by Robert Coles
The childhood development of the boys forked: one neat, precise, his mother’s favorite as well as her physical reflection; the other, by his own description, naughty, often idle or busy being scrappy. John in short was an overlooked and troubled middle child. He resembled his father, yet had hated him for as long as he can remember. Oddly, though, his manner, his temperament sound like the father’s as he describes the man and shows pictures of him, now ten years dead, a large blustery fellow, open, opinionated, rumpled, a mechanic preoccupied with automobiles — under them daily, reading magazines about them by night. He had storms within him, and they fell upon his middle child, alone and arbitrarily, the boy felt.
Once John and I had talked long and hard — it seemed like a whole day. I noticed it had actually been three hours. The length of time measured a certain trust, a certain understanding that was developing between us. I found myself knowing him, recognizing some of the hardships he had endured, not just psychological ones, but the hunger and jobless panic which must have entered so many homes in a decade when I was scarcely born and he yet a child. I felt guilty for a moment, torn between him and the simple but of course complicated facts and experiences of his life, and him as he now is, a shabby fanatic. He was feeling his own opening toward me, and with considerable emotion in his voice, lifting his right hand in a gesture which might well have been his father’s, he interrupted our talk of Huey Long’s racial attitudes and how they compared with those of his family: “Daddy [Southern fathers can be “daddy” to their children forever without embarrassment] had a bad temper, and I took it all myself. We had never had much money and bills would set him going, but he wouldn’t touch my mother, or my brother or sister either. Yes” (I had asked), “my sister and brother both favored Ma, and Daddy, he’d feel no good because he couldn’t get a week’s pay, so he had to hit someone. Oh, he was for Huey boy all the way, except Huey was soft on niggers, but I think Daddy was, too. He used to say they were children, and we should protect them. But if they’re like kids, they’re like bad ones, and just like animals, so they’ve got to be watched over. You wouldn’t let a wild animal go free in your home or in school with your kids, would you? It’s right crazy how we forget that sometimes. Look at Harlem, and what happens when they let them go. They rape and kill our women and dirty the whole city up. I’ve been there and seen it. No” (prodded again), “I don’t blame Daddy, because, you see, in those days we had them firm under our grip, so it was different and you didn’t have to worry about them. But look at now.” We did talk about current events for a few minutes, but each of us tired suddenly, and hardened.
Of course, from those old times to the present had been an eventful period for him as well as for the Negro race. He almost died twice. At seven he had a serious bout of pneumonia which — with no help from antibiotics — almost killed him. He recalled gratefully a Negro maid who cared for him through this, one of those (few now) who knew and willingly lived in her “place.” She died shortly after he recovered. Abruptly and looking still young (“I think she was around forty, but you can’t tell with niggers”), she collapsed before his very eyes while preparing supper for him. It was by his description probably a stroke that took her, and she proved irreplaceable. They had paid her a pittance, but she had stayed with them for lack of better. About that time several Negro families started moving North, while others trekked south to New Orleans. Though his father had not really been able to pay Willi-Jean her established wages for many months, only death ended her loyalty and their comfort. “I got pneumonia again when I was twelve, and so did my brother. It nearly killed Ma taking care of us. She used to try to keep everything in its place, I think that’s why it was so hard without Willi-Jean. With us sick on top of it, she almost didn’t get through it all, she got so nervous.”
In telling him of my interest in his medical history, I asked him several times to describe in further detail his fits of illness, and the care given him during those times. It seemed clear that he had, in fact, suffered badly at his mother’s hands, neglected by her for his sister or brother, blamed by her for getting sick. The Negro woman’s sudden death was actually a severe and deeply resented blow to him. His affections for her were hastily buried with her. He had to keep on his guard against his mother’s personality, now no longer buffered by Willi-Jean. During one of our last talks he said, “You know, Doc, I think I did have a bad time with sickness when I was a kid. When I was twelve I almost died of pneumonia, and then I broke my leg a few weeks after that and lost that year of school.” He had tried to run away from home before he contracted pneumonia, and after his recovery, too, until his lame leg made such attempts impossible for a while.
If his mother was nervous, oppressively ritualistic, and hardly his advocate, his father was a heavy drinker, temper-ridden, and fearfully unpredictable. When drunk he was moody. He also became brutal, and his middle son was his customary target. Declaring a truth whose painful implications he could not look at too closely, John once reflected, “I never figured why Daddy picked on me. We got along fine when he was sober, but when he got liquored up, I got it first and hardest. I looked like him and helped him most in fixing things around the house, but he never remembered things like that when he was drunk.” Not that his parents weren’t “the nicest parents anyone could ever want.” Any vision into their shortcomings, any criticism of them, had to be followed eventually by the atonement of heavy sentiment. He had long ago learned how dangerous it was to speak his mind. Perhaps his life, as we now see it, has been a quest for that very possibility. “I used to be afraid to say anything for fear it would get someone upset at home, so I just kept quiet and ran my trains.” Trains were his chief hobby for a little longer than is usual, well into the early teens. He warmed while telling me about his empire of them, and he became wistful afterward. I wanted to hear of his childhood interests, and in speaking of them, he said ambiguously, “I knew trains better than anyone in town.”
By the last two years of high school he had found an easier time. His mother reached menopause, surrendered in her war against dust and for order, and became cheerless and distant. His father now drank less, but had to struggle hard with another form of depression, an economic one which he shared with his country. Amid all this John strangely enough prospered. His sister married poorly, a marginal farmer soon dispossessed of his land. Slothful and malignant, he beat her regularly, fathered two children by her, and left shortly thereafter. She never remarried and has had to work hard to keep her two children fed and clothed. John’s brother had trouble with learning. He left high school after one year, and for a time, nearly penniless, he drew food and small coin from government relief programs. Recently he has managed a job in a bank, but his wife is a heavy drinker, maybe worse, and they have five children. John says they “live like pigs,” and apparently this state of decay set in very rapidly after their marriage. His brother’s cleanest, most organized moments are at his job.
John, however, graduated from high school, the first in his family to do so, and went beyond that by securing a coveted job in the local hardware store. He had come to know its owner and his daughter, too. Always interested in fixing things — bicycles, injured cars, faltering plumbing, stray wires — he began in the hardware store as a willing and unpaid helper. The radio, new and mysterious, was his love, and he tinkered endlessly with the various models. The store had many other gadgets, and it also had his girl friend, the owner’s daughter. He determined at about fifteen to marry her and did so at twenty. At the time of his marriage he was a relatively prosperous man, now wearing a white collar, regularly paid in dollars increasingly powerful out of their scarcity. (“My folks said I married real well, especially for those days.”)
To hear him talk, the twelve months before and the twelve months after his wedding day were his best time. He remembers the pleasure and hope; but his nostalgia is brief, and is always tinctured with the bitterness which soon followed. His father-in-law’s business collapsed, to be foreclos
ed by the handful of creditors who seemed to be gathering the entire countryside into their control. These provincial financiers, with their small banks all over the state, were controlled by Big Power and Big Money, both in New Orleans. Governor Huey had said so, and they killed him. John, with a wife and a boy of three months, had no choice but to try Huey’s gambit — follow the Power, follow the Money. “We just up and moved. An uncle of my wife’s thought he could get me work repairing radios. They were like TV today. No matter how poor you were, you needed some relaxation.” John got a job and held it. He started by going into homes to repair wires or replace tubes. Soon he was selling radios themselves, all shapes and sizes on all kinds of payment plans. He was an exceptional salesman, seeing the radio as a box of easily summoned distraction for weary, uncertain people. He aimed at first not to sell but to explain, tracing with the future customer the webs and tangles of copper, informing his listener of their connections and rationale, pressing hard only at the end their whetted appetite, their need. (“Mostly they were people without cash.”)
However, by the time a second world war was underway most Americans had radios, and his work slackened. In early 1942 he was the father of a four-year-old son, a two-year-old daughter. He owned a comfortable home in a distinctly middle-class area of white frame houses, each bulky, yet each a bit different. Most, though, had green shutters, high ceilings, thick walls, large, long windows, but no garage, all expressions of a warm, wet climate. More likely than not every residence had a single car so that the streets, palmy, well-paved, were lined on both sides just as from a plane’s view the roofs asserted rows of radio antennae.
He still lives there, though many of his former neighbors have moved. For some the neighborhood was out of keeping with what they had recently become. They left for one-storied new houses in sprawling developments outside the city. The emigrants were replaced by others for whom the same neighborhood’s value was defined by what they had just left. There are, however, a few who still prize those old houses, see their faintly shabby gentility and cherish their age and the memories they inspire. For John it is this way: “Those ranch houses are too expensive. Funny thing with a lot of the nigger lovers, they move out into the suburbs and then tell us how we should open our streets to them. I won’t leave and I’d shoot to kill if they ever tried to buy a house nearby.” (He cannot afford to leave. “They” are 2.4 miles away at their nearest.)
The war came as a relief. The economy was stagnant, floundering with too many unemployed. Poor people had bought their radios, and he was beginning to feel the pinch. (“Even the niggers had them. Some of them even had two.”) Actually, he had sold many to Negroes in his years of salesmanship. He had collected money from them and taken showers after he came from their houses. Outweighing such services for Negroes was his participation in lynchings. He’s been in two. His words: “We’d go home to see our folks, and you know in the country things are more direct, and there’s no busybody reporters around. Once I heard one being organized, so I dropped by to see it.” The other time was a rather spontaneous and informal affair. He noted that they “did it real quick like, the way you should. When you draw them out it makes it hard because you might get bad publicity. There are still lynchings around in farm country, I don’t care what they tell you in the papers. We know how to take care of them when they get wise. We don’t use rope, it’s true, and get the crowds up we used to get. We may not always kill them, but we scare the Jesus out of them. You know the buckshot shootings you read about every now and then, it’s the same thing as rope or fire. They know what’ll happen if they get smart.” Did he object at all to this? “Hell, no.”
The Negroes were working for the Communists, any he would want to kill; I must know that. Had there been Communists in his town when he was a boy, during the twenties and thirties when lynchings were more public and common, some of them seen by him as a youth? Of course. The Communists took over in 1917, he knew the autumn month, but some of them had been working in this country even before that. He wasn’t sure how far back, but he thought maybe twenty or thirty years, and they wanted to take this country, its free economy, for their prize. John was capable of broad, apocalyptic strokes: “This is a war between God and His Commandments and the Devil, and we may lose.” I broached the subject of loss. How could God lose? “To punish us.” Why would he want to do that? “We disobeyed him.” Just an example or two — I was interested in them. “Nigger-loving.”
In any case, he was glad to go to war in 1942, for he was accumulating unpaid bills. He yearned for the East — he wanted to go fight the Japs. He wasn’t so sure about why we were fighting the Germans, who were combating the Reds, and might be our allies if we would have them. Hitler’s enemies were his enemies: the Jews, moneyed, slyly alien, and the main support of the Negroes, inferior lackeys who did their bidding for small reward. This was all communism, personified in those hundreds of thousands of hook-nosed or black-skinned natives who lived in New York, in Hollywood. They were the capitalists, too; they controlled publishing houses, banks, and the stock exchanges. Their voices commanded a crippled, traitorous President’s ear, bought the votes of errant, susceptible congressmen. “I was never against the Germans. I was proven right. Look at us now. They’re our best protection against the Commies.” Still, he added, the Germans would be of small help if the UN and integration took over America.
He never fought, though he helped others fight. He did his service at an army camp in New Jersey, a very small distance from Manhattan’s subversion, perversion — and fascination. He went to New York all the time, to look, to see his enemy. He would always tell his friends how well he knew his New York enemies, and his friends, from what I could see, always seemed interested and stimulated by the details he supplied.
From all those furloughs to Union Square, Harlem, and Greenwich Village he managed to return home alive, heavier by fifteen pounds, his balding completed. He worried about work after his discharge, with good reason. He came home to children grown older, a wife with moderate rheumatoid arthritis (“her joints are stiff all the time”). He was now irascible and sullen. His wife usually wanted to stay away from him — out of pain, out of lack of response. She was withdrawing into her narrowing world of routine care of the home and the symptoms of a chronic, slowly crippling disease. To help her she had a young Negro, a high school girl, not very experienced, but not very expensive. (The price of Negroes was rising, along with other postwar costs.) A mulatto, as thin and lissome — I gathered from pictures I saw of her with his children — as her mistress was fattening and severe, she stayed with them for three years, five part-time days a week, until her marriage bore unexpectedly heavy demands of her own in twin sons.
During those years right after the war John found life confusing and hard; and he became bitter. He tried television-repair work, but couldn’t “connect with it” as with radio. He drew unemployment relief for a while, short rations in the face of consuming inflation. Finally, nearly drowning in doctor’s bills, in debt even for essentials like food and the most urgently needed clothing, his home heavily mortgaged, he found rescue in the state government, a clerk’s job in a motor vehicle registration office. Now barely secure, in his mid-thirties, he was free to settle into concentrated, serious suspicion and hate. It was, after all, the decade of the fifties, when many of our countrymen would seek far and wide for subversives — and when the Supreme Court would declare segregated schools unconstitutional.
I met him, of course, well ripened in such zeal and involved in actions based upon it. From our first meeting it was clear that he relished talking, and talked well. He had found comfort for his views from his employer, a Louisiana state government whose legislature, in its very chambers, had carried on a mock funeral of a federal judge, a native son who had ordered four Negro girls into two elementary schools in New Orleans. The governor was a man whose chief merit seemed to be as a banjo player and singer whose theme song (composed by himself) was “You Are My Sunshine.”
John dips constantly into the literature of segregation for support. It ranges all the way from the remarks of a scattering of biologists about a purported inferiority of the Negro on the basis of a supposedly lighter, smoother brain (fewer lines on the all-important frontal lobes) to the pathetic gibberish of the insane. He reads in such allied fields as the frantic anticommunism which holds the President and Supreme Court contaminated victims, even agents. There are always such diversions from the mainstream as the menacing ability fluorides have to erode America’s freedom.
One of the first questions he had hurled at me, in our early tentative moments, was about his son. The young man was contemplating marriage and, a loyal Catholic, was about to attend a pre-marriage instruction course offered by their local church. The church was hellbent on integration, however, and John feared the worst for and of his son. Did I believe “in integrated marriage courses”? I wanted to know more about this. Well, he would kill his son if a Negro came into such a class and he, John Junior, remained. His customary composure cracked (one of the few times I was ever to see this, even when I knew him much better) and he shouted at me. I began to doubt whether he was “reasonable enough” for me ever to get to know “reasonably well.” Yes, he’d kill his own son, he shouted. Would I? I thought not. Still, I told him I wanted to hear more about integrated marriage classes. Well, if I wanted to hear more, he would oblige.
The real truth was that he and his son hadn’t been able to get along for many years, and for that matter he and his wife weren’t now “together” as they used to be. Menopause along with arthritis had come to his wife, heightening with its flashing signals her sense of decline, pulling her from her husband into a separate bed. (He still remembered his mother’s menopausal depression, and he mentioned it when talking about his wife’s health.) Once scornful of even an aspirin, she now juggled and swallowed seven separate encapsulated remedies. Their daughter, his daughter, his great delight for years, had rewarded him with excellent school work and high achievement in pre-college tests. Yet her success in the form of a full scholarship had eventually transported her away from home. Now it was their son, an office worker by day and part-time college student by night, who was about to leave. His family was dissolving, his marriage disintegrating. He was lonely.