The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

  III

  I think it was the artfulness of these warnings, the elegant language in pursuit of hard truth, that first attracted my attention. I was, after all, an aspiring writer myself, and I envied the talent of Baldwin and Wright. But it was also true that I was drawn to their subject matter as well, felt that their stories were somehow mine, for all of us—it seemed obvious to me—were caught in the great melodrama of race.

  It is safe to say that many African Americans disagreed. The brilliant Southern novelist William Styron was pilloried for his presumption in daring to write The Confessions of Nat Turner, a book, as it happened, that I deeply admired. And even a few journalists like myself, white writers who played it closer to the vest, were viewed as interlopers at best, trying to tell a story that we couldn’t understand.

  All of which makes me wish, looking back, that I had discovered Albert Murray much sooner. It was strange in many ways that I didn’t, for he was a writer who came from my hometown. Born in Mobile in 1916, Murray grew up on the northern edge of the city, where a neighborhood of shotgun houses lay in the shadow of a black water swamp. Even as a boy, he sensed the hostility of the white world around him, but the message driven home by his elders—by the community that raised him—was that Southern racism was simply a given, a reality to be negotiated every day, but not an excuse for personal failure.

  Boy, don’t come telling me nothing about no old white folks. Boy, ain’t nothing you can tell me about no white folks.

  As Murray’s writing makes clear, he was an avid reader by the time he finished high school, having been pushed to excel by his favorite teacher, Mister Baker. (That was the way he always wrote it, spelling the courtesy title in full as a gesture of gratitude and respect.) The teacher, Benjamin Baker, thought he saw something special in Murray, a rare intellect and hunger to learn, and both of them knew, without even having to say it aloud, that such gifts ultimately belonged to their community. Baker had studied the great black thinkers, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, and he shared with Murray his estimations of their legacy:

  “Booker T. Washington sacrificed too much to expediency. Dr. DuBois in his up-north bitterness spends too much time complaining. The youth of today must find the golden mean.”

  With such thoughts swimming in his eager young mind, Murray left Mobile for Tuskegee Institute, which was in those days, and remains today, a vibrant memorial to the vision of its founder. Booker Washington came to Tuskegee in 1881, teaching the first classes on July 4, and died in November 1915, the year before Albert Murray was born. But the Institute’s most famous professor, George Washington Carver, was still on campus when Murray arrived, still working in his lab, still accessible to students who might seek his counsel. There were other teachers, too, who earned a place of legend in the minds of many students—and even those students, to Murray, were impressive. Perhaps the one he admired most was an upperclassman by the name of Ralph Ellison, a music major from Oklahoma, who would go on to write Invisible Man, a masterpiece of American letters, published in 1952.

  In the years after college, the two became close friends, sharing a love of books, but also of music, especially jazz and the blues, where it seemed to Murray that the finest musicians anywhere in the country—people, for example, like his friend Duke Ellington—had the artist’s gift for transforming sadness, for riffing on the lowdown feelings of life, and creating joy and beauty in their place. They were like an echo of the elders back home, people whose words and laughter and wisdom were not only their armor against a segregated world, but sounded to Murray almost like a song. And some years later, when he began to make his mark as a writer, he tried to find that music in his prose.

  Sometimes a thin gray, ghost-whispering mid-winter drizzle would begin while you were still at school and not only would it settle in for the rest of the afternoon but it would still be falling after dark as if it would continue throughout the night . . . As nobody ever needed to tell me . . . it was one of the very best of all good times to be where grown folks were talking . . .

  Those were the first words I ever read by Murray, the opening lines of a story in Harper’s, and I thought as I made my way through the pages that this was a writer who loved being black. I don’t remember dwelling on it at the time, but it seemed in 1969 when rage was the stock and trade of black writers, that Murray was attuned to something very different—to the strength and resilience, far more than the pain, at the heart of black life.

  And then for some reason, I simply moved on and didn’t read him again until I finally encountered, quite by accident, his memoir, South to a Very Old Place. Published in 1971, it was the second of Murray’s dozen books, which included fiction, nonfiction and poetry written over a period of more than thirty years. The memoir—still to me his most fascinating work—helped to seal Murray’s double-edged reputation as perhaps the ultimate black integrationist. But if that was the pigeonhole du jour, it has to be said that with Murray it could be a disconcerting truth.

  “In Murray’s hands,” wrote Harvard author Henry Louis Gates, “integration wasn’t an act of accommodation but an act of introjection . . . perhaps the most breathtaking act of cultural chutzpah this land has witnessed since Columbus blithely claimed it all for Isabella.”

  What Gates was saying was that Murray could meet white America halfway precisely because he was secure in his blackness, in the depth of a personal and cultural identity that was nurtured when he was growing up in Mobile. Thus, Murray would write about William Faulkner, an author whose artistry he admired, and whose racial sensitivity was more developed than most:

  When William Faulkner declares as he did in the eulogy he delivered at her funeral that his black mammy was a “fount of authority over my conduct and of security for my physical welfare, and of active and constant affection and love,” and that she was also “an active and constant precept for decent behavior, from her I learned to tell the truth, to refrain from waste, to be considerate of the weak and respectful of age,” you don’t doubt that he was deeply moved as he spoke or was moved again every time he remembered what he said, but being one of black mammy’s taffy- and chocolate-colored boys you could not only tell him a few things, you could also ask him a hell of a lot of pretty embarrassing questions, beginning, for instance, with: “Damn, man, if the mammyness of blackness or the blackness of mammyness was so magnificent and of such crucial significance as you now claim, how come you let other white folks disrespect and segregate her like that? . . . Man, do you really think your reciprocation was adequate?

  Throughout its 266 pages, South to a Very Old Place resonates with such observations. But there are also, delivered quite often when you least expect them, those flashes of generosity and acceptance that formed the other side of Murray’s understanding. One of the most revealing scenes in the book was his description of a visit with Walker Percy, a Louisiana novelist living just north of New Orleans, whose debut best seller, The Moviegoer, was one of Murray’s favorites. He discovered, as expected, that he and Percy shared a love of good writing—of Hemingway, Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot, of Flannery O’Connor and Robert Penn Warren. But in the early stages of their warm conversation, he couldn’t help wondering if Percy might slip into unintended condescension. He was after all the favorite nephew of William Alexander Percy, a Southern writer from an earlier generation, whose plantation memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, was filled with declarations such as these:

  I would say to the Negro: before demanding to be a white man socially and politically, learn to be a white man morally and intellectually—and to the white man, the black man is our brother, a younger brother, not adult, not disciplined, but tragic, pitiful, and lovable. Act as his brother and be patient.

  Try as he might, Albert Murray could scarcely imagine a passage more offensive. But even with his antennae on high alert
, he detected nothing like it from Walker Percy—no hidden agendas, no whiff of racial arrogance, just a pleasant companion on a Louisiana night. And then as the evening was drawing to a close, the two of them began to talk about trees. Did Percy know the difference, Murray wanted to know, between a mulberry bush and a mulberry tree? Because Murray had tried unsuccessfully to look it up and was unsure of the precise definition.

  Percy was not sure either, but a week or so later an envelope arrived at Murray’s apartment in Harlem. Inside were a leaf and a hand-written note: “Al, is this the leaf? If it is it’s a Spanish mulberry—has a purple berry. Shelby was disappointed not to see you.” As Murray understood, “Shelby” was a reference to Shelby Foote, the novelist turned historian and Civil War scholar who had been unable to make it to dinner that night. But perhaps the most striking thing about the note was how essentially unremarkable it was—simply a small and thoughtful gesture, directed unobtrusively from one friend to another.

  For Murray the change was duly noted. Not that he waxed sentimental about it, but it was clearly the case that in one generation the Percy family had shed a major piece of Old South baggage. “. . . It is precisely,” Murray later wrote, “Walker Percy’s freedom from condescension that you are inclined to vouch for first of all.”

  IV

  I have never met Albert Murray, much to my everlasting disappointment. But my friend Jay Lamar, a respected Alabama writer and editor, has gotten to know him well through the years. Murray, she has written, believes that race matters deeply in America, but so does the shared humanity of black and white. And it is, she explains, a humanity he discovered in “the territory of the blues”—that literal and metaphorical land he encountered as a boy growing up in Mobile, and as an artist who plied his trade in Harlem. Murray doesn’t romanticize these communities. Indeed, says Lamar, these were the places where he first understood that “life is a lowdown dirty shame.”

  But in the existential gospel of Albert Murray, all of us share with the artists among us—particularly the great practitioners of the blues—the opportunity to find our meaning in the struggle and to transform ugliness into beauty. “We do not receive wisdom,” Murray writes, “we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness that no one else can make for us, that no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to view the world.”

  And so it is that Murray, perhaps even more than Baldwin and Wright, is a writer whose work belongs to us all—who believes in the very depth of his soul that black identity and American identity are joined at the heart. But in praising Murray, I don’t mean to denigrate the others—or for that matter any of their brilliant peers; not Ellison or Morrison, not Hurston or Hughes. For in the great complexity of our original sin, in struggling with what could—or should?—have been a fatal flaw, we were lucky enough to discover on the way the discomfort that came from reading their words.

  4

  The Power of the Truth

  featuring:

  The Old Man and Lesser Mortals—Larry L. King

  Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers—Tom Wolfe

  The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy—David Halberstam

  Also, Willie Morris, Jimmy Breslin

  I

  In April 1971, I opened my copy of Harper’s magazine, and thumbing through the pages I came upon an article by Larry L. King—not to be confused with Larry King, the gravelly voiced talk show host on CNN. Larry L. King was (and I suppose still is) a profane, flamboyant Texas roustabout, son of a dirt farmer, and by the early 1970s, one of the stars of literary journalism. I had read some of his earlier pieces, one of the most disturbing of which was a profile of Brother Dave Gardner, a comedian whose career had peaked in the 1950s with his manic, down-home monologues, a half-dozen of which had produced hit records.

  But a little more than a decade later, when Larry L. King caught up with him at a comedy club on the outskirts of Charlotte—“Klan Country,” according to a billboard just up the road—Gardner’s act had degenerated into a bizarre and disjointed political rant. “Do y’all remember, dear hearts, when they awarded that Nobel Peace Prize to the late Dr. Junior on account of his efficiency in teaching our New Citizens to riot? Man, what’s that Nobel cat doing giving a peace prize, after he done went and invented dynamite?”

  “Then,” wrote Larry King, “he hit them with the line that caused a sudden shocked silence, a line that even many of the Good Ole Boys deepest into the mysteries of their brown bags were not braced for, and it stunned them, caused gasps, a quick dark murder of laughter. Maybe the wild grin on his face, the sheer exuberance of his delivery, were as petrifying as the line itself: “God, wasn’t that a clean hit on Dr. Junior?”

  Even as a reader, I remember being stunned, reminded of that subterranean darkness that was still a part of the Southern heart and soul, at least in scattered corners of the countryside, among the hard-core patrons of those hard-liquor dives, where most of us would prefer not to go. But Larry King had been there, spending six days with Brother Dave, and marveling with every passing hour at the terrifying lunacy in which he took such delight.

  After reading that story in Harper’s, I have to say I was not quite prepared for King’s contribution to the April issue. Entitled simply “The Old Man,” it was a story about his father, one of the most tender and well-crafted pieces—then as now, perhaps the most touching magazine article—that I have ever read. This is how it began:

  While we digested our suppers on The Old Man’s front porch, his grandchildren chased fireflies in the summer dusk and, in turn, were playfully chased by neighborhood dogs. As always, The Old Man had carefully locked the collar of his workday khakis. He recalled favored horses and mules from his farming days, remembering their names and personalities though they had been thirty or forty years dead. I gave him a brief thumbnail sketch of William Faulkner—Mississippian, great writer, appreciator of the soil and good bourbon—before quoting what Faulkner had written of the mule: “He will draw a wagon or a plow but he will not run a race. He will not try to jump anything he does not indubitably know beforehand he can jump; he will not enter any place unless he knows of his own knowledge what is on the other side; he will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once.” The Old Man cackled in delight. “That feller sure knowed his mules,” he said.

  It was, I discovered, a lovely foreshadowing of what was to come: a story of two generations reaching out across the years, of a family divided by mutating values, but straining against time to cobble some new understanding. Clyde Clayton King, as The Old Man was known, had come to Texas in a covered wagon back in 1895, and at the age of twelve, had taken over as head of the family when his father was killed by a shotgun blast. He scratched out a living from the hard and reluctant west Texas soil, finally giving up the farm during World War II, and moving through a string of uninspiring jobs: blacksmith, dock loader, chicken-butcher; and later, night-watchman.

  He did it all with no murmur of complaint, determined to make a living for his family, and fully expecting, with the earnest piety of a backcountry Methodist, greater rewards in the life yet to come. Along the way, as Larry King wrote, “he had the misfortune to sire a hedonist son,” and by the time Larry reached the age of fifteen, the two were at each other’s throats. They even fought physically on one occasion, and as the younger King remembered it later, “it was savage and ugly—though, as those things go, one hell of a good fight. Only losers emerged, however. After that we spoke in terse mumbles or angry shouts, not to communicate with civility for three years.”

  It proved to be a long way back, tentative gestures scattered through the years, most often initiated by The Old Man. Slowly, however, a gradual reconciliation emerged, culminating in a trip across Texas just a few weeks before The Old Man died. It was something they had talked about for a while, a pilgrimage to the state capitol in Austin�
��a distant destination that, in the daily grind of Clyde King’s world, he had assumed that he would never see. They set out in the summer of 1970, humming along past the oil fields and desert sand dunes, until finally they came to the hill country of Austin—lush by the dusty standards of home.

  One realized as The Old Man grew more and more enthusiastic over roadside growths and dribbling little creeks, just how fenced-in he had been for thirty years; knew, freshly, the depth of his resentments as gas pumps, hamburger outlets, and supermarkets came to prosper within two blocks of his door. The Old Man had personally hammered and nailed his house together, in 1944, positioning it on the town’s northmost extremity as if hoping it might sneak off one night to seek more bucolic roots.

  On several occasions before their final trip, King had tried to write about his father—encouraged in that delicate ambition by his editor, Willie Morris, at Harper’s. But the words wouldn’t come. Or at least they somehow refused to take on a shape, or to incorporate the subtle shadings of character that this most personal of subjects required. Even after the satisfying journey to Austin, which he hoped might also serve as research, King was still not ready to write. But there were moments that stayed in his mind, mental snapshots that refused to go away, and before long—for reasons that he would later explain—the dam on his writer’s block finally broke, and a rush of images poured forth: a four-week binge of forty thousand words that he eventually trimmed back to twelve. There was this, for example, from a thirty-dollar motel room in Austin:

  That night he sat on his motel bed recalling the specifics of forgotten cattle trades, remembering the only time he got drunk (at age sixteen) and how the quart of whiskey so poisoned him that he had promised God and his weeping mother that, if permitted to live, he would die before touching another drop. He recited his disappointment in being denied a preacher’s credentials by the Methodist hierarchy on the grounds of insufficient education. “They wanted note preachers,” he said contemptuously. “Wasn’t satisfied with preachers who spoke sermons from the heart and preached the Bible pure. And that’s what’s gone wrong with the churches.”