by Bob Zellner
I confess I didn’t know exactly what she had told me, but I understood clearly that it was all I was going to get out of her, at least at this sitting. I’d have to give it another shot later, or figure out on my own what a “woods colt” was.
I only hoped I had heard Mother correctly. She inadvertently gave me a hint when she walked off shaking her head and muttering something under her breath about Southerners always being “so dad-burned interested in the blood lines.”
Apparently, Mom and Dad didn’t think it was odd for us boys to have a grandfather and uncles in the KKK. Having a woods colt in the family, however, was kept a deep dark secret.
Dr. Bob Jones Sr. thought so much of his little preacher boy, James Abraham Zellner, that after graduation, he picked my Dad to go with him to Europe on a mission from God to spread the true gospel to the Jews. Dr. Bob’s cockamamie scheme was to convert Europe’s Jews to Christianity to save them from Nazi gas chambers. Doctor Bob had returned after a month or two, but where was that pretty little preacher boy, James?
Dad stayed on in Europe, but his conversion to integrationist-internationalist was not what Bob Jones had in mind. The young Reverend James Zellner was interrogated by the Gestapo in Berlin while delivering messages and money to the Jewish underground. My father began to question the beliefs that had attracted him to the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t know how much training, if any, Dad had to be a spy, but he was certainly primed by the government to keep his eyes open for information which might be useful in the coming struggle with the Axis powers. Patriotism and nationalism vied in Dad’s soul with the racist beliefs he had actively espoused since boyhood. The fascists would soon be enemies of his country, yet their ideology was close to his own. The process of differentiation between himself and the fascists was speeded along by the sobering realization that he risked execution or life imprisonment for what he was doing.
As the train pulled into the Berlin station, Daddy frantically pondered how to conceal the letters and the packet of cash he had been instructed to deliver to the man with the white carnation whom he would meet on the platform. A sharp rap on the compartment door made Reverend Zellner and his British compartment-mate jump. “Passport please,” the Gestapo officer barked in English to the Englishman, who stood closest to the door. Seeing the British passport, he methodically took the man’s luggage apart. Then without a word he turned to my father. Dad casually placed the letters and the money in the back cover of his passport, snapped it shut and handed it to the German. With the faintest of smiles the Gestapo agent handed back the passport along with all its contents. “American,” he mused, “Welcome to Berlin, Herr Zellner.” With his riding crop, the officer turned one shirt over on top of Dad’s open luggage, stepped out and closed the door to the sleeper. It was lucky the Third Reich hated the British so much while holding out some hope for Joseph Kennedy’s America. Joe Kennedy, the father of future president JFK, was a renowned bootlegger and a notorious admirer of Hitler.
After a while in Berlin, Dad was so little enamored of Germans and their leader that he passed up an opportunity to see Hitler. When he told the story I would always fuss at him that he could have at least looked. Dad said Hitler was not worth walking down to the corner to see. He had been sitting in a café and someone had run by saying that the Fuehrer was passing in the next street. Everybody rose and ran to look, while Dad kept his seat.
The defining experience for Dad in Europe, however, occurred one winter in Russia. He’d been traveling for several months on the underground circuit without encountering a single English-speaking person. It was the dead of winter and my father traveled in deep snow, mostly by horsedrawn sled, with no one but a guide and a Latvian interpreter. Going from one little secret church to another scattered across the Russian hinterland, my father’s small band of outlaws joined up with a group of gospel singers from the United States, who were making the same underground rounds. It had been so long since Dad had heard any native English spoken, he was transported with delight. What is more, they spoke with Southern accents. Daddy said, “Bob, it was so wonderful seeing people from home.”
The only trouble was that the singers were all black. It was the first time in his life, Dad told me, that he spent whole days and nights with black people. “We preached together and sang, we ate together in the homes of the poor people, many times using our fingers as there were few utensils, reaching into the common pot of potatoes with small pieces of salt-meat, and maybe some cabbage. We even slept together, either in one big bed or huddled together on the floor for warmth beneath some thin and ancient blankets. We talked about home and food and a warm fire and the most disconcerting thing kept happening. I forgot that they were black!”
Dad said the first time it happened he thought he was having a nervous breakdown, like he woke up suddenly and didn’t know where he was or even who he was. “It wasn’t their fault; they weren’t trying to make me forget my place, I was sure of that. But that pesky thing started happening more often. It got to where there were large parts of the days when I would forget my new friends and comrades were black. And they didn’t treat me like a ‘white man.’ Of course they had no need to, here in Europe. It finally got to bothering me so much I just determined to make it light on myself and forget about color while I was here and just go back to the old way when I got back home. But, you know, things never were the same after living with my friends and not thinking about what color we were,” he said. “It certainly ruined me as a Klansman, that’s for sure.
James’s joyous homecoming to Alabama in the mid-1930s was unmarred by the revelations about race from his trip abroad. The born-again street preacher was prepared to come out from under the hood, but first he had to find the woman who had occupied many of his daydreams when he’d been stranded in Russia in the dead of winter for months on end. Ruby Rachael, the beautiful oldest daughter of the Reverend J. J. Hardy, had promised back at Bob Jones that she’d wait for him to get back from Europe. Dr. Bob Jones performed the wedding ceremony for Ruby Hardy and James Abraham Zellner in Fort Deposit, Alabama, in the middle of the Great Depression, on December 31, 1935.
After the wedding, Mom and Dad served their first charge in a mission church in Mobile, Alabama, working with the homeless and the seamen on the waterfront. To get closer to Granddaddy and Grandma Hardy, they moved to Dixie, Alabama, where their firstborn entered the world as James (after Dad) Hubert (after Mom’s brother). I was born next on April 5, 1939, after they had moved to the Jay, Florida, charge. Then in quick succession Richard Douglas was born in Century, Florida; David Otis in Newton, Alabama; and the baby, Malcolm Cary, in Slocomb, Alabama.
Each time I asked Dad why our family had different attitudes than most Southerners, he always came back to that experience in Russia when being struck blind to color ruined him as a Klansman. Being an intelligent man and a real believer in the gospel of Jesus, Dad was forced to wrestle with the deep beliefs from his childhood. In the final analysis he could not reconcile his belief in white supremacy with the high ideals of his country, the teachings of his church and Bible, his innate intelligence, and, now, his own experience in Europe.
I don’t think Mother had ever been as enthusiastic about the KKK as Daddy. Maybe Mom was only a lukewarm racist because having a bastard for a grandfather had bent her in a more liberal direction. When Dad finally broke with his Klan brothers in the mid-1940s, Mom happily cut up his Klan robes and made white shirts for us boys to wear to Sunday school. Mom’s dad, Reverend J. J. Hardy, was one of the last of the old horseback circuit riders in the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the Methodist Church. He had already alienated the Klan when he had refused their “love offering” at one of his small country churches. The KKK—in full regalia—had marched unannounced down the center aisle of the church to hand Granddaddy an envelope full of money. Eyeing their dirty boots and the ridiculous hoods covering their faces, the right Reverend Hardy made a simple but truthful statement,
“My church no longer accepts donations from unidentified persons.” Grandfather, who could look awfully stern, handed back the money. The Klan did not come back.
She also must have known, growing up in Blountstown, that it was named in honor of John Blount, chief of the Apalachicola Creek Indians. She may not have known of their forceful removal in April 1834, when Chief Blount led them away from their ancestral home in Florida to Mabank, Texas, the present site of their tribal council house. History like this was hidden from most white Southerners in school.
From the time I was born in Jay, Florida, until we moved to Loxley, Alabama, in 1947, we lived in an area that relied on oysters from Apalachicola Bay. Daddy used to smack his lips reaching for a frosty Apalachicola oyster on the half shell. “These are the best raw oysters on earth—this is the life!” he’d exclaim. As an adult I wondered if Daddy ever thought how much the Southeastern Indians who had been removed to the west missed those great oysters and clams, once the very basis of their diet and money.
We moved every four years to a new church assignment, and memories of the various towns remain so clear. I was not quite two when we moved to Newton, Alabama, at the edge of Fort Rucker. The base boomed during the war, and every available room was taken up by soldiers flooding in from all over the country. We always had a smartly dressed officer living in the parsonage, and I remember Dad’s cardinal rules—no women and absolutely no drinking in the officer’s quarters. Two “family stories” cling to my little boy’s mind. One time, Daddy ordered a drunken soldier out of the house, and he marched solemnly off the porch into Mom’s favorite rose bush. Another officer, posted overseas, left the “apartment” in seemingly spotless condition, but when Mom opened the closet door, empty Four Roses bottles cascaded to the floor. The officer, after carefully stacking the bottles from floor to ceiling, had tacked a friendly note to the door, “Thanks for the good times. I’m off to fight the Hun. Love, Col. Tricky.”
In 1945, we moved to Slocomb, Alabama, a little town just east of Dothan, where Dad served the Slocomb Methodist Church as well as eight country churches. Zion Hill, Pinkard, Malvern, Hurricane, Headland, Mars Hill, and Oak Grove remain branded in my memory, redolent of a rural existence known today mostly through film and literature. They evoke a delicious nostalgia of planks on sawhorses lined up under the trees along the cemetery fence, loaded with country food—sliced fresh tomatoes from the garden, not the store, slightly wilted in the afternoon heat, blue bowls of green and yellow butterbeans next to fried okra and fried green tomatoes, mounds of fragrant fried chicken—yard chickens with real meat on them, done according to grandma’s recipe—anyone’s grandma. One lady invariably made a platter of sandwiches with sliced white bread, a great treat because it was store-bought. I loved tomato and mayonnaise on white bread, or sliced pineapple or sliced banana made the same way.
Back to the oysters. Slocomb was famous for Brink Barnes’s salty winter oysters, and when older brother Jim and I were little we’d accompany Dad there. The ancient mahogany bar at the oyster house, where the shucking went on right in front of us, occupied half of the Gulf filling station, smack in the middle of town, on Highway 52 between Hartford and Dothan. Enterprise, just up the road in Coffee County, was known for a giant bronze boll weevil on a pedestal in the middle of town square, erected in recognition that the weevil had forced cotton farmers to plant corn, peanuts, and that new “Jap” bean, the soy. Dothan, meanwhile, was noted for peanuts.
At Barnes’s oyster house, Daddy would pay ten cents a dozen, and he always reminded us that when he first starting eating oysters there, they were a nickel a dozen. Today, oysters cost a dollar or two apiece. The bill was figured by Brink counting the half-shells left in front of us. The top half of each shell had already gone in the waste barrel, so each half-shell represented one oyster. When Barnes opened the fresh, dripping oysters, he’d flip the top shell into the shell tub, cut the muscle with a flick of his oyster knife and place the plump morsel in front of us, nestled in its own dish. It was not uncommon for Daddy and us two little ones to eat twelve or fourteen dozen of the briny bi-valves, which Brink would “round down” to ten dozen—“Pay up, Rev., one dollar.”
The whole time we were growing up, Mom taught school to supplement Dad’s meager minister’s pay. Truth be told, she probably earned as much or more than he did. Mom was a gifted country cook; she had to be good in the kitchen to feed seven hungry mouths on those small salaries. Dad always grew a garden, and he often experimented with new seeds. We were introduced to fennel as a vegetable, which never caught on so well, and once he planted an exotic type of vine spinach that grew to fifty-two feet long. The more you picked the leaves, the more the vine grew. We couldn’t eat or can everything Dad grew, so when we lived in Loxley he made a deal with our school lunchroom to supply produce in exchange for free lunch for the Zellner kids. Jim and I would trudge the six blocks to school each morning pulling our red wagons full of collards, turnips, okra, tomatoes, lettuce, and onions. One day we brought artichokes and fresh fennel which nobody knew what to do with.
Mom loved flowers and cultivated them as often as possible. When I finished hoeing and weeding the vegetable garden, I often helped Mom in her little flower beds. She taught me the names and the nature of each one—snap dragons, monkey lilies, pansies, daises, peonies.
I almost always had a pig to fatten, and Dad made wonderful barbecue and often cooked strange and wonderful things. We always kept a cow for milk, butter, and cheese, which Jim, my older brother, and I milked every morning and night. Mother canned a lot, and the church would give the preacher’s family a “pounding” (food packages). We always had huge bowls of vegetables, cottage cheese made by Mom, ham from Uncle Harvey’s smokehouse, along with rabbits from the pens and chickens from the yard. Daddy liked to hunt and fish and cooked us squirrel, quail, wild ducks, and venison when he could get it. We boys learned to fish and hunt and we brought game to Mom’s kitchen as often as possible.
Dad and Mom had invented Zellnerinies, toasted home-baked bread covered with chopped lettuce and scallions from the garden. This was topped with hot soft scrambled eggs fresh from the nest, and finally crowned with Mom’s famous bubbling hot white sauce flecked with black pepper and specks of butter from our own cow and Mom’s churn. The hot eggs and white gravy wilted the onions and lettuce. Dad said it reminded him of food he had eaten in Russia and Poland.
Despite this bucolic life, our stint in Slocomb was a rough time for me. I couldn’t seem to do right no matter hard I tried. One time I released the captive crows of an important parishioner. The man lived way out in the country, where he had a large cage in his back yard. I stood by full of amazement as the church member explained to Dad how he had trapped the crows and split their tongues. He was teaching them how to talk. There must have been a dozen or more of the huge black birds, and they made a lot of noise when the farmer came close to their cage. I couldn’t make out any words they were saying, but they didn’t seem very happy to me. Their owner, on the way into the house for Sunday dinner with the preacher’s family, bragged that the flock was so tame by now that they would not leave even if he left the cage open. I decided to see if he was telling the truth so I hung back and darted toward the cage when Daddy and the man disappeared into the dogtrot of the house.
I stood on a box and quietly opened the cage door. The birds began to squawk loudly but they would not go near the open door. Now I was afraid the farmer would come back so I tried to hush the crows or shoo them away by beating on the back of the cage. Suddenly, they all flew out of the cage and perched on the center ridge of the old farm house and started yelling like someone was beating them to death. I ran up and down in the cleanly swept, grassless backyard flapping my arms and yelling for them to leave before the grown-ups came back. The crows wouldn’t leave and they wouldn’t shut up. I sat down in the sand frustrated at the stupidity of a bunch of birds being given their freedom and not having the sense to lea
ve. Out of nowhere, Daddy suddenly picked me up by the collar and promised me, through clenched teeth, a whipping when we got home. That was always the worst kind, the kind you had to wait for. I always preferred punishment on the spot. Back home in the woodshed Dad give me a whipping. It may have been my imagination but it seemed that any misbehavior involving parishioners always resulted in the harshest punishment.
I started school in Slocomb in 1945, at six years old, and I failed the first grade. That really put the hurt on me—whoever heard of failing the first grade? My teacher and Mom were concerned that it might be bad for me but they agreed that it might be worse on me in the second and third grades if I still could not read. So I repeated the first grade in 1946, and in June 1947, we moved to Loxley where I went to second and third grades.
Then the summer of 1949, when I was ten, everything changed. In those days few people understood dyslexia, and in my early grades, my teachers must have thought I was retarded. Every assignment I handed in came back with a huge zero on it for everybody to see. I had the misfortune to follow two grades behind my brother. Jim was a gifted student and my teachers tormented me with questions of why I couldn’t be more like him.
Luckily I lived in a family full of school teachers. Mom was a teacher as was her sister Lavada Pope, the one we called Aunt Peg. Mom’s sister Rosetta Hardy was also a lifelong school teacher in Roanoke, Alabama. Aunt Rose was so dedicated to teaching that she never married. My mother didn’t know exactly what was wrong with me, but she knew I was not stupid. She and her sister Peg consulted on why I couldn’t learn and Peg suggested that I go to summer school at Barton Academy in Mobile. She had heard that they were experimenting with teaching methods to aid the learning disabled (if that was a phrase then). Most classroom teachers had not the mistiest idea about learning disabilities. If you got zeros, then you were terminally lazy or an imbecile. It did not occur to me, or to my teachers, for that matter, that in order to make consistent zeroes the problem might be that I did not even understand the instructions. I blanked on every task. If I had no idea where or how to begin, then I was doomed.