The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  I remember Dr. King saying, “Now, Bob, you must remember, meeting with the students in private is one thing. Coming to a mass meeting or to the nonviolent workshop where the police and the press are present is another matter entirely. All the proceedings are tape-recorded by state investigators. The police are inside and all our meetings are completely public.”

  I’m sure they wanted us to come, but Dr. King was being meticulous in telling us the dangers. They could tell what neophytes we were, and I’m sure they didn’t want us to get into trouble and then come crying to them or anybody else that we had been tricked into attending. But we felt we had a right to attend any meeting we wanted, and we were willing to fight for that right. At the same time we wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible and not to do anything as a “demonstration.” If we were arrested, it would be the fault of the police—not us. We were terribly naive and found out later that state investigators had followed us to every meeting, even the “secret” meetings with the students.

  Our first mass meeting, however, was fantastic. Three of us came rather furtively to the front door and asked for the “deacon” as we had been told to do. The deacon led us to seats on the back row in the corner of the church under the balcony and told us that the cops were in the balcony above and that he would keep us informed of their movements. The church was humming at our presence!

  For some reason I had expected not to be noticed by the congregation. I guess I had a preconceived notion that I and my friends would be invisible. So it came as a somewhat disconcerting but pleasant surprise that the people in the church began to make eye contact with us. I remember the friendly eyes and the bright smiles. I thought later that black people had never looked at me like that. Maybe they had always thought of me as the enemy, and in this context it was clear that I was not. Maybe it was because I had never looked at them like this. Anyway, this was great!

  We were just getting into the swing of the meeting, however, when the bottom fell out. I had noticed the large, conspicuous, reel-to-reel Wollensack tape recorder on a table in front of the pulpit with wires running up to a microphone clipped onto the light stand in front of the speaker. We had arrived late, and Reverend Abernathy was introducing Dr. King. I had seen and heard King on television and had been with him in private meetings, but I had not heard him preach to a movement mass meeting. I was really looking forward to this. But it was not to be.

  As Abernathy was thundering his introduction, the deacon suddenly appeared, leaned over several people and hissed, “They’re coming down; the cops are heading this way and we’re afraid they are going to arrest you.”

  “Can we leave the way we came in?” I asked.

  “No. They’re out there between you and the door,” the deacon said.

  “Is there any other way out?”

  “You can go out the back way. Follow me.”

  We trailed the deacon down the aisle, by the pulpit, where a startled Abernathy glanced our way. We hurried through the choir loft while the whole choir and congregation looked at us. Without looking back, we darted out the back door. When the cool outside breeze hit us, we ran. If we had looked back while running down the center aisle of the church, we would have noticed a single cop in the balcony, one who had not come down with the others. He had noted our exit from the church. Later I got to know this state investigator very well. His name was Willie B. Painter.

  The next night at the second in the series of mass meetings, Townsend, Joe Thomas, and I had to leave early because we were actors in a play at Montgomery’s Little Theatre. We left the church as quietly as possible. I thought we had gotten away again when suddenly, out of the shadow of a giant magnolia tree on the corner, two figures emerged. I could see the glow of cigarettes remaining under the tree. Two uniformed Montgomery policemen approached us, and one said, “Do you mind if we take your pictures?” The other cop was raising a camera with a flash attachment to his eyes.

  “Yes we do!” I said quickly and firmly.

  I didn’t feel very confident or very firm. Events were happening in slow motion. Maybe that’s why I remember these confrontations so clearly.

  “Why can’t we take your picture?” one asked.

  “Why do you want to take our picture?” I asked.

  The small one with the camera ignored my question and continued, “What’s wrong? Are you ashamed of what you’re doing?”

  “Why should we be ashamed?” I asked. I regretted asking the question because I quickly realized that they wanted to provoke this kind of give and take—the old police technique designed to get us to talk as if this was just a normal conversation that might happen between people on any street in the city.

  The big one, his hand on a black leather slapjack which hung from his belt, chewed his tobacco wad. He spat and said in what I’m sure he thought was a kindly voice, “We’d just like to get your names and ask you a few questions and we really would like to get your pictures, if you don’t mind.”

  “Look, sir,” I said, “we definitely do not want you to take our pictures, and if we are not under arrest we would like to go on our way. As for our names and answering questions we won’t do that either if we’re not under arrest.”

  “Oh, you’re not under arrest. We just thought you wouldn’t mind if we took your pictures and asked a few questions.”

  We slowly walked away. The policemen followed us for a few steps, then stopped. One said, “If you’re not ashamed of what you’re doing then why . . . ?”

  When we were out of earshot, we picked up the pace and headed for Joe Thomas’s mother’s car. But as he was about to reach for the door of the car Joe said in a loud stage whisper, “Wait! I can’t let them get the tag number of my mother’s car—she’ll kill me! Or worse, yet,” he said, with grim humor, “they’ll kill her.”

  “What can we do?” Townsend groaned. “We’re going to be late for the play and the director will kill us.”

  It was opening night of an eight-performance run for the play. Townsend, Joe, and I comprised the major part of a Chinese ensemble that had to be on stage throughout the whole play.

  Our problems were complicated and solved with almost the same stroke when it started to pour rain, and a cab came by. We hailed the cab and leaped in as Townsend said to the black cab driver, “Thank God you stopped, man. It’s raining like a tall cow pissing on a flat rock out there.”

  “Yeah, I know, man,” said the young driver. “I’m not supposed to pick you guys up, you know, but what with the rain and all, I thought . . .” His voice trailed off and then he said, “I hope it ain’t no cops watching—that’s all.”

  We all laughed hysterically just to release the tension. In this rain we couldn’t tell whether the fuzz was following us or not.

  We found out later that seconds after the three of us dashed soaking into the dressing room to put on our costumes and makeup, four cops chugged into the theater searching the audience for us. We thought it was funny that they didn’t recognize us onstage as Chinese musicians. How they missed Townsend, we could never figure out.

  The week progressed; we kept going to meetings, dodging the cops, and acting in the play. We relaxed slightly and even felt a little cocky, looking forward to the weekend, so we could attend the workshop at Reverend Abernathy’s church on Saturday.

  On Friday night while everybody else was out partying, the five of us—Townsend, Joe Thomas, myself, John Hill, and William Head—who had gone to some of the mass meetings got together for a bull session in the room I shared with Townsend. We lived on the fourth floor of Massey Dorm, crammed under the eaves with only a narrow dormer window to give light. The room was cluttered with dirty clothes and Townsend’s big stereo and a thousand or so unsheathed records. The Kingston Trio was blasting a calypso song about down Jamaica way where the nights are gay and the dancing girls sway to and fro. The December weather was unseasonably warm; trees had sprouted
buds like they intended to skip winter. The breeze through the window was sweet with false spring—light and soft. We felt good talking about the cloak-and-dagger week we had just spent. The conversation turned inexorably to the subject. What would we do tomorrow? Should we press our luck and go to the workshop or leave well enough alone, gather our research, and write those damned papers for Sociology 402?

  Townsend was saying, “I say let’s go and to hell with them!” Whenever Townsend swore, I always suspected he had been drinking. I had never had a drink, but I could always tell when he had.

  “Townsend,” I said, “where did you have supper tonight? I didn’t see you in the dining hall.”

  “At the Green Lantern—why?”

  The Green Lantern, a local roadhouse, was the stage for one of the most memorable stories about my beloved friend Townsend. He and I liked to go to there and order their specialty, a huge steak prepared for two. Townsend would get two orders—one rare, and he’d ask the waitress to line up sixteen stingers, his favorite drink. He explained to me that weighing in at about four hundred pounds, it was hard for him to get good and drunk. I did not drink, but I did understand his problem.

  After one of his drinking bouts, Townsend and a Montgomerian named Sonny Kyle Livingston reached the exit door at approximately the same time. Townsend could seem arrogant at times and refused to give way. Sonny Kyle was a local bail bondsman with a vested interest in maintaining his reputation as a Klan enforcer. He was famous for having his picture in the Montgomery papers in the act of smashing a Negro woman in the head with a baseball bat. He had also been implicated in several incidents of violence connected with the bus boycott, and was acquitted each time by all-white juries.

  As my roommate brushed by the smaller Klansman, Sonny Kyle blurted out that he was going to kill Townsend’s roommate Bob Zellner. Townsend glared down at Sonny Kyle in the roadhouse parking lot. Townsend, pretty well tanked up and standing his full height of six feet five inches, looked around at Livingston and his companions and made them all a proposition.

  “If anything should happen to my roommate, anything at all, will y’all explain to this fool that I will personally hold him responsible. If Bob should slip and fall in the shower, Sonny Kyle, I will come looking for you and I promise I will break every sorry bone in your scrawny-assed body.”

  So far Livingston hadn’t bothered me, and on this Friday night in the dorm room, the five of us continued discussing the pending workshop. I warned that we could be arrested if we went to the meeting the next day.

  “I know that,” Townsend said, “but didn’t you say we should be willing to be arrested if it came to that because we, by God, have a right to go to those meetings if we want to?”

  I had wondered if I was egging the others on to go to the meetings—that maybe if it weren’t for me they wouldn’t be doing this. It occurred to me then that I was not influencing them as much as I thought. This freedom stuff was in the air and it was contagious. Joe, John Hill, Bill Head, and Townsend really wanted to go to the workshop even at the risk of being trundled off to jail.

  I was relieved. I could make my decision, and they could make theirs. But there was one issue I thought we should discuss—parents. “Townsend,” I said, “what is your mother going to say if you wind up in jail? Your father, for that matter, what will he say?”

  “My father?” Townsend laughed. “If he’s sober enough to speak at all, he’ll holler, ‘Jail! What’d they get him for? Public drunk? Chip off the old block. That’s my boy!’”

  Most of us knew about Townsend’s father, but it was awkward for us for him to laugh it off with such bitterness.

  “I know about your father, Townsend, but what about Delia?”

  “Oh, Mother will no doubt be highly pissed. Our business is, as you know, about ninety percent colored, so that’s where her bread and butter is. What will really tick her off is the rich white clients who’ll never darken her doors again with their tax returns. That will lose her some profit. Personally, she doesn’t mind if I consort with Negroes. She does it all the time, and Daddy drinks with them on the corner, but, all in all, they will be highly pissed.”

  Bill hadn’t said much so I asked, “What about you, Head?”

  Bill looked at me morosely and sighed, “They’ll run me out of Union Springs like an egg-sucking dog, but that won’t be any great loss. I don’t even go home for holidays now, and my parents haven’t spoken to me since I told them I’m an agnostic. Mother knows I spend most of my time writing poetry. Let’s go,” he said firmly.

  “Wait just a minute,” Joe said. “I don’t know about John Hill’s situation, but I’m pretty doggone sure that Zellner here is the only one of us with any support from home. The rest of us are going to be hung out to dry, and we’ve got to realize that the KKK, if they choose to, can hunt us down like stray dogs. I don’t like to be hunted, and I know Bob doesn’t either, but at least he’s got the support of his daddy and mother.”

  I tried to say something, but Joe put his hand up and continued, “Reverend Zellner is a for—” Thomas paused and struggled for the word. “Formidable,” Bill Head prompted. “Formidable,” Joe agreed, “fighter inside the church. He’s willing to battle the church and the college, so Bob’s got real support.”

  “But the support is not just for me,” I interjected. “It’s for all of us.”

  “I know,” Joe agreed, “but it makes a hell of a lot of difference to the way a person feels when he has the support of his family. None of us do.” In the spring I would remember Joe’s words when I was the only one of our five to graduate.

  Finally, John Hill, who didn’t talk much, suggested that we had debated long enough and that the time had come to choose whether to knuckle under or rebel. “There’s no middle ground in Alabama,” he said.

  I said I agreed with him and that we had to realize how completely alone we were among white people in supporting civil rights. “Do you wonder how we can be right, and everybody else, the white people at least, are all wrong?” I asked. As we were soon to discover, there were a few white people in Montgomery who were defying the segregationist line. Their numbers were small, but they were there and would soon be bringing us in the circle.

  “Wait a minute,” Townsend said. “What was that you said about taking action? I’m not talking about taking action. I’m just talking about going to a meeting.”

  Everybody just looked at Townsend and laughed. Head said laconically, “That seems to be action enough for me.”

  “Look, Townsend,” I said, “Reverend Abernathy said there might be some young people at King’s workshop from SNCC. They draw cops like flies.”

  I had pronounced SNCC the way the movement people said it—“SNICK.”

  “Who’s ‘SNICK’?” they all said.

  I reminded them that Joe Reed had mentioned the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in our first meeting with the Alabama State students. “SNCC people are supposed to be the most militant of the movement. There’s friction between them and King, but they cooperate.”

  “Okay, okay,” Hill said, “I didn’t ask for an essay. We just wanted to know who they are, that’s all.”

  “I read about them in Newsweek,” I explained lamely. I was excited about SNCC because they were determined to eradicate segregation in the South or die trying. My friends might not be interested. I was.

  By this time we had discussed the subject so long that we could not think of any valid reason not to go to the workshop the next morning. The decision we made to break the law, defy the college, the state, and in most cases our families, was one of the most fateful of my life.

  We would go.

  4

  The Huntingdon Five

  For most of the local black participants, the workshop might have seemed anti-climatic after a week of soul-stirring mass meetings. But I soon realized that these working sessions
were the nuts and bolts of the movement. Here were the people who went out and did the actual work. The meeting began with a brief prayer and a welcome by Reverend Abernathy. Then the congregation divided into smaller groups which went to various rooms of the church or corners of the sanctuary to discuss voter registration, direct action, fund raising, and other subjects. Each session was led by an experienced person. We five Huntingdon students had a brief discussion on which workshops we would attend. We all wanted to go to the direct action session, but we decided to split up and go to different ones, so we could report their contents to each other.

  The others deferred to my desire to go to the session on direct action. There I met, for the first time, some of the SNCC people. Strangely, I don’t remember who they all were, though they made such an impression on me. I had known church people strong in the faith, but until then I had never seen such dedicated soldiers. It was clear that they did not fear death. This gave them an aura of invincibility and a charisma I had never experienced. SNCC kids were powerful. I was so new and naive, and the day was so exciting. When the Freedom Riders came to Montgomery the following spring, in May 1961, and were brutally beaten by a KKK-led mob, I visited the wounded at St. Jude Hospital. I had the definite impression that I had met some of them before at the workshops, including Jim Zwerg and Bernard Lafayette. I know John Lewis was there—the John Lewis who two decades later became a Georgia congressman.

  After the morning session, the ladies of the church furnished an incredible dinner (lunch is called dinner in the South and dinner is called supper) and as we ate we compared notes on the morning sessions and talked with the movement people. I don’t know who was more interested in whom—the black students in us young white Southerners, or we in them. Of course the white students from Nashville, like Susan Wilbur, her sister, and others from Scarritt College and Vanderbilt, had been working all along with the black movement and had participated in the sit-ins and nonviolence training. We were delighted to meet some of the characters we had seen on the front pages of our papers and on television—the same students who had dressed themselves neatly in suits and trench coats and gone to sit quietly at lunch counters, reading their books, waiting to be served.