When the Wallaces were campaigning together, he appeared one morning at a rally in northern Alabama, looming over the heads of the assembled townfolk like a tired leviathan just awakened from a long nap. He drifted through the crowd aimlessly and restlessly and with a certain air of preoccupation and detachment, his eyes fastened on the ground as if he were looking for something he had dropped in the grass. In fact, he did stoop to pick up a Wallace button and inserted it in his lapel. When Wallace had finished speaking, he edged up beside him and leaned over and rumbled, “Awright for me to be here?” Wallace, flipping his hand to pat Folsom's arm backward, replied, “Sure, guvnuh, always glad to have you with us.” Folsom then leaned closer to Wallace and confided, “Yeah know, I'm ridin' with Pitt Phillips today…” Wallace paused a moment and then said, “That's fine, guvnuh. We glad to have you with us,” and turned back to the crowd. For the rest of the day Folsom followed Wallace's party, standing off at the edge of the crowd at each stop, his hands plunged deep in his pockets, enormously alone. At one rally he sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck with his head hung drowsily, quiet and dull in the sun like a huge ancient dog, and at another rally later in the afternoon, while Wallace spoke he sat in the cab of the truck that was hauling Wallace's victory bell, unnoticed now by the crowd, his cheek lying on his palm, asleep.
In the bright, adventurous days of Folsom's political prime, his most familiar campaign call was “Yawl Come!”-a glad and jubilant beckon that he explained in one speech during his 1954 campaign for governor: “When I was a boy in knee-britches, my momma and poppa used to take me visitin' with the neighbors … and when it was time to go home, Momma would call me, and I'd stand by her side all tired out while she said to the neighbors, 'Yawl come,' and the neighbors would say, 'We will, and yawl come.' You know, there's something friendly and warm and sincere about that farewell; there's something about it that's deeper and bigger than even fear. And you know, nations ought to be friendly and warm toward each other, and the peoples of different nations should part with a 'Yawl come,' and maybe we wouldn't have to worry about who was gonna drop the H or the A bomb first…” It's no surprise that the memory of Folsom now invokes among the minority of thoughtful liberals in Alabama the melancholy sense of a paradise lost. At the least, he leaves one with the feeling of something lost that was better than what came after him.
He lives now in the northern Alabama town of Cullman, where he has taken over a small plant which manufactures lock-nut bolts for cars-“I was the head boss of a nut house,” he says, “so I figgered I'd buy me one”-and he sometimes travels down to Montgomery to hustle his product before legislative safety committees; on one such trip to the capitol, he dropped by the executive offices to see Wallace, could not get past the elaborate, evasive, polite parrying of Wallace's aides and secretaries, and had started back toward the door when Wallace walked in, saw him, and invited him in; they chatted for only a few minutes, and Folsom left his former protege with a few samples of his product. But most of his days he spends in Cullman, arising every morning before sunup, according to his wife, and wandering for miles all through the town and its outskirts before returning to the house for breakfast.
It is a comfortably expansive wooden dwelling, neat and white, with a generous and neatly trimmed lawn shaded by chinaberry trees. On a recent Sunday afternoon in May he sat in his den, heaped in a large black leather chair, a vast hulk in soiled khakis and a white shirt with faint blue pinstripes, his left foot in a cast and propped up on a footstool. His khakis sagged from thin and exhausted-looking thighs and shanks. With his two wives Folsom sired eight children, four of them girls who are uniformly handsome, glowing, sleek, and brimmingly cheerful. The house around him seemed as full of spontaneous and careless life as an aviary, with a TV burbling in another room and the phone beside him constantly shrilling. He would sometimes snatch it up himself, listen a moment, and then clap his hand over the mouthpiece and deliver an ear-splitting yodel, “Bama! … Ohhhh, Bama! … Yeaaow, Bama! …” Finally he spoke into the phone to report, “She don't seem to answer. I'd hunt her up myself, but I got a broke foot.” A shattered glass was lying on the tile floor beside his chair-broken how, broken when, he seemed to have already forgotten, glancing down at it with only a brief curiosity when his wife came into the room- “Oh, Jim, how did that happen?”-and swept it up.
His eyes were soft, dark, shy, dewy, faintly sad. His iron-gray hair was clipped and brushed upward in wild stray tufts, and his hands, long and tapering, looked waxy and translucent, like an invalid's or a penitent's; according to his friends, he has maintained a cautious sobriety since undergoing brain surgery two years after his 1962 television appearance, and there is about him the quiescent, chaste quality of someone who has passed through a holocaust and emerged uncertainly restored but still alive. There was a faint continuous shudder in the house from a giant cooling fan somewhere, a low and even thrumming that muffled all other noises, and Folsom, as he talked, kept yawning as if he were trying to shake off a stubborn lingering drowsiness, frequently pausing with his mouth slightly parted and his lower lip cupped out as if arresting still another yawn. When he finally reached his point after long vague floundering, his head would suddenly whip around, and in that quick movement he would seem to lose his idea for a moment, his eyes would stare blankly, and he would shake one long pointed finger once, twice, then again, like a fisherman fly-casting, until finally one cast would snag the idea, the next sentence.
“My daddy … My daddy was a straight old-fashioned Democrat, a courthouse politician. He fought the Populists. But me, I patterned after Huey Long. The difference between me and the other Populists, I refused to use the race issue. I can read the Constitution. There ain't no use in goin' out and lyin' to people. I coulda hung a nigger on every stump, but I just didn't go for that kinda politics. It don't get you nothin in the long run. Folks give me hell about bein' a nigger-lover. Hell, I don't know nothin' about that. They was just against me 'cause I wouldn't hang niggers. You gotta get up there and hang them niggers. If you won't hang niggers, there ain't no use in runnin', that's all. It's an old Southern custom. Maybe if I'd taken a more positive stand-send 'em back to Africa and all that-the folks would of liked it better. I guess I just wasn't aggressive enough to suit 'em.”
All through the afternoon, he was swept by abrupt dark gales of alarm and rage; he would lapse into silence, staring mutely across the room as one finger abstractedly tapped the knuckles of his other hand, clenched in his lap, and suddenly he would unload a long thunder roll of cursing. “Them Democrats up there in Washington-I raised funds for the damn sons-abitches two times a year for eight years, but I'm broke today and there ain't none of them tryin' to help me. There ain't nothin' about them low-down sonsabitches I like. Hell, this fancy-pants from Massachusetts-what's his name? They tried to put my whole family in the penitentiary. That's right. Them goddamn Democrats-them goddamn Democrats. Any governor they couldn't control, they'd put the income-tax people on him. That was the system, they either got you or your friends. Earl Long, they tried to get him-he was my friend. Them sonsabitches in Congress turned me in just like they did him. Them low-down sonsabitches. Hell, I'm for Johnson just 'cause them sonsabitches are cussin' him. Those bastards now, they wouldn't give me potato chips if they was rotten and I was starvin'. Hell, if they was hurtin', I'd help them out…”
Though Folsom is hardly destitute, he has very little left from his days in the governor's office: only a few tokens, an old dented brass spittoon that now sits beside the desk in his den, and scalloped draperies that look like remnants from his tenancy of the mansion, faded and sleazy now, hanging improbably in a bare, bleak, pink bathroom. And it seems that Wallace now has him in a kind of gentle but absolute captivity-that he is a confined and disarmed giant. '“Course, George, now,” he rum bled, “George wadn't no race bigot either back yonder. Me'n'George was always close. My uncle and his granddaddy were Populists together. George ain't nothin' but an old Populist hi
mself. We just disagreed on one thing: I never did want to take any credit for hangin' niggers. And he wadn't always like he is now. He just wanted to get elected to things, that's all…” He leaned forward, a movement like the shifting of a mountain, to slurp from a cup of coffee, a fly crawling tinily down his massive back. “But I'm through with politics now, I'm done out of it, so I try to get along with him and not give him any trouble….”
Finally he arose, with a slow and terrific surge, up on his crutches to see a visitor out. “But you say folks still mention me around the state?” he mumbled. “You know, I don't have no idea anymore, tucked away up here. I can't tell whether they still remember Big Jim or not. It's good to hear folks sometimes say they do…” He waited in the doorway a moment longer, sagging tremendously from his crutches, a huge wholesome eye-crinkling grin on his face in the fine Sunday-afternoon sunshine. “Well, yawl come,” he said, and turned and heaved himself back into the dim cool of the house.
Even before Wallace's repudiation of Folsom, he had decided to strike out on his own. When Wallace began his second term in the House under Persons, he was, as one of Persons' aides puts it, “banished to the two most unimportant committees we could find for him-local government and local legislation.” He could not be ignored altogether, since he had been named floor leader for the League of Municipalities. But he was denied access to Persons' inner office; each time he presented himself, Persons' secretary would inform him that the governor was busy, and Wallace would turn and leave with a flat, hard little grin on his face.
So he left Montgomery to run for circuit judge in Barbour County. “Circuit judge was a little better than representative anyway,” remarks an old Barbour County official. Merely by announcing his candidacy, he dislodged one opponent; the incumbent judge, who had been serving for almost forty years, quietly bowed out of the campaign before it had even begun. His other opponent was a state senator from Barbour County named Preston Clayton, a genteel politician and ardent horseman with a field full of Arabian horses just outside town. A parchment-skinned man with a long patrician face, fine, gauzy white hair, and long, languid, willowy hands, his family, a vestige of the county's pre-Civil War aristocracy, had been presiding over the community for years and had given the town of Clayton its name. The local UDC chapter had been named for his grandfather, a major general in the Confederacy, and his uncle had served in Congress; Clayton himself had served for sixteen years in the state Senate. He also had the misfortune of having been a lieutenant colonel in the army during World War II.
Clayton was blasted into political and social oblivion. Ever since that campaign for the circuit judgeship, he has been living in a kind of semiexile from the community which his family had named, which to a degree had continued to belong to them until one of them, Preston, had run against George Wallace. “Yes,” remembers Clayton, “he went all over saying, 'Now, all you officers vote for Clayton, and all you privates vote for me.' He'd tell those country men that I was living out here in a mansion while he was living in a little house and paying twenty dollars a month rent, that I didn't need to be circuit judge. He even talked about my horses. He had all those rednecks.”
Now, every morning, Clayton drives to the law office he maintains in Eufala, sitting there until noon, when he drives a few blocks across town to eat lunch with his mother; he locks the office shortly before dusk and drives back through the gathering night to the family home just outside Clayton-a small white frame dwelling, built in 1850, looking almost like a cottage, with a white picket fence enclosing a tiny front yard dense with camphor trees and oleander bushes, and a tiny front parlor cluttered with dusky portraits of his forebears, harshly and almost viciously painted, a primitive Etruscan-like flatness to their almond eyes. There he builds a fire in the bedroom, puts down the stock behind the house, eats his supper in a cold kitchen, and is in bed by eight o'clock. The townsfolk seldom see his wife. If they happen to call his home in the evenings while he is out bedding down the stock, no one will answer- his wife merely sitting motionless in their bedroom with the fire he has just kindled beginning to dull the day-long cold, listening to the phone ring until it is finally silent. Behind the house is a small fenced field, now scribbled over with brush and scrawny trees, where Clayton's grandfather once maintained the finest fruit orchard in Alabama-peaches, pears, apples, cherry trees- but, says Clayton, “during the hard times, poor country folk from roundabout would slip in at night and scavenge for firewood, and before long the whole orchard disappeared.”
It wasn't long after Wallace's election as circuit judge that Watson met him one morning in front of Clayton's city hall and casually remarked, “George, you just keep up with what you're doing, you can be governor.” Wallace snapped, “I know it.”
He began battering about the state in an old faltering Chevrolet to make speeches, driving all alone, sometimes leaving Clayton before dawn and not returning until early the next morning. “That damn car of his was dangerous,” says an old friend. “The tires were slick, the battery was run down, it was always out of gas and water. He just didn't take care of it-he never had the time to get it serviced, he was too busy driving it somewhere to make another speech.” He was still wearing the same pair of garish chartreuse trousers, now patched, which Watson had sold him years before with the assurance, “That's what they're all wearing these days, George.” He now had a wine corduroy shirt to go with it. To many, he seemed, both as a judge and in his simultaneous hasty, urgent scrambling to acquire the governorship, a whimsical and unlikely figure. A former state legislator recalls, “Here he was going all over the state presenting himself as a candidate for governor, and he was still wearing his hair in a ducktail like he had in the legislature- you know, slick-combed and overlapped in the back with his ridge sticking out. I told him once that if he was really running for governor, maybe it was time to get rid of that ducktail, and he said, 'Naw. Women like 'at long hair.'” One of his townsmen also recalls, “He had this bad habit of combing that ducktail all the time. Anywhere he was, in a restaurant or church, he'd whip out that comb from his front pocket and start smoothing that hair back. I'll tell you, he might not have had any drawers on, but he'd have that comb…” He made only one or two token concessions to the normal sobrieties of his office: he served as superintendent of his church's Sunday school for a while and was a member of its board of stewards. But when a friend asked him once how he liked his new position, he replied, “Fine, if it wasn't for all these damn legal problems I have to solve.”
They were generally simple and humble problems, involving little more than the day-to-day housekeeping of the two counties in his circuit-and, more particularly, the small homespun quarrels of the Negroes in those counties. One case concerned a number of local Negroes who had been sold cans of Red Devil Lye by a flim-flam artist, who instructed them to plant the cans in a circle and then stand in the center of the circle, whereupon they would be cured of constipation. “All the nigguhs said they'd been hexed by the thing,” says Wallace. “They were all sittin' down on the front row of the courtroom, and I asked them how many had been hexed. Every one of them shot up his hand. They all said, 'It's been 'ginst us, Judge. It's been 'ginst us.'” His disposition of such cases was usually genial and casual. When a jury exonerated a white man charged with rustling peanuts at night from the warehouse of the local sheriff, Wallace promptly released his three Negro accomplices, none of whom had been able to acquire a lawyer. “He instituted probation in this county,” says one Barbour County official. “The former judge had been automatically taking the jury's verdict for almost forty years, but Wallace would probate 'em whenever he could. He wanted to give everybody a second chance.” It was his habit in the courtroom to give money to the bailiff and dispatch him to purchase hamburgers for prisoners.
But when the cases were less folksy, he encountered certain difficulties. In 1947, in one of his first cases as a lawyer, he represented a complainant who was suing to sell land he held in partnership with other
owners. Wallace won the case, but in distributing the money from the sale of the land, forgot to figure in his client's share. The clerk of the court called him in and said, “George, everything's fine here, you did real good, except you left your client out of the sale.” Wallace swallowed. “My God. How in the world did I-what we gonna do about it now?” The clerk managed to stop payment on all the checks but one- otherwise, Wallace would have met with a financial disaster- and Wallace made up the disparity on that check out of his own fee. Accordingly, when he became a judge, cases involving complicated and bitter equity disputes caused him considerable pain. But that was not so much because of the legal subtleties they confronted him with, as because his primary instinct, even as a judge, remained, as Billy Watson observed, “Against takin' sides. I remember whenever an argument would come up on a sidewalk somewhere, he'd express his view, and then if he found out yours was different, pretty soon he'd of quietly worked around to where all of a sudden he was agreein' with you. You never could get him to be explicit about nothin'. He'd side with everybody somehow. He'd of found some excuse to side with a Russian if he'd ever come up on one.” His inevitable reaction when presented with such disputes-especially disputes involving the more populous and politically significant families in his two counties-was to coax the parties into agreeing to a jury trial, and then, quickly and without comment, to accept the jury's recommendation.
A circuit judgeship would not seem a likely stage on which to engage in swashbuckling political poses and rhetoric. But in that relatively innocuous post, Wallace somehow managed to produce an inordinate amount of dramatic noise. In 1953 he availed himself of his office to become the first judge in the South to issue an injunction against the removal of segregation signs in railroad terminals. Incredibly, he began showing up in Washington testifying against pending civil-rights bills before congressional committees, flourishing at one appearance a copy of a dowdy and raucous little racist sheet from Augusta, Georgia. In 1956, when federal officials demanded to see the grand-jury-selection records of Georgia's Cobb County, Wallace, in rather gratuitous outrage, threatened from way down in Alabama's Barbour County “to invoke the full power and authority I possess and shall issue an order for the arrest of every member of the FBI or other federal police” who might turn their attention his way. It struck many as almost an invitation.
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