Educated at Duke University, Thaddeus Garland Stem Jr. came home from postgraduate wanderings in Florida in the late 1930s and gave himself to the serious pursuit of whiskey and women and verse. Although he held a sinecure as the veterans Administration representative in Oxford, which occupied him for two or three hours a week, he spent the rest of his hours reading and writing. His regular “Rock Wall Editorial” for the Raleigh News and Observer was renowned for many years for its erudition and wit. He published two novels and a whole shelf of poetry.
The self-appointed singer of rainstorms and pretty girls on bicycles, Thad had taken Chesterton’s advice to learn to love the world without trusting it. He detested sham and loved flowers; Thad would have plowed up his lovely yard and planted corn before he’d let the Junior League’s “Yard of the Month” sign pop up on his property. Thad was proud of his position on the margins of small-town Southern life. Asked to join anything, Thad always gave the same reply. “I don’t belong to but two things,” he’d say, “the Methodist Church and the Democratic Party, and I am thinking about quitting both of ’em.”
Thad inherited at least some of his racial progressivism from his father, Major Stem, an unlikely egalitarian, who died the year I was born. Back in the 1930s, when Thad was a teenager, Major Stem was leaving Hall’s Drugstore with his son and they passed Mrs. G. C. Shaw, the wife of the principal at Mary Potter High, the local Negro high school. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Shaw,” the major said, tipping his hat.
A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. “Why’d you call that damned nigger woman ‘Mrs. Shaw’?” he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy titles for their black neighbors. While it was permissible to call a favored black man “Uncle” or “Professor”—a mixture of affection and mockery—he must never hear the words “mister” or “sir.” Black women were “girls” until they were old enough to be called “auntie,” but they could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as “Mrs.” or “Miss” or “Ma’am.” But Major Stem made his own rules.
“Well, Mrs. Shaw’s older than I am,” he began softly. “She’s better educated than I am, and she has more money.” Then, thrusting the bootlegger away from him, the major exploded: “But more to the point, what I call Mrs. Shaw is none of your goddamned business, you low-life taxidermist, you two-for-a-nickel jackal, you knee-crawling son of a bitch, net.” These were the days when people really knew how to cuss.
Back then, the appendage “net” meant a real son of a bitch, doubled and in spades. Thad knew that, and he understood what the rest of the words meant, but on the way home he asked his father why on earth he had called the bootlegger a “taxidermist.” The major said quietly that a taxidermist is a man who mounts animals. Thad told me it took him about five years to figure that one out, and he reckoned the bootlegger never did. In any case, whether it was nature or nurture, Thad clearly acquired some of his father’s freethinking ways.
Raised on the concept of original sin, too, Thad knew that human beings not only had problems but were problems. What was different about Thad was that he did not permit his pessimism about human possibility to translate into an easy defense of the status quo. Things could be done, and ought to be done to make the world work better. But Thad could never be persuaded, however, that any amount of reform or education would ring in the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. One day he was strolling down Front Street and came to a group of sweaty workmen leaning on their picks and shovels under a shade tree, taking a break from their toil. They had removed several slabs of sidewalk and had dug a deep trench, which Thad was stepping around when he spoke.
“That is a right good-sized hole you’re digging, brethren,” he said, smiling as he stepped past them.
“Yeah,” one of the workmen replied. “We’re digging a hole big enough so we can bury every sorry sumbitch in Oxford.”
“Who’s going to be left to cover us all up?” Thad responded.
Renegade though he was, Thad had a full set of keys to the library at Duke University, that great seat of learning forty miles south of Oxford, down the Jefferson Davis Highway. If he got curious about something, he would get in the car and ride down there, day or night, and roam the stacks. Thad would quote Cicero, Browning, Wilde, Housman, Frost, and Whitman as though he’d run into them at Hall’s Drugstore that morning on his way to work. Listeners unfamiliar with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay might have adjudged by Thad’s tone of voice that he was dating her. He could rattle off Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” faster than a cat licks cream.
His own words ambled in the salty, succulent patois of Southern courthouses and roadside taverns of a distant day, before television had drained the life out of regional dialect, back when people told stories to pass their evenings. One local politician “wasn’t worth hell room in August,” Thad would growl. “Anybody could take a Barlow knife and a wooden shingle and fashion a better specimen of humanity.” One of my father’s fellow preachers in Oxford was a man of some vanity and bombast. “The sumbitch sends his mama a congratulatory telegram every year on his own birthday,” Thad would say whenever the good reverend’s name came up. “He is the only man I ever saw who can strut sitting down.”
Thad had strong views about liquor—that is, he held a solemn conviction that there were only two occasions when drinking was appropriate: one, when a fellow was thirsty, obviously, and, two, when he wasn’t, as a preventative measure. Thad loved Jack Daniel’s sour mash whiskey and made no secret of it, though he certainly was not what people used to call “the town drunk,” as if it were an elected position and singular, too. It is true, however, that Thad’s last will and testament stipulated that “good liquor” be served after his funeral. And he loved to quote a bit of doggerel that he attributed to Dean Samuel Fox Mordecai: “Not drunk is he who from the floor / Can rise again and drink once more. / But drunk is he who prostrate lies / Without the will to drink or rise.”
Most of Thad’s intoxication stemmed from the English language. He was literally a man of letters, and the archives in North Carolina are jeweled with his hilarious and insightful correspondence. When a man from Bunnlevel wrote to Thad in the late 1950s to ask advice about his own “poetry career” and to find out “how one goes about getting the most from a poem financially,” the salty writer replied that “the Deity probably knows, but I am not aware that He has told any poet.” Stem’s advice reveals both his joy in his work and his sense of isolation in Oxford. “I suppose,” he wrote, “that only a damn fool is a poet. God knows, he will be personally misjudged, socially mismatched, virtually unpaid, and worse than all of that misquoted.” Stem wondered whether his questioner had the “guts” to be “lonesome, out of step, often out of tune and soon out of time. Can you look the world in the teeth and tell it to go to hell and continue to stitch the dawn with gleaming words as if doing so is the only decent thing left in the world?”
Poetry did not pay, Thad regretted to tell his correspondent, and it was hard work, too. “If you subsequently improve upon the Psalms and upon Leaves of Grass you will still need a paying job,” Thad told him. “And if poetry isn’t as thrilling as making love—that is, if it can be successfully replaced with anything else, give it up.” He realized that he had been discouraging, Thad added, but the rewards of the writing life for those crazy enough and disciplined enough to follow it were immense: “I have never been a Kipling adherent, but if you do what I have told you, you will be a MAN, and what Ike, or Billy Graham, or Mr. Du Pont think about it will not matter a two-penny damn.”
That self-willed style of manhood was one important thing that Daddy shared with Thad, although the preacher was inevitably more politic than the poet. In between his periodic assaults on their sense of racial superiority, Daddy took such good care of his flock’s families and delivered such soul-soothing sermons that many of them were inclined to overlook his race-traitor tendencies. In response to the inevitable “n-lover�
� epithet, I recall hearing him telling a hostile caller, “Yes, I guess you’ve got a point there, because I do try to love everybody.” Thad probably would have added “even stupid sumbitches like you.” But Daddy was more patient, and rarely showed anger toward his adversaries, even though he had inherited a full measure of the Tyson temper. He held his ground like a sweet-gum stump, trying hard to live in a spirit of love and action, not anger and reaction. Oxford might be a little spiritually arid, but Daddy wasn’t drawing his water from an empty well.
He went back to the well in 1967 and once again invited a black preacher into his pulpit, thinking that things had probably eased up a little since the Dr. Proctor episode in Sanford. He had survived that one and, after the waves of race riots in the intervening years, Daddy probably figured that a black man in the pulpit would not seem so revolutionary. In any case, when Daddy told Eli Regan, his powerful lay leader, that he was planning to invite Reverend Gil Gillespie, a noted black Methodist preacher, to deliver a sermon at our church, Regan asked why Daddy wanted to do a thing like that. Racism was an important moral issue, Daddy replied, an issue that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority in front of a white congregation was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was not a bad thing, either. People needed to work through these things, and not just in the abstract.
The wizened old conservative responded that he didn’t think racism was a problem in our church at all, that he’d never heard anything that suggested any antipathy toward “our nigrah brothers and sisters.” Had Vernon asked anyone on the administrative board whether they thought this was a good idea? No, Daddy told him, the Methodist Book of Discipline stated clearly that the minister shall determine the number and nature of services. And he didn’t need to take a poll to know how people felt about these things. Nor did he think that a minister was bound by the principle of majority rule in all cases. Did the preacher mind, Regan wanted to know, if he asked around a little bit? Daddy told his lay leader that he didn’t mind him asking around, as long as Regan understood that as a preacher he had to do what the Lord called him to do.
Regan dropped by the office the following day. “Vernon, you’ve only been here a year and you know us better than we know ourselves,” he said. “I asked almost everyone on the administrative board, and you don’t have one bit of support for bringing in that nigrah preacher. I don’t think you have one vote, if it came to that,” Regan said. For a moment, it seemed as though the conservative elder was preparing to warn Daddy not to invite Reverend Gillespie to speak. “We need him a lot worse than I thought we did,” Regan went on. “You bring him on. And don’t you back down on it, either. I’m not going to say a damn word about it unless you get in trouble,” he said. “I might even oppose you a little bit. But if they come after you, they’ll have to come through me first.” And then the red-faced old man winked at him and ambled out the door and back down to the orphanage.
When the news of Reverend Gillespie’s coming filtered out to the congregation, there was a fair amount of low grumbling, but nothing approaching the protests in Sanford before Dr. Proctor came. And while Reverend Gillespie never became a nationally known orator and intellectual like Dr. Proctor, he was steeped in a black Southern homiletic tradition and was one hell of a preacher. Reverend Gillespie had all the traditional strengths and the polish of a good education, too, and a smile that would melt glass. His personality was so forceful, as folks back home say, that if he’d drowned in the river, folks would have looked for the body upstream. He was the genuine article, a first-class, grade A “pulpit peacock,” as my father and his five preacher brothers would put it.
WOXF routinely broadcast my father’s sermons locally, so that shut-ins, the elderly, and those members whose Sunday morning could not transcend their Saturday night could hear the Word nonetheless. That morning, Daddy hadn’t notified WOXF that he would not be preaching. And so when Reverend Gillespie climbed into the pulpit, he was unfurling his words not merely for the white congregation in front of him, but for all of Granville County. Otto von Bismarck had a point when he warned the Reichstag that conquering armies were not halted by the power of eloquence, but he had never heard Gil Gillespie. That morning, my father’s controversial guest was like the minister who, as the poet Richard Baxter once wrote, “preached as never to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” Gillespie simply mesmerized everyone in the congregation and, for all we knew, everyone in the county who had a radio.
Daddy’s most implacable adversary on the question of inviting Reverend Gillespie had come to Sunday school earlier that morning. But the fellow made a point of letting my father know that, as “a matter of principle,” he was not staying for the eleven o’clock worship service. The next week, however, the man dropped by the church office with a confession. “Vernon,” he laughed, “I started on home, but I reckon I have more curiosity than I do principles, because I could not keep myself from turning on the radio in my car just to see what the man was going to say.” As he drove along, the fellow told Daddy, he became more and more intrigued by the sermon and almost forgot who was giving it. “When I got to the house,” he said, “I couldn’t get out of the car because he was still going at it. My wife just brought me out a sandwich and laughed at me.” The man threw back his head and squealed at his own silliness. “I’ll tell you, Vernon,” he said, “the longer that feller preached, the whiter he got.”
Even though Reverend Gillespie’s 1967 visit caused less trouble for my father than Dr. Proctor’s had in 1964, it would be a mistake to assume that the racial chasm in American life had narrowed. In fact, few white people, North or South, were comfortable with the notion of racial equality in the early 1960s, and the victories that black Southerners finally won—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the voting Rights Act of 1965, principally—recruited legions of opponents. As the Democrats increasingly became identified with the black freedom movement, white Southerners poured out of the party. Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina had predicted this thirty years earlier as he’d filibustered against a 1938 anti-lynching bill: if national Democrats “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro, so help me God, you are going to learn a lesson which no political party will ever again forget.”
Bailey’s prophecy came true. In the presidential election of 1964, five states from “the Solid South” went to the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Republican organizers in Dixie traded almost exclusively in racial fear and white resentment. Political developments in the North reflected the same racial impetus; in the Democratic primaries of 1964, a third of the Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana voted for Alabama’s Governor George Wallace, the bellowing, slick-haired icon of Southern white supremacy. That summer when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he is said to have handed a souvenir pen to aide Bill Moyers, remarking, “Bill, I think we just gave the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine.” Johnson turned out to be an optimist. Two traditional Democratic constituencies, white Southerners in Dixie and “white ethnics” in the northern suburbs, now stampeded out of the Democratic Party, launching an enduring and racially driven realignment in American politics that would eventually put determined opponents of the early 1960s freedom movement into the highest offices in the land.
It is important to note that the “white backlash” that fueled this realignment, fed Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” and created the Republican Party of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and Newt Gingrich began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not the riots of the late 1960s. The reaction against the African American freedom movement began much earlier, and rejected not only black militancy but also simple justice. National opinion polls taken in 1963, only weeks after Dr. King told America about his dream “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will
be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” documented that “anti-Negro prejudice is widespread and deeply rooted in the U.S., extending to the vast majority of ordinary, well-meaning Americans” in all parts of the country. In truth, Dr. King had many admirers, but he was also one of the most widely and deeply hated men in the United States.
The sugar-coated confections that pass for the popular history of the civil rights movement offer outright lies about most white Americans’ responses to the freedom movement instead of reminding us how profoundly it challenged American practices of justice and democracy. No one, in the rosy glow of our hindsight, was opposed to this movement except potbellied, tobacco-chewing racist rednecks in Mississippi. And thank God for the federal government, who in these fantasies rode over the hill like the cavalry to iron out these little difficulties on the frontier of American society. Polling data revealed that the majority of white Americans in 1963, prior to the Civil Rights and voting Rights Acts, believed that the movement for racial equality had already proceeded “too far and too fast.” North and south, whites avoided social contact with black people and strongly objected to integrated housing and schools. Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hearing Dr. King’s dream of racial reconciliation and equal citizenship, launched a calculated effort to destroy King’s personal life and tried to blackmail the eloquent young preacher into committing suicide.
While most Americans would not have approved of the FBI’s secret campaign to bring about King’s suicide, we should not forget that comparatively few of them applauded Dr. King while he lived. In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates. Politicians who oppose everything King worked for now jostle their way onto podiums to honor his memory. Many of them quote Dr. King out of context as they denounce “affirmative action,” despite the fact that King repeatedly, publicly, and passionately supported that principle. In his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait, King called for “compensatory consideration for the handicaps [American Negroes] have inherited from the past. It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.” But our memories about what actually happened in the civil rights era are so faulty that Dr. King’s enemies can safely use his words to thwart his goals.
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