Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  I look at it. The stuff is not new. I have seen it before, elsewhere. It was used in the last gubernatorial campaign in Tennessee, it was used in the march on the Capitol at Nashville a few weeks ago. There are the handbills showing “Harlem Negro and White Wife,” lying abed, showing “Crooner Roy Hamilton & Teenage Fans,” who are white girls, showing a schoolyard in Baltimore with Negro and white children, “the new look in education.” On the back of one of the handbills is a crudely drawn valentine-like heart, in it the head of a white woman who (with feelings not indicated by the artist) is about to be kissed by a black man of the most primitive physiognomy. On the heart two vultures perch. Beneath it is the caption: “The Kiss of Death.”

  Below are the “reasons”: “While Russia makes laws to protect her own race she continues to prod us to accept 14,000,000 Negroes as social equals and we are doing everything possible to please her. . . . Segregation is the law of God, not man. . . . Continue to rob the white race in order to bribe the Asiatic and Negro and these people will overwhelm the white race and destroy all progress, religion, invention, art, and return us to the jungle. . . . Negro blood destroyed the civilization of Egypt, India, Phoenicia, Carthage, Greece, and it will destroy America!”

  I put the literature into my pocket, to join the other samples. “If there’s trouble,” I ask, “where will it begin?”

  “We don’t condone violence,” he says.

  “But if—just suppose,” I say.

  He doesn’t hesitate. “The redneck,” he says, “that’s what you call ’em around here. Those fellows—and I’m one of them myself, just a redneck that got educated—are the ones who will feel the rub. He is the one on the underside of the plank with nothing between him and the bare black ground. He’s got to have something to give him pride. Just to be better than something.”

  To be better than something: so we are back to the pridefulness the yellow man had talked about. But no, there is more, something else.

  There is the minister, a Baptist, an intellectual-looking man, a man whose face indicates conscience and thoughtfulness, pastor of a good church in a good district in a thriving city. “It is simple,” he says. “It is a matter of God’s will and revelation. I refer you to Acts 17—I don’t remember the verse. This is the passage the integrationists are always quoting to prove that integration is Christian. But they won’t quote it all. It’s the end that counts.”

  I looked it up: And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.

  There is the very handsome lady of forty-five, charming and witty and gay, full of dramatic mimicry, a wonderful range of phrase, a quick sympathy, a totally captivating talker of the kind you still occasionally find among women of the Deep South, but never now in a woman under forty. She is sitting before the fire in the fine room, her brother, big and handsome but barefoot and rigid drunk, opposite her. But she gaily overrides that small difficulty (“Oh, don’t mind him, he’s just had a whole bottle of brandy. Been on a high-lonesome all by himself. But poor Jack, he feels better now”). She has been talking about the Negroes on her plantation, and at last, about integration, but that only in one phrase, tossed off as gaily and casually as any other of the evening, so casual as to permit no discussion: “But of course we have to keep the white race intact.”

  But the husband, much her senior, who has said almost nothing all evening, lifts his strong, grizzled old face, and in a kind of sotto voce growl, not to her, not to me, not to anybody, utters: “In power—in power—you mean the white race in power.”

  And I think of another Southerner, an integrationist, saying to me: “You simply have to recognize a fact. In no county where the Negroes are two to one is the white man going to surrender political power, not with the Negroes in those counties in their present condition. It’s not a question of being Southern. You put the same number of Yankee liberals in the same county and in a week they’d be behaving the same way. Living with something and talking about it are two very different things, and living with something is always the slow way.”

  And another, not an integrationist, from a black county, saying: “Yeah, let ’em take over and in six months you’d be paying the taxes but a black sheriff would be collecting ’em. You couldn’t walk down the sidewalk. You’d be communized, all right.”

  But is it power. Merely power? Or any of the other things suggested thus far?

  I think of a college professor in a section where about half the population is Negro. The college has no Negro students, but—“The heat is on,” he says. “But listen, brother,” he says, “lots of our boys don’t like it a bit. Not a bit.”

  I ask would it be like the University of Alabama.

  “It would be something, brother. I’ll tell you that, brother. One of our boys—been fooling around with an organization uptown—he came to me and asked me to be sure to let him know when a nigger was coming, he and some friends would stop that clock. But I didn’t want to hear student talk. I said, son, just don’t tell me.”

  I asked what the faculty would do.

  “Hide out, brother, hide out. And, brother, I would, too.”

  Yes, he was a segregationist. I didn’t have to ask him. Or ask his reasons, for he was talking on, in his rather nasal voice—leaning happily back in his chair in the handsome office, a spare, fiftyish man, dark-suited, rather dressy, sharp-nosed, with some fringe-remnants of sandy hair on an elongated, slightly freckled skull, rimless glasses on pale eyes: “Yeah, brother, back in my county there was a long ridge running through the county, and one side the ridge was good land, river bottom, and folks put on airs there and held niggers, but on the other side of the ridge the ground so pore you couldn’t grow peas and nothing but pore white trash. So when the Civil War came, the pore white trash, as the folks who put on airs called them, just picked down the old rifle off the deer horns over the fireplace and joined the Federals coming down, just because they hated those fellows across the ridge. But don’t get me wrong, brother. They didn’t want any truck with niggers, either. To this day they vote Republican and hate niggers. It is just they hate niggers.”

  Yes, they hate niggers, but I am in another room, the library of a plantation house, in Mississippi, and the planter is talking to me, leaning his length back at ease, speaking deliberately from his high-nosed, commanding face, the very figure of a Wade Hampton or Kirby Smith, only the gray uniform and cavalry boots not there, saying: “No, I don’t hate Negroes. I never had a minute’s trouble with one in my life, and never intend to. I don’t believe in getting lathered up, and I don’t intend to get lathered up. I simply don’t discuss the question with anybody. But I’ll tell you what I feel. I came out of the university with a lot of ideals and humanitarianism, and I stayed by it as long as I could. But I tell you now what has come out of thirty years of experience and careful consideration. I have a deep contempt for the Negro race as it exists here. It is not so much a matter of ability as of character. Character.”

  He repeats the word. He is a man of character, it could never be denied. Of character and force. He is also a man of fine intelligence and good education. He reads Roman history. He collects books on the American West. He is widely traveled. He is unusually successful as a planter and businessman. He is a man of human warmth and generosity, and eminent justice. I overhear his wife, at this moment, talking to a Negro from the place, asking him if she can save some more money for him, to add to the hundred dollars she holds, trying to persuade him.

  The husband goes on: “It’s not so much the hands on my place, as the lawyers and doctors and teachers and insurance men and undertakers—oh, yes, I’ve had dealings all around, or my hands have. The character just breaks down. It is not dependable. They pay lip service to the white man’s ideals of conduct. They say, yes, I believe in honesty and truth and morality. But it is just lip service. Most of the time. I don’t intend to get lathered up. This is
just my private opinion. I believe in segregation, but I can always protect myself and my family. I dine at my club and my land is my own, and when I travel, the places I frequent have few if any Negroes. Not that I’d ever walk out of a restaurant, for I’m no professional Southerner. And I’d never give a nickel to the Citizens Council or anything like that. Nor have any of my friends, that I know of. That’s townspeople stuff, anyway.”

  Later on, he says: “For years, I thought I loved Negroes. And I loved their humor and other qualities. My father—he was a firster around here, first man to put glass windows in for them, first to give them a written monthly statement, first to do a lot to help them toward financial independence—well, my father, he used to look at me and say how it would be. He said, son, they will knock it out of you. Well, they did. I learned the grimness and the sadness.”

  And later, as we ride down the long row of the houses of the hands, he points to shreds of screening at windows, or here and there a broken screen door. “One of my last experiments,” he says, dourly. “Three months, and they poked it out of the kitchen window so they could throw slops on the bare ground. They broke down the front door so they could spit tobacco juice out on the porch floor.”

  We ride on. We pass a nicely painted house, with a fenced dooryard, with flower beds, and flower boxes on the porch, and good bright-painted porch furniture. I ask who lives there. “One of the hands,” he says, “but he’s got some energy and character. Look at his house. And he loves flowers. Has only three children, but when there’s work he gets it done fast, and then finds some more to do. Makes $4,500 to $5,000 a year.” Some old pride, or something from the lost days of idealism, comes back into his tone.

  I ask what the other people on the place think of the tenant with the nice house.

  “They think he’s just lucky.” And he mimics, a little bitterly, without any humor: “Boss, looks lak Jefferson’s chillen, they jes picks faster’n mine. Caint he’p it, Boss.”

  I ask what Jefferson’s color is.

  “A real black man, a real Negro, all right. But he’s got character.”

  I look down the interminable row of dingy houses, over the interminable flat of black earth toward the river.

  Now and then, I encounter a man whose argument for segregation, in the present context, has nothing to do with the Negro at all. At its simplest level its spokesman says: “I don’t give a durn about the niggers, they never bother me one way or another. But I don’t like being forced. Ain’t no man ever forced me.”

  But the law always carries force, you say.

  “Not this law. It’s different. It ain’t our law.”

  At another level, the spokesman will say it is a matter of constitutionality, pure and simple. He may even be an integrationist. But this decision, he will say, carries us one more step toward the power state, a cunningly calculated step, for this decision carries a moral issue and the objector to the decision is automatically put in the role of the enemy of righteousness. “But wait till the next decision,” he will say. “This will be the precedent for it, and the next one won’t have the moral façade.”

  Precedent for what? you ask.

  “For government by sociology, not law,” he will say.

  “Is it government by law,” one man asks me, “when certain members of the Supreme Court want to write a minority decision, and the great conciliator conciliates them out of it, saying that the thing is going to be controversial enough without the Court splitting? Damn it, the Court should split, if that’s the honest reading of the law. We want the reading of the law, not the conciliation by sociology. Even if we don’t happen to like the kind of law it turns out to be in a particular case.”

  And another man: “Yes, government by sociology not law is a two-edged business. The next guy who gets in the saddle just picks another brand of sociology. And nothing to stop him, for the very notion of law is gone.”

  Pridefulness, money, level of intelligence, race, God’s will, filth and disease, power, hate, contempt, legality—perhaps these are not all the words that get mentioned. There is another thing, whatever the word for it. An eminent Negro scholar, is, I suppose, saying something about that other thing. “One thing,” he says, “is that a lot of people down here just don’t like change. It’s not merely desegregation they’re against so much, it’s just the fact of any change. They feel some emotional tie to the way things are. A change is disorienting, especially if you’re pretty disoriented already.”

  Yes, a lot of them are disoriented enough already, uprooted, driven from the land, drawn from the land, befuddled by new opportunities, new ambitions, new obligations. They have entered the great anonymity of the new world.

  And I hear a college student in the Deep South: “You know, it’s just that people don’t like to feel like they’re spitting on their grandfather’s grave. They feel some connection they don’t want to break. Something would bother them if they broke it.”

  The young man is, I gather, an integrationist. He adds: “And sometimes something bothers them if they don’t break it.”

  Let us give a name now to whatever it is that the eminent Negro scholar and the young white college boy were talking about. Let us, without meaning to be ironical, call it piety.

  What does the Negro want?

  The plump yellow man, with his hands folded calmly over his belly, the man who said it is the white man’s “pridefulness,” thinks, and answers the new question. “Opportunity,” he says. “It’s opportunity a man wants.”

  For what? I ask.

  “Just to get along and make out. You know, like anybody.”

  “About education, now. If you got good schools, as good as anybody’s, would that satisfy you?”

  “Well—” the yellow man begins, but the black, intense-faced man breaks in. “We never had them, we’d never have them!”

  “You might get them now,” I say, “under this pressure.”

  “Maybe,” the yellow man agrees, “maybe. And it might have satisfied once. But”—and he shakes his head—“not now. That doctrine won’t grip now.”

  “Not now,” the intense-faced man says. “Not after the Supreme Court decision. We want the law.”

  “But when?” I ask. “Right now? Tomorrow morning?”

  “The Supreme Court decision says—” And he stops.

  “It says deliberate speed,” I say, “or something like that.”

  “If a Negro wants to study medicine, he can’t study it. If he wants to study law, he can’t study it. There isn’t any way in this state for him to study it.”

  “Suppose,” I say, “suppose professional and graduate schools got opened. To really qualified applicants, no funny business either way. Then they began some sort of staggered system, a grade or two at a time, from either top or bottom. Would something like that satisfy you? Perhaps not all over the state at the same time, some place serving as a sort of pilot for others where the going would be rougher.”

  The yellow man nods. The intense-faced man looks down at his new and newly polished good black shoes. He looks across at the wall. Not looking at me, he says: “Yes, if it was in good faith. If you could depend on it. Yes.”

  He hates to say it. At least, I think he hates to say it. It is a wrench, grudging.

  I sit in another room, in another city, in the Deep South, with several men, two of them Negroes. One Negro is the local NAACP secretary, a man in build, color and quality strangely like the black, intense-faced man. I am asking again what will satisfy the Negroes. Only this time the intense-faced man does not as readily say, yes, a staggered system would be satisfactory. In fact, he doesn’t say it at all. I ask him what his philosophy of social change is, in a democracy. He begins to refer to the law, to the Court, but one of the white men breaks in.

  This white man is of the Deep South, born, bred and educated there. He is a middle-aged man, tall, rather spare but not angular, the impression of the lack of angularity coming, I suppose, from a great deliberation in voic
e and movement, a great calmness in voice and face. The face is an intellectual’s face, a calm, dedicated face, but not a zealot’s. His career, I know, has been identified with various causes of social reform. He has sat on many committees, has signed many things, some of them things I personally take to be nonsense. What he says now, in his serene voice, the words and voice being really all that I know of him, is this: “I know that Mr. Cranford here”—and he nods toward this black, intense-faced man—“doesn’t want any change by violence. He knows—we know—that change will take time. He wants a change in a Christian way that won’t aggravate to violence. We have all got to live together. It will take time.”

  Nobody says anything. After a moment I go back to my question about the philosophy of social change. Wearily the intense-faced man says something, something not very relevant, not evasive, just not relevant. I let the matter drop. He sits with his head propped on his right hand, brow furrowed. He is not interested in abstractions. Why should he be?

  Again, it is the Deep South, another town, another room, the bright, new-sparkling living room of the house of a Negro businessman, new furniture, new TV, new everything. There are several white men present, two journalists, myself (I’ve just come along to watch, I’m not involved), some technicians, and about ten Negroes, all in Sunday best, at ease but slightly formal, as though just before going in to a church service. Some of the Negroes, I have heard, are in the NAACP.

  The technicians are rigging up their stuff, lights and cameras, etc., moving arrogantly in their own world superior to human concerns. In the background, in the dining room, the wife of our host, a plump fortyish mulatto, an agreeable-looking woman wearing a new black dress with a discreet white design on it, stands watching a big new electric percolator on a silver tray. Another silver tray holds a bottle of Canadian whiskey, a good whiskey, and glasses. When someone comes out of the kitchen, I catch a glimpse of a gray-haired Negro woman wearing a maid’s uniform.