The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  The kid managed to gasp, “Somebody take him for a while.”

  My brother stepped over close to me and shouted, “One at a time, please, otherwise you’ll have to deal with me, too.” Then Jim added, somewhat irrelevantly, but I thought with a touch of pride, “He’s my brother.”

  I had time to be thankful he hadn’t said “little brother,” before another big boy stepped in front of me. I felt like a bull, and Jim said later that I never stopped walking forward and I never stopped swinging. As each boy would tire, another took his place until everybody who felt froggy had jumped. When there was nobody else in front of me, I figured that I had at least demonstrated that I was willing to fight—as silly as it was, and as pointless. So I had a good cry and Jim walked with me back to my classroom. Recess was over.

  2

  Biscuit Man

  I did my real growing up in East Brewton, Alabama, a small town across the creek from Brewton, once called America’s richest little town. We moved there in 1955, when Dad was finished with his ministry serving the church in Daphne.

  People in East Brewton, where we lived, didn’t own much. I know we didn’t. The sister towns were separated by Murder Creek. In the 1800s, legend and history say that a group of settlers traveling west—and supposedly carrying a lot of money, were ambushed, robbed, and murdered on the banks of this creek by three bandits, two white men and an Indian. The solid citizens of Brewton let you know in no uncertain terms and as often as possible that if you lived in East Brewton, you lived on “the wrong side of Murder Creek.” I found that this didn’t bother most people in East Brewton; it had always been that way. Mother being a school teacher, and Dad a minister, I was in contact with people on the “right side” of Murder Creek, but I quickly learned where my place was. It struck me more forcefully, no doubt, because I had come from outside. My family, as explained, was a bit unusual anyway, and we would, after all, be moving on in another three or four years. Also, we may have been on the wrong side of the Creek, but we were closer to the coast and our delicious oysters.

  In the meantime, I began to learn consciously about race and class. I started to work for “King Tut” Edwards who ran a little country store. He hired me to wait on customers, clean the store, and deliver groceries to our “charge” customers. One day, after an old black couple left the store, Mr. Edwards said to me with a worried look, “You can’t do that, Bob.” I asked what I had done wrong and was told that I had said “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” to the old people who had just left and not to do that if there were white people in the store at the same time. I was puzzled, and told my boss that my daddy and mother had taught me to be courteous, especially to old people.

  “Well, that’s right,” said Tut with a pained expression, “and I’m sorry to have to teach you this, but you can get in trouble saying yes sir and no sir to a colored person, and I can get in trouble, too. They all know I’m a Unitarian, so I’m in enough trouble already.”

  King Tut got his name when he worked in the brick yard in Brewton, and he was always covered in red brick dust. This was around the time that King Tut’s dusty remains were dug from the tomb in Egypt. He taught me about the state of Alabama being run by the “Big Mules” for the benefit of the rich people. He told me that Huey P. Long was the greatest politician of all time and that he would soon unite all the poor people, including the colored, to kick out the Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, which owned most of the state. Tut repeated that Brewton was the richest little town in America and East Brewton was the poorest.

  Then he told me about the bloodlines and how the rich families—the Bloedels, McGowins, Millers and MacMillans had intermarried for generations so that they could own everything in sight—the T. R. Miller Company, a huge lumber outfit, and the new Bloedel and MacMillan paper mill. Most of the timber land was owned by them along with TCI (which later became United States Steel). The Robbins and McGowins and Hainjes owned the department stores and the Luttrells owned the biggest hardware store in south Alabama and with the L&N railroad here, “they shipped all over the state.”

  I asked Tut what he meant by “Big Mules” and he said it was like the way big mules, being taller and stronger, ate the hay off the wagons being pulled by the little mules. He said the image came from former Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, a Montgomery Kluxer. Then I was even more confused and told Tut I thought the Klan were bad people. He told me, “They are, but politics makes strange friends sometimes. It will take some time before you understand any of this, Bobby. I’m not sure I understand it myself.” The best I could make out, at my young age, was that populism was good and the idea of poor whites and blacks helping one another was good, but difficult and unlikely to happen—that the rich guys liked to keep poor white and black people alienated. Where the Klan fit in, I was not at all sure. I knew that my daddy had left them and that our family was happy about it. The fact that I was even thinking of this, at age fourteen, was a testament to the passions and teaching ability of my improbable mentor, the Unitarian King Tut Edwards.

  When I was in high school, my Dad was moved from the East Brewton Methodist Church to the Broad Street Methodist Church in Mobile, where I had lived for that summer with Aunt Peg and Uncle Doug. I know that Daddy was happy about the move and Mom was glad to be close to “The Seven Z’s,” our little cabin in the woods across the bay from Mobile. Daddy called our little homemade house the “Seven Z’s” because there were seven of us Zellners.

  If East Brewton had set me on a path of discovery concerning race and class, our sojourn in Mobile proved pivotal in leading me toward the emerging civil rights movement. It also seemed that the pace of life suddenly picked up. My new high school was so big that it had sororities and fraternities. I pledged the first fraternity that asked me. Mercifully, I have forgotten its name. One of my new friends was Tommy Adkins, “Mr. Everything” at Murphy High, Mobile’s only public high school—for whites. Tommy’s dad owned United Fruit Company and many of his ships made port calls at the Mobile docks.

  I guess it was ironic that the Klan would contact me at the same time I am hanging out with the offspring of the local ruling class, but that is what happened.

  All the high school boys who could afford it were getting souped-up jalopies and killing each other drag racing and playing chicken, or going at top speed over thrill hill up on Wolf Ridge. The point was to make all four wheels leave the ground at the same time. Some cars ended up upside down in the kudzu or wrapped around a loblolly pine.

  The mayhem caused the city fathers to institute a nightly 9 p.m. curfew applying to everyone under eighteen. When I had just turned eighteen, Daddy had helped me buy a canary yellow Dodge convertible, sporting a raccoon tail and a shrill wolf whistle. Daddy was a Chrysler man his whole life. He made me promise not to use the whistle, explaining that the sound was produced by cold air hitting the hot motor block when the string was pulled. “You can bust your block like that and it would cost more to fix than this thing is worth,” he warned.

  Soon after the curfew was imposed and I got the car, I was hanging out at Johnny’s Drive-In eating a burger and talking to girls. Suddenly a bright light hit the girls hanging on my door and they parted to reveal a TV cameraman and someone holding a microphone. There were giggles and gasps as the reporter stuck his mike in my face and started firing questions about the curfew. Television was so new that I had seen my first telecast just two years before and we had gotten our first set just the last Christmas, a gift to Mom and Dad from the church.

  I was flattered to be questioned about the curfew and it happened so unexpectedly that I did not have time to be nervous.

  “What’s your name young man?”

  “Zellner.”

  “What school and what grade?”

  “Murphy, Senior.”

  “Is it a good idea to have a curfew for young people in Mobile?”

 
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “It seems to be arbitrary—what if someone is seventeen and a half? Do they still have to be home by nine?”

  “Any other reasons you oppose the curfew, Mr. Zellner?”

  “Yes. If sixteen is old enough for a license and some boys are able to get in the Navy at seventeen, why do they have to be in by 9 p.m.?”

  I figured later that the TV reporter had picked me because of my yellow convertible and not because I looked particularly intelligent. But that may have been one way I got on the KKK’s screen.

  Anyway, the bad guys picked me up one night to go for a ride with them. Ralph and Clyde, a couple of my fraternity brothers, were in the car, so I was not overly concerned. They said they wanted to show me their friend’s car, a green 1955 Pontiac which they assured me was fast and powerful. Both the boys were also in Demolay with me, the junior version of the Masons—Daddy was a 33rd degree Mason and Mom was active in the Eastern Star.

  The two older guys in the front seat took turns talking to me. The driver said he thought I had “leadership” potential. I asked why he had that opinion and he said, “We have our sources. We’ve been hearing about you.” The other one hinted that I “might better join them.”

  “Join who?” I asked somewhat belligerently.

  “But first,” he said, “you have to pass the test.”

  “What test?” I asked, not feeling very well.

  “Don’t ask so many questions.”

  One of the boys in the back with me was putting together something that looked like a long fishing rod, fitting it piece by piece.

  “Here comes one,” the driver yelled. “Get ready and really let him have it!”

  Before I knew what was happening, my “friend” Ralph hove the rod out the back window just as the car swerved to the left side of the dark road. We were in Prichard, a mostly black town on the outskirts of Mobile.

  The protruding rod struck something in the darkness with a stomach-churning thud. Inside the speeding car we lurched to the left as the driver swung the big Pontiac back to the right, throwing up a hail of gravel. My “friend” held the pole tight, I realized, in order to deliver the maximum blow to the midriff of an old black man walking in the opposite direction. I barely glimpsed his startled face as we hurtled by.

  The glee was instant and sickening, as if the guys in the car had experienced a sudden release of almost sexual tension.

  “I’ll look for another one,” the driver sang out. “Get that stick to Bobby and let’s see if he’s any good.”

  Clyde hollered, “Bob, quick, change places with me.” I was shunted to the right side of the back seat as Ralph tried to shove the disjointed rod at me. “Put this back together and whack one on that side.” I clasped my hands in front of my chest and said, “No, sir, that’s not for me, you moron.”

  “You got to,” Ralph hissed, leaning past Clyde in the middle.

  “I ain’t got to do crap.”

  “You most certainly do,” Clyde said into my ear. “These fools don’t play. They might kill all three of us.”

  I was really weary by now and not willing to play their game anymore. “What do you mean us, man?” I asked loudly. “I am not one of you, whatever the hell you are. You can let my ass out now!”

  “Y’all having any trouble back there?” It was the older man in the shotgun seat. I had already silently nicknamed him “Green Teeth.” His tone was low and menacing, and he did not look around.

  “No, it’s all right,” Ralph tried to explain. “He’ll do something even if I have to kick his ass.”

  “Okay, look,” I said, “I’ve got this biscuit that I saved from supper. If it will make you happy, Ralph, I will try to hit somebody with it.”

  Clyde chimed in, “Biscuit?”

  “A biscuit,” I said, showing them the small piece of bread I had saved to eat later. “That’s the best I can do, but I will sacrifice my biscuit for the cause. If that won’t satisfy you and your unknown friends up there, then I guess we’ll all have to die.”

  With that I rolled the window down and tossed the scone in the direction of the next pedestrian walking toward us. A muffled whump seemed to give my tormentors some relief, so they delivered me back to the vicinity of my comfortable little convertible.

  I often remember that night of testing—testing to see if I had a violent-enough nature to be good Klan material. If things had not been moving so fast, I might have acquitted myself more honorably. But I really make no excuse, because I failed on two counts—I washed out as a future Klansman because I was not mean enough, and I flunked as a decent person because I failed to stand up to the criminals in that car.

  In spite of my somewhat cowardly response to the Klan overtures, I had disagreed with my peers on matters of race and segregation prior to that incident, and some of us tried to witness whenever we could. During my junior year, on February 3, 1956, Autherine Lucy enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Alabama, and the demons of race hate descended. That is when the nightmare began.

  On the third day of classes, Autherine Lucy faced mobs of students, townspeople, and even groups of outsiders. There were students behind her saying, “Let’s kill her! Let’s kill her!” She needed a police escort to get to class and crowds chanted outside constantly. Lucy was suspended from the university with the board stating that it was for her own safety. The NAACP filed a contempt of court suit, but Lucy’s expulsion took place anyway. In 1988, Lucy re-entered the University of Alabama to earn a master’s degree in elementary education, and in 1992, both she and her daughter, Grazia, received degrees.

  I am not sure exactly what made me follow Lucy’s story so closely in 1956, but I remember being fascinated with what the “adults” would do to keep her out. Before the actual event, I was with a bunch of students were standing and sitting around the red brick stoop leading up to the main building of Murphy High School—band members and football players and our after-school prayer group. I played second trombone in the marching band. We were discussing the ever-hot topic—the integration of the University of Alabama.

  Someone hollered, “If Autherine just wants to get an education, she wouldn’t be trying to go the university—she knows she can’t. They’d close it before integrating. She knows she should go to one of her own schools and not try to destroy ours. It’s a shame that nigger girl wants to destroy our state university.”

  When I said I thought she had a right to go to any tax-supported school in our state, Sam Culpepper, one of our star football players with a neck as wide as his head whispered to me, “Don’t let anyone hear you say that.”

  “Why do you think she wants to explode the university?” came another question.

  “Maybe she just wants to get an education,” I said.

  An angry rose color spread up Sammy Culpepper’s thick neck to his screwed-up face. “Be quiet, because they will hurt you.”

  “Who is they?” I shot back. “Will you hurt me, Culpepper?”

  “No, hell, Bob I won’t hurt you. I know you are crazy, but they don’t have the slightest idea how screwed up you are, and I’m telling you they will put the hurt on you. Let any of them hear you talking that mess, and I can promise you that I ain’t going to help you when they get on your scrawny little ass.” Culpepper, all 285 pounds of him, paused and took a huge breath. “Zellner, you know I am planning on playing pro ball, you idiot!”

  It was kind of fun, the image of Big Sammy helping me in a fight with the Klan boys, but I pressed the point. “Culpepper, I know you are planning on going to Alabama to play college football, and I know how important it is to you, but you don’t need to be so fearful. The University will still be in Tuscaloosa next year when you get ready to go.”

  “Fearful? You little shit, I ain’t fearful of nothing on earth that moves.”


  “Yes you are,” I pointed out. “You just advised me to keep quiet or get hurt.”

  “Well for your information, I just think it is my duty to protect you from your own stupidity if you believe in something as far out as integration. I’m telling you these old boys will whip you till your ass won’t hold shucks. People just don’t go around talking like that. I myself ain’t got to worry, because I think segregation is just fine. But even if I didn’t, I certainly wouldn’t let people know.” Sammy spun around and skulked off looking around to see if any of the in group had taken offense at him talking to the alien.

  I called after him, “I’m not scared of anything either, Culpepper, I refuse to live that way.”

  Sammy and I had been going at it so intensely that others in the group weren’t able to get a word in.

  Jamie Cecil, my girlfriend and the leader of our little prayer cell, admonished me for being so argumentative with Sammy. “We’ll never make converts beyond the six of us if you don’t learn to be more diplomatic. You put people on the defensive.”