Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  Suddenly the car was slowing into the outskirts of Clayton. “This is a pretty little town,” observed Wallace. “All little towns are pretty.” The car eased around the square, where that night’s rally was to be held, turned a corner, went a short distance down a quiet street in deep shadows, and then pulled into the back yard of an old white frame house sheltered by large and generous trees. Wallace and Lurleen had lived there before he became governor, when it was an apartment house, and they had wound up buying it as Wallace’s fortunes rose; but it was still only a token and tentative settling place, occupied now by Wallace’s paternal grandmother. Called Momma Mae, she was a frail little lady with soft white luminous hair like spun glass, as thin as a bamboo slat, with a sparrowlike face and small round eyes behind rimless glasses. She greeted Wallace at the screened back door with a dry brief kiss on the cheek, as he murmured, “Hi, Momma Mae, how you feelin’?” and bolted on into the house. Harper and the bodyguards drove off to eat supper somewhere else, leaving Wallace and Lurleen there.

  Wallace now was hurrying from room to room, furiously smoking his cigar, looking as if he were being propelled from one quick discharge of smoke to the next, and leaving behind him a thin trail of ash. His coat still buttoned, he paused in each room only long enough for a swift embracing glance—the spacious front parlor with clay-colored rug and green draperies and an old burnt-umber velour couch, a lot of chill air hanging between the furniture and the high ceiling this autumn evening; the back bedroom, with green floral wallpaper and thickets of family photographs on dresser and chest of drawers; the small cold dining room, with an arrangement of white chrysanthemums placed in the precise middle of a table on a white doily. Here Wallace squatted on his heels to rummage through shelves below a wall cabinet. Lurleen presently entered the room and asked, “What are you digging for, George?” He mumbled, “Scrapbook I just wanted to find.” She told him, “It’s not there, George. I moved it with some other things up yonder to Montgomery.” He continued shuffling through the shelves until she repeated, her voice higher, “George, honest, it’s not there.”

  He retreated to the pine-paneled den and watched television while waiting for supper, slouched low and deep on the sofa, his tiny heels crossed on the coffee table. Lurleen looked in, and he asked her, “How you like that Abbeville crowd, honey?” “It was all right,” she said. “That was a good crowd,” he informed her. Then he said, “What you gonna tell ’em tonight?” and she replied, with a touch of a smile, “I’m gonna say howdy.” Wallace merely looked back at the TV—he didn’t think her remark very funny.

  Supper—served in the large kitchen, with its formica breakfast table and, on one of the damp yellow walls, a display of undersized plastic fruit—consisted of coffee, homemade chicken salad, pimento cheese, and more coffee. The talk around the table was of the town’s Republicans, a conversation conducted mostly by the women in the shrill and slightly incredulous tones of outrage and scandal, Wallace listening to them with small sniggers. Presently a neighbor—an elderly effusive woman—walked into the kitchen without knocking and cried, “Oh, George!” Wallace now was like a small boy basking in the adoration of fond womenfolk. When he rose to leave with Lurleen, Momma Mae followed him out to the back porch, telling him, “Now, you can stay here whenever you want. That’s your bedroom back there, George, that’s your bathroom.”

  There was a huge throng at the square in front of the courthouse, with the combined country high-school bands bleating lustily. The air was warmish, with an almost springlike flush and promise of rain, but Wallace, when he pitched out of the car, asked the first people who approached him, “Yawl cold? It’s not too cold, is it?” A woman came up and squeezed his hand and said softly, “How you, George?” her eyes twinkling with tears. “I sho am glad to be back home,” he declared. The music, with a few stray squawks and honks, abruptly dwindled into silence, and the local Methodist minister opened the rally with a prayer: “Tonight, our Father, we thank Thee for Lurleen and George. We pray that Thou will use them. . . .” It did seem a special and beautiful night, limpid and sweet and filled with love and the tender thrill of homecoming. Wallace whispered to an aide, “Watson out here tonight?” and he was told, “No, Guvnuh, I ain’t seen him yet.”

  Lurleen gave her talk, her voice ringing over the hushed crowd. Waiting for her to finish, Wallace stood by his car in a small, momentarily empty circle, his head ducked, pulling thoughtfully at his jowls, hearing finally the spatter of clapping as Lurleen turned from the mike. Then, with his own hillbilly band breaking into a spry mischievous, hot-diggety-dog “Dixie,” he was on.

  Afterward he leaned down from the flatbed trailer, his bodyguards having to catch him by the coattails to keep him from tumbling into the surge of faces below him. “Hi, Josephine. Martha, honey, glad to see you. Listen, now, yawl be careful goin’ home, heunh? Birdy, honey—Mr. Charlie, how are you? Don’t yawl stay up too late, now, honey.” An old lady, when he took her hand, fairly wriggled with fondness and wrinkled up her face. “Bless you heart, we need you so much!” A young mother lifted up her little girl for a handshake, a blessing. An old man in a corduroy coat strained up to him on his tiptoes to mutter the message he had been waiting all evening to deliver: “We got a little sumpum over yonder now to pick you up if you want—it’s what we got it here for, now.” When Wallace declined, the old man announced, “Well, I think I’m gonna have me a little. But I’m keepin’ it for you, in case you decide later on.” Wallace clung to a pretty girl’s hand. “Aw, Lucille, honey, I didn’t recognize you”—burst of happy laughter under him—“I got sinus trouble, you know, and it’s kind of hard to see sometimes.”

  It was over now. Dismounting from the platform, Wallace found the youths who had traveled through the campaign distributing bumper stickers ahead of his rallies, and he told them, “Boys, we’ll wind up in California someplace. . . .” He then wandered over to the Dixie Academy fried-chicken stand, a booth that had been set up on the square for the evening to raise funds for a private school in the county—a hasty assembly of raw planks now dappled with puddles of melted ice in the bleak glare of a string of light bulbs. He told the townsmen who were closing it, “I’ll see all yawl in the mornin’. I’ll be around with you boys tomorrow for the votin’, heunh?” The square now was nearly deserted, with paper blowing in a light, damp, late night wind and a few people still lingering under the street lights, quietly talking. From somewhere came a high hoot of mountain laughter. Wallace made for his car, giving an unlit cigar two swift licks and then popping it into his mouth still unlit. Then he noticed, heading toward him like a pair of pale specters, the two women who had been following him all over the state in their aged black Cadillac. The girl, her damp dark eyes still stricken and full of suffering, whined to him with a brave little smile, “We done recorded a victory song.” He instantly swerved to avoid them, calling to them over his shoulder, “Well, I ’preciate yawl bein’ with us. Good-bye, sweetie. We’ll see yawl, heunh?”

  He could have spent the night there in Clayton, where he was to vote the next day, but, too energized, he decided to drive back to Montgomery. Lurleen went on ahead of him in another car. Before following her, he dropped by his brother’s house, a few blocks from the square. There was a yardful of cars, and as Wallace got out, he exclaimed, not unhappily, “Godamightydamn, look at them people. I’ll never get away.” The den of his brother’s home was paneled in the same bright yellow pine as Momma Mae’s, but with the addition of a large brick fireplace. As soon as he entered, he asked, “Don’t guess Watson made it out tonight, did he?” and someone answered, “Didn’t see him, George.”

  A few members of the national press were waiting for him; they were a trifle uneasy, laughing a bit too quickly and loudly at the banter going on around them among the assembled townfolk. Cokes were served, the bottoms of the bottles wrapped in paper napkins. Wallace settled himself on a sofa with a jaunty, “Well, what yawl wanna distort tonight?” The newspeople from New York and
Washington and Chicago all laughed heartily, but their eyes were quite blank. It was a short session.

  After they left, Wallace was informed that Watson had “passed out” at the supper table that evening before the rally. “It was just the excitement, probably,” someone said, “and he’d probably had a couple too. You know Billy.” A moment later, someone phoned to say Watson had suffered an insulin shock but was coming out of it. “Well,” snorted Wallace, “don’t let him know we been askin’ about him. He might get the idea we worryin’ about him or something.” But he seemed vaguely troubled.

  On the way back to Montgomery, he talked for a while about Martin, the Republican candidate: “He’s dead now. He’s finished. He might could of been senator, but he ain’t gonna be nothing now. He fixed himself, we didn’t do it. People say we used to be close, me’n’him, but it wasn’t like that—he tried to get close to me, but I was never close to him.” He finally subsided into silence. As the car hummed on through the night on the long drive back to Montgomery, he periodically leaned forward to peer out the window at passing cars and trucks, still checking for Wallace stickers.

  Mystery and Manners

  1963

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  We’re all grotesque and I don’t think the Southerner is any more grotesque than anyone else; but his social situation demands more of him than that elsewhere in this country. It requires considerable grace for two races to live together, particularly when the population is divided about 50-50 between them and when they have our particular history. It can’t be done without a code of manners based on mutual charity. I remember a sentence from an essay of Marshall McLuhan’s. I forget the exact words, but the gist of it was, as I recollect it, that after the Civil War, formality became a condition of survival. This doesn’t seem to me any less true today. Formality preserves that individual privacy which everyone needs and, in these times, is always in danger of losing. It’s particularly necessary to have in order to protect the rights of both races. When you have a code of manners based on charity, then when the charity fails—as it is going to do constantly—you’ve got those manners there to preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other. The uneducated Southern Negro is not the clown he’s made out to be. He’s a man of very elaborate manners and great formality, which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy. All this may not be ideal, but the Southerner has enough sense not to ask for the ideal but only for the possible, the workable. The South has survived in the past because its manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together and give us an identity. Now those old manners are obsolete, but the new manners will have to be based on what was best in the old ones—in their real basis of charity and necessity. In practice, the Southerner seldom underestimates his own capacity for evil. For the rest of the country, the race problem is settled when the Negro has his rights, but for the Southerner, whether he’s white or colored, that’s only the beginning. The South has to evolve a way of life in which the two races can live together with mutual forbearance. You don’t form a committee to do this or pass a resolution: both races have to work it out the hard way. In parts of the South these new manners are evolving in a very satisfactory way, but good manners seldom make the papers.

  The Negro Revolt Against “The Negro Leaders”

  Harper’s Magazine, June 1960

  LOUIS E. LOMAX

  For nearly a century a small “ruling class” has served as spokesman—and has planned the strategy—for all American Negroes. Now it is being overwhelmed by an upsurge of aggressive young people, who feel that the NAACP is far too conservative and slow-moving.

  As Pastor Kelly Miller Smith walked to the lectern to begin his Sunday sermon, he knew his parishioners wanted and needed more than just another spiritual message. The congregation—most of them middle-class Americans, many of them university students and faculty members—sat before him waiting, tense; for Nashville, like some thirty-odd other Southern college towns, on that first Sunday in March of this year, was taut with racial tension in the wake of widespread student demonstrations against lunch-counter discrimination in department stores.

  Among the worshipers in Pastor Smith’s First Baptist Church were some of the eighty-five students from Fisk and from Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University who had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct trade and commerce because they staged protests in several of Nashville’s segregated eating places. Just two days before, Nashville police had invaded Mr. Smith’s church—which also served as headquarters for the demonstrators—and arrested one of their number, James Lawson, Jr., a Negro senior theological student at predominantly white Vanderbilt University, on the same charge.

  The adult members of the congregation were deeply troubled. They knew, as did Negroes all over America, that the spontaneous and uncorrelated student demonstrations were more than an attack on segregation: they were proof that the Negro leadership class, epitomized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was no longer the prime mover of the Negro’s social revolt.

  Each protest had a character of its own, tailored to the local goals it sought to achieve. Neither the advice nor the aid of recognized Negro leaders was sought until after the students had set the policy, engaged the enemy, and joined the issue. Despite the probability that the demonstrations would be met with violence, the students took direct action, something Negro leadership organizations consistently counseled against. By forcing these organizations not only to come to their aid but to do their bidding, these militant young people completely reversed the power flow within the Negro community.

  “Father forgive them,” Mr. Smith began, “for they know not what they do.” And for the next half-hour, the Crucifixion of Christ carried this meaning as he spoke:

  “The students sat at the lunch counters alone to eat and, when refused service, to wait and pray. And as they sat there on that southern Mount of Olives, the Roman soldiers, garbed in the uniforms of Nashville policemen and wielding night sticks, came and led the praying children away. As they walked down the streets, through a red light, and toward Golgotha, the segregationist mob shouted jeers, pushed and shoved them, and spat in their faces, but the suffering students never said a mumbling word. Once the martyr mounts the Cross, wears the crown of thorns, and feels the pierce of the sword in his side there is no turning back.

  “And there is no turning back for those who follow in the martyr’s steps,” the minister continued. “All we can do is to hold fast to what we believe, suffer what we must suffer if we would win, and as we face our enemy let us say, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ ”

  The New Gospel

  This new gospel of the American Negro is rooted in the theology of desegregation; its major prophets are Christ, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. But its missionaries are several thousand Negro students who—like Paul, Silas, and Peter of the early Christian era—are braving incalculable dangers and employing new techniques to spread the faith. It is not an easy faith, for it names the conservative Negro leadership class as sinners along with the segregationists. Yet, this new gospel is being preached by clergymen and laymen alike wherever Negroes gather.

  Negro businessman John Brooks temporarily deserted his place in a picket line around Thalhimers department store, in Richmond, to make this comment to newsmen:

  “The Bible says, ‘A little child shall lead them,’ but it didn’t say these children should have to drag us. We should willingly follow these young people’s example. I am suggesting that mothers picket one day, ministers the next, doctors the next, and so on until we bring segregation to its knees.”

  And all over the South the Negro masses said, “Amen.” So ran the litany as the once reluctant elders walked and shouted in cadence behind their offspring. Without doubt, the students had delivered a telling blow against the centralization of Negro leadership.
<
br />   The demonstrators have shifted the desegregation battle from the courtroom to the market place, and have shifted the main issue to one of individual dignity, rather than civil rights. Not that civil rights are unimportant—but, as these students believe, once the dignity of the Negro individual is admitted, the debate over his right to vote, attend public schools, or hold a job for which he is qualified becomes academic.