing him for the first time in more than four decades, his classmates looked him over for signs of mental bruising. They hadn’t expected him to walk in twitching or wearing a straitjacket, but they wouldn’t have been shocked if he had seemed haunted in some way—a Boo Radley they had all helped create.

  Greg put them at ease. He joked about being so nervous that he had almost asked his brother to turn the car around and go home. He told them about his real estate business in West Virginia and made the requisite crack about the suspected commie growing up to become a capitalist. Everyone fussed over his doe-eyed four-year-old, who climbed into his lap and then joined her mother on the oriental rug to play with some toys Mrs. Crabb had found for her.

  His classmates were relieved to see that Greg was not haunted. He seemed happy. He seemed to be at peace.