Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  One summer evening, his youngest brother, Jack, returned to the house after milking the cows to find him standing in the kitchen waiting for supper. Jack angrily blurted, “How come you don't ever do any of the work around here, how come I'm always the one supposed to look after the cows for you?” George replied in a quiet, toneless voice, “Because there ain't no future in that stuff…”

  But while he waited, he existed within the calm matrix of a village boyhood: a Huck Finn boyhood, like those classic gentle sweet scenes on jigsaw puzzles or calendars distributed by feed-grain stores. The boys plundered watermelon patches on midsummer nights and regularly raided a neighbor's sugarcane stand, often in the company of the owner's daughter, who once at a public holiday gathering bit down on some of her father's birdshot in one of the canes. “I guess we looked like something out of the Our Gang comedies,” says the middle brother, Gerald. “We wore coveralls and Mother made us shirts out of fertilizer sacks, and on Sundays we put on these knicker suits.” They would pass a whole afternoon, sitting beside a creek, with luxurious and tingling speculation about what they would do if John Dillinger suddenly were to stroll up to them out of the tangled brush and honeysuckle, out of the fierce rushing glory of the newspapers and radio.

  Jack Wallace now lives in a comfortable brick ranch-style home on the edge of Clayton-a quiet, mild, slightly shy, but pleasant man, a bit toothy and foxy of features, with heavy black eyebrows over his dark shell-rim glasses. “There was an old man in town,” he recalls, “who, every time he saw us, used to call George governor and me senator.” In his mid-forties now, Jack spends a lot of his time in his workshop behind the house-a snug retreat which he carpentered himself, where, with a wood stove to warm him in the wintertime, he labors in solitude through long mornings and afternoons, hammering, sawing, drilling, planing lumber into such humble but cunning contraptions as butterbean-shellers and wire-basket fish-sealers. His work is neat, careful, stout, spare of embellishments.

  Between court sessions he passes the peaceful vacant afternoon in his office at the Clayton courthouse, sometimes studying pamphlets and brochures advertising new sailboats, model blueprints spread over the legal books on his desk. “Fella always starts wanting to go to Tahiti at my age, you know,” he confesses. When he reminisces about his boyhood, he talks on and on with a soft eager urgency, a steady inexhaustibility (getting up from behind his desk to snap on a light after the afternoon fades away in the windows), as someone who has been stranded for years on an island might talk to the first stranger who found them. “We'd hunt for catfish by running our hands up under creek banks, and kill possums and barbecue them and then give 'em to the colored folks. We got this old guidewire cable once and unraveled the strands and strung them from a tree at the top of a hill to another tree at the bottom, and then we hung an apple box on it with a pully and called it 'The Jolly Ride.' Boy, it would jar your teeth to ride that thing! We would break yearling calves, you know, and then hitch them up to what we called a Hoover cart, something we made out of Model-T rims with a kind of oxen yoke that we made out of poplar trees and pipes. It looked like-wait a minute-” He found a piece of onionskin paper under his sailboat blueprint, pulled his ball-point pen out of his shirt pocket, and then slowly, deliberately, almost grudgingly, line by careful line, traced out a diagram. “It looks like this, see-” He is reluctant to break off his recollections, gently protesting, “No, no-I mean, I'm enjoying it. I don't have anything else to do here.” It's as if he never expects to know such innocent happiness again, such private bliss and peace, as if everything since his boyhood-his circuit-judgeship, his older brother's transfiguration into legend-has all been somehow anticlimactic. Things can never again be as full and good and real as they were when he was a boy. “We did a lot of kiteflying in the spring and fall-we got this real long string once and went out in a field and turned loose of the kite; it went up, up, up, until it was clean out of sight, we were standing in that field just holding on to the end of a string.” After a moment's silence he says quietly, “It's still the most fun I ever had…”

  In that calendar-picture boyhood, they lived among Negroes as closely and easily and unconsciously as they lived with the weather, the landscape, the sparrows, and the rabbits in the fields. An ancient illiterate handyman named Carlton McKinnis, seemingly without age or prospect of ever dying, a kind of family heirloom, was as familiar about the house-dozing in the backyard, waiting outside the kitchen door to be handed his meals- as an old, dear, dutiful dog. He would often take the boys for walks through the fields, Wallace's mother having admonished him to switch them if they misbehaved. “One time he decided he wanted to go up to Detroit,” recalls Wallace's mother. “They all get that in their heads sooner or later, you know. That's all he could talk about for days, about how he sho would like to see what it was like up there in Detroit. So we let him go ahead and even gave him a little money. He wasn't gone long. I walked out on my back porch one evening, and he was just standing there at the back screen. 'It sho was cold up there,' he said, 'and the way those folks live is sumpum terrible.' We were as glad to see him as we would a member of the family.” Wallace himself remembers, “Yeah, ole Carlton-we loved him. When he got too old to get around, we built him a little house down toward Blue Springs, not too far from the Methodist church, and on Thanksgiving and Christmas we'd take stuff down to him. I can see ole Carlton now, smilin' and tremblin' and laughin' when we toted in those hams to him. All his sisters and chillun down there been told I'm anti-nigguh now. Yeah. But I can still see ole Carlton when we'd bring him stuff to eat. We gave him money and looked after him until he died. It made us all mighty sad when he was gone.”

  They also played football and shot marbles with Negro boys their own age, and systematically baited a seventeen-year-old Negro helper at the local market into scuffling with them. “There were several that went around with us all the time,” says Wallace's brother Gerald. “Jake and Sheenanny, and ole Roscoe French-he was a dancer and entertainer in New York last I heard of him. Hell, we had integrated swimmin' forty years ago down there; we built this dam and made a swimmin' hole, and we told Jake and Sheenanny and Roscoe they could use it if they'd keep it up. And they did. We went swimmin' with them all the time. They were regular members of our gang and went around with us everywhere. There was this other gang in town, the Brock boys-they all turned out to be servicemen-but Jake and Sheenanny and Roscoe were with us when we raided the Brock boys' tepees and threw them all in the branch. And we'd have these rock wars with the Brock boys, maybe seven or eight to a side, with elaborate trenches and bunkers just like real war, tunnels from one trench to another so you could get a resupply of rocks and change your direction of attack. You could get the hell knocked out of you. Jake and Sheenanny were right in there with us. We didn't think anything about it.”

  More than the children of this insulated age, they grew familiar with the implacable finalities of life. They had a friend next door about Wallace's age named Terrell Rush, and he and Wallace went to an all-day swimming picnic one Fourth of July; when they returned, Wallace was scorched, but Terrell was stricken with a fever. “I don't know why it didn't get me like it got him,” says Wallace. “I was ill a few days, but Terrell got worse and worse. We could look from our bedroom window into his bedroom next door. We could see 'em ministerin' to him, tryin' to help him breathe. He was delirious. They'd try to hold him down, but he'd fight 'em, and they'd try to put some ice on his head, but he'd just flip it away. We just couldn't believe Terrell was gonna die. It took him five or six days, but he did- he finally died. It sho was sad, watchin' him dyin' like that. He used to play with my dog a lot. He was just a quiet, nice little boy, and everybody liked him.”

  The weekdays would pass as only a flat, fretful, noisy hiatus between the Sabbaths and the music of their stillness. They went to the simple white-frame Methodist church in Clio, which consisted merely of one large room and a smaller room in the back for the children's Sunday school; there, in t
he summer, with the windows open to the hot piny afternoon outside, they would pass the Sunday-school hour swatting at wasps with paper fans advertising the local funeral parlor; but in the winter, with the windows shut tight and the two-by-fours which propped them up through the hot months now lying cobwebbed and fly-specked on the ledges, there was only the smell of dust, the empty fluting of mud-dauber nests crusted to the corners of the ceiling, and the voice of their teacher mumbling like the familiar hum of a fly in the small room. After that, they would file into the sanctuary for the preaching service, with people bumping and coughing into the pews, and then the first abrupt imperious chords of the piano and the voices gathering after it a moment later, following it like the slow, steady swinging of a scythe. After church they were sometimes allowed to go out in broomsage fields and hunt for rabbits with sticks-guns were forbidden on Sunday.

  There was a general happy combativeness among the young males of the community. “There were the Watson brothers,” says Gerald, “Billy, Buck, H.D., John, and Clyde-they were all nineteen and twenty years old when we weren't but nine and ten. They'd be standing in front of this store in Clayton whenever we came over from Clio, and they'd holler, 'You Walruses get out of town'-they'd tell us they were gonna cut our peters off. They scared the hell out of us. Got to where, when we'd come to Clayton, we wouldn't go anywhere near that store.” The fights, when they came, were quick, furious, and curiously impersonal. “There was this fella named Clyde Norton,” says Gerald, “and we'd fight every time we saw each other. There wasn't any way for us to avoid fightin'. I mean, if I just saw him comin' across the street, I'd meet him halfway and we'd go to it.”

  Discipline, as they were growing up, was also quick, direct, and refreshingly physical, involving belt strops and switches. “The worst whuppin' we ever got,” says Gerald Wallace, “was when we were about six or seven: Mother had got herself twenty Rhode Island pullets, and they'd just begun layin', and one day we found some fishin' poles and stuck some little kernels of cooked corn on the hooks and then went up on that high back porch and threw out our lines. We caught two of 'em, flappin' and pullin', before she found us. It was funny to us, but she whupped the livin' shit out of us. She never used her hand. She'd use peach-tree switches. She planted about twenty peach trees, and she never got a peach off one of 'em. That's the damn truth.”

  When they were little, she gave them books for Christmas Robinson Crusoe and Tom Swift. She was distressed when their father brought them boxing gloves from Columbus, Georgia, and began giving them lessons. “I never did care much for boxing,” she says. At first, they would thump away at each other for the entertainment of spectators during the halftime of basketball games in the school's wooden gymnasium, and then they built a ring of their own in their grassless, dusty, chicken-tracked backyard-a plank platform under the pecan trees with ropes attached to two-by-fours, and a big stump and boards placed on upended long chunks for spectators to sit on-and charge a penny admission for bouts with boys enlisted from the neighborhood. On some afternoons as many as fifty people would be clustered in the backyard. A young college student who was working part-time in the telephone exchange on the top floor of a building across the street would serve as timekeeper, watching the fights from his window and ringing up the Wallaces' telephone to signal the beginning and end of each round. At times, Wallace solicited Negro boys off the street as sparring partners. “He didn't really recruit any of 'em,” remembers one native of Clio, “he just drafted 'em. He'd talk 'em into goin' over 'to play a little bit,' and 'fore they knew it, he'd have them gloves on them-they didn't know what was comin' off. He wasn't brutal about the thing. He just wanted somebody to practice on. He'd resort to any means to find somebody to fight. But a fella that'd get into the ring with him was in a helluva fix. None of them nigguh boys ever came back for more-he'd whale the hell out of them. One of them said one time, 'They might draft me, but I ain't volunteerin'.' He just couldn't find anybody around who was as good as he was.”

  Wallace was equally bluff with his brothers, particularly Gerald. “We fought all the time,” remembers Gerald, “but he'd always whup me. We had this system at the house where, the one who woke up first in the morning would raise up in bed and holler, 'I choose the paper,' and that was supposed to do it, you'd go back to sleep. I was always an early riser, so I was usually the one who hollered first, but a lot of times when I'd wake up the second time, George'd already have the paper. So I'd fight him, though I knew it wasn't any use-he'd always beat me, and then finish the paper and throw it on the floor. He was just mean as hell. I got a six-inch scar today on my leg, right here on my thigh, where he spiked me once slidin' into second base. He did it on purpose, too. We had a fight right there, I threw down my glove and we went to it, but he got the best of me. He was a helluva fighter. George was always a good athlete anyway, and I wasn't. I was always on the scrub team.”

  Gerald Wallace was operating, in 1966, as a lawyer out of a plain little fifty-dollar-a-month office at the top of a narrow, dingy stairway in a downtown Montgomery office building. “I could have me an office in a big ole fancy building and drive some long expensive car,” he explains, “but George doesn't think it would look right. And I don't want to do anything that might embarrass him. George, he ain't gonna put up with no crap.” According to a number of sources, Gerald was summoned to the state capitol not long after Wallace took office and given a savage tongue-lashing behind closed doors after Wallace learned he had appropriated a state plane for an epic spree with friends out of the state-some say it was in Las Vegas, others say Chicago, others Mexico. In any event, he has apparently committed few such swashbuckling indiscretions with state property since then. Nevertheless, within his brother's restrictions he has managed to improve his estate in life dramatically: the cars he drives, while of a more modest size than he would like, are of the plusher models, outfitted with all the available luxuries, and he has acquired an expensive farm a few miles out of Montgomery. “I ain't gonna say it's hurt my practice any, him being governor,” he said, “but I don't do anything to take advantage of it. Folks seem to come to you on their own.”

  A slight, reedy, parched-looking man with thinning hair and slightly bugging eyes, as frail and light and dry as a grasshopper, there is a quality about him not quite furtive but at least elusive and uneasy and quietly desperate. Up until his brother's inauguration, he had led a star-crossed life: he spent the years from 1949 to 1955 in a succession of tuberculosis hospitals in Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina and was asked to pack his bags in at least one of them, he admits, because “of drinkin' and some other rascally behavior.” Wallace's manner toward him throughout, it seems, has been a mixture of exasperation and despair, though one old crony of Wallace's claims that while Gerald was in law school at the University of Alabama, Wallace, who was in the legislature at that time, arranged for the state to contract for an order of cars with a Tuscaloosa dealer where Gerald was a spare-time salesman. (Wallace also introduced legislation when he was in the House to raise the daily allocation for state tuberculosis patients from forty cents to a dollar and five cents, and to construct four new tuberculosis hospitals.)

  “I'm not gonna say I'm especially close to him,” Gerald says. “Hell, nobody is. I just help him out whenever I can. The only person I guess he was ever really close to was Billy Watson down in Clayton. He doesn't have any time for friends, and he doesn't speak of anything except politics. He wraps up his whole existence in politics, and if you're not interested in talkin' about politics, there's just no need to be around. So I just go my own way and try to stay out of his and not cause him any trouble.”

  When the churches staged their regular mass county-wide revivals, George would ride the shuttle school bus out to the site every evening, according to his brother Jack, “just to be there with the girls. He didn't care anything about the preaching.” Those glowing nights during revival-meeting time, with young boys and girls drawn out of the countryside as thickly as moths, we
re busy with a continuous delicate flirtation that proceeded through the hymns and preaching in a manner as formal and ceremonious as the flirtations conducted by Restoration dandies and belles at the opera-the same hot shy glances and burning cheeks, the random brush of shoulders and quick mingling of humid fingers-with the service itself, especially the singing, acting as the same kind of sweet and exalted accompaniment. The choir, flush with young people, a little tinny but cracker jack, cantered through each verse of a hymn and then swung into the chorus like a galloping cavalry charge, whipped along by swift licks from the piano, looping the simple melodies with lavish and intricate blood-rhythms, a unanimous blush faintly spreading over the faces of the young girls in the choir at lines like “There's no pleasure in this world …” Their tireless, soaring voices elicited cracked and thirsty “Amens” and “Bless 'em, Lords” from the old people in the pews beneath them, who, their shoulders stooped under faded denim shirts and flower-print dresses, their weary weathered faces rapt and uplifted, seemed to have come there to feed off the glad and oblivious vitality of their young. And all the while, the young girls in the congregation would be employing their dogeared paper fans as coyly and tremulously as powdered and ruffled court ladies once employed their small lace fans-this exquisite flirtation proceeding on through the service and the invitation and then out into the musky night under the trees with soft twitters and laughter in the dark, until the girls were finally called away by their elders.