Southern Discomfort

John Shelton Reed from the January 1994 issue

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James moved on to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he encountered Ralph Johns, a former Hollywood bit player and double for George Raft who ran a Greensboro clothing store to support his true vocation of crusading for left-wing causes. Johns apparently shamed four North Carolina A&T students into undertaking the historic sit-in at the Woolworth'sacross the street from his store, but never got the recognition he (and they) feel he deserves. He has now returned to Cali-fornia and writes for an environmental weekly in Beverly Hills.

We also meet the young Jesse Jackson. As a football hero and student-body president at North Carolina A&T, he was already a skilled manipulator of the media; already, too, a little careless about the facts. (That Jackson wasn't yet in Greensboro at the time of the original sit-ins is "just one of the things that's got all mixed up over the years," says one of the four participants.)

But the best of James's characters come from Eutaw, Greene County, Alabama, "a town so lost to the world that it was almost in Mississippi." It's there we meet Lula, the live-in maid in a plantation house owned by the family of James's wife. Hired for $50 a month to clean, garden, cook, and tend to an invalid old lady, Lula dismayed her employers by using the indoor toilet, eating at a "white" table, entertaining her guests in the house, and watching her soap operas on the family's television set. Despairing of teaching her correct behavior, "Uncle Dud" rehabilitated the old privy for his own use.

As a symbol of segregation, Uncle Dud is almost too good to be true. He believed that the U.S. government should compensate the descendants of slave-holders for their losses at emancipation: "I still say it's a good fair debt that the government of the country owes the South. And they'd be well rid of it. Why, it's the right thing--the only honorable thing. And I'm bound to think they'd feel a whole lot better about themselves if they'd just go ahead and clear it off the books."

Eutaw was also home to O.B. Harris, a black merchant and chairman of the local NAACP chapter. Harris believed in the power of voter registration, and he opposed the demonstrations and boycotts brought to town by the young organizers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (They also brought signs left over from demonstrations in other towns. "Integrate the Bowling Alley!" said one. There was no bowling alley in Eutaw.) James tried to interview Harris after he was kicked out of office for being too moderate, but Harris said that he was saving most of his material for his own book, to be called Uncle Tom Speaks Out.

Harris was succeeded by a 47-year-old preacher named William McKinley Branch. Like so many black preachers, Branch was a powerful speaker, and James gives us some samples. In support of a boycott: "Stay outa them white men's stores. Let them balonies rot. Let the cheeses rot. The vegetubbles and the fruits and the fresh meats, let all them things rot." But also: "I believe we are made of the same order other men are made by....I believe that we can be stronger and better, and the world made stronger and better because we have lived."

The boycott was supported by a good many of what Southern white folks used to call "outside agitators," including SCLC members. But what made the boycott work was outside help of another sort: An outsider named Andrew Marisette organized teenaged boys into "goon squads" to tear up grocery bags and to intimidate, sometimes to beat, black folks who didn't cooperate. Looking back, a local preacher observes, "Yeah, I guess you might say there's lots of things we did that was against King's guidelines, all right enough. But we saw it took that technique to get the thing over, and so we contraried a lot."

Greene County was no stranger to violence. Civil rights demonstrators had been threatened with chainsaws and sprayed with poison from a crop-dusting airplane. But increasingly, the violence directed against Greene County black folks came from other blacks. One of the most painful conversations in this book is with Wes Taylor, an aged black man whose young daughter was blinded by shotgun blasts from enforcers, out to get those who did not vote the insurgent line. "Why'd dey pick me out, cap'n?" Taylor asks. "Why'd dey want to go en shoot my little girl?"

In Greene County neither the worst fears of whites nor the highest hopes of blacks have been realized. Some whites have left the county, but the feared mass exodus never happened. Economic power is still solidly in white hands, political power now in black. Although there has been a measure of rapprochement (over the objections of some diehards, both black and white), there has been nothing like redemption, and James makes bitter fun of some writers who wrote that story prematurely.

His book ends, oddly, in a different Alabama town, with the old story of the rape of a white woman, racial tension, rumors flying, muttered threats--and a lynching that doesn't happen. That, he suggests, is progress, of a sort. Even those of us who are more optimistic than he can agree with that.