The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  It was time for lunch. Mrs. Crabb asked everyone to stand up, link hands, and go around the circle saying a prayer. “Father,” Deanie offered in her hushed, earnest tone, “you have softened hearts and changed our minds about different things, and we are very thankful.”

  The group moved into the dining room for chicken salad sandwiches, chips, and iced tea, Greg sitting at the right hand of his teacher. He said that the scene reminded him of all the days when no one would come near him in the cafeteria, and the others nodded knowingly. Soon they were talking about all the things they wouldn’t talk about in high school: Koinonia and the Klan, bombings and boycotts, all the shunning and abuse Greg put up with. They stayed at the table talking for more than ninety minutes, the conversation becoming so animated at one point that Mrs. Crabb had to resort to an old teacher’s ploy to get everyone’s attention. “Y’all aren’t listening to me,” she said, and then clapped her hands and shouted, “Class!”

  Deanie, David, and Greg at Mrs. Crabb’s house before the reunion. Courtesy of Faith Fuller

  Mary Ellen admitted that much of what she was hearing came as news to her. Although she attended grades one through twelve with Greg, she said she hadn’t realized it was so bad for him because the boys were behind most of the harassment and they didn’t usually brag about it to the girls. A male friend had recently told her about some of the things they did, she said, “and it just made me ill.”

  Greg assured her that he had never thought most of the students truly hated him. They just went along with what their parents believed and bent to the will of the most opinionated among their peers. “I’d say maybe 10 percent had that racist attitude of white supremacy. But they’re the ones who set the tone, who put their ideas ahead of everyone else’s. Everyone kowtowed to the outspoken ones.”

  Deanie, who had been listening intently, felt compelled to weigh in on the psychology of bigotry, something she had thought about over the years. “It’s hard to fathom prejudice. It’s hard to understand where it comes from and how it develops. Growing up, I knew—and nobody sat me down and told me this stuff; you just absorb it—I believed that blacks were not clean and that morally they were corrupt. Y’all understand that’s not true, but I thought it was. That was the mind-set I had.”

  She turned to Greg with a pained expression. “I don’t know who told me this, but I heard that someone had gone out to Koinonia and seen a black woman, and she was in a slip, like it was an immoral atmosphere. There was a tremendous fear of intermarriage in those days. We thought that if you brought black people into our lives as equals, intermarriage was bound to occur, and our people were proud of their heritage and their bloodlines.”

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang, and in walked Deanie’s friend Celia, accompanied by her Hispanic husband, Ron Gonzalez. The two women gave each other hello kisses, and the couple sat down at the table and joined the discussion, which had moved on to their graduation day.

  “We figured you were going to be killed,” Mary Ellen told Greg.

  “I did get death threats,” he said.

  Celia glanced at her husband, who looked like he was staring into headlights, and explained that he was younger and came from a very different background that made it hard for him to comprehend the way people behaved toward Greg. “I grew up in the North,” he said, “and most of my friends were black. When she told me about all this, I said, ‘What do you mean? Call the man up.’”

  Celia wrote instead. As the lunch was drawing to a close, Greg thanked everyone again for their letters and told them how touched he had been as he read them.

  Deanie said they were so relieved. “We didn’t know how you were going to respond—or if you were going to respond. We were concerned that we had really done some damage to you. I’m so thankful you’ve been able to forgive us.”

  “But not all of us have,” Greg answered. “Carol Browne is still very resentful. She said, ‘If I saw any of those kids from high school, I’d smack them in the face.’”

  While it was true that Greg had forgiven them, he wanted these most understanding of his classmates to know that there had been damage, that it had taken time for him to disarm his resentment. He described the nightmares he had experienced when he was overseas with Friends World, the ones where he retaliated in a bloody high school revenge fantasy that could have come out of a Stephen King novel. “I was standing there with a Thompson machine gun mowing down the bunch of you,” Greg said, his voice even and calm. “I was so relieved it was a dream. I guess I had to work it out subconsciously.”

  The table was quiet for a moment.

  “When you think about it,” Greg continued, “if my parents hadn’t been nonviolent, if we really had been Russian Communist atheists who thought that you settle things with military might, I could have reached a flashpoint. I could have walked into that school and shot everyone. Gone down in a blaze of glory. The way I was treated, we could have had a Columbine on our hands.”

  Anne was surprised that her husband had been willing to talk about his nightmares. He was confessing that some part of him had once wanted to kill them all—not your typical luncheon chitchat. But when she thought about it later, she was glad he had done it. They needed to know exactly what they had been forgiven for.

  ____________________

  The reception that night was held in a class member’s home in the Americus historic district, a picturesque two-story traditional with a wraparound porch that exuded southern charm. It was the kind of neighborhood Greg rarely visited as a teenager because he was usually hanging out on the other side of the tracks when he came to town on a social call. He thought the luncheon had gone well—he had been impressed with everyone’s candor and sincerity—but he was more apprehensive about this event and the reunion on Saturday night. Only four classmates had been at Mrs. Crabb’s. He was about to see many more of them, including ones who had not wanted to write him and some who had bedeviled him in high school.

  “Don’t worry about it,” David Morgan reassured him. “There are going to be just as many people there who don’t like me. You’ll be among friends.”

  When Greg and Anne arrived at the reception, they saw Joseph Logan standing out front with Deanie and several others. “Greg?” he said, sticking out his hand. “How are you doing? Do you remember me? Was I ugly to you?”

  Joseph apologized for missing the lunch—he hadn’t been able to leave Alabama early enough—and was genuinely moved to see Greg for the first time in forty-one years. “The character this guy has . . .” he said, and then choked up and couldn’t finish the thought. He regained his footing by making a pointed joke.

  Greg hugging Joseph outside the reception, with Deanie

  and his brother David looking on. Courtesy of Faith Fuller

  “I was just telling folks that I ain’t out to get you, but I don’t know who’s in there”—he motioned toward the house—“and what they might do.”

  “We’ll find out,” Greg said.

  “Well, you haven’t changed. You haven’t run from anything.”

  If Joseph seemed a little overwrought, it was because of what he had been doing before Greg walked up. He had been sitting in a wicker chair on the porch doing an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Faith Fuller. Greg had phoned her after he received the letters and invited her to come to the reunion with a camera. Faith was one of Millard and Linda Fuller’s daughters and spent much of her childhood at Koinonia before her parents left the community to devote themselves full-time to Habitat for Humanity. She had known the Wittkampers her whole life and had been baptized by Greg’s father, whom she requested for the job because she thought Will looked like Moses. A few years before the reunion, she made a film about Koinonia called Briars in the Cotton Patch, which aired on public television across the nation; she saw Greg’s reconciliation with his classmates as a continuation of the story.

  Joseph readily a
greed to speak with Faith, but he was uneasy about doing the interview in front of the arriving guests. “Other people might come up and think something,” he said, his eyes scanning the street. He went ahead and did it anyway, talking at length about the boy nobody wanted to be around. When he retold the tale of Thomas striking Greg beside the baseball stands, he misted up and had to pause several times to recompose himself.

  “He went to some Quaker college and went around the world to broaden his mind—like he was the one who needed that,” he told Faith. “We were the ones who needed it. We were narrow-minded jerks. We had blinders on. I really struggled with whether I needed to apologize to him. Did I hit him? Did I do anything? What he said hurt him the worst was being ignored. If somebody were to ignore me, that would hurt. We were doing the worst thing in the world by ignoring him.”

  Joseph had been right to wonder what some of his classmates would think of him holding forth about Greg in a taped interview. Faith went to every event over the weekend—the luncheon and reception on Friday, the reunion on Saturday—and some people at the larger functions did not like seeing her there with a camera. They expected their reunion to be lighthearted and nostalgic, not soul searching. It rankled them to hear class members like Don Smith, the one who had written a senior English paper about Greg, telling Faith about the time he had aimed a pistol behind Greg’s neck and fired a blank. “She was asking questions about the bad things, and it made some of the people mad,” David said. “They were going, ‘She don’t need to be here. Listen to what they’re saying over there.’”

  It was a complicated weekend for Joseph. As much as he had matured over the years, part of him was still a teenager longing to be liked, concerned about appearances. He was trying to make things right with Greg at the same time he was reconnecting with people he didn’t see very often anymore, especially his old football teammates. He suspected they would not look kindly on him chumming around with Greg and getting all weepy as he told some filmmaker about the way people used to gang up on him. “My classmates are going to see that, and they’re going to resent what I had to say,” he said later, “and that bothers me. I cherish their friendships. I hope they don’t hold it against me, but I’m just telling the truth.”

  On the day after the reception, Joseph and David visited Greg at the Hampton Inn where he was staying in Americus. Greg and David got out their guitars and picked a few tunes, and then they talked for much of the afternoon. Joseph told Greg that what had happened to him in high school was wrong. They embraced, and then he left to drop by a teammate’s house for another get-together. He seemed sorry to go.

  ____________________

  The Class of 1965 convened in the old Carnegie library on Jackson Street, long since cleared of books and converted into an elegant event facility. Soon after Greg got there, one of the classmates who had phoned him, Jeannie Fletcher, reintroduced herself with a surprising admission. “I don’t want to upset you,” she told Anne, “but I had the biggest crush on your husband all through high school.”

  Greg had no idea. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I actually thought about asking you to the prom.”

  “I would have gone,” he replied. There was a deejay playing oldies, so he did the next best thing and asked Jeannie to dance.

  As the evening progressed, Greg began to feel something like a guest of honor. People who had been secretly sympathetic to him in school thanked him for coming and told him how nice it was to see him. Some of the guys who had made his life miserable came over to pay their respects; once menacing, they looked rather harmless with their middle-aged paunches pressing against their Polo shirts. They were friendly enough, if not quite confessional. Greg saw one of the hardest cases standing across the room and made a point of introducing himself first and shaking his hand—still loving his enemy; Clarence Jordan would have been proud. Their meeting was as polite as could be. A casual onlooker would not have known that this particular fellow once tried to kick Greg down a stairwell.

  After they helped themselves to the buffet, many of the class members lingered over a table where yearbooks, photos, and yellowed copies of the Paw Print student newspaper were displayed. David had brought his annuals, including the one with Greg’s portrait scratched out. Some people laughed when they saw the page. David later cut a small patch of white paper and glued it over what was left of the picture so no one would have to confront his youthful foray into vandalism again.

  Anne overheard some of the laughter at the table and was not amused. Several times during the evening, she had to fight the urge to reprimand the adults milling around her having a good time for what they had done to her husband as adolescents. “I was getting angry. I wanted to blurt out things like: ‘Did you ever think what it was like to stand in his shoes?’ I thought they all should have been torn up emotionally. I didn’t want them to minimize what had happened. This wasn’t a bad week for Greg. It was his life.”

  Anne was having a tough time of it. Her lower back had been hurting—she would soon require surgery—and she was moving slowly and stiffly. She probably should have been at home resting, but the weekend meant so much to Greg that she wanted to be there with him, even if she had to do it on prescription painkillers. Knowing few people at the reunion, she spent much of the night on guard, tense, observing. As far as she could tell, there was only one black person in the room, a young man who was tending bar. She sidled up to him and sketched out the narrative between the lines.

  “You have no reason to know this and you may not be interested, but there’s a significant story unfolding at this reunion,” she said. As he continued to pour drinks, she gave him a five-minute synopsis of the tale so far: about Koinonia, the terror campaign, the ordeal Greg went through in high school, and now this scene. As busy as he was, the young man appeared to listen and seemed taken aback.

  “That happened here? In Americus? Well, I’ve got just one question: Why did your husband want to come?”

  The answer came a few minutes later when the music stopped and the president of the senior class stepped up to make a few announcements. He recognized David Morgan, thanked him for planning the reunion, and handed him the microphone. David made some routine remarks and then, in a matter-of-fact fashion, mentioned that one of their classmates had rejoined the fold.

  “It’s significant that Greg Wittkamper is here,” he said. “I think everybody has heard the whisperings of this story, and it’s a wonderful story.” He stopped as applause swept through the gathering. Faith’s camera located Greg across the room and zeroed in on his face, which was flushing and turning several shades of pink.

  “It’s remarkable what he endured,” David continued, “and how he dealt with it and put it behind him even before we contacted him. It’s a sweet story and an appropriate story, and I’m glad it turned out this way.”

  He paused and cleared his throat. “I’m starting to get emotional.”

  Later in the evening, there was an open mic for class members to tell stories and share reminiscences. A few of the women urged Greg to get up and do a song or two. Others weren’t so eager. “Do we have to go there?” one of the men groused. Greg’s brother went out to the car to fetch his guitar, the same Gibson he had bought in high school and taken around the world in college. During his worst days as a student, Greg had daydreamed of becoming a famous folk singer and imagined how sorry his classmates would be that they had treated him so shabbily. In his fantasy, he would put them down by singing the caustic lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street”:

  You got a lotta nerve

  To say you are my friend.

  When I was down,

  You just stood there grinning.

  Now that he actually found himself facing his class with a guitar and a harmonica, the circumstances had changed and the cutting message he had imagined was out of the question. Needing something more conciliatory, he settled on tw
o other Dylan songs: a reunion evergreen, “Forever Young,” and one of the anthems of the civil rights era, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  “I hope you enjoy this,” he said, and then added with a sly expression: “Please, no one boo. I have a fragile ego.”

  Perhaps a fourth of the people in the library congregated in front of him as he performed the songs in his raspy, countrified voice. Elsewhere in the room, Joseph noticed others standing quietly and waiting for the impromptu concert to pass. “I could almost hear them grumbling under their breath,” he said. But the grumbles were not spoken for general consumption. Greg’s fragile ego was safe. When he finished singing, there was no booing, as there had been at his graduation; there was only applause.

  ____________________

  Greg stayed at the reunion until the party was breaking up. That night in their motel room, Anne was aware of her husband tossing and turning in bed as his mind replayed what had happened the past two days and sorted through what it all meant. The next morning, they visited Koinonia and then started for home later that Sunday.

  Back in West Virginia, Greg decided that he needed to say something to his schoolmates—even the ones who were unenthusiastic about him showing up. He sat down at his computer and wrote a thank you note and mailed copies to everyone in the class directory, almost a hundred names:

  Open Letter to the AHS Class of 1965

  Thank you all for the overwhelmingly warm and friendly reception of me and my family at the reunion. It was an occasion that I had decided would never happen. I am moved by all of your words of acceptance and your smiling faces.

  Please forgive me for not recognizing more of you. The lack of constructive communication in high school kept us from getting to know each other very well. I hope this turn of events will change things. I would be open to corresponding with any of you who would want. Special thanks to those of you who have been moved to write or call me so far.