“You cannot ignore it, that is true. But when it rains you put up an umbrella. When it snows you wear rubber boots. Racism exists, yes. But it is not the worst thing there is.”
“Tell me what is worse,” the first one said.
“Being afraid to confront your fears is worse,” the other one answered him. “You must not be afraid to face them. Your fears must never control you. You must learn to surrender what you do not need and move forward. This is what we have always done. Remember, you must not be like the men who hate you. In order for you not to hate, you must be able to forget.”
“But in order to know who I am, I must remember.”
I drifted deeper into sleep with their words ringing inside my head. When I awoke I knew that this little journey would end up either costing me my life, or somehow saving it. Perhaps both.
I knew I had come to the South to face my fears and to surrender them, to forget the many things it is best to forget, and to remember what is essential to remember. Until I did these, the South would own my anger and my sanity, my dignity, my pride, my sense of self.
“You northern blacks have given up the fight,” a man on a street corner told me. “You ran away like cowards from the real struggle and got sucked into the battle about being able to join the country club.”
He was a policeman. He had been standing on the corner of Hull and Jefferson, acting as a crossing guard for the children and the tourists who this morning were wandering in this part of the city they call Old Alabama Town, a historic area with old homes open for touring.
I had approached him after looking into an old house with what must have been slave quarters attached, and I asked him quite casually, “How are the white folks treating you?” He looked at me and sneered.
“This is Alabama, son,” he said, though he seemed younger than I. “How do you think they’re treating us?”
He had come from Birmingham, he told me, and couldn’t wait to get back there. His name was Bell.
“This place is too tame,” he said.
“So what are you doing here?”
“When I got out of the service, they were looking for cops in Montgomery,” he said. “When there’s an opening in Birmingham, I’ll go back home.”
I asked if he had ever thought about moving out of the South. He looked at me as if I were pathetically stupid.
“The front line is here,” he said. “You blacks in the North are fighting a rearguard action to keep from losing ground—to keep from losing your material gains, actually, what little you’ve really gained. We’re down here fighting the real fight, the quiet fight for dignity.”
“Are we winning?”
“Inch by inch,” he said. “The governor of Virginia is a black man. We got black mayors and black chiefs of police in places you never would have dreamed possible. And over in Mississippi—in Mississippi, of all God’s places!—there are more elected blacks than anywhere.”
“So you’re optimistic about the future?”
“No,” he said flatly. “I would have to be a damned fool or very naive to be optimistic. White folks is white folks, as they say. How can I be optimistic? It’s the optimists that get us into all this trouble. They look for a few things going right and take great cheer from it. They forget about everything else that’s still going wrong. They never see what’s really happening because they can’t see through those thick rose-colored glasses they wear. When they see things get a little bit better they think all of a sudden that everything is going to motor on fine and dandy all by itself. I know that ain’t so. I’m no optimist. We’ve got a long hard fight on our hands, and I’m staying here to do some of the fighting.”
It seems very often that blacks in the North feel themselves superior to blacks in the South because they think blacks in the South were simple-minded enough to stay and suffer the worst of the horrors and indignities. Southern blacks too often are called “’Bamas” and country niggers, and are seen as backward and uneducated. This man Bell was telling me the opposite, that blacks in the South look down on blacks in the North.
“They’re up there killing each other, doing the white man’s work,” he said. “They escaped to the Promised Land and got handed a bunch of lies. Now they don’t know what to do. But we’re down here like we’ve always been, suffering, enduring, hanging on. We’ll win this thing just by hanging on. Like all those black folks who suffered a whole lot more than you and me ever will. The white man beat us with sticks and clubs, shot us and lynched us, pitched us in the river. But here we are, still here. Eventually the white man’s going to get tired and he’s going to quit. Eventually they’re going to see that it’s taking two of them to hold one of us down, and they’ll see that they’re not getting anywhere either.”
“So you are an optimist,” I said.
“No,” he said emphatically. “An optimist thinks the white man is going to realize what a fool he’s been and how he’s been wasting all his time and money and energy holding us in a ditch, and that he’s going to reach down and pull us up and hand in hand we’ll all walk off into the happy sunset together. That’s an optimist. But me, all I want is for the white man to leave us alone. He doesn’t have to help us. I just want him to stop blocking the way. And that’s why I say this battle is really about dignity. If they would stop trying to deny us that, we could make it on our own.”
A group of kids came toward us, primary school kids, black and white and I think I saw an Asian face. They were walking two by two, holding hands to keep together. I looked at Bell and he was smiling.
He had to leave me now to stop what little traffic there was and help them cross the street.
“We’re here,” he said. “And we’re going to be here. We in the South know it hasn’t been easy and that’s why we fight so hard, the one side against the other, the one side with the other. You all in the North seem to have forgotten what we in the South will never forget. Every day we face the reminders of what we’ve been through. Here in the South we could never forget. None of us. Black or white.”
Four blocks from where Bell and I stood, on the corner of Dexter and Decatur, is the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was Martin Luther King’s first parish. When you call the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce, some old white lady will answer the phone. If you ask her, as I did, to tell you if the Dexter Avenue Church has any historical significance, she will answer indignantly and say to you, as she said to me with a hint of pride in her voice:
“My heavens, yes. That was Dr. Martin Luther King’s church.”
She will make it clear that she thinks everyone ought to know the history of her town and country.
And when you ask her about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were blown up one Sunday morning when a bomb was tossed through the window, the Chamber of Commerce lady will tell you without skipping a beat:
“Mister, that church is in Birmingham.”
As if you should know that too.
This history, she seems to be saying, is her history, the pain of the past, her pain as well, and we all ought to know it and never forget any part of it.
There is a street in Montgomery named Jefferson Davis, of course, but there is also one named for Rosa Parks, of all people. They intersect. Mostly Rosa Parks Avenue runs through a black section of town, the same as every Martin Luther King Drive, Street, or Avenue in the country does. But wouldn’t it say something wonderful if Rosa Parks and Martin King were recognized in white neighborhoods as well for what they did? Maybe one day.
But in the center of the business district, only three streets away from the first White House of the Confederacy and in the shadow of the state capitol with its rebel battle flag flying, a Civil Rights Memorial has been built. Businessmen and politicians and tourists and others—black, white, and all colors—pass it daily, and there it sits as reminder of the struggle that has not been won, that is not yet over, that goes on and on everywhere and for
ever.
The monument is a curved wall of black granite, smooth and cool, and on it are inscribed the words of Martin Luther King. “[We will not be satisfied] … until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
In front of the wall, from the center of a circular black granite table, water spouts up and flows over the table’s flat surface. On the tabletop, beneath the thin sheet of cool flowing water, are engraved as if burning the dates of important events in the battle for human rights in this country, and with those dates, the names of important men, women, and children who sacrificed for the future.
It was a violent struggle. Of the fifty-two dates inscribed there, thirty-two of them mention death; four others involved less lethal violence.
Some of the people who died in the struggle knew what they were doing, others did not. Some are household names, most are the quiet heroes we never hear about unless we search for them. But they are there. They have always been with us. They are extraordinary people, and we must never forget them and what they did for us—for all of us—that we might live in harmony, not in dominance or in servility, in peace and not in fear.
George Lee murdered for urging blacks to vote.
Lamar Smith murdered for the same thing.
Emmett Till murdered for flirting with a white woman.
John Reese killed when white men shot through the windows of the café where he was dancing.
Willie Edwards, Jr., forced by Klansmen to jump into the Alabama River where he drowned.
Mack Charles Parker taken by a mob from his jail cell and lynched.
Herbert Lee murdered by a state legislator for registering blacks to vote.
Cpl. Roman Ducksworth, Jr., murdered by a police officer.
Paul Guihard, a French news reporter killed by gunfire from a white mob.
William Lewis Moore murdered as he tried to deliver to the governor of Mississippi a letter urging tolerance.
Medgar Evers murdered at home by a sniper.
Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley murdered for being black, for being young, for being in church one Sunday morning, the wrong place at the wrong time.
Virgil Lamar Ware murdered by white teenagers for being black, for being young, for being on the street with his brother, the wrong place at the wrong time.
Louis Allen murdered for witnessing the murder of Herbert Lee.
Rev. Bruce Klunder murdered for protesting the building of a segregated school. A bulldozer crushed him.
Henry Hezekiah and Charles Eddie Moore murdered by Klansmen.
James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Henry Schwerner arrested by the sheriff, handed over to Klansmen, murdered, and buried in an earthen dam.
Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn murdered by Klansmen shooting from a passing car.
Jimmie Lee Jackson beaten and shot by Alabama state police as he tried to protect his grandfather from a police attack.
Rev. James Reeb beaten to death as he walked down a street in Selma.
Viola Gregg Liuzzo murdered by Klansmen shooting from a passing car.
Oneal Moore killed by a shotgun blast from a passing car.
Willie Brewster murdered by members of the National States Rights Party, a group responsible for church bombings.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels arrested for helping blacks register to vote, released suddenly, murdered moments later.
Samuel Leamon Younge, Jr., murdered at a gas station for arguing about segregated restrooms.
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer burned to death after he offered to pay the poll taxes for those who couldn’t afford the fee.
Ben Chester White murdered by Klansmen.
Clarence Triggs murdered for attending civil rights meetings.
Wharlest Jackson murdered for taking a job previously reserved for whites.
Benjamin Brown killed by police who fired into a crowd.
Samuel Ephesians Hammond, Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, Henry Ezekial Smith killed by police firing on student protesters.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated for wanting a better world.
These are merely the ones whose names we know, the ones we recognize. There have been and are still many many others, many others whose sacrifice will never be known, many others whose names have been lost, the ones who died, and the ones who suffered the torture of a living hell. But one day we will know who they are, these silent heroes, we will see them all around us.
“One day the South will recognize its real heroes.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
By the time I found the men waiting to call me nigger, I had been to this Civil Rights Memorial and sat in the cool shade. The late afternoon sun could not reach the place where I sat, where I meditated. I cooled my bottom on the pavement and rested. The tall shadow of people I had never met fell over me. I felt a deep sense of peace.
The Civil Rights Memorial fronts a modern office building that houses the Southern Poverty Law Center. The man who started the center, Morris Dees, is a lawyer who made a fortune publishing a cookbook. For some godly reason he turned his back on the security of business. He got involved instead in the right fight and on the right side. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to ask him why. Morris Dees is a white man.
When the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Dees was a part-time minister at a white church. From the pulpit he asked members of his parish to donate money to help rebuild the church. He asked them to pray for the families of the four little girls who were killed. His congregation of Christians walked out on him.
Five years later Dees was devoted full-time to civil rights law.
Lawyers from Washington had come to the South to put into motion the legal workings of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When those structures were set up, the northern lawyers went home. Dees got involved with the lawsuits that would make the real gains possible. He made a lot of enemies. Ku Klux Klan graffiti were painted on his office walls. His office was flooded. The hate mail started.
In the 1980s Dees took on the Klan itself when Klansmen lynched a nineteen-year-old black kid named Michael Donald. Dees and the Law Center sued in civil court on behalf of Donald’s mother and won a seven-million-dollar judgment against the United Klans of America. This particular branch of the Klan was essentially put out of business, bankrupt.
Dees became something of a marked man. Hate mail increased, death threats were not uncommon. No wonder then that I could not get into his office. I had to have an appointment and no amount of persuasion could gain me access. They didn’t know me and they were not going to let me in.
I left Montgomery and came back, I made connections with politicians in Mississippi and tried to get to Dees through them, I called the Law Center and said I wanted to interview Mr. Dees for a book I was writing, but nothing I tried got me past the voice on the intercom system or past the women who juggled me from one to another on the telephone.
I only wanted to ask one question. I simply wanted to know why he did what he did. I wanted to hear it from Dees, but I already knew what he would say.
As I sat on the steps at the memorial I ran scenario after scenario in my head. I imagined Dees’ soft drawl, his paunch, and the tired sadness beneath his eyes. I imagined the fire within them. He didn’t look like a lawyer. He certainly didn’t look like a cookbook salesman. He just looked like a southern white man.
Why I do what I do? I imagined him saying. Because I love your people and I love my people. Well, they are the same people. I do what I do because I love my country. And this is what my country stands for. It stands for justice. I do what I do because I love the South and I do not want to see the South ruined again, and the only way to avoid such destruction is to redeem the past. This is the only way I know how. I do what I do because no one else would do it. I do what I do because of a debt I owe to those who will come after. I do what I do because it’s right and it’s good and it needs doing. I do what
I do because I have no choice.
“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash; your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
—William Faulkner.
Suddenly, mysteriously, miraculously, I found myself loving the South. Fear and loathing vanished. My eyes opened all at once and I saw the South for what it truly is, in all of its contradiction and confusion, a swirl of strangeness and strain.
The South is a wounded old dog.
How it longs for its glory days when it was the most savage beast on the block, how it longs for its youth. How it growls and snarls, ferociously barking its bravado while craving a gentle word, a little understanding, the kind touch of a friendly hand. The South is old and tired.
The South is as afraid of me as I had been of it.
I pulled into the gravel parking lot of a roadside café near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A hot day, the sun beat down brightly. I was in my leather jacket and sweltering. I peeled it off, then took off the helmet. I was frowning from the heat, from the effort. My hair was matted, my beard overgrown and wild. I must have looked mean, angry, and dangerous.
A man was watching me from the window. He stared hard and I stared hard back. I frowned even more. We locked eyes and I would not back down, would not give an inch. Unmoving, unflinching, I glowered fiercely at him. He looked away.
On the side of the building there was a window where you could get cold drinks and ice cream. That’s all I wanted, a cold drink. I didn’t want to go inside. I only wanted a moment to stretch my legs. I had been on the bike a long time that day, doing more miles in a few hours than Great-Grandfather Joseph, on foot or in a wagon, could have done in weeks. Perhaps that is why, at the end of his journey, knowing firsthand the slow difficulty of each long day’s journey toward frontier and future, he sank his bucket where he was and dug his well, and started a stagecoach line.
In those days, Mississippi was the far West, new country, the distant frontier and the end of the line. As a nation we have always looked west to find the future, west to the setting sun, west to paradise, to unspoiled and uncrowded lands, wide open spaces, freedom. Joseph would have been no different from any other American in his expectations, desires, and concerns. Only in one concern was his outlook different: He went west to escape, went west until the great river blocked his way.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 24
