The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  The Phillips land was filled with virgin pines, so we cut down just enough for space for the house, and just those trees from that small area were enough to build the whole house. The logs were hauled off to the saw mill nearby and cut into floor joists and floor boards, rafters, studs, and boards for the outside of the house. The roof was tin, which made wonderful sounds when it rained.

  Then Daddy built a large stone fireplace. He had dreamed of this house for years and had collected the stones from all over, and as he mortared the stones, he would say, “Now, I got this rock in North Carolina when I was on a trip to Boston.” He knew the story of just about every stone that went into that chimney. The fireplace had a big iron bar that swung out, and you could hang a pot on it. We also had a grill for that fireplace to roast ducks and clams and oysters right out of the bay.

  On my way down through the woods, I remembered Jim and I and Mother helping Dad build the cabin when I was eight years old. The board-and-batten siding had since turned an old weather-beaten green. Helping to build that cabin was the beginning of learning the skills of carpentry which would see me through lean periods in my life. Doug, David, and Malcolm were too little to help but they all remember carrying nails or at least beating on something while the work was going on. Those are wonderful memories.

  Mobile Bay was a big part of our life in Daphne. Leaving the trees for the sand of the beach, the salty tang of bay water brought images of Jim and me and sometimes Doug sailing our little skiff, with the rigged-up sail, from our house all the way up to the May Day wharf in Daphne and back. In summer, when all the conditions are right, the eastern shore at Mobile Bay has a jubilee. That is when the flounder, eels, crabs, and shrimp just come right up to the shallows at the edge of the water. We would go down and get bushels of them. I remembered one jubilee when Felix Bigby and I tied a line from the boat to our belt and towed it behind us as we waded near the shore and gigged 108 five-pound flounders. We speared so many of the flat fish, while others were scooping up crabs, that the flounders started flopping over the sides of the boat and getting away. We gave away a lot of the little ones and started gigging only the huge ones of door-mat size. We cleaned them and put them in the freezer, feasting on them for months. Those were the days, I thought, and then I remembered I was about to go away to Atlanta. I didn’t know what was waiting for me.

  I took a long look at the clear water of the bay, making a conscious effort to imprint the way the grass on the shallow sand bars waved slowly, hiding flashes of the startled blue crabs. We would wade in the eel grass in the shallows and pick up the delicacy known as soft-shell crabs. The uninitiated could not tell the difference, but you could always pick out the ones who looked shiny and clean, just up from the gulf. Local Mobile Bay crabs were darker with patches of brown and green moss clinging to their shells. Mr. Phillips and his son Talley had taught me to distinguish between a freshly molted crab with rubbery bright blue and pale yellow skin and one right next to it which could give one a nasty wound with its sharp claws. The soft-shells we picked up in our hands and placed carefully in a white oak basket for Mom to fry later. The hard ones we unceremoniously scooped in the long-handled net and threw into a wash tub.

  The sun was barely up when Jim came down the dirt path and joined me on the bay. He had noticed that Henry and Talley had already gone down the hill to the water as well. Later, they would pull and push their old cart, hopefully full of fresh mullet, back up the hill to the ice house next to the road that ran in front of both our houses.

  “If they get back in time,” Jim said quietly, reading my mind, “we could plank some mullet by the fire, before you go.” I told him that would be great but we’d be gone by then. There was not a soul in sight, as Mr. Phillips and Talley had rowed completely out of sight. The September air was brisk here on the cold sand but Jim dragged our old skiff toward the shallow water. We slowly crow-poled through the thick grass, peering down through the clear fall water. This had always been my favorite time of year—when time stopped and all the fish and animals were fat from summer and not yet hidden from the cold to come.

  Jim was in graduate school at Duke, studying theology—for a career in the ministry. Jim had participated in the early sit-ins at Duke the previous spring. He tried to warn me what I was in for. “I hope and I think your personality is suited for this kind of thing. Mine isn’t,” he said. “I get too angry.” He was by that time, pretty full of anger, and I was less full of anger, because my makeup was more optimistic. Jim had always been a little darker, more existential. He said, “It’s gonna be really tough, and it’s gonna be tough for you to be accepted. You know, you can be a part of it, but it’s really their thing.”

  I don’t know if I saw it as a good thing that early on, but I did understand that the leadership of the student civil rights movement belonged to young black Southerners. Whites in the freedom struggle should and would be, as far as leadership is concerned, in a secondary role. But, I told Jim that I was not in this for the black people—if this was just acting on a missionary impulse, I wouldn’t survive—that I had to look at it from a different angle. I was involved because I was fighting for my own rights as well. At Huntingdon, I had seen what happened to people when they stood up on the racial issue. My cautious professor had tried to restrain us, but he was nonetheless crucified for his association with us. No, I was joining the movement to establish my own right to fight for what I believed in.

  Jim nodded in understanding as we walked back into the house with our catch of a few crabs. Fried soft-shell crabs and crab omelets were our favorite breakfast. We liked them fried with great big bowls of white crabmeat that had been picked out and scrambled with eggs. Mother also made corn muffins, grits, bacon, hot biscuits and fig preserves. Sometimes, we also had pickled herring and pumpernickel bread, which Dad had learned to like while he was in Europe.

  While Mom prepared breakfast with some help from Jim and me, the rest of the family descended the stairs to the table. Besides Jim and myself and Mom and Dad, there was my next youngest brother Doug, then David and Malcolm. Jim was 23. I was 21. Doug, 18, David, 17, and the youngest, Malcolm, was 14. I was especially close to Malcolm because we had just spent the summer together at Highlander.

  Breakfast was a noisy, boisterous meal. It was an emotional day, and everyone seemed determined to put a jolly face on it. My family would cover up any potentially traumatic or sorrowful event by being very funny, making lots of jokes, and playing tricks on people. My father had gone to boarding school early on, and the culture was to hide any kind of hurt—stiff upper lip at all times. You toughed it out. We had all learned that from him.

  My younger brothers, who were kind of wide-eyed about all this, kept saying, “Bob is going to jail. You better enjoy your last breakfast, because you don’t get good food in jail.” My brothers are a kaleidoscope of images and memories. Baby brother Malcolm never made a secret of his admiration for and approval of what I was doing. Doug, the next down from me, had suffered in silence, following two older brothers’ footprints at Huntingdon, then transferring to Rocky Mount College in North Carolina to get away from my notoriety. But he was no doubt resigned to more of the same, as he stoically supported my actions.

  David, next to the youngest, was getting away. Drafted into the Air Force (as Malcolm would be in two years), he was slated to help Uncle Sam fight the powerful Vietnamese peasants.

  Jim was quiet and withdrawn, even more so than usual. I sensed that this cheerful celebration contained more than a little irony for him. He had tried to become a part of the movement at Duke, and now everyone was making such a fuss over me going to work for SNCC. In Durham, North Carolina, a number of white students had taken part in movement activities; it was, apparently, no big deal. But in Alabama, fewer opportunities existed for whites to participate, so it became a big deal. Jim’s quiet personality had probably made it difficult for the black students to relate to him easily.

 
Mother took no part in the joking. She always remained ethereal on one hand, but strongly spiritual and tough on the other. She had to be, in a family with six males. Also, when we were small and living in the country, Daddy had small country churches and we didn’t have much money. She had to work awfully hard just to keep the clothes clean, and she made sure we all learned how to make beds and sweep floors and cook. I am grateful for that to this day. Many times, she had told me that her secret dream had been to be a missionary to Africa, but she had gotten married right out of college, and like many women at that time, she subsumed all of her dreams to her husband’s. She became the perfect minister’s wife. She also taught school, but that was secondary to Dad’s career as the minister.

  Looking across the table at her, I saw tears in her eyes. She was afraid for me, but she was too strong and unaccustomed to expressing sentiment to voice it. Still, I knew her wet eyes were sending me a message to be careful. In the South, a young man with prospects, from a good family, was not supposed to go off and join the rabble. I knew, and they knew, my actions would not sit well with the Klan—even those who were family. Mother was struggling between being proud of me for going off to SNCC and the movement but also wanting to protect me from harm. Suddenly, I felt a powerful tug not to leave this nest. I worried about what would happen to her, to them, because of what I was about to do. Indeed, later on when I was in the thick of things with SNCC, all of my brothers caught a lot of flack for being named Zellner. They told me that they made a pact to always say, “Yes, he’s my brother, and I’m proud of it,” even though it placed them in harm’s way.

  I felt privileged that my family would give me their support to join the movement. I knew that most of my fellow recent graduates would choose to go on with careers—grad school or jobs. After breakfast, my father and several of his minister friends would drive me to the Butler Street YMCA in Atlanta. I was touched that in some way they saw the Methodist Conference sending me as their stand-in. After dropping me off, they were going on to one of their “core” meetings, as they called their regular gathering of progressive ministers in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.

  We were still eating breakfast when Floyd Enfinger showed up and immediately pitched into the breakfast, gobbling up huge mounds of eggs and crabs and crunching into one of Mom’s fried soft-shells. Floyd’s church, which had provided my part-time job while I was at Huntingdon, was located in a white working-class community just outside Montgomery. Floyd had a lot of Klansmen in his congregation, but he was still one of the most outspoken ministers against the group. Chisholm was a small community and since Floyd’s was the only Methodist church, that’s where Methodist Klansmen had to go. In fact, one of the Klansmen in his congregation was related to Sonny Kyle Livingston, who had made a public vow to kill me and had the confrontation with my roommate Townsend when we were at Huntingdon. The good Reverend Enfinger was committing an act of bravery by coming with us to Atlanta.

  Mom may have been thinking at that last breakfast that I was going to make a missionary-like contribution for the good of the people, but she was also worried. She knew how dangerous it was with her own brothers-in-law as vicious Klansmen who would hurt people and maybe even kill. So she was struggling between pride and fear.

  Then it was time to go, and we all went outside to pack up our ’56 Chrysler with the Dynaflo transmission. I sat in the back seat on the right hand side. Along with all of the family, some of the neighbors came out who probably thought I was going off to graduate school. My brother Jim gave me a big hard hug, and Mom was pretty tearful by that time. The other little boys were running around pretending that they weren’t all that concerned about it, but they were worried about it, too. What I was doing was a decidedly weird thing. I remember looking back at them standing in front of the cabin, and I thought back to building the cabin and all the good times we had there I knew there was a chance I would never see it again. The cabin had become almost a character in our family story, because it was between Mobile and Montgomery and not too far from East Brewton. Now, the little crescent of my childhood—Daphne, Brewton, and Montgomery—was being extended up to Atlanta.

  Before the interstates, one route to Atlanta went from Daphne through East Brewton, and on to Montgomery, and from there to Opelika, then West Point, Georgia, and finally on into Atlanta. That used to be a segment of the main route from New York City to New Orleans—most of it was a two-lane road, up the hills, down the hills, with lots of kudzu-covered forest. Up closer to Montgomery, you come out of the piney woods into the Black Belt, just like a prairie, a large alluvial plain that was ocean bottom for eons. It has deep rich soil, good for grazing cattle, and especially good for cotton. Alabama’s Black Belt is the heart of the Deep South with a lot of old towns, where the rich planters lived and built their antebellum houses. You could still see many of them from our car, up the straight driveways with the oak trees on both sides—columned houses—some gone to rack and ruin and others bought up by people with new money and refurbished.

  Against that was the stark poverty. White Southerners almost never noticed the poverty even though there was always the big house and the little shacks, because for them, that was the way it was. Someone might comment on the little shacks, “Aren’t they picturesque?” Did they even see the people—white and black—who lived in the shacks, sitting on the front porch with cotton sacks hanging up on the sides of the house, and maybe a pile of cotton at one end that they have picked and are waiting to take to the gin. Some of these shacks were called “shotgun” houses, meaning you can see from the front door all the way through to the back, and if you shot in the front door, it wouldn’t hit anything until it went out the back door. Others were called “dogtrots,” because the two parts of the house were separated by an open-air gallery to let breezes blow through against the sweltering summer heat. Another reason was that in summer, when they had to cook on the wood stove on one side, the other side of the house would not be so miserably hot. Sometimes, the shacks wouldn’t have window panes, but instead would have shutters that were hinged at the top that were let down at night or in cold weather. Otherwise, they were propped up, with no screens, just open air. If you were inside the shack, you could look down through the floor boards to the ground where the chickens were scratching around under the house, or where some old hound dogs were resting. Most people kept hound dogs for hunting.

  There was an outhouse in the back and a pump over on one side, and the barn right down from the house. There might be some mules in the barn for plowing. There might be three or four cars in the yard. Most of them were up on blocks. You’d usually try to get the same model car, so that you could take parts as needed for the running car, and as older ones became skeletons, they could be dragged off into the gully in back of the house. The kids were in short pants, no shoes, ragged shirts.

  It was a good ten- to twelve-hour trip, about four hundred miles, to Atlanta. It was really a fascinating car trip for me. The four ministers began to talk and tell stories—some that I had never heard. They were part of a group of progressive ministers who had made a pact that they would not allow themselves to be run out over racial issues. If one preacher was run out, people would then say, “We should be able to get rid of our preacher—he’s preaching the same stuff.” So these progressive ministers viewed themselves like rocks in a dam: if you moved one, the whole thing could be swept away. They took a pledge—We will not go North; we will not be run out of the conference. We’ll teach what we see to be Christianity, and we will stay. The progressive minister knew that the Bishop of the Alabama-West Florida Conference, by church law, was obligated to give the liberal preachers a church to serve each year, unless he could convict them of a formal morals or ecclesiastical charge. My father was one of those ministers, and the pledge also meant that they wouldn’t mind being punished and sent to low-paying charges and difficult churches. They weren’t going to prosper in their profession. They would never have the “f
irst” church, the big church, the big salary, or the nice car.

  Reverend C. C. Garner, one of the older ministers in this group, had mentored a lot of the younger ones. He was a backwoods scholar, almost completely self-taught. As we continued the trip, the ministers all started talking about their mentors, and Garner told the story of Andrew Sledd. Their own little group was named the Andrew Sledd Study Club. Garner said that many of the early twentieth-century churchmen in the Alabama conference were influenced by the Candler School of Theology at Emory. Sledd was a professor of Latin at Emory who had married the daughter of the Reverend Warren A. Candler, the president of Emory. The Atlanta Compromise at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition saw Booker T. Washington embrace the tragic failure of Reconstruction, while W. E. B. Du Bois continued to organize the struggle for economic, political, and social equality.

  By 1902, Andrew Sledd, whose Southerner views had been ameliorated by two years at Harvard, was aghast at the upsurge of lynchings as the new century began. His article opposing lynch law in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Negro; Another View,” turned out to be far too progressive for turn-of-the century Atlanta. Even though his father-in-law, one of the most powerful men in Georgia, had become Bishop, there was no protection for Sledd and he was fired. So Dad’s secret group of activist ministers took Andrew Sledd as one of their heroes as they vowed never to leave the Alabama–West Florida Conference.

  Then they talked about Dan Whitsett and Andrew Turnipseed who were a little bit older than my father, and had led the young ministers into the social gospel, having put some steel into their backbones. The two had spoken out, after the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, on the need for churches to support school desegregation. Whitsett and Turnipseed were both learned and popular ministers slated to be bishops. But after their stand, both were forced to leave Alabama. Whitsett went to Epworth Methodist Church at Harvard; Turnipseed to a big Methodist Church in Brooklyn, New York. Both came back to Alabama near the end of their careers. Ministers like them and in the car with me said, “If we’re going to let our congregations dictate what we can preach from the pulpit, we’ve lost the soul of the church.” They were a part of the tradition of strong ministers taking strong social stands and developing a social gospel.