The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  The behavior of the four men on the trip was a revelation to me; they were “off stage,” and it was fun. Dad was uncharacteristically quiet, but I sensed he was proud of me. Fletcher McLeod and Dad had been comrades in arms during the battles inside the church for integration and a more socially significant ministry. Floyd Enfinger, of the generation between me and Daddy, had chosen the ministry under Dad’s preaching of the social gospel. Daddy had baptized young Floyd by totally immersing him in the cold clears waters of Hurricane Creek, which flowed past the Hurricane Methodist Church on its short trip to the Gulf of Mexico. At about the age of nine I gave my soul to the Lord as Daddy dunked me in the same little creek out from Hurricane, Alabama. Being baptized in the same creek by the same minister always made me feel close to Reverend Enfinger.

  These men really believed what they preached, and they knew a person could get into trouble acting on those beliefs. The good feeling and banter, as we whizzed along old Highway 31 going north toward Montgomery, centered on the reality that a new generation was going forth to do battle for the cause. They felt both concern and responsibility because I was following in their footsteps, putting their teachings into action. Grown up now, and going forth to make my mark, I was grateful for the presence of Floyd and Fletcher. I knew I needed to speak volumes to my father. I sensed it would be awkward without the others.

  Dad told the story of how C. C. had helped wean him from the Klan when he was still a kid preacher. Dad had apparently told Garner that Klansmen sometimes did good things like taking up a collection for farmers about to lose their land to the bank. Garner argued that cooperatives would help the farmers, but the collective efforts needed broad membership to be effective. Dad said C. C. then asked him (Dad was trying to build cooperatives through the CROP program of the Methodist church): “Who do you think is doing the most to weaken those coops and keep them from spreading?”

  Then he answered his own question, “The banks are, the people who own things. And who do you think is doing the most to help the bankers keep the coops weak?” he asked my father. “The Klan.” Then Garner gave my father The Lesson, paraphrasing from Booker T. Washington’s famous aphorism, a lesson Daddy now passed to me through the story. “Look, James Abraham,” Garner had said, “If you want to spend your time holding the Negro down, you can do that. You’ll be able to hold that dark brother down in the ditch all right, and you’ll be on top of him, but you’re still down in the ditch with him, and don’t forget that the rich man is clean and walking down the middle of the road laughing at both of you in the ditch.”

  Then C. C. Garner himself told about his first year of retirement. He had just retired to Stockton, which was just up the Mobile River from Daphne. He had always loved that area because he had served a church at Canoe, Alabama, and at Atmore, not too far away, and close to the Indian reservation where he had a lot of friends. He started going to the Stockton Methodist church, and the congregation knew him by reputation as a nigger lover, an integrationist, and a wild radical when it came to the gospel, so they did their best to discourage him from attending their church. They knew he had a bladder condition and had to pee frequently. On the second or third Sunday that he went to church there, they had the bathroom locked with a sign on it, “Out of Order.” He inquired about the problem the first Sunday and said he had to go out to the woods and pee and then come back. The next week, somebody told him that there was nothing wrong with the bathroom, that they were trying to discourage him from coming to church. So, he told us “The next Sunday, I conducted a pee-in. I went over to the bathroom door, and sure enough it was locked, so I just walked out to the front of the church and stood on the stoop. I unzipped and let her fly; peed right off the stoop. Everybody was so shocked and mortified, nobody said anything, but the next Sunday the door was open on the bathroom and it was fixed. That direct action really does work.”

  When we were going by Phenix City, the talk turned to John Patterson, the governor of Alabama, whose father had been a crusading attorney in Phenix City, also called Sin City, USA, because of mob-controlled gambling, prostitution, and drugs that catered to the soldiers stationed at huge Fort Benning, Georgia, just across the river. Patterson’s father was assassinated there, and Patterson had become attorney general and then governor, but in addition to the passionate crusading of his father, he became a passionate segregationist. For a while, Patterson had hitched his star to the John F. Kennedy political wagon, but when integration became an issue, he became a flaming bigot and demagogue. When the Freedom Rides came through Alabama, Patterson saw the opportunity of polishing his own image by fighting federal power. He got into a huge fight with Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy. My father bemoaned the fact that Patterson was another person with a chance to be a leader and make a difference on the side of peace and racial harmony and desegregation, but he refused to do that. Fletcher McLeod called Patterson “sorry-assed” and talked about how his stand had made it difficult on people like them—stirring up a lot of hate in peoples’ hearts and making them think that violence was a good thing.

  Then the riding preachers tried to top each other on biblical jokes, testing each other. “When was money first mentioned in the Bible?” “That was in Genesis when the dove brought the green back.” “When was tennis first mentioned in the Bible?” “Oh, that was when little David served in the courts of Saul.” “Who was the smallest man in the Bible?” “Knee-high-miah.” The topper was, “Oh, no the smallest man in the Bible was the Roman centurion who went to sleep on his watch.”

  Thus went our trip to Atlanta. Jim Forman, SNCC’s incoming executive secretary, had told me to go to the Butler Street Y and get a room. That Negro YMCA was in the “Sweet Auburn” area of Atlanta—the heart of the black business district. We saw a white guy on Peachtree Street, which was only a couple of blocks away, but when we asked for directions, he just didn’t believe that we wanted to go to Auburn Avenue, telling us it was a “nigra” area. Fletcher, who had been not-so-secretly nipping from a pint of bourbon under his seat, said to the gentleman, “Yeah that’s the one. We’re applying for membership. Do you think we’ll pass?”

  When we got to the Y, my traveling companions all got out and walked around for a few minutes, and then came in with me. They stood around the lobby and checked out the place while I got my key. It was a little disconcerting, because they had been the ones who had taught me and taken care of me for so long. Then they said they were going to press on to Lake Junaluska in North Carolina for one of their core group meetings. Dad made sure I had enough money. I had twenty-five or thirty dollars from the collection taken up from my friends and family. It cost fifty cents a night at the Y, and you could get a meal for a dollar and a quarter to a dollar and a half. Once Forman got there, I could start getting my salary, so I felt that I had enough.

  Dad made me promise to let him know what was going on, thinking that some of his FBI and other contacts might be of help (though years later, he said they were a bunch of nogoodniks, a bunch of criminals). He actually gave me a hug, which was unusual. First we shook hands. Then he said, “Oh, well,” and he hugged me. Then all the other preachers came up and shook my hand and gave me a hug—“You’re gonna be our guy,” Enfinger said. “You know, you’re doing something that we would all love to do, but we ’re too old. But we’re in the same trench with you. And we’re gonna be back in Alabama, fighting it out there every day with the people in our churches and boards, and you’re gonna be our representative on the front lines.” So I always felt that I was representing the whole Alabama-West Florida Conference in the movement.

  They got in the car and drove off, and I waved at them from the sidewalk. I was excited. “Here I am in the biggest town I have probably ever been in outside of New York City, and I don’t think I know a single person here except the person I just got a key from.” I felt completely free, free and light as a feather, and yet very much alone—about to start a whole new life. I was blissfully u
naware that in only a few weeks I would possibly be facing my last day on earth.

  When I had first gone to the Y desk, the man behind the counter asked dubiously if I wanted a room and looked at me a little strangely, especially with all these white men in suits, preacher-looking types. I told him that Jim Forman had sent me and the men were my preacher friends who had delivered me to start working for SNCC.

  He immediately warmed up. He told me all the ropes. He said, “You’ll be fine as long as you’re here. Mr. Forman asked me to tell you two or three places around here where you can eat. They’ve got a charge account at one of the places.” He recommended a wonderful barbecue place. There were a few white places around, but mostly the neighborhood was completely black.

  My room at the Y was spare and simple. I hadn’t been in jail at that point, but I learned later on that it was a little bit larger than a jail cell, about eight feet by twelve feet, with a three-quarter bed, a little night table, a Gideon Bible, a linoleum floor, and a window that opened onto a little alley, so it was quiet. There was also a sink beneath a small medicine chest. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall. The bathroom and shower were down the hall. The other residents were a little curious. At first, they thought I was a foreigner from Europe. Then they heard me speak in my thick Alabama accent, but when I told them I was working for SNCC, everything was fine.

  9

  Briefcase and Broom

  The next morning, I got to the SNCC office around 7:30 to meet Ed King, who had been filling in as the interim executive secretary pending Jim Forman’s assuming the position. The office was in a storefront on Auburn Avenue, around the corner from the YMCA. A door opened from the street into a hallway with a beauty parlor on the left hand side. On the right was a little room, not much bigger than my room at the Y with nothing in it but one big desk, some basically empty bookcases along the wall, one little filing cabinet in a corner and two chairs—one behind the desk and the other in front. Ed King was behind the desk on the phone when I got there, so I waited in the door. When he hung up the phone, he looked up and said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Bob Zellner.”

  “Oh, I was expecting you. Come in.”

  The big old desk took up three-quarters of the room. You could barely squeeze around one side of it, and then it was about three or four feet from the front of the desk to the door. The desk was a gray metal, very utilitarian. Ed was in his early twenties with close-cropped curly hair. He was just a little older than me, fashionably dressed like an Ivy Leaguer. He had on a vest and a blue long-sleeved shirt with a tie. On the back of his chair was a striped jacket. He was very pleasant. “I’m glad you’re here. You came early. You are going to need to be here by 7:30 every morning and you don’t leave before 5:30.” He had a slim-line leather briefcase, and a pad he was writing on. He said, “I’m sorry I’ve got to leave so fast, but I’ve got to catch a bus.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Who is coming?”

  “I don’t know. Just take all the phone messages—who’s calling, who they’re calling for, and what they want.”

  Then he said, “Here’s the briefcase,” and he shoved it toward me. I had assumed that it was his briefcase, but he slid it over to my side of the desk and said, “Here’s the briefcase, take good care of it. Everything’s in there.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just keep it, and when somebody comes, they’ll know who to give it to. Keep it with you at all times. Don’t leave it here. If you need anything else, Wyatt Tee Walker with SCLC is across the street. Moses has a desk over there.”

  “Bob Moses? Is he there?”

  “No, he’s in Mississippi.”

  “When is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know, but if you need anything just go over there and talk to Wyatt, and he’ll take care of it for you.”

  Wyatt Walker had succeeded Ella Baker as the acting director of SCLC. I had first heard of Bob Moses at Highlander Folk School. The SNCC people there said this guy had come down from New York and was doing some work at the SCLC office, and then he went to Mississippi to contact some of Ella Baker’s cohorts. They said he was going around Mississippi to see about voter registration. I knew just a little bit about the internal politics of SNCC, and I didn’t know that the staff was just getting together that fall of 1961. Since the lunch counter sit-ins and the freedom rides had been led by young people, I figured the organization was already a going concern. I didn’t realize they had literally been a coordinating committee up to that point—that the staff was just coalescing. That’s why there was such a dearth of people in Atlanta. Everybody was out wherever doing whatever they were doing, and the staff was just going to come together that fall.

  The office was so tiny that SNCC staff had to meet in the various nearby restaurants which gave us meeting rooms in the back. The main one was B. B. Beamon’s Restaurant on Auburn Avenue, but sometimes we would meet at Paschal’s, on the other side of town near the Atlanta University complex. Paschal’s was high-class; the little places where we ate around the office, we called the greasies. There was a barbecue place with a wood-burning open pit. The interior of the place was black with smoke from the pit, but it was one of the finest restaurants you’d ever want to have a meal in.

  Ed King left within forty-five minutes after I got there. I sat down behind the desk. I wanted to look inside the briefcase, but he hadn’t told me I could. There was nothing to read, so I walked down the hall and looked into the beauty parlor. Only black people were inside. They all looked at me pretty strangely until I said, “Oh, I’m with SNCC.” They immediately said, “Oh, you’re with SNCC. Good, come on in.” They gave me some magazines to read. I got Ebony and Jet and other black magazines. I started especially reading Jet because you were likely to run into the names and pictures of many SNCC people. Jet became my favorite reading material; I used to take it on the bus with me.

  I was trying to find some local SNCC people who knew what was going on, and somebody told me how to get to Paschal’s. I walked up to Peachtree, and then got to the street to catch the bus to the Atlanta University area. I had Ebony in one hand and Jet in the other, and I wondered if people thought I was the whitest Negro they had ever seen. Almost no white people were on the bus. I was really trying to soak up black culture during those days. I was reading The Black Bourgeoisie by Franklin Frazier. One of the first things I did when I went to lunch that first day was to stock up on newspapers and Newsweek, etc. I knew instinctively I could get a lot of reading done in the next two or three days.

  The phone started ringing right away. The caller would just say. “Where’s Forman?” If I spoke, they’d say, “Is this the SNCC office? Who are you?” I would reply, “I’m Bob Zellner.” I guess word had gotten around that they had hired this white guy to do some campus traveling, because at least most of the callers had heard my name. Reggie Robinson called from Baltimore and several people called from New York—“Where’s Moses? When’s he coming back?”

  Everybody wanted Moses or Forman. “When’s he coming?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “I’m the only one here.”

  “Well, when is somebody coming?”

  “I don’t know. You just tell me what you want ’em to know, and I’ll write it out and make sure they get the message.”

  Forman never called in. Nobody ever did, so I just collected this whole stack of pink message slips. I don’t think a single person came into the office that first week. After I locked up, I’d go to the barbecue place for a sandwich and eat it there, or take it back to my room at the Y. I was so lonesome in the room, I would find a place in the lobby with a lamp and a chair. Every now and then I would get into a convers
ation, and I played ping-pong a couple of times with one of the residents.

  One morning when I had been in the office almost a week, I sensed someone’s presence, looked up, and standing just outside the door looking in was Forman, although I had no idea who he was at the time. I just said, “Hello, come in. Who are you?”

  Without saying who he was, he said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Bob Zellner.”

  “Of course you are. I expected you would be here. I’m James Forman.”

  “Oh, Mr. Forman, please come in.”

  I jumped up from behind the desk and walked around in front and I took the seat in front of the desk. He had a duffel bag and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He stood there a minute, and I pointed to the chair behind the desk and said, “Why don’t you sit over there?”

  He said okay, and then he put his bag in the corner and his tape recorder on the desk. He sat down kind of warily. I stood up and pushed the briefcase toward him and said, “Here’s the briefcase.”

  He said, “Oh, the briefcase.”

  “Yeah, the briefcase.”

  He looked at it a little bit. Then he said, “What’s in the briefcase?”