Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  The Integrationist South

  “I’m the True Southerner”: Mrs. Trumbull

  In many respects she is the most explicitly Southern person I know. Her name is Southern, Flora (Searcy) Trumbull. Her speech is as soft, her accent as honeyed as any in the South. In her bones — they are slight and she is a thin and small woman — she is the delicate Southern lady the region continues to venerate and make a show of defending. Her family background is unblemished: in the early eighteenth century her ancestors came to Virginia, then moved down to South Carolina, to Charleston. “That’s where they were during the American Revolution,” she once told me. In that same conversation she rather quietly and wryly reminded me that she was a daughter of both that revolution and a later one: “Sometimes I tell my own daughters they’re going to have to choose when they’re twenty-one — either they’ll be a Daughter of the American Revolution or a Daughter of the Confederacy.”

  Mrs. Trumbull lives in Mississippi on a plantation, “a smaller one,” she apologetically says. Her husband was a lawyer as well as a farmer, and his death, in 1957, revealed to her how very much she had become a Mississippian, and a planter’s wife.

  “I was born in South Carolina, and I expected to die there. Do you know that both my parents made a point of telling my brother and me that they never had put a foot out of that state. They claimed distinction for that, and even said that their parents hadn’t either — though I think each of them had something on the other in that respect. I later found out what: both sets of grandparents had traveled out West, and my father’s father had gone to Washington, even to New York — ‘on business,’ he insisted when I confronted him with what I had discovered.”

  She knew that laughable as the determined and boastful parochialism of her parents was, they were living quite intimately with history, with the temper and style of their generation’s South. “It was fashionable for Southerners to stay home then, or travel only to Europe. They would even justify their travel to London or Paris by reminding themselves of the great sympathy felt for the Confederacy in London or Paris. It may seem absurd to you, but that’s the way many of our present-day leaders were brought up to think. I don’t frankly know how I managed to free myself of such blindness. In a way, it was coming to Mississippi with my husband that did it. I realized that after he died. I went back to Charleston on a visit — alone this time, and so more exposed to people and their views. I found old friends of my age still talking about the wonderful, mystical South, unblemished by Negroes except in the cotton fields or our kitchens. Those friends are young, too, if you think being forty-five is young.

  “One evening I went to a party, filled with youthful conservative segregationists. They knew the South they wanted was gone forever. (I don’t believe it ever existed.) Four years after 1954 they must have known history was moving in the opposite direction. Yet, there they were, talking like my parents, only sounding harsher and more absurd. Suddenly I understood what had happened to me. When, as my mother put it, I went ‘West’ to Mississippi I went from the frying pan to the fire; but I also went away, to a different state with different customs, even if staunchly segregationist ones. (People forget how very different each Southern state’s history is.) It was geographic distance and a new social situation that gave me a real chance to see what nonsense and cruelty I had overlooked all my life — indeed even accepted as fair and honorable.”

  I first met her in 1958, shortly after her husband had died. I was living in Mississippi at the time, and a doctor I knew told me I should go see her: “Mrs. Trumbull is the most outspoken integrationist who has ever managed to stay alive in this state. She’s a well-to-do white lady, unquestionably a Southern lady, and the mother of four daughters. She has gray hair, and she’s a churchwoman, a devout Methodist. Maybe for all those reasons no one has shot her yet. One thing I know, there isn’t anyone else in the state — white or Negro — who would dare talk the way she does — without expecting to die in twenty-four hours.”

  When I approached her house I felt disrespectful for doing so in a car. The home, the trees, shrubbery, and flowerbeds around it, the cotton fields nearby all suggested an earlier, quieter age: columns in front of the fine, white plantation manor; high ceilings and antique furniture bought in the shops of Royal Street in New Orleans; delicately scented rooms where one is sent to be “refreshed”; warm air that must not be cooled, as Mrs. Trumbull puts it derisively, “artificially”; fragile china and carefully brewed tea served by the strong hands of a tall, confident young Negro servant; a sense of timelessness. We sometimes take authors to task for being “romantics” when in fact they do literal justice in describing people like Mrs. Trumbull and homes like hers.

  During the two years I lived in Mississippi I gradually came to appreciate how astonishing her leadership was. In subsequent years, while living in Louisiana and Georgia, I continued to visit her, or watch her in action at a committee organized to insure peaceful desegregation of schools, or at meetings of human relations councils — groups dedicated to what Mrs. Trumbull delicately called “improvement for all the people of the South.” Her voice would ever so gently yet firmly emphasize the word “all.” As she put it once: “You have to pay respect to the possibilities in language. Perhaps we in the South have produced so many writers because everyone, from the intellectuals to the ungifted, has to learn the subtleties and indirections of what my husband used to call ‘race talk.’ Even outspoken segregationists who seem capable of nothing that is refined so far as the Negro is concerned will resort to euphemisms and pretense under certain circumstances.

  “I remember a friend of ours who screamed ‘treason’ just because I used the word ‘Negro’ instead of ‘nigger.’ (I think I was probably the first friend he ever heard do so; and he took a long time to get used to it.) Yet, when he went hunting he wanted company, and the company he most wanted and enjoyed was that of his ‘nigger boy,’ James. They were friends, anyone who cared to look closely could see that. They enjoyed talking about work to be done on the plantation, about everything from the weather and the state of the crops to hunting. They hunted together, too; only the Negro had to go as ‘help.’

  “Well, I saw them going and coming back, and they were companions. They even drank together. The Negro was his boss’s age, and they had known one another since they were both children. They had grown up together. For a while when boys they called one another Jimmie and Ted; but soon Jimmie became James, and Ted had to be called Mr. Theodore, which still makes James privileged, a ‘house nigger,’ as men like him are called — in 1960, mind you. The others, field hands or more remote servants, have to say Mr. Stanton.

  “Anyway, one Sunday I saw Ted Stanton and James coming back; half drunk they were, and as happy and familiar with one another as could be. I asked my husband how Ted could do it, do it in his mind so that James and he got along the way they did. I’ll never forget what he said: ‘There’s not very much logic to human emotions. People do contradictory things, and there’s no explaining why. It’s just in their nature to do so.’

  “I disagreed with him then, and I do now. It’s the one thing we never agreed on, to his last day. I believe that when Ted Stanton talks about needing ‘help’ from James he is behaving in a very logical, predictable way. When I first asked my husband how Ted could do it, I meant that I was surprised at the man’s ability to miss the logic of his own behavior. Ted wants a friend’s company, but he has to call for his ‘help.’ That means Ted, despite all his money and influence in our community, follows the rules rather than makes them. He thinks of himself as a leader, but he talks like a follower. It’s not that his actions are illogical, it’s that he protects himself from the truth that would explain them.”

  Mrs. Trumbull willingly talked with me about her reasons for being extraordinarily committed to so unpopular a cause. She, like Ted Stanton, had grown up close to Negroes, had been cared for and “helped” by them. Her mother had been a sick woman, intermittently confined
to bed with tuberculosis while her three children were growing up. Mrs. Trumbull has two older brothers, both lawyers, both in Charleston, both in her words “conservative and segregationist, but not indecorously so.”

  “Why you and not them?” I asked her — and, as we got to know one another, she asked herself out loud. If she had been a boy she would now have the same social and political attitudes her brothers have, or so she was inclined to speculate: “I’ve thought about all this vaguely. You have to think about what you’re doing when it’s so unpopular. It’s hard to do it though. You don’t want to discuss your motives too much with those who are taking the same risks you are — if you start doing that, you’ll soon stop doing anything else. So you talk to yourself sometimes, in front of the mirror while dressing; or when you should be reading and your mind drifts; or after one of those calls, telling you your life is about to end.

  “I never come up with a real answer. Right now I’m ‘too far gone,’ as my friends tell me rather angrily at times. To them I’m sick, mentally ill. They wouldn’t even believe you if you told them I was sane. They would say you’re crazy, too. That’s how they dismiss anyone whose thinking they don’t like, or they fear. They call the person insane, or they say the ideas he advocates are crazy ideas. Sometimes I find myself going along with them, thinking just as they do — about myself. I’ll remember the quiet life I lived as a child in South Carolina, and ask myself what in those years ever made me the way I am now. (Isn’t that what you’re trying to find out?)”

  “To some extent,” I replied. “Though I don’t think we can fully ‘explain’ someone’s contemporary behavior on the basis of specific childhood experiences. I think we can look back at a life and see trends in it — of cruelty or kindness, of concern for others or self-absorption, of indifference or continuing involvement in one or another problem or activity. Yet, such trends — they are patterns of thinking or acting — come about for many reasons, some of them apparently innocuous, or inconsistent with one another. There may have been a cruel parent who inspired compassion in a suffering son; or a kind parent whose child for one or another cause grew to confuse easy-going toleration with indifference, or gentleness with weakness. Then, as you know, events in the world, and in one’s later life, bring out things in people, or for that matter, prevent people from being the kind of people they perfectly well might have been. So, I think a lot happens in childhood that either helps make us what we are, or prevents us from becoming what others are; but each person’s life — entire life — has to be considered very carefully before ‘explanations’ are offered for his or her willingness to take an unpopular, a very dangerously unpopular stand in full public.”

  Once she gave me a long letter she had written to herself. She had been told by the sheriff of the county that he could not be responsible for her safety, for her life, if she continued her advocacy of “race-mixing.” This time he not only said so, but wrote her a letter telling her so. She started her letter of reply in direct response to his, but soon felt impelled to wander through her past.

  “Of course I have always known that one day a vulgar threat on my life, or my family’s safety, might become much more, a nightmare become real. I have discussed the dangers with my daughters, and though they are more fearful than I — they have more living ahead of them, more to lose — they support my position.

  “What is my position, according to you so likely to cause me ‘serious harm’? I simply believe in the law of the land, in the obligation that every American citizen must assume to obey the courts and the decisions of Congress.

  “You, sir, may find me simple-minded for insisting that Mississippi is one state in the United States, and as much subject to the Constitution and its spirit as any other state. You address me as if I were in peril. You write to me as if I were a confused outcast, causing trouble, but also deeply in trouble with herself, and in need of what you call ‘wise counsel’ before it is too late. My ‘eccentric position,’ you tell me, will ‘ruin’ me and my children. We might very well die, you say; or at a minimum, we will be destroyed socially and psychologically. Fortunately I have enough money to resist economic pressure. If I didn’t have enough I am sure you would have mentioned the likelihood of that ruin, too.

  “I want you to know why I’m doing what I am; why I am ‘risking my life,’ as you have described it, ‘in order to get a few niggers into a school, and change everything around against the will of the people.’ Until you understand that fellow Southerners, and not simply ‘outside agitators,’ want to abandon segregation as both criminal and wrong, you will be as confused about me as your letter was insulting to me.

  “As you know, I am from South Carolina, and I dare say as Southern as you or anyone else in this town. Perhaps it is because I am a woman that I feel the way I do, a woman who grew up with two brothers who constantly made light of what I could do or be. Instead of being their pet younger sister, I became someone they could bully, and call weak. My mother and I were close, though, and in her eyes she was weak, too. She believed that all women were weak because she believed my father, and he said so — often. He was a rich man, partly through money he inherited and partly through money he made in law and investments. My brothers worshiped him, and my mother obeyed him. She was the ‘Southern woman’ you sheriffs are always talking about; the one who is so wonderful and beautiful and fragile and delicate and in need of your brute force to protect her against — of all things — the nigger-lust in every Negro’s body and soul.

  “Actually my mother was silently strong; and my father was noisily weak, so weak that he had to scare everyone around him to compliance, submission, agreement, or at least a pretense of such behavior. Thus, neither of my brothers ever had a chance to be anything but lawyers, and anything but intolerant — about the poor, the North, Negroes, foreigners, and in a way, women.

  “My mother and I were supposed to mind the house, the garden, and ourselves. I remember my mother waiting until my father left the house to read his newspapers and magazines. She used to go to the library to read books — there. ‘Your father wants us to breed and decorate the world, but when someone is lynched I feel a child of God has been killed against His will, and my instinct as a mother is aroused.’ She told me that when I was about ten or twelve. I suppose I must remember that women then had only recently been able to vote, let alone object to murder.

  “When I was a teen-ager my mother wanted to join a group of Southern churchwomen who had organized to protest the wave of lynchings that periodically took place over the South. My father absolutely forbade it, and she gave in immediately to his decision. At least she pretended to do so. That’s where she and I have always differed. I believe that women and men have to respect one another. When I was engaged to my husband he promised me that he would never treat me as a child because I was a woman. He never did, and I will never be able to forget his kindness and fairness. To my mind, the Negro is treated like a child by nervous white people, who feel safe so long as they have someone to step on and generally abuse — women and Negroes, not to mention children! When I was fifteen I told my mother that — long before I read books by historians or psychologists. She smiled at me and told me not to get too ‘thoughtful,’ as she put it. That was her way of admitting how impossible it was sometimes to look at certain problems. Of course, I think my mother would be different now. Women have become much more independent, even among the sheltered rich or middle class.

  “I came here to Mississippi because it was my husband’s home. His family has been here for a long time, and they are fine people. They are now troubled and frightened by my stand. They worry for my life and even for their own, since the Klan does not discriminate in its hate; a family is a family to them. I don’t say my in-laws go as far as I do, even when we talk in the privacy of our own homes. They try to make up for the historical record, for the cruelty that the Negro race as a whole has suffered in the South, by being unusually generous with their tenant farmers and household
help. They have even offered to help them go North, and pay them a yearly wage there until they feel settled. None of the Negroes want to leave though; they are as devoted to my husband’s family as they were ten or twenty years ago.

  “I argue that it’s still paternalism. My sister-in-law and my two brothers-in-law say that their generosity is not paternalistic. It’s hard to settle the point, but I think we all agree that the system, apart from exceptions, is paternalistic, at best. I would rather have a few favored Negroes on their own but poorer, and the rest finally free. My husband always agreed, but he never would say so out loud, and his brothers and sister are like him today, silent about what they think.

  “Since he died I’ve been the one who has taken the risks, gone out on a limb by writing letters and helping form committees, in order to declare what some know in their hearts is right — and others feel is dead wrong. For doing that, speaking my mind, I have been ostracized and threatened as if I were a murderer, or a foreign agent. Even those who agree with me think I am crazy — “emotionally disturbed,” one of them told me after two martinis. Those who disagree with me are trying to find out how much I’m paid by Northern emissaries, or government people. It would all be funny if it weren’t done at the expense of a whole race of people, who have about lost their patience with such antics all over the world.