by P. G. Abeles
But the miracle of the internet was that as ruthlessly as the Okono supporters had driven the McCracken supporters from the huge parallel blogging universes of the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos (which had become so unashamedly partisan that both had ceased to be regarded as reputable news sources by objective observers)—a McCracken resistance movement started to build and grow.
McCracken supporters developed networks of email correspondents, which grew almost overnight into the thousands. User groups banded together, new websites and chat rooms and blogs supporting McCracken started springing up everywhere. The Okono campaign monitored them and went after those they could identify as possible leaders. In one case, having media partisans and internet outliers accuse one McCracken supporter of being a racist and another of embezzling funds. One of the men leading a large network was savaged on television by a reporter who claimed the McCracken supporter had inflated his fundraising expertise —not usually considered a major offense by news organizations that regularly employ scandal-tinged commentators.
The online attacks were spiteful and shocking, directed as they were, not against paid political operatives, but private citizens and fellow Democrats, regular people who had somehow ended up involved. But the McCracken sphere—wary at first (could it be true? they wondered, worriedly), rapidly grew skeptical and then downright distrustful of the attempts to go after their leaders, particularly when it was pointed out that these were the same tactics the Okono campaign had employed against McCracken herself.
McCracken supporters started to see the Okono game for what it was—a cynical strategy to discredit and distort, and to leave the nascent resistance rudderless and confused. The mainstream media, so seemingly eager to support Okono at every turn, wisely stayed away from these attacks. Perhaps, some of them wondered, even if they refrained from publicizing it, how the McCracken websites were routinely being taken out and rendered inoperable—sometimes for days—by some malevolent unseen internet powerhouse strong enough to send millions of untraceable spam messages and overwhelm the servers in the space of a few minutes. After all, not many amateurs had the capability to pull something like that off—at least not without “borrowing” the capabilities of multiple data centers of a major network.
Chapter Eight
Atlanta, Georgia
MIRIAM CARTER WAS NOT SOMEONE to whom people said “no”, or at least not easily or with any regularity. Carter had made a career as someone who was hard to distract or talk down to. Before she had gone into politics, she had been an effective civil rights lawyer. When it dawned on her in her forties that the elected officials she was trusting to make wise decisions for her community were not very smart, and more frequently motivated by self-interest than a call to service; she decided to run for Congress.
Atlanta was only one hundred and twenty nine miles north of where she grew up, but it was worlds away. She was born in 1945, the fourth child of Georgia sharecroppers who wanted something better for their only daughter. Her parents had never even completed elementary school, never mind college or law school—and they were delighted when all the boys made it through high school. But right from the start, Miriam’s parents were determined she would have opportunities they had been unable to provide for the others. When her brothers and most of the other kids were earning extra money for their families working full-time to bring in the harvest, her father insisted that she go to school.
But even before Miriam was born, her father had sought a connection with a wider world. Electricity had come to Oglethorpe in 1931, earlier than other places in the rural South. Miriam grew up hearing stories about how it took Big John four years to save the $7.80 (20%) down payment to buy a radio; a mind-blowing extravagance to some in the community. But it hadn’t been just any radio. Big John had no interest in the cheap Philco radios sold by the traveling salesmen to the other croppers, where the much-touted “wood surface” was just a painted, paper-thin decal.
As the man said on the radio advertisement “There is no substitute for quality. And when you’re buying Atwater Kent, you’re buying quality.” The Atwater Kent 145 was a five tube beauty with a cathedral shape, burl walnut veneer and illuminated “aeroplane” dial. With a balanced superheterodyne nickel-plated chassis—its rich bass and treble resonated bold and sweet. With three tuning ranges, Big John could listen to broadband, police band and even shortwave radio broadcasts from Europe. The other cropper children used to come in just to look at it.
The first consequence of the purchase was the rearrangement of the parlor to accommodate the extra visitors who dropped in for a quick chat and a long listen. The radio could be heard throughout the small house, but for some unexplained reason, people wanted the set in full view; the nearer they sat, the more honored they felt. Therefore, all the chairs were rearranged to face the 15-inch set, which sat on the parlor table like a little walnut deity.
It was hard to overestimate the way radio changed the family’s point of view. Of course, being church-going people, they already knew what every neighbor in the county was doing. But, for all of them, it was their first real experience of themselves as part of a nation or larger world. Every morning after taking care of the animals, her father turned on the radio to hear The Farm Hour, courtesy of KDKA radio in Pittsburgh and rebroadcast by the local station every morning at 6:30 a.m. Breakfast was eaten silently; the scraping of fork tines against porcelain the only interruption as the family listened almost breathlessly to the agricultural reports (with musical intermissions provided by the big band sound of Slim Bryant and The Wildcats). It was on The Farm Hour before Miriam was born, that her parents had first learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Most mornings, as soon as the program ended, her father and the boys were back in the fields or tending to chores on the estate until dinnertime. When the men returned from a day’s work, her quiet, gentle father would wave his enormous calloused hands and ask Miriam about her day: “Tell me something I don’t know,” he’d say—and she would.
He liked current affairs best. She remembered how amazed her father was to learn that former President Franklin Roosevelt had spent most of his time in a wheelchair, and how he had insisted she keep that to herself as if it were a secret too dangerous to share. But Big John was interested in everything. He was fascinated to hear how scientists were beginning to develop rational explanations for meteorological phenomena—weather patterns that as a farmer he’d been hostage to his whole life. “Well, I’ll be,” he’d say over and over, asking her to explain, again, about earthquakes and tornadoes and how weather patterns in Southeast Asia might affect cotton plants in rural red clay Georgia. She was always surprised at how much her father remembered about what she’d told him, and his intellectual curiosity never left him. She often wondered how Big John’s life might have been different if he’d had the opportunity to get more than a fourth grade education.
Saturday was bath night for farming children across Georgia. But once in her plain cotton nightgown, Miriam would lie dozing on the parlor rag rug, as her parents and older brothers clustered around to listen to the WSB Barn Dance on radio station WSB out of Atlanta. WSB had a powerhouse 50,000 watt clear channel, and the hillbilly sounds of Boudleaux Bryant on the fiddle, Harpo Kidwell on the harmonica, Kid Clark on the accordion, and Boots Woodall on the steel guitar came through the wooden box like those fellas were raising the roof in the next room. Miriam’s favorites were three sisters: Bertha, Irene and Opal Amburgey who called themselves the “Hoot Owl Holler Girls.” So many Georgians flocked to the Atlanta station for tickets for the Barn Dance, the station started to host the show at auditoriums around the state just to accommodate everyone. At the end of every program, Master of Ceremonies Chick Kimball would intone:
“It’s about time for us to get off the wind now, but we’ve had a fine time at your house tonight and we hope you’ll let us visit with you next Saturday night at the same time— 9:30 p.m— when we’ll be broadcasting from the High School A
uditorium in Forest Park, Georgia. The ‘WSB Barn Dance’ is a regular Saturday night feature of WSB, “the Voice of the South”, Atlanta, Georgia.”
Every Sunday after the whole family attended services at the Whitewater Baptist Church, Big John drove them all over to Smitty’s in nearby Ideal to pick up the Macon Telegraph. Miz Tummy started right in, clipping out the coupons from one of the big new grocery stores in Macon. The Piggly Wiggly! So wonderful, even its name sounded like entertainment! The store was the brainchild of Clarence Saunders, who in 1917 had patented the idea of a self-service grocery. Previously, shoppers had presented lists of items they wished to purchase to behind-counter clerks. The Piggly Wiggly changed all that. For the first time, shoppers with baskets were invited to browse through attractively presented aisles of merchandise (the prices clearly marked) and pay cashiers in the front of the store. By 1932, the idea was so successful that Piggly Wiggly had 2,660 stores in more than 29 states and was doing $180 million dollars in business—and retailing would never be the same. For the cropper wives, their Saturday excursions to the Piggly Wiggly, with its intoxicating rows of shiny canned goods, brightly packed boxes and elaborate store displays, was almost like going to the theatre.
While Miz Tummy was clipping coupons, Miriam started on the front page of the Telegraph and read the whole thing to her parents—end to end. Sometimes her father would ask a question about a story: “Well, why didn’t so-and-so do such-and-such?” he’d ask. If she didn’t know, he’d just shrug his shoulders and keep on rocking in his chair. “Well, that’s all right, child. I expect we’ll learn more about it next week.”
Years later, on her parents’ black and white TV, they’d watched the troubles in Alabama and Mississippi when the authorities had turned fire hoses and dogs on black people who wanted basic access—to drinking fountains, to schools, and to cafeteria lunch counters. One of Miriam’s proudest moments was explaining to her father what the civil rights legislation of 1964 meant to him. For 20 years, starting in 1945 when the state of Georgia had eliminated the $3 poll tax, Big John had gone to vote. For most of those years, he’d been turned away.
For a time, her father had been hopeful. After the war, things felt different. When, in 1946, Primus King had challenged the legality of the Muscogee Democratic Party refusing to let him vote—and won—more than 125,000 black men registered to vote in Georgia within a few months—the highest registrations of blacks in any southern state. But the euphoria was short-lived. Within months, the state inaugurated Herman Talmadge as governor, and civil rights activists learned to their injury and detriment what happened to those who criticized or defied segregation.
Twenty years later, when Big John learned that he now had protections to ensure he could cast a ballot in an election, he started to cry. Not that he hated whites—her father was among the most tolerant people Miriam had ever met. “Black folk and white folk just mostly misunderstand each other, and they both are afraid because of those misunderstandings. And their fear makes them dumb, and dumb makes them frustrated, and frustrated makes them angry.”
Her mother was known universally as Miz Tummy, but no one remembered why. The little brother who had named her had died from the arsenic dusted on the cotton fields. Miz Tummy never forgot the brilliant blue-green sheen of his skin after his accidental exposure to the pesticide. For many years, she and the other children believed that he hadn’t died at all, but had become a leprechaun. She told Miriam once that she still believed it, preferred to believe it.
But if she was sentimental in some ways, for the most part Miz Tummy took a clear-eyed view of things. One time, Miriam asked her mother why she never tried to vote. Miz Tummy put her hands on her hips and hooted with laughter. “You ever see any black woman go to vote?” she asked.
Miriam thought. “No, ma’am,” she replied.
“You ever seen any white woman?”
Miriam bit her tongue and tried to remember. “I don’t think so.”
Her mother picked up a big rolling pin covered with flour. She waved it emphatically at her youngest child and only daughter. “Miriam you remember this.” Miriam watched, eyes wide. “When man slaves were counted as three-quarters of a person…women—black or white—weren’t counted as nothing. Women in this country, black or white, don’t go upsetting everybody by doing no voting, because they know they don’t have no rights except what their men-folk decide to give them.”
But on a rural southern farm, the distinctions Miriam saw every day between male and female, black and white, were so ingrained it took her a long time to understand her mother’s warning. On some level, she began to realize that though her father treated her mother with respect and cautious affection, few of the other women—black or white—enjoyed the same degree of independence and equality.
For both of her parents, it was a hard life. Her kind and quiet father worked as a sharecropper because that was the only job on offer, the only job he knew. Sharecropping had existed as long as anyone could remember, but began in earnest in the U.S. during Reconstruction. In a more perfect world, sharecropping should have been a wonderful, synergistic arrangement benefiting both partners. After the Civil War, plantation owners had rich farming land, but no money to pay laborers to farm it. Former slaves and poor whites were skilled at agricultural work, but owned no land. The idea was that owners and “croppers,” as they were called, would share in the risks and rewards equally. The benefit to the sharecropper was that he was, perhaps for the first time, his own master—master of his time and the method and form of his labor. The benefit to the landowner was that he received a 50% share of the crop produced. By the 1930s, 3,000,000 African Americans and 5,500,000 whites were sharecroppers.
But sharecropping yielded another dividend for the corrupt landowner—the insidious introduction of the institution that has created misery from time immemorial for human beings of every color on every continent—“the company store.” Farms were located in rural areas, often quite remote from big cities. As the population began more and more to rely on purchasing manufactured goods, a savvy planter came up with the idea of stocking a commissary to sell durable goods to his croppers. For some landowners, perhaps, it was intended as a means of supplying necessary goods, foodstuffs, and even medicines to a captive population. But on too many farms, the commissaries soon became a lever of control, some planters insisting their workers purchase goods only at their store. Lack of competition enabled cash-strapped landowners to charge exorbitant rates, and lack of alternatives required the sharecroppers to pay.
After settling their debts with the commissary, many croppers, regardless of the success of their crop, made only five or ten dollars for a year’s worth of work. Others found themselves mysteriously owing hundreds of dollars—with their next year’s labor (and crop) held as ransom toward paying off their “debt.” Croppers had little or no education, could seldom read or write, and the planters used this circumstance to calculate the debt to their advantage. For the cropper to challenge the word of his landlord would be to risk losing everything: his house, his livelihood, even the crops he’d cultivated in the field. But if he did, it mattered little. A poor white man in the South had no recourse to the law that would be honored; a poor black man had no recourse to the law at all.
The other problem for the croppers was an ugly little grayish-brown beetle that had crossed the Rio Grande somewhere around Brownsville, Texas in 1892. In 1913, the fuzzy beetle with the prominent snout was decimating cotton fields all over Missouri. By 1915, the quarter-inch insect had reached southeast Alabama, and by 1922, it had reached the Carolinas. Traveling an estimated 40 to 160 miles in a year—depending on conditions—it had wreaked havoc across the entire cotton-growing portion of the Southeast by 1926.
Scientists identified the beetle as “anthonomous Grandis.” But to the desperate farmers, who painstakingly removed as many of the pests by hand as they could, it was simply the “boll weevil.” But the farmers’ frantic efforts were of no use, and
by the mid-1930s the boll weevil infestation in the cotton belt had reached almost Biblical proportions. One pair of boll weevils could produce 134 million offspring before the first frost —and that was assuming the frost even killed them. Winter temperatures in the cotton-farming South rarely reached the 23 degrees Fahrenheit necessary to destroy the rapacious insects. It would take almost seventy years before scientists figured out how to minimize the devastation.
Chapter Nine
Oglethorpe, Georgia
THE PLANTER FOR WHOM BIG JOHN WORKED was a brutish and puerile man named Drew Jackson. Jackson routinely raised his fist to workers and was known for his violence and drunkenness. When discretion or sobriety stood in the way of his hitting his workers, he beat his dog, a self-consciously dignified big-boned poodle named Cotton. “Goddamn, no-account dog, never even barks,” he would say when asked about the good-looking dog. The only thing Jackson was known to care about was his car—a 1955 Buick Century convertible, “the banker’s hot rod”—eight cylinders and 236 horsepower of sheer trouble. There was nothing Jackson appeared to enjoy more than pretending to run people off the road and leave them choking on the car’s dust.
Very little was known of his family life; his wife was rarely seen. Drew Jackson’s wife was “county”—folks said she came from a grand family in Virginia. And that’s all most folks knew about her. Amalia Jackson would appear some Sundays in church, a fine, elegant-looking woman. Then she would disappear for weeks at a time, just a fleeting shadow of a face glimpsed from behind an upstairs curtain.
Riverview, named for the sweeping vista it commanded of the nearby picture-perfect Flint River, was incredibly fertile farmland. But the steamboats that used to carry all the local plantations’ cotton to market had ceased operations in 1928. The big riverboats were simply too expensive to run for so few trips. Their owners either found more lucrative routes, or were ‘done in’, the farmers lamented, by the weevil.