by Robert Coles
I went to talk with the very storekeeper he mentioned, and eventually came to know him rather well. The Negro student knew him only as a demonstrator does a man of property who repeatedly refuses what is asked of him. I soon learned, however, that the nonviolent student was a shrewd — and in a way compassionate — judge of human nature. Eventually I was able to tell the middle-aged merchant how the Negro youth had appraised his position and his attitude.
“He’s right. I want peace and quiet, and I want to go on making a living. If he knows that, he knows that he’s wasting his time trying to preach to me or demonstrate. The way I see it, he and I are together. Neither one of us made the world the way it is; and all I want is to stay alive in it, just as he does. At the rate he’s going, he’ll spend most of his life in jail, and I’ll go broke. What does that solve for either of us?”
I found him to be a stubborn but pleasant man, a native-born Georgian, in turn a high school graduate, a soldier in the Second World War, and the recipient of a degree in pharmacy. He bought his drugstore with a large loan, and worked for years to own, really own, his business, located in a small town that is really a suburb of Atlanta.
He and his wife grew up together, and fitted together very well. He tended to be serious, even somber. She had a light touch to her voice and her everyday mood. He worried about money and the marks each of their three children brought home from school. She was a devout Baptist and believed in faith: “I tell my husband and my children both that it matters not what things of this world we have, so long as we pray for God’s grace.” (She would often exalt her sentence structure when reproving what she called “the excessive worldliness about us.”) They received me cordially into their home, and talked as openly with me — I became convinced — as they did with their neighbors or, for that matter, between themselves.
Sometimes, particularly when under pressure, her husband fell back upon her outlook. Indeed, one day I heard him, and not her, talk of God with such feeling that I at once sensed I was hearing not only his strongly held opinion but perhaps the (hitherto secret) inspiration for his wife’s piety.
“Who ever stops to figure out why we live the way we do? Those nigra students come and try to talk with me and the other businessmen on the block. They tell us they’re going to sit in, they’re going to picket, they’re going to do this and that to embarrass us, and shame us, and make us lose money, until finally we surrender to them. They ask me: don’t you feel guilty, don’t you feel ashamed for all you’ve done, all your people have done to us? They say if I don’t give in, they’ll make me — by marching up and down, and being nonviolent, and letting people spit on them, and shout at them, or getting the police to arrest them.
“For a long time I tried to ignore them. First I thought they would get tired and go away; then I thought the police would take care of them, or my customers. But they didn’t get tired, and it seems that the more they’re arrested, the more they want to come back.
“My customers were the ones that became tired. They told me they just couldn’t keep on coming in and out of the store, past those nigra students, with their signs and their songs and their slogans. Some of them made a point of shopping downtown, though the drugstores and restaurants there are being picketed, too. Some tried to cut down on their shopping trips. They would save up things to buy, and come here once instead of twice a week.
“I had to close the counter. Who wants to eat with those people trying to move in and eat beside you? I lost money that way, but there wasn’t any choice. Every customer I had would have left me if I hadn’t done it. White people won’t eat with nigras, and the sooner those students find that out, the better it will be for everyone.”
I asked him at that time what he felt about the students. Did they bother him as little as he had been saying, or was he trying to “forget” — at least in our conversations — how troublesome they actually were to him?
Yes, it was true they bothered him, though he wanted very much not to take their actions personally. That was the clue to survival, he felt: “I’ve seen other businessmen knuckle under. They get so angry at the nigras that they close their stores or they start fighting them, and make all their white customers afraid to come near, for fear of violence. Or they try to make a settlement with the nigras, and lose all their white customers that way.”
Why did those customers leave — out of fear, distaste, outrage, resentment, shame? Again and again we came back to that issue; he was obviously interested in discussing it, and I felt that the more he talked about his “average” customer, the more I came to know the contradictory substance of his views, not to mention the customer’s. They were earnestly held views, but easily abandoned ones. Over several years I watched a changing social and political situation utterly undermine some of those views, and make others seem antique or irrelevant even to the man who once proclaimed them. Yet again and again he did come back to certain principles that were consistent.
“Say what you will, people run a store to make money. You offer things to the customers, and you hope they’ll buy what you have to sell. Now this race thing has suddenly come up; I don’t know from where. All my life I’ve lived with nigras, and not treated them bad, nor them me bad. We’ve got along — and recently a lot of them have come to me and told me how sorry they are for what I’ve gone through. Like with most white folks, a lot of the colored just want to live and let live.
“That’s my philosophy: live and let live. You can’t make a rich man the equal of a poor man. Even in Russia that guy Khrushchev has villas and big cars and all that, while the peasants live the way our tenant farmers do, or worse. The same holds with race. The white man is different from the nigra, all over the world he is. They say we in the South are unfair to colored people. All I want to know is where do they really give a nigra the same acceptance a white man gets? In Boston, or New York? In England? (I’ve been reading how they have their problems there, the same ones we do.)
“You go into a nigra’s home in Atlanta and you’ll see them eating well, and wearing good clothes. They have cars, bigger ones than I would ever buy. They have radio and television, and everything else. I’ve seen their drugstores. They sell the same things I do. They have what the country has to offer. Isn’t that enough?
“They try to tell me no — that they’re treated inferior. They try to make me feel as if I’m persecuting them, as though I’ve done something wrong to hurt them. One of them said to me the other day: ‘Don’t you feel that in turning us away you’re being un-Christian?’
“I say no to them every time. I don’t see what Christianity has to do with politics or the customs we have. I don’t want to hurt them, and I don’t want them to hurt me. It’s as simple as that. They’re trying to make me into a slave owner, or something. I can see that, and I told them that once. I told them they weren’t going to get me angry or excited, the way some people get. They want that to happen. It gives them satisfaction. It makes them think that they’re right — that we’ll lose control and give in after a while.
“I went to see my minister and talked with him about this. He said that I had to examine my conscience and pray. I told him I have, and that I can’t see why I should have to make up for whatever troubles the colored man has in Georgia. I’m just an ordinary person. I can barely depend on enough money to pay my bills. I can’t subsidize an integrated cafeteria in my drugstore. Soon it will be segregated again — all black.
“The minister told me that the problem was larger than both of us. (Our church has no colored in it.) He said we both faced a lot of trouble these coming years, through no fault of our own, but because the society is changing and the average man has to adjust himself to it. I told him I was as flexible as anyone — I’m just waiting to see every other drugstore — and church — in Georgia ‘adjust.’”
A year later (1963) he was no longer the besieged storekeeper. He had won his battle, and kept his store white. The Negroes eventually tired of demonstrating in front o
f his store. He continued to fear their renewed interest and attention, and out of his experience he developed an interest in what they were doing elsewhere. He often talked with his customers — and his minister — about “the problem.”
“You know, it is our number-one problem today, the problem. I’m like you — I have to be in my business. I want to know what people think, where they’re headed in their thinking. To be truthful, I think we’re slowly going to settle this thing. We already have nigra children in the schools, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be back here asking me for coffee and Cokes. I ask some of my customers what they think, and I can hear them being as annoyed with the whole thing as I am. They’re no longer as shocked though — any more than I am. When those colored boys first came here last year I thought they were crazy. Then I thought they were hoodlums pretending to be nice and Christianlike. Now, from what I see on television, they’re the younger generation of nigras, or at least they’re some of the younger generation. I still think a lot of nigras don’t care one way or the other. Like most of us whites, they want calm. You only live once, and you don’t want to spend your days fighting.”
His drugstore was desegregated in 1965, after the Civil Rights Bill was passed. He was nervous and fearful when it happened, but also relieved: “They finally got around to me. To tell the truth, I thought they were overlooking me as not worth their while. I told my wife I felt hurt. When I saw them come in I shuddered again, just like before. They weren’t the same nigras, and I thought they might get tough or violent. But they didn’t. They just moved in on those counter chairs and asked for coffee. My countergirl looked scared, and confused. She turned to me and asked me with a look what she should do. I didn’t say a word. I just nodded to her. She knew what I meant. She started pouring. They didn’t seem to want to stay long. They drank a bit, then they got up and left. The three white people at the counter just sat there. They had stopped drinking their coffee out of curiosity. We all looked at one another, then one of the customers said to me: ‘A store is a store, I guess; and you have to serve whatever walks in from the street.’
“That wasn’t the way he talked last year, I remember. But I guess it wasn’t the way I did either. It’s changing down here, that’s what’s happening, and the man in the street, he has to keep up with it, even if he doesn’t always go along with it. I suppose that comes later, agreeing with what’s already happened. Some of my friends say that if we had fought this battle harder, the integration people never would have won. I tell them that we did fight once, and lost. No one ever let us vote on this. We’re all segregationists, the white people of Georgia; or most of us are. But we’ve got caught up in something that’s bigger than us, and we’ve got to live with it, the way I see it. There’s no choice. When I say that to them, they agree with me, no matter how much they talk of killing every nigger in sight. So I guess most people make their peace with things as they are.”
The Last Ditch
On August 5, 1964, a press service story quoted an FBI agent who was working in the area of Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the remains of three civil rights workers were found: “I wish I could have a psychiatrist examine whoever did this right now and see what they’d be thinking now that we’ve got the bodies.”
I had heard a similar remark several weeks earlier from an agent in McComb, Mississippi. A house occupied by several “integrationists” had just been badly damaged by dynamite, and while I was looking into some of the medical problems — two students were injured — the officer was trying to find out who was responsible for the explosion. Standing near the debris with soda pop in our hands we talked about the details of the incident. The officer assured me that it was a serious attempt at murder rather than a mere effort to warn and frighten, and then he turned his attention to explanations. Why would people want to do this? He asked it, then I asked it, both of us less curious than appalled. Yet, slowly the curiosity rose in him, and well after we had finished our talk he came back to the question. Why would anyone have nothing better to do in the middle of the night than plant dynamite? He was clearly suggesting that only an unhappy, a disturbed person would be awake so late, preparing that kind of deed. Perhaps, he suggested, I had some thoughts on that matter.
We each returned to our work, though I found myself ruminating about how indeed I might have explained to him exactly what my thoughts were. As I tried to lay that challenge to rest I kept on coming back to the chief capability we have in psychiatry, the case history. Perhaps if we had had the time I would have been able to show him what I felt to be the answer to his question by telling him about a particular segregationist’s life, including of course the life of his mind.
This man did not murder the three civil rights workers, or plant dynamite in that home in the terror-stricken McComb area of Mississippi; but he has committed appallingly similar acts, in company with many others. He has been in mobs and will not deny having seen Negroes assaulted and killed as a result. I am sure he would satisfy those agents and all of us as a prototype of the bigot who is a potential killer. I thought of him immediately that morning in McComb, and again when I read the report of the government agent’s dismayed call for psychiatric help in Philadelphia.
I first met John, as I shall call him, while he was protesting the archbishop’s decision to admit some children who were Negro but also Catholic to the parochial schools of New Orleans. It was a warm, faintly humid early spring day, a Saturday too, and the next year’s school opening hardly seemed a timely worry. Up and down he walked, picketing, tall, husky from the rear, an incipient paunch in front. He wore a brown suit, slightly frayed at the cuffs, and on its right shoulder rested his sign, wrought and lettered by himself: “Fight Integration. Communists Want Negroes With Whites.” His shirt was starched and he wore a tie. He had brown eyes. He was bald but for the most meager line of black hair on his neck — baldness must have happened early and fast. His face was fleshy and largely unlined, and I thought, “Forty or forty-five.”
Several of those in the picket line seemed unaware of the gazes they attracted. John, however, was the most engaging and communicative. Looking at people directly, he would talk with them if they showed the tiniest interest. He moved faster than the others, and seemed to be in charge, now signaling a new direction for walking, later approving or suggesting luncheon shifts.
We moved along the pavement side by side, he and I. Would I want a sign — he had several in reserve? I would rather talk with him; I was very much interested in his opinions. I felt it important that he, that they, not be misunderstood, and I would do my best to record fairly what he thought and wanted. I am a physician, I told him, a research physician specializing in problems of human adjustment under stress. A little amplification of this, and he laughed — it was a strain, the police and the scoffing people, and those reporters with the sly, obviously unfriendly questions. He would talk with reporters, any of them, so long as they were not niggers, not Communists, because he wanted to be heard. It was important to be heard or nothing could be accomplished. He wanted to do something, not merely have his say, and so he would surely talk with me if I were a teacher, if I wanted to report the truth to the educated. They needed the truth. I agreed. He was visibly impressed with certain credentials which, in my nervousness, I had offered: cards, pieces of paper which I now know were unnecessary for his cooperation. We began that day, later in the afternoon, signs put aside, over coffee. I arranged to meet him regularly, weekly, for several months at his home, or over coffee in a diner. He gradually told me about himself and his life, about what he believed and how he came to see things as he does.
He is a passionate segregationist (“you can put down the strongest, the strongest it’s possible to be”). He has plans. He would like to exile most Negroes to Africa, perhaps sterilize a few quiet ones who would work at certain jobs fitting their animal nature, itself the work of God, he would emphasize. He would strip Jews of their fearful power, sending them off also, but to
Russia, where they came from and yearn to return. There are other suspicious groups, Greeks, Lebanese — New Orleans is a port city, and he has worried about them leaving their boats. Do they try to stay on land? Unlike the niggers and Jews, whose clear danger to his city he had formulated for some time, he had not determined his exact position on such people, or his solution for them.
He was born in central Louisiana, say for example a town like Acme in Concordia Parish. The state is split into its southern, Catholic and French area and a northern section, basically Protestant and Anglo-Saxon. Typically, his father was the former and his mother Scotch-Irish, a wayward Baptist who embraced the Roman Church (the only term used for the Catholic Church in certain areas of the so-called Bible Belt) a few weeks before her marriage. Born their second child in the month America entered the First World War, he was sickly and fatherless his first year of life. While his father fought in Europe the boy was taken with what we now call “allergies,” a timid stomach which mostly rejected milk, a cranky skin which periodically exploded red, raw, itchy, and was often infected by his responsive scratches. His sister was five years older, and she remembered all this. She and her mother, still alive, have told him about his fretful infancy, and he knew it well enough to be able to pass on their memories. His first memory was a whipping from his father’s strap. With his father home from war, a second son and last child was born. John was three. He had pinched the infant, done enough wrong to the child’s skin to cause a cry and attract his father’s punishing attention. That was to happen many times, though he held a special place in his mind for this earliest occasion: “My brother and I started off on the wrong track, and we’ve never got along with one another.”
His brother is tall and thin, ruddy-faced and blue-eyed like his mother, wears a white shirt to a bank teller’s job near their hometown. John, dark and short like his father, has several “blue-shirt” skills which at various times he has used. “I can build a house myself” was his way of summarizing them: carpentry, electric work, plumbing, even bricklaying.