The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Later, when the protests started in Americus during her high school years, Deanie tried to stay away from the controversies. “Our father kept us sheltered from all that, so we were kind of ignorant about things,” she remembered. “I was more interested in when I was going to get my hair done for Friday night.”

  Then the troubles spread to her congregation, and she could ignore them no more. Deanie’s family attended First Presbyterian Church on Jackson Street, where her father, Crawford Dudley, served as an elder and Sunday school superintendent. In those days of flux and unrest, every white church in town knew that black worshippers would soon appear at their sanctuary doors to gauge their commitment to Christian brotherhood. The largest congregations—First Baptist and First Methodist, where Joseph, David, and Celia went—were dead set against even token integration. First Presbyterian was smaller and more undecided on the issue. At first Mr. Dudley was inclined to keep out any civil rights testers. He believed that they would be coming for political reasons, not spiritual ones, and didn’t see any reason to accommodate them and provoke dissension within the congregation. But he kept thinking and praying about it.

  Deanie Dudley.

  One day he called his family into the living room—a sure sign that he had something important to say—and told them that the Lord had spoken to him and said that the church belonged to him, not to the people in the pews, and that if worshippers of a different race wanted to enter the sanctuary, no one had the right to bar them. He intended to say as much at a congregational meeting. He warned that the issue was contentious and that his statement would probably anger some people. It might get to the point where he could lose his job. “We’re probably going to have to move from Americus,” he said.

  Her father’s words alarmed Deanie. It wasn’t that she disagreed; the whole family was behind him. But having to leave town? She dearly loved Americus—her friends, her church, her school—and the thought of uprooting the only life she had ever known frightened her terribly.

  On the day of the congregational meeting, the church was jammed. Deanie was proud of her father as he stood up and spoke his mind. Mr. Dudley was well read, a lover of poetry and literature, and could be uncommonly eloquent for a man who sold Chevys for a living. As a member of the church’s governing session, he voted for an open-door policy, but the panel split evenly over the question. The minister, C. W. Rightmyer, broke the tie in favor of admitting all worshippers, making First Presbyterian one of the earliest churches in Americus not to exclude black people. Soon afterward, a small party of them showed up and were seated without incident.

  On the afternoon of the congregational meeting, Deanie answered the front doorbell at their house and found a church member who wanted to speak with her father. She couldn’t help but overhear part of their conversation, as the man told her dad that he wished he had had the guts to speak out in public about what he knew was right, as Mr. Dudley had done, but he didn’t. He broke down sobbing.

  A few days later, another man widely respected in Americus told Deanie’s father that he really ought to resign his job because his stand on church integration was costing James Chevrolet customers. The man was right; some people had taken their trade elsewhere because of what had happened. Mr. Dudley felt bad about the lost business and offered to resign, but his employer, Woodrow James, wouldn’t hear of it. “Crawford,” he said, “a man’s got to do what he’s got to do. As long as you want to work here, you have a job.” Mr. Dudley stayed at the dealership until he retired, and his family did not have to leave Americus after all.

  The church integration trauma deeply affected Deanie. Thinking back on it years later, she realized that she had drawn the wrong lessons from her father’s courage. He had resolved to speak out, regardless of the consequences. Without really articulating it, she had decided to do the opposite. The controversy so agitated her that she decided not to do or say anything that might complicate matters for her family. That included speaking to any classmate from Koinonia. At times she felt a hidden sympathy for Greg, Lora Browne, and Jan Jordan because of the way they were being treated, but she couldn’t say so out loud. It was safer to shun them. So that’s what Deanie did when she saw Greg in the hallway: she suppressed her gregarious nature and ignored him.

  “I was a coward,” she said.

  ____________________

  After she graduated, Deanie stayed at home for a year to attend Georgia Southwestern College and then married her high school sweetheart, Bill Fricks, the son of an Americus pharmacist who was several years older and had already finished at Auburn. They moved to Newport News, Virginia, where he went to work for a shipbuilding company. She was nineteen and had never lived away from her family, and she had a hard time adjusting to being alone for so many hours. “I went into shock when I realized that my husband wasn’t going to come home in the middle of the day and eat lunch with me. That would have been unheard of in Americus.”

  It wasn’t her biggest shock. Not long after the newlyweds settled in Virginia, Deanie was walking to the laundry at their apartment complex when she came upon a young maintenance man wearing a work uniform. As he passed her on the walkway, he looked at her and said, “Good morning. How are you?”

  Deanie was taken aback. As innocent as the greeting may have seemed, it was a breach of etiquette to her. The young man was black. On the sidewalks back home, at least in her experience, a black man would usually look down or away when he passed a white woman he didn’t know personally; he certainly wouldn’t lock eyes with her and speak in such a familiar manner. Maybe things were different in the Tidewater of Virginia, with all its bases and naval personnel, but she did not like it one bit.

  When she considered it later, Deanie had to admit that she had expected deference from the young man simply because he was black and she was white. “I guess it came out of the sense that I was better than him. That’s what I was used to.”

  There was another dimension to her visceral reaction, one that was rooted in perhaps the deepest American phobia about race. Many of the rules of segregation had to do with prohibiting interracial contact between the sexes. Flouting those rules could be dangerous. People had been beaten and lynched for such offenses, real or imagined. That’s what the Emmett Till case was all about; the black teenager from Chicago was showing off to friends and got a little fresh with a white woman in Mississippi, and it cost him his life. Deanie certainly wasn’t thinking about such horrors when the maintenance man greeted her, but she did feel an involuntary and irrational fear, and it disturbed her.

  When her husband returned from work that evening, Deanie told him about the incident, expecting that he would commiserate with her.

  “Bill, he looked right in my face and said good morning.”

  “Deanie, he was just being friendly. Get over it.”

  “Don’t you understand?” she said. “He can’t do that to me.”

  Her husband understood. He was from Americus, too, and knew the racial customs as well as anyone. But he had formed a relationship during his youth that had broadened his outlook. He took golf lessons from an employee at the Americus Country Club who happened to be black. The employee was a fledgling golf pro who was allowed to play the course only during the early morning hours and was expected to show proper respect to the white members and their sons by not calling them by their first names. He and Bill became good friends during their sunrise sessions. Some people around town told his father that they were becoming too close.

  “I think you need to deal with this,” he told his wife.

  Deanie took his words to heart and began to examine the attitudes she had been raised with: the assumption of superiority, the habit of fear. The next time she saw the maintenance man, she spoke to him first. It was a start.

  Part 5

  Reunion

  chapter 13

  Almost Heaven

  In the fall of 1969, Greg and his brother Davi
d made it as far as Panama before the road ran out and they decided to end their ramble through Central America. They shipped their motorcycle home, flew to Miami, and hitchhiked to Koinonia, arriving a few days before Christmas. It was less than two months since Clarence Jordan had died, and they could see the freshly turned soil on his unmarked grave on Picnic Hill. The brothers had been looking forward to letting Clarence try out the cycle they had ridden on their trip, a powerful, new four-cylinder model from Honda. He may have been a minister and a man of letters, but Clarence enjoyed motorcycles and engines and loved getting his hands dirty. “When we got there,” Greg remembered, “the mood was different. Everyone was still in shock that he was gone.”

  While they were home, Greg and David had to attend to a potentially troublesome piece of unfinished business: the draft. Both of them had been granted conscientious objector status, but they had yet to perform their alternative service. They didn’t know what to expect as they walked into the federal building in Americus and reported for assignment—after all, this was the draft board that had threatened Greg with arrest while he was in Africa. He proposed that they fulfill their obligation by working at Friends World College, and a day later, much to his relief, the authorities approved the request.

  After the first of the year, the two of them rumbled into New York on their Honda, their faces frosted in the middle of a snowstorm, and settled back in at the college on Long Island. Greg wasn’t technically a student anymore. He never received a degree because he didn’t want to write his final thesis about what he had learned during his round-the-world exploration of faith: namely, that there are as many religions as there are people. Now he was an employee. He and David spent the next two years doing general maintenance and helping the college relocate from the old air force barracks it had occupied to a new home on a North Shore estate—Great Gatsby country. They lived there for months with other workers, camping out in a colonial mansion as they retrofitted it for students.

  Greg fell for one of those students, a tall, vivacious young woman who came from a prosperous family in New York. Judy was curious about communal living and was fascinated to hear about Greg’s upbringing at Koinonia and his ordeal in school. He hadn’t told many people about his tribulations at Americus High—just talking about it usually made him well up with tears—but it helped him to relate the story to Judy. It was a way of organizing the bad memories, of finding meaning in the pain. Greg had always exhibited a reticent personality, and his adolescent experience as a social pariah only reinforced his nature. His new girlfriend helped him make sense of his emotions. “She warmed me up,” he said. They were soon living together, beginning a relationship that would last five years.

  When he finished his alternative service at the end of 1971, Greg joined Judy in Europe as she toured communes for her Friends World studies. It was the heyday of intentional communities, a flowering of spiritual enclaves and agricultural collectives that liberally mingled strains of religion, mysticism, environmentalism, and occasionally pharmacology. Although he didn’t want to return to Koinonia as a resident, Greg was partial to communal life and wondered whether some other version of it might suit him.

  The couple’s first stop was the Community of the Ark, an isolated farming commune in the mountains of southern France that mixed Christianity, Hinduism, and an Amish aversion to modernity. They met the founder, an Italian priest who had traveled to India to become a disciple of Gandhi, and worked beside the “companions,” as the inhabitants called themselves. They were all pacifists who believed in simple living and the sanctity of hard physical labor. They spun their own cloth, grew their own food, and used almost no electricity or mechanical devices. It was like a monastery; Greg thought his father would love it.

  An honorary “doctor of prevailing humanity” from Friends World. Courtesy of Greg Wittkamper

  After two months at the Ark, he and Judy moved on to a spiritualist community in the north of Scotland called Findhorn. It was a nexus of New Age thought, the kind of place where they heard people discussing fairies, nature spirits, and the power of crystals. Greg listened with an open mind, but he was dubious about the way the community’s leaders claimed to relay orders from God. One of them had heard of Koinonia and asked him to tell everyone what it was like.

  “Well, we were founded on the principles of nonviolence and racial equality, and we own everything in common,” Greg said, “but we don’t really have anyone who communicates directly with God.” He suspected that last part offended the man. He and Judy departed after a few days.

  They drove across Europe to Turkey and then sailed to Cyprus and Israel, where they took up residence at a kibbutz in the Jordan River Valley. Sha’ar HaGolan was a traditional agricultural collective enjoying a respite between wars with the Arabs. It was harvest season, and Greg woke at four every morning to cut and haul bananas, strenuous work that was harder than anything he had done at Koinonia. He loved it. Sweating in the Middle Eastern heat, alone with his thoughts, he found the exertion cleansing, like a good session of meditation. When the picking was done, there was time for fun and dancing with the other young people. Greg and Judy lived there for five months. As their sojourn drew to a close, he again found himself the outsider, in a good-natured way. “Everyone wanted Judy to stay because she was Jewish. Nobody asked me to stay. It was like: ‘What are you doing with that goy anyway?’”

  ____________________

  After a year abroad, Greg and Judy returned to the United States in early 1973 and found an unlikely new setting to pursue their longing for communal living: West Virginia.

  It was his brother’s doing. The head of Friends World had asked David whether he would like to fix up a rustic home he owned in Monroe County, tucked in the low, green mountains at the bottom of the state along the Virginia border. David was married now, with a child on the way, and he leapt at the chance to put down roots in an unspoiled place that seemed cut off from the cares of the materialistic, war-mongering outside world. Greg and Judy moved in with them, and they were joined for a time by his younger brother Dan and one of their childhood friends from Koinonia, Charles Browne.

  David and Greg Wittkamper getting ready to hit the road by motorcycle. Courtesy of Greg Wittkamper

  They tried to create a community, pooling their resources, growing their food, living the life organic. It didn’t take. Some of their spouses weren’t keen on sharing and bickered about money and trivial matters like one of them using too much toothpaste for another one’s liking. Judy wanted out, so she and Greg moved to a house down the road while he split the communal property with David, a process that consisted of “You take this screwdriver, I’ll take that hammer.”

  The brothers continued to work together, supporting themselves by putting up hay, digging septic tanks, roofing houses, and doing other manual labor for chicken-feed wages. Greg used much of his earnings to buy a milk cow, and he and Judy made artisanal cheese and butter to sell—that is, until the cow got into some bad fodder, bloated, and died. “That was a $500 cow,” he said. “After that, we had nothing left. That’s when I thought it might be time to stop this hide-in-the-wilderness thing and rejoin the world.”

  Judy’s father agreed. He was a lawyer and developer in Manhattan and had been warning his daughter that she and his man had better make some money or they would be paupers for the rest of their lives. Greg told him that land was cheap in West Virginia and that people were starting to buy sites for retirement homes in their part of the state, which had never been ravaged by coal mining. The New Yorker proposed they go into business together. He would find investors and arrange financing if Greg and Charles Browne, who was in on the deal, would scout tracts of land to purchase, subdivide, and market. They’d draw a salary to manage the operation and wouldn’t have to put up any funds, which was just as well because Greg didn’t have any.

  They started with four hundred acres and expanded from there. Soon Greg was roa
ring around the country roads on his motorcycle, meeting prospective customers and showing them to their slice of mountain heaven. The boy from the commune was becoming a capitalist. He was also becoming single again. Greg and Judy broke up not long after he went into the land trade, but he continued the business arrangement with her father. “She always joked that her dad stole me from her,” he said.

  Greg met another woman who worked in their real estate office and married her a couple of years later. He and Sharon settled into a late-1800s farmhouse he was able to afford with his new earnings. Soon they had a daughter, Stephanie, followed a few years later by a son, Stephen.

  As he was starting a family, Greg faced two crises that threatened everything he was building in West Virginia. First, the land business caved in during the hyperinflation of the early ’80s, bringing down the company Judy’s father had formed. Then Greg almost got prosecuted for growing marijuana. In the suspicious eyes of the law, the two misfortunes were linked.

  While the real estate venture was teetering, Greg briefly cultivated pot, as many countercultural types were doing in the secluded hill country. He was a small operator compared to his neighbor, Charles Browne, who was eventually busted and served time in a federal prison. Charles didn’t miss a beat after his release; he converted his cannabis fields into vineyards and started making wine. “I went into a different branch of the mood-altering business,” he explained.

  Greg narrowly escaped becoming a criminal defendant. The Drug Enforcement Agency was cracking down on pot growers in the backcountry, and he expected to see government helicopters hovering over his property at any time. He prepared for them by digging post holes throughout his marijuana patch, cutting down some small trees, and sticking them in the ground like beach umbrellas to keep the illegal crop out of sight. It worked for a while, but then the grand jury investigating Charles began asking questions about Greg. “They thought the land business was a front for pot,” he said. “I think they just wanted me to testify against Charlie.” Greg stopped growing the stuff, and the inquiries ceased after someone else turned on his friend and he was convicted.