by Tanner Colby
[PART 1]
LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM SUBURB
[1]
Bus Kid
“Turn on the heat, Mom.”
“It’s on, baby. It’s on.”
It’s way too early. The sun is barely up, it’s cold out, and Alicia Thomas is warming up the engine of her big yellow school bus. She cranks the heat for her two young boys, Robert and Walter, who sit a few rows back. Still bundled up in winter coats to stave off the February chill, they’re pulling out their schoolbooks to get in some last-minute studying before homeroom.
Up in the front row, I reach over and hand Ms. Alicia—as all the kids call her—the warm cup of coffee I’d promised when she invited me along for the ride. She says thank you with a sweet, sunny Alabama smile, which seems impossibly bright given the hour. We idle a few minutes while she double-checks some gauges. Then she puts the bus in gear, and we’re off.
Alicia Thomas drives the bus. Not the regular bus, and not the short bus. She drives the other bus, the bus that brings the black kids. Every weekday morning for nearly four decades, her bus, or a bus quite like it, has followed the same well-worn route: out from the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, along Highway 31, up Columbiana Road, down the far side of Shades Mountain, and out into the Oxmoor Valley below. There, in Oxmoor, the bus picks up its quota of federally mandated integration and hauls it back to the leafy, lily white enclave where I went to high school: Vestavia Hills. It’s a route Ms. Alicia could probably navigate blindfolded. In the early 1970s, long before she drove the bus, she rode it as a student.
“It used to get so cold,” she says with a shiver, remembering her mornings at the stop. “The boys had to light campfires to keep us warm until the bus came.”
“You had campfires?” I say. “At your bus stop?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “We were so country.”
Less than ten miles from the million-dollar cul-de-sacs of Vestavia Hills, the Oxmoor where Alicia Thomas grew up was little more than a rambling crisscross of back roads on the outskirts of nowhere—not a town at all, really. There were a few ranch-style brick houses for those who could afford them, but clapboard and cinder block shacks were more the norm, some with dirt floors, others with no running water. There wasn’t much else to see in the sprawling seven thousand acres of the Oxmoor Valley. It was a scrapyard, a garbage dump for the industrial waste of the U.S. Steel Corporation, which at one time held a monopoly on Birmingham’s steel trade.
Back then the Oxmoor kids had to be up at five a.m., Alicia tells me, to walk through fields of chickens and cows, some of them upward of a mile, just to reach the bus stop. In her day, the bus they rode was a rickety, scrap-metal clunker, lurching around the hairpin turns of the city’s mountainous terrain. Their bus driver? Some old white guy clutching the wheel, half scared to death by the rowdy children crammed in behind him. “I can just remember riding down those big hills,” Alicia recalls. “The brakes going out and the bus packed with kids. It was three to a seat with the rest on the floor or standing in the aisle, with no air-conditioning. And here’s this one old white guy driving all these black kids? He couldn’t handle all those kids.”
“What was the guy’s name?” I ask.
The question brings her up short. “You know,” she says, “in all those years of driving us, I don’t think he ever even spoke to us once to tell us his name. We just called him Shaky, ’cause he was always so nervous. ‘Shaky, slow down! You gon’ kill us!’”
Vestavia Hills sits just south of Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama and, at one time, the largest industrial center in the South. Together with the neighboring towns of Mountain Brook, Homewood, and Hoover, Vestavia forms the nucleus of “Over the Mountain”—the catchall term for Birmingham’s suburban sprawl, so named because you go “over” Red Mountain to get there from downtown.
Having lived there, I suppose I can say that whites in Vestavia aren’t any more or less racist than the ones in the other suburbs. But when the school system was formed there in 1970, born in the exodus of white flight, the city did go to great lengths to put its feelings on display. Vestavia’s chosen mascot was the Confederate rebel, “Colonel Reb.” An ornery, cartoony-looking fellow, the Colonel resembles a cross between Yosemite Sam and an angry Mark Twain, his hat cocked back and a clenched fist sticking out. The official school banner? The Confederate battle flag. Flown from pickup trucks and waving high in the bleachers, the Stars and Bars was always on proud display. If you stumbled onto a Vestavia football game by accident, you might think you were at a Klan rally with a concession stand.
That’s the image Vestavia wanted, and it stuck. To this day, racial incidents land the school on the five o’clock news. There are many in Birmingham’s black community who still refuse to set foot in “that racist suburb,” because, to them, this isn’t just a suburb. As a symbol, Vestavia Hills was nothing more than white flight’s parting shot at the civil rights movement, the final insult.
Alicia Thomas first arrived here as a five-year-old kindergartner in 1971. Friends of hers had come the year before, so what she encountered wasn’t a complete surprise. There were problems. Name calling, graffiti on bathroom stalls. Huddled around the bus-stop campfire, the stench of smoke would sink into your clothes; once you got to school, you’d sometimes hear “God, what’s that smell?” or “Those niggers stink” as you walked down the hall.
For the first several months, Alicia says, she and the black students were all put with a black teacher and had their classes in a corner of the cafeteria, still segregated from the white kids. Even after she was put in regular classes, white teachers didn’t always treat her fairly. They assumed she was slow, less capable. “My third-grade teacher was a mean lady,” Alicia recalls. “I had to say to her, ‘I can read. I can write.’ One day she told me I had to get out of her class and go down to the learning lab. I ignored her and just sat there and read my book. I wanted her to know that I could read.”
It was the same when she went out for the volleyball team in middle school. The coaches told her she couldn’t join because the bus kids had to leave at three thirty and couldn’t be counted on to stay for practice. “So we didn’t even try out,” she says. “I didn’t know they couldn’t tell us not to try out for something. And my parents had a car. They could have driven us back after school. But the coaches told us no.”
And so went Alicia Thomas’s time in Vestavia Hills: kinda separate, not exactly equal. Yet she looks back on it without regret, even when remembering the worst. “I don’t feel like I got as much out of the system as the other kids,” she explains. “I don’t. We didn’t have anybody fighting for us. My feelings got hurt. But the little stuff I went through, it’s nothing. I’m okay with it. I didn’t have anything growing up, and Vestavia gave me something I probably wouldn’t have had. I know how much it did for me, and I hope it can do the same for my boys.”
Her sons, the two young men diligently doing their schoolwork behind us, are the reason Alicia Thomas is driving the bus today. After graduating from Vestavia, she went to the University of Alabama at Birmingham on scholarship, got married, and settled in the small town of Midfield, just west of downtown. She landed an office job in the personnel department of the Saks Fifth Avenue store out at the Galleria. Then, ten years ago, Saks downsized and Alicia was let go.
While she pondered what to do next, an unlikely job offer floated in from her past: Vestavia Hills needed a new bus driver. Her children were about to start school, and like all parents she wanted them to get into a good one. She’d long ago moved from the busing zone in Oxmoor, and she couldn’t afford to move into Vestavia itself. But every employee of the Vestavia school system, from the principal to the lunch lady, can enroll his or her children for free. “I knew Vestavia was the best,” Alicia says, “so I decided to drive the bus.”
So here we are.
It’s the end of the first leg of our bus ride, and we’ve reached Oxmoor. “That’s where we’d wait by the cam
pfire,” Alicia says, pointing to the corner of Goss Street as we go by. She calls out a few other landmarks from her childhood here and there, but Oxmoor is no longer the place it once was. In just the past few years, this onetime industrial scrapyard has been consumed by suburban sprawl. The old shacks and shanties are all still there, still inhabited, but they’re surrounded by a sea of McMansions, golf courses, and condominiums. On Ostlin Street, one of the frontiers between old and new, these three-story, new-money monstrosities literally tower over tumbledown clapboard shacks right across the way.
When we reach Ostlin, Alicia pulls over to let her boys out; they have to switch to the middle school bus, which will be along in a minute. Then we pick up the high school kids. They climb in one by one, either plugged into their iPods or yammering about this week’s big basketball play-off game. We head back to Vestavia and up to the high school—newly renovated and nearly doubled in size since I was here. The kids all pile out to a steady refrain of “Thank you, Ms. Alicia!” and “Study hard now, baby!” And then it’s back to the bus yard.
Alicia Thomas’s tale bookends the strange and strangely American phenomenon known as “busing.” After being one of the first to ride the bus, she may be one of the last to drive it. Because of those big, fancy Oxmoor McMansions, Vestavia’s forty-year saga of court-ordered integration is coming to an end. On December 13, 2007, the District Court of Northern Alabama vacated the desegregation order against the city of Vestavia Hills, granting the school system “unitary status,” the legal jargon used to describe the very simple state of being made whole—no longer dual, no longer separate.
As a slaveholding nation dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal, America built its house on two fundamentally irreconcilable ideas. We’ve been struggling to reach unitary status ever since. The particular chapter of this struggle that pertains to Vestavia Hills began in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which nullified the use of segregated facilities for blacks and whites in public education. Separate but equal was inherently unequal, and therefore unjust, said the court in its unanimous reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown’s sweeping indictment of segregated schools, however, did nothing to eliminate them. For fifteen years, white school districts kept blacks out by evading and stonewalling, forcing the government to devise a solution. And the solution we came up with was this: the school bus. In the same decade that America put a human being on the moon, our nation’s finest minds could offer no better fix for four hundred years of slavery and segregation. Just some nervous white guy named Shaky in a busted jalopy lurching down and around the mountain with everyone screaming for him to slow the hell down.
There was a lot of extra weight riding on that bus, too—possibly more than it could bear. With Brown v. Board, America had set its eyes on the ultimate prize: social integration, racial equality—unitary status. Many had even dared to dream that this big yellow school bus would take their children to a place where they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Shaky wasn’t just taking these kids to school. He was taking them to the Promised Land. Some of them made it, and some of them didn’t.
[2]
A Place Apart
In 2000, the History Book Committee of the Vestavia Hills Historical Society published the city’s authorized biography, Vestavia Hills, Alabama: A Place Apart, by Marvin Yeomans Whiting. A handsome, gold-embossed collector’s piece, it was issued to commemorate Vestavia’s fiftieth anniversary. “Commemorate” is the operative word, as you won’t find a whole lot of history going on inside its covers. Not unless you count the history of the men’s garden club or the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast. The book is a whitewash. During the cataclysmic civil rights campaign of 1963, we learn, Vestavia was opening a brand-new swimming pool and Little League field. School busing is given slightly greater coverage, but only in the context of how difficult it was to endure: the city had “survived” court-ordered integration.
All of this is in keeping with Vestavia’s carefully cultivated image. It’s a town with “good schools,” people say. “A great place to raise a family.” There’s a Chuck E. Cheese anchoring the strip mall and a Protestant church on every corner and the Little League facilities, it must be said, are really quite nice. When I was growing up here in the eighties, it was like living inside a real estate brochure. The actual real estate brochures, the ones that the Realtors here use, present a heartwarming story about how Vestavia’s name comes from a local building modeled after the temple of Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth and home. Here in Vestavia, they say, “you’ll find that spirit of hearth and home” in your own three-bedroom, split-level slice of the American Dream. Like a lot of what you read in brochures, it’s complete bullshit.
The real story of Vestavia Hills begins with George Ward, a financier who served as mayor of Birmingham from 1905 to 1909 and as president of the city commission from 1913 to 1917. Birmingham was a steel town. Unique in the agrarian South, it sits up in the Appalachian foothills on some of the richest deposits of iron ore found anywhere in North America. As the city’s industry grew after the Civil War, black sharecroppers from across the cotton belt left the land in hopes of finding better jobs in the mines and steel mills. But even if the wages were a touch better than sharecropping, the working conditions were not. Blacks were relegated to the lowliest and most dangerous jobs. As one Northern observer noted, if horses and mules had been subjected to the same treatment as blacks, the Humane Society would have come in and shut everything down. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Birmingham was little more than a polluted mining colony. Ward turned it into a thriving city of industry. He modernized the water system, paved the roads, added hundreds of acres of parkland; he even created a red-light district with legalized prostitution to control the spread of venereal disease.
In 1910, Birmingham annexed several of its surrounding municipalities, tripling its population and bringing the outlying areas—semirural, mostly white, and very Protestant—into a growing metropolis with a large population of blacks and Catholic immigrants. Among Southern Protestant fundamentalists at the time, prejudice against Catholics was often as virulent as that against blacks; the Church of Rome and its foreign-born, papist followers were a scourge, a threat to real American values. When Ward ran for reelection in 1917, his chances hung on the fact that his chief of police was Catholic and, despite growing protests, Ward refused to fire him. A local Baptist minister organized the Protestant opposition under the banner of the True American Society. They ran a smear campaign, calling Ward a leading conspirator of the Catholic menace—never mind that he was an Episcopalian. On the eve of the election, Ward stood by his principles, declaring that he would rather lose his office than terminate a man “merely upon religious grounds.”
He lost.
The “True Americans” took hold of Birmingham, consolidating power on the side of those who would seek to crush the civil rights movement four decades later. The extractive policies of U.S. Steel and the stifling politics of Jim Crow began to slow the material progress of the city. As the 1920s began, the moneyed elites began their exodus, quietly slipping out and resettling in what would become the blue-blooded enclave of Mountain Brook. In 1925, George Ward left Birmingham and its politics behind for good, choosing for himself a very different retreat.
The area now occupied by Vestavia Hills has always been “a place apart.” It was once so isolated that Native Americans lived there unmolested long after being routed from the rest of the region. Only four miles from downtown Birmingham, it sits high atop Shades Mountain, the north face of which had always been too rocky and steep for large-scale settlement to reach the top. Before the Highway 31 expressway cut through in the early 1950s, the only way up was a winding, switchback road that climbed slowly around the side.
George Ward was what we in the South politely term “an eccentric.” During a trip to Rome as a young man, he’d fallen in lov
e with the temple of Vesta. He gave a replica of it to his architect, pointed at the crest of Shades Mountain, and said to build him one. And lo, “Vestavia,” a four-story temple/mansion ringed by imposing Doric columns, gilded with Italianate scrollwork, and bedecked with marble statuary. Imagine Graceland crossed with the Parthenon. Ward carved twenty acres out of the mountaintop and cultivated them into gardens of international renown. On Sundays, he opened them to the public free of charge—even, once a year, to people of color.
So, yes, there was a building called Vestavia and it was a home and it probably had a hearth, but that’s where any similarity with the real estate brochures ends. Ward threw lavish, fabulous theme parties, bacchanals of wild abandon; one year an airplane showered guests with rose petals from the sky. The former mayor “loved a parade,” it is said, and he “was often seen in costume.” His nickname while in office was “the fighting bachelor.” His only marriage, at the age of fifty-two, lasted little more than eighteen months. For reasons that “remain uncertain,” he insisted that the marriage never be made public. His wife never “lived in the Vestavia temple.” They never “had any children.” When he died he “left everything to his nieces.” And the “faithful retainers” on his staff were strapping young black men. Ward nicknamed them Lucullus, Pompey, and Scipio. On special occasions, he liked to dress them up in Roman centurion uniforms.
