The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  For Reggie Robinson’s birthday, in the fall of 2006, we had a fine fishing party in Martha’s vineyard. I took my Ram 2500 4WD pickup to the island so we could drive on the sand. There I met Reggie, McDew, and other fishing friends at a rented mansion. Reggie planned the trip to coincide with the Vineyard fishing derby, but the weather was so hot the stripers were late coming down from the north. We caught barely enough fresh fish to eat, but we had fun grilling steaks and telling lies late into the night.

  For years and years, whenever Reggie and I would see each other, one of us would jump into the other’s arms. Reggie was from Baltimore. He was a street guy in lots of ways—a wonderful, funny, upbeat person and with a philosophy sometimes different from a lot of other SNCC people. Most of them had never had any brushes with the law—we were a nice middle-class group, whether black or white. Reggie had no illusions about run-ins with the law, because he ran on the streets of Baltimore. Reggie never got arrested with us. He would tell us, “You guys go get arrested. I’m out here doing the work. I’ll take care of you.” Indeed his strength was knowing what had to be done in emergency situations, and he was willing to stay in the background. He made phone calls, arranged for bail, did a lot of basic good community organizing. He has worked in D.C. since the movement and has lived in the same house for years and years, which has become a kind of safe house for all of us and a place to stay when we are in town.

  I continue to travel around the country talking about the movement and how we must continue to promote justice and freedom for the people in the United States and the rest of the world.

  My friend Maggie Donovan and I were talking about the mess our society is in since Hurricane George struck America’s shores eight years ago and the huge mess that continues today. We take comfort from Ella Baker’s words—“We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest Until it Comes.” Maggie said she was really tired and having some health problems and was going to have to take some time off from a heavy teaching load. She was feeling bad about this turn of events but had reinterpreted Ms. Baker’s words to mean that if she has to rest for a while, there are others who will take up the slack. We do this for each other and we will not rest “until freedom comes.”

  Epilogue and Acknowledgments

  People say that I must have suffered a lot for my principles. They are often surprised when I laugh and tell them that my family suffered more than me. Far from suffering for my beliefs, I count it as a blessing that I was privileged to participate in one of our country’s greatest struggles. Until I began to question my brothers about their experiences during the upheavals of the sixties, I never understood how they and Mom and Dad had simply sucked it up and endured the slings and arrows from my outrageous fortune. If you think the British are the owners of the stiff upper lip, you don’t know my part of the South. The endless courage and support from my family is reflected in this book. I am forever humbled and grateful to them.

  My father developed a brain tumor and entered a steady decline. He had retired from the ministry and two years later collapsed in the pulpit while preaching as guest minister at the Government Street Methodist Church in Mobile. After a nonmalignant tumor was removed, he and Mom moved in with Suzanne and Mal, who aided them with love and dedication. From the time Dad collapsed with the brain tumor until he died, Mom took care of him. The tumor and surgery left him with scrambled speech—a particularly bitter pill after a lifetime of delivering exactly the right word at the right time with the right modulation. I always thought rather cynically that the Lord had played a trick on Dad. He had served God faithfully for more than forty years and now, Job-like, he was being tested instead of enjoying twenty years of retirement ease.

  Mother was a saint in the face of Dad’s black moods and his ever-present frustrations. The only time he could put words in the correct sequence was when he was furious. At these times he would lash out! In a detached part of my brain I would say, “Oh yes, the speech center of Dad’s brain is scrambled, not his anger center.”

  Mom watched Dad slowly give up the fight to live. As his death approached, Mom called us to the Seven Z’s cabin to give him permission to leave. The hospice nurse told us that several days before, Dad had seemingly made a rational decision to stop eating and drinking. He was ready to meet the deity he had labored for all these years, and I’m sure he expected to receive a commendation from his Commander-in-Chief for a job well done. He died October 5, 1996. After his death, Mother began to show signs of frailty and Alzheimer’s disease. She lived with Mal and Suzanne until she died on April 19, 2005.

  Years before I had asked Dad if he expected to see some of his fellow preachers of the segregationist faith up there. He thought before saying he knew he would see Fletcher McLeod, Garner, and the others who had fought the righteous fight for equality in the church, but he wasn’t sure that Red Hildreth and the Bob Jones crowd would make it through the pearl-studded doors. Then he laughed and said, “What the heck, I won’t be surprised at all if God forgives those suckers and has them playing harps right along with the rest of us.”

  While Daddy was fading away and later when Mom was beginning her own decline, we had many joyful family gatherings. Suzanne would cook up a storm and Mal would fire up the outdoor fireplace and barbeque pit which he built in their courtyard under a huge live oak. While the well-cured oak and hickory burned down to magenta and gray coals, he and I and his boys would drive down to the fish shack on Fly Creek in Montrose for fresh shrimp and crabs.

  Whenever I went down home for a visit, I would walk with Mom past Mal’s tin-roofed cabinet-making shop, toward the grape vine which had remained for sixty years in the same place curling around the old cedar sapling runners. We would pause and remember the good times the Zellners and the Phillipses and all the Hardy-Zellner clan had enjoyed while gathered near the old arbor for all-day singing and dinner on the grounds, with the food spread on white table cloths over wide boards laid across sawhorses.

  Mom could remember the old days better than the present. As we approached the old cabin I thought how small and forlorn it looked. It was a bit saggy then, being vacant, but Mom’s eyes would brighten and her pace quicken. Past the ancient azalea bushes, now thick and tall, she retrieved the mail from the battered mailbox by the road, then she’d turn to enter the Seven Z’s. Inside it was the way she left it when she reluctantly moved across the yard to Mal and Suzanne’s. The oversized fireplace with its ten-foot mantle exuded the same elegance and utility it demonstrated when its first fire was proudly laid by Dad some fifty years before. Swallows have now built mud nests in the massive chimney and their red dirt droppings cover the cold hearth.

  During each visit I would take Mom for a drive in the country. When Margaret and Katie were along we would pile into one of the many vehicles around the Zellner compound and head out. Baldwin County roads made Mom reminisce about her years driving the dirt tracks when she served as a visiting teacher to handicapped and shut-in children. Driving to Dad’s grave just outside Loxley, Alabama, where Mom’s mother and dad lived and had died in their retirement home, she would point to a country cabin high on a hill. “Margaret and Katie, that’s where little Clyde lived,” she’d say, “He would always be in his chair on the front porch waving and clapping. He’d always smile so big, he was that happy that ‘teacher was here.’”

  At the cemetery, Mom would softly say, “Here they are,” pointing to a low stone that was inscribed “Rev. James Abraham Zellner and James Hubert Zellner” (Brother Jim). The last name on the three-person plot read “Ruby Rachael Hardy Zellner.”

  Mom always said the same thing: “It does make me feel funny to see my name there already, but it was cheaper to have them put it on at the same time as Daddy’s and Jim’s.” Then, pointing to four little plots near Dad’s and Jim’s feet, she said, “Bob you are over here. Doug, David, and Mal are next to you over there.” It gave her comfort to think we’d all be together after the last of us entered th
e fog bank.

  After “seeing” Daddy and big brother Jim in their red-dirt plot overlooking a small creek and a cotton field, Mom, the girls, and I would wend our way among the modest headstones to pick out the graves of Granddaddy and Grandma Hardy lying next to Uncle Hubert and Aunt Rosetta. Uncle Harvey slumbered a few yards away beneath an incongruously large headstone adorned with a very handsome ceramic of him in his Sunday best. They said his likeness would last for a thousand years, but Cousin Jane and Aunt Lois were told they paid way too much for it.

  My brother Jim, the oldest of the five Zellner boys, had entered the ministry like Dad and strove mightily to live up to Dad’s expectations. Jim excelled at Duke Divinity School and served a small country church in Rocky Mount to hone his preaching skills and make a little money for graduate school. Jim started drinking and smoking, but the good church folks didn’t take kindly to their preacher drinking or, even worse, smoking tobacco. Jim laughed and pointed out that tobacco grew right up to the church door, being about the only cash crop worth raising in those parts. The hypocrisy he saw was enough to run him out of the ministry. After Duke, Jim figured the right thing for a well-educated young single man was to make leather sandals, belts, and purses for the wealthy young flower children not attending classes in Durham and Chapel Hill. Listening to progressive jazz, brother Jim hung out at the Null and Void coffee house giving occasional readings and acting in little plays. A fierce anger was building in him about the way black people and misfits were treated and about the growing obscenity of Vietnam.

  My beloved big brother then became an expatriate in Germany and returned to the U.S. only for short visits. He worked on his little farm, making leather goods and developing a thriving antiques and repair business. In the early 1980s, he and his German wife came to spend some days with me with me and my partner, Judy Irola, in Paris. The last time I saw Jim, we stood for a picture in front of Notre Dame on the banks of the Seine. I later received a tape he recorded as he suffered through the last days of lung cancer. His voice, still strong, talked about his struggle to understand. He died February 8, 1991, in Wartburg, Germany, after telling us, “I don’t know what might be on the other side, but I am interested to see.”

  Using that Southern metaphor of the great beyond, I hope our beloved brother Jim and our underestimated and often-unappreciated parents, James Abraham Zellner and Ruby Rachael Hardy Zellner, will look down with approval on my effort at telling this story. Since Jim led the way to Huntingdon in 1955, my treasured old-fashioned, happy nuclear family has scattered to the winds. I thank my remaining brothers and their wonderfully giving and forgiving wives for the excitement and concrete assistance they have brought to this project.

  Doug, my next brother, is a retired social worker. He followed the family tradition of willingness to tackle almost any job by working in almost every setting, client group, and program in the health and human services field. In both direct service and administrative positions he was an advocate for disadvantaged individuals and groups. Doug married his college sweetheart, Judy, a gifted photographer and the mother of my nephews, Davey, a builder, and Mike, the marine. Doug and Judy lived in the South until his retirement, then moved to Indiana and later to La Jolla, California. For this book, Doug and Judy corrected much of the family history and offered their photos and extensive family archives.

  Brother David served in the Air Force in Guam in 1964 before the bombing began in Vietnam. He lives in Rockford, Tennessee, with his wife, Ruth. They met in New Orleans while David worked as head mechanic at a paper plant. He and Ruth have two boys, Mark and Jason, and have recently adopted Ruth’s great-niece. While I worked on the book, David and Ruth provided photos, family lore, and joyful enthusiasm, and played host to the entire writing and publishing team. They fed Chuck McDew and me more than once. Thanks to the good food and fellowship, Chuck adopted our Tennessee family branch as his own.

  Mal, the youngest, was drafted into the Army in 1966. He was an MP serving at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver. The military considered him a a security risk because of my civil rights work, prompting an investigation that took so long that he did not have enough time left in service to be sent to Vietnam. He now lives in Daphne at Mom and Dad’s old home place where he works as a builder, designer, and cabinet maker. Malcolm’s wife Suzanne works with Catholic Charities, most recently aiding victims of Hurricane Katrina. Mal is a Catholic deacon, and performs weddings and funerals. I feel immense gratitude to Malcolm and Suzanne. They cared for Mom and Dad with love during their last years while preserving the core of the family archive in the old Seven Z’s cabin. They have become the darlings of the Wisconsin State Archives in Madison and, incredibly, the library and archives at Bob Jones University. When Mal carried pictures of Dad with Bob Jones in Europe to the BJU library in South Carolina, the archivists said they had the same pictures but could not identify the young men in the pictures. Mal said, “Well that’s Dad right there standing next to Dr. Bob Jones.” Mal and Suzanne have five children, Francis, Ashley, Rachael, and the twins, Peter and Stephen, all of whom graduated from Alabama’s super-advanced state boarding high school for science in Mobile.

  Dottie Zellner lives in Manhattan and I am proud that she is the mother of our two fine daughters, Margaret Rachael and Cathrin Ruby. Dottie fights for the rights of all people, including the Palestinians, showing the courage she consistently displayed during the gloomiest days of the freedom struggle in this country. In the years we were a family, Dottie, Margaret, Katie and I were a team of sculptors chipping away the granite of Southern segregation. A redneck Southern scalawag romanced the beautiful Northern Jewish school-marm-red-diaper-baby. With the resulting two movement diaper babies, Marg and Katie, the four of us sallied forth to battle the bloody dragon of American apartheid.

  I could write a whole book about the accomplishments of our super daughters. This history is for them and their generation; I hope they will someday pass it along. My love and gratitude goes to them.

  Katie and Margaret are doing well in their careers and I am proud of them. Both live on the upper west side in Manhattan. In the family tradition, they have chosen to serve others. Katie worked for a number of years as a staff assistant in a day treatment program for developmentally disabled adults. She now works in a nonprofit organization taking care of homeless and disadvantaged people in New York City. Katie also uses her skills in computer medical record keeping and research.

  After graduating from Brown University, Margaret got a master’s in Latin-American studies. Following psychoanalytic training, she was certified as a practicing psychoanalyst, conducting much of her therapy in Spanish. She has now completed a PhD in neuropsychology at Queens College, which happens to be the alma mater of both her mother and her step-mother. She is active in a growing movement to bring together neuroscience and psychoanalysis with practical application in addiction therapy. Abby Rockefeller and the Brothers Fund supported the GROW Project. Margaret worked with Peggy Rockefeller and Roberto Mizrahi while working her way through Brown. With her new degree, Dr. Maggie Zellner is now ensconced in the Rockefeller Laboratories in Manhattan.

  I have been saddened over the years by the loss of people dear to all freedom lovers and to me. Deaths now come with quickening regularity. Clifford Durr died in 1975; Virginia in 1999. They are memorialized with an annual civil rights lecture series in Montgomery. My mentor and great friend, Anne Braden, died in 2006; Anne set a high-water mark of dedication that has no equal in the movement. Catherine Fosl, her biographer, has founded an institute in Louisville to honor Anne, her family, and her work. It is often said of soldiers that when they go off to war, the family goes with them. Families of civil rights workers also served. James Forman died in 2005, as did Jack Minnis. Joanne Grant Rabinowitz died in 2005 and Victor Rabinowitz in 2007; they were longtime friends and co-midwives of my memoir, not to mention stalwarts of the movement. There are many, many more I could mention here and some of
us are working to make sure that they are known and celebrated through the Freedom Curriculum project.

  Thankfully still among the living are many to whom I owe debts of gratitude for friendship and support. I have already mentioned the chair of my dissertation committee, Professor Larry Powell, along with an activist friend, Lance Hill (now Dr. Hill), who were responsible for getting me into the History graduate program at Tulane University. They set me on the path leading to completion of this book.

  Even before Tulane, however, I was already thinking about writing a memoir. Jeff Jones was the first to help me pull it together. He and fellow SDS Weather Underground activist Eleanor Stein shared a country hideaway with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn in upstate New York. They gave cinematographer Judy Irola and me the use of a converted chicken coop down the hill from their estate, Red Hawk. The tiny cabin had lights and a small refrigerator, but no running water. I spent winters there writing close to the wood stove where Judy and I cooked. The years I spent planting the vegetable garden with the help of the Ayers-Dohrn and the Jones-Stein kids, along with Katie and Margaret, helped me survive some severe post-traumatic stress disorder. The freedom to roam the woods harvesting meals of squirrel and venison, while spending priceless time with Katie and Margaret provided the serenity I needed to join a twelve-step program and become a real friend of Bill’s.