“My son, because of my job, has never experienced that kind of rejection. In my work here I’ve been surrounded mainly by whites, and that’s the environment my son grew up in.”
His son went to white public schools, until his father put him in a black school affiliated with the local black university.
“He couldn’t take it. He had never been in an all-black situation. The music was different, the manners were different. Michael had been listening to white kids’ music. In his scout troop he was the only black kid.”
Maurice Crockett had lived through a hard time, and had more than survived. But had some people broken under the strain?
“Some people back away. And the way you do that is you involve yourself in your church, in things around the home. So to all practical purposes you isolate yourself from reality. The church is all black, and when you go there everybody is friendly, and you aren’t threatened, and it’s like being in the womb again.”
But he had had a special source of strength.
“Most black kids have mainly a matriarchal system. But I grew up with a man. He was my stepfather. He was a role model and a guide for me. Mothers tend to be not as strict with boys. Boys need the kind of structure that a male provides. I think a lot of the black kids today would go to school if the basic family structure with the male was in place. But black males have a hard time establishing themselves, because of the lack of job opportunities.”
I asked him about his son, who had been taken out of white schools to be sent to black schools.
Maurice Crockett said, “He’s begun to be aware that he’s black, and that everybody doesn’t love him. He’s starting his third year at Tuskegee. But Michael still has his basic cadre of white friends.”
Out of success now, out of his new security, Maurice Crockett was rediscovering, reasserting, his blackness. He needed religion, but he needed a black religion.
“I’m not a shouter. But I like to be in a church where that kind of thing goes on. A lot of us want to emulate other standards, and we have to do that. But I still think that, like most ethnic groups, you shouldn’t divorce yourself from your basic culture. Especially when I go to church. The church is my salvation. The church keeps me sane.”
Salvation, sanity—I hadn’t heard the two run together. But in the job of Parole Board commissioner there were special needs.
“Some days in this job the stress of trying to keep up sends you home with pain. One of the most stressful things we have to do is that we hold the final face-to-face interview with the prisoners on Death Row. We actually go to the prison and sit down with the inmate and his attorney. Our meeting is transcribed by a court reporter. And when the world gets too much for me, I go to church. The saving grace for us black Southerners is the church.”
“Do you feel successful now? Content?”
“I’m not content. I’ll go to my grave being not content. I’ll constantly try to improve. People want to say we want to land from the trees and eat watermelon for the rest of our days. I want them to know that that kind of stereotyping is misplaced. I receive visitors a lot in my job. Most people from outside see us as ethnically deprived, nonverbal. I guess they see us as semiliterate people.”
That was where our conversation had begun. Now he had brought it back to that point, with an explanation.
“But this is false. If you come to me like that, I will let you know that I am not the kind of person you can handle in that way.”
His own truce with irrationality—how had he managed it? What was it about the past that now, from this distance, most surprised him?
“What I find hard to understand now is how I contained the anger. I suppose you have to learn that the anger doesn’t solve your problems. You sometimes have to sit down and wrestle with yourself.”
He still occasionally wrestled. He lived in a white neighborhood. He took his dog for a walk. At whatever time of morning or afternoon he took the dog, there was always, in a house at one end of the street, an old white man who sat out on the porch and watched him. It would appear that the old man was waiting for Mr. Crockett to go past his house.
“But what’s the point?”
I didn’t understand the explanation Mr. Crockett gave. “He wants me to know that he is there. He wants me to know that I’m being watched.” And Mr. Crockett made a gesture with his finger, drawing a horizontal line.
“Does he say anything? Do you talk?”
“We do. And I always have to think of something to say back. The last thing he said was, ‘I don’t know who’s slower, you or the dog.’ And I have to think of something to say, something foolish like, ‘You’re slower than both of us.’ That kind of nonsense.”
But the neighbor would have been a religious man, perhaps a Baptist, a fundamentalist. Didn’t that make for a certain kind of communication?
Mr. Crockett rejected that. “White fundamentalism”—putting it in quite a different category from the black fundamentalism he liked in black churches and saw as part of his black culture—“it is their attempt to go back to the good old days. The white church now has a school attached to it. They call it a ‘Christian school’; the main purpose is to keep it segregated. The white-fundamentalist church has consumed these people and consumed the issues. It’s a half-baked attempt to establish a structure that has long since gone by the board.”
IT WAS the advice of a West Coast writer, someone originally from Tallahassee, that had sent me to Tallahassee. Northern Florida, I had been told, was quite different from southern Florida. Northern Florida, the panhandle part of the state, was part of the Deep South. But it had taken me a long time to find my way; it sometimes happens on this kind of journey.
Tallahassee, the state capital, was an artificial administrative center midway between the extremities of the panhandle, midway between the towns of Pensacola and Jacksonville. And all that I had got to know of the countryside was the few miles between Tallahassee and the beach houses on the black creeks and white sandspits of the Gulf of Mexico: a holiday landscape of food shops, restaurants, mobile homes, gas stations, places offering live bait, and churches—disposable buildings in “redneck” country, where (I was told) in the old days blacks would have been burned out if they had tried to settle, and where there were still almost no blacks.
But then, almost at the end of my time in Tallahassee, I saw something other than that holiday landscape. About an hour’s drive away, and just behind the highway—American highways make one state look like another, and one part like another—I saw old dirt roads, forest where there had once been fields, houses that had been abandoned whole, barns and garages in overgrown yards. It was a little like being in an abandoned European town in Africa, in Zaire or Rwanda.
There had been an old community here. Now it hardly existed. Farming could no longer support it; farming no longer paid. And here and there among the ruined houses—trees and shrubs and bush seeming to reach out towards them, darkening the open space of yards—were places in which people still lived, black and white, people not ready to go, holding on, people who it might be said were working out the quirks of their own character. The fat young man rocking on the low porch, for instance, was the son of a black farmer. That was the way he had chosen to spend his days; he had made that choice of solitude. I thought of the drinking man in Howard’s village, framed in his window on a Sunday, looking out, but far from the life of his community. Here there was no longer a community; the fat young man rocked in the middle of bush.
My guide was Granger. He was white, in his forties, and he worked in a hotel in a nearby town. He did that for the ready cash, to keep his own farm going. It was a small farm, 120 acres. But it was ancestral land. It had been homesteaded—Indian land, staked out and claimed from the federal government—in the decade before the Civil War. The local Baptist church had been established in 1856; Granger was a Baptist. The land had never been worked by slaves. “We feel like we were the first Americans,” a relation of Granger’s told me.
And various ancestors had migrated to this part of Florida from South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.
There were stories in some branches of the family of old wealth. There was a story that one ancestor had owned a third of a county in England. There was a later story, from a time after the calamities of the Civil War, of another ancestor who had made good in the China trade and had brought home a chest of gold coins, which, when emptied out onto the farmhouse floor, had sent up a cloud of pure gold dust.
Now Granger worked in a hotel, two days on, two days off, and looked after what was left of the ancestral farm, doing so not for money but for the piety, the debt owed his ancestors, and doing so as well because farming was for him part of the beauty of the days. Farming meant being in these fields, these woods.
We drove in his fields in his old, un-air-conditioned pickup truck. One of his cows had just calved. We stopped in the truck among the pine trees, in the thin, broken shade, among the cowpats and the pine litter, the cones, the needles, the brittle dead branches. He got out and, keeping his distance, spoke both to the mother and the birth-smeared calf struggling to its feet. He had been waiting for this event for some days. This was the kind of farming he did and liked. It had given him his gentleness.
But development was coming. People with jobs in the towns were building houses in the villages. The old farms were under threat. A cycle that had begun when the Indian land was homesteaded was coming to an end. (The tomb of Osceola, the Seminole chief who had died at the age of thirty-eight in federal-government captivity, was not far from Charleston, and within sight of Fort Sumter.)
Fifty miles or so away, still in the panhandle, building development and agricultural failure were putting an end to another kind of community, a community of black sharecroppers. Black people had lived on this land since the end of slavery. Once everyone was related; these fields bounded everyone’s horizon. Now the roads had got there; the community, exposed, was breaking up; there were pine plantations in the old fields—young pines growing out of a lot of bush. But not everyone was ready to move to a town.
The life on the land here was different from the life that Granger found on his 120 acres. There was a different idea here of ancestors, history, piety. For Barrett, the black man in his thirties who was showing me around, the agricultural life of this inbred black community was stultifying and shameful.
Barrett was middle-class, with parents who were modest professional people. He came from a biggish town where there were few black people. Until he had come to Tallahassee he had thought that black people in the South were like his family; he was still unsettled and enraged by those aspects of black life in Tallahassee that didn’t fit in with his old ideas. The idea of being in a minority was so much part of his upbringing, and so important to him, that he had had trouble, he told me, getting used to the sight of all-black streets. I liked him for saying that; not many people would have confessed to something so simple and undermining. And when his work had taken him to that old black agricultural community, he said, he had suffered from “culture shock.”
I didn’t think that what he was showing me was all that bad. But, then, I didn’t have his expectations. And, with anger building up in him again, and out of this anger wishing to see the worst again, and to show it to me, he drove me to a side road and said, “Look at that one. A house without windows.”
It was extraordinary, a much-patched-up and wretched old wooden house, standing by itself in a bare yard, with no trees around, and with bush in the field at the back.
I thought I understood now what Maurice Crockett wished to save his son from: growing up “white” and then having, like Barrett, to make adjustments.
Barrett didn’t think as Maurice Crockett did about black religion. Barrett didn’t think that the shouting religions were part of his own black culture. After he had got married, he said, he and his wife had talked about what church they should go to. They had talked very seriously, and they had decided to go to the Presbyterian church.
He was twenty years younger than Maurice Crockett. He didn’t have the older man’s needs.
At the start of our drive I had noticed his racial passion. He wished to blame someone first of all; but then his own words had led him away from that, to a more general irritation. I had asked him about his racial passion; it seemed to be so much his main subject. He had acknowledged my question, but not replied to it. Now, when we were almost back at the hotel, he returned to the question.
He said, “You asked me about that. I’ve been thinking about it. I suppose I am angry because I am black. I don’t know whether that’s a good enough reason, but that’s how it is.”
It was a good reply. It was part of his honesty.
In the driveway of the hotel there was a black figure I had grown to recognize. He wore a black turban and a cream-colored Indian-style long shirt. He was reading aloud, chanting, from an Arabic book, perhaps a Koran. He paid no attention to the coming and going around him. He read aloud like a student; he held the fat book close to his face; he sat on a low wall; he could not be ignored.
REVEREND Bernyce Clausell, Mr. Crockett, Barrett—they were all aspects of a developing black movement forward. And Jesse Jackson came to Tallahassee one day, looking for support for his presidential candidacy. Even if the man himself was not seen by many, his presence was felt. His entourage nearly filled the Golden Pheasant restaurant. Later that evening a limousine with its hood up waited outside a club where the candidate was meeting local people. Such style, such expense; and this was just one day, and not a very important one, in the calendar of a presidential candidate.
It would have been historically satisfying, and simpler to manage intellectually, if this movement forward was, broadly, all; if black people, their legal rights won, were now becoming masters of their own destinies. But at the other end of this movement, and close enough to threaten this movement (in spite of the mighty presence in the Golden Pheasant restaurant of the men and women of the Jackson party), there was irrationality and self-destructiveness, and despair of a sort perhaps not known before.
It is like the final cruelty of slavery: that now, at what should have been a time of possibility, a significant portion of black people should find themselves without the supports of faith and community evolved during the last hundred years or so. In the Caribbean islands, in the most settled days of slavery, the slaves played at night at having kingdoms of their own: a transference to the plantations of West African beliefs—still current in the Ivory Coast—that the real world begins when the sun goes down, and that at night men change or reverse their daytime roles. No fantasy even like this, no African millenarian dream, supports the new denuded black element. It is hard to enter into their vacancy.
“I’m nothing. I’m just existing,” a young black in a detention center said. “Your hands soft,” another said, using words that seemed to me to come from a long time ago. “Your hands soft like cotton.” His own hand was gentle. He had the intelligence and dangerous attractiveness of a kind of delinquent. But he was horribly lost; he couldn’t be reached. Another man said, “It is very hard for a black man to make a very small step.”
They were all going to be released in a few months. But there was nothing for them in the world outside; they insisted on that. And they all spoke as though their lives had been predetermined, and were already over.
“Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third of its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing … the body politic.”
The words read like special pleading. And they were. They come from the speech Booker T. Washington made in Atlanta in 1895, when he was only thirty-nine: a famous speech that established him in his reputation, and in which he did two appare
ntly irreconcilable things—calm Southern white people down, and offer hope to black people at a time of near hopelessness. Special pleading, overstated; but those words of the 1895 Atlanta speech now read like prophecy.
4
TUSKEGEE
The Truce with Irrationality—II
I HAD got to know Up from Slavery when I was a child. My father had read me a story from the book, and I believe I then read more of the book on my own. My father, born poor, and in spite of his ambition always poor, liked stories of self-help and of men rising from poverty. He suffered in Trinidad, and I would have known that Up from Slavery had racial implications and could be related to the way things were on our own island. But I was too young to do anything with that kind of information. I received the Booker T. Washington story my father read me almost as a fairy story, and in the part of my consciousness where it lodged it was stripped both of race and historical time.
Within the larger story of a man rising and making good, the story in question was the story of a test. The young boy, alone in the world, and just starting out in the world, had been asked to make up a bed (this was the way the story lived in my consciousness). And what was at stake, what depended on the correct making up of the bed, was the young boy’s entire future.
It was hard to forget that story (and every time I made up a bed it hovered in my consciousness): the fairy-tale test, the doing of a seemingly trivial or irrelevant thing supremely well. Like the story of a temptation to an honor-bound knight or a saint who had made a vow; like magical tests in other fairy stories: picking up the grains of rice, guessing the name of the dwarf, spinning straw into gold.