This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed in Southern legislatures. It has produced laws of a cynicism scarcely believable in a civilized society. Even when these have been tested and thrown out as illegal by superior courts, they have in some instances continued to be enforced because “they haven’t taken them off the dockets.”
Subscriptions were canceled. Ads were canceled. As a result of my host’s campaign for nothing more than fairness or “couthness,” as he came to call it, even his old friends, swayed by the pressures put on them by society, turned against him. He began getting telephone calls telling him he was a “goddamn nigger-loving, Jew-loving, communist son-of-a-bitch.” Wherever he went he carried a gun.
“My reaction was as it had been before and as it was to be many times in the days to come. I was depressed to the point that I went into my room at home, sat on the side of the bed and wept like a baby.”
It was an odd manuscript; in the midst of the profoundest personal tragedy, sinking into economic ruin, he wrote brilliantly funny columns. His finest attacks have been to take the “true Southerner’s” viewpoint and render it absurd, all in seeming to defend and explain it. Tragedy turned him into one of the subtlest and sharpest satirists in American letters. In The Magnolia Jungle the juxtaposition of the best of these columns against a background of stark horror gives a striking effect. It shows the phenomenon of a man living at his lowest and writing at his highest; a grief-stricken man who turns out monstrously funny copy. Like Monoculus, he poked fun at the devil.
His case, along with those of other “Southern traitors,” like Hodding Carter, Easton King, Ralph McGill and Mark Ethridge, illustrates the “true Southerner’s” admirable lack of race prejudice: he is as willing to destroy whites who question his “wisdom” as he is to destroy Negroes.
I put the manuscript away and tried to sleep. But the sun poured into my window. I had read all night.
November 15
Ihad hardly dozed when East came into the room with a lone cup of coffee on a serving tray. Groggily, I asked him the time. It was seven thirty. My body pleaded for sleep, but I knew he wanted to discuss the manuscript.
It was an odd, exhausting day. We spent it in the office he has at his home. I drank cups of coffee and listened to Mozart quintets and read the portions of the script he had cut out. In many instances I urged him to restore these deletions - but it was insane. I was sleepy, I was preoccupied with the magnificent music and I was trying to read while P.D. talked - a long, immensely funny monologue, punctuated every five minutes by: “Well, I’ll shut up now and let you concentrate on that. But did Max ever tell you about …” And it would be another story.
“I was supposed to go to Dillard and give a lecture Monday,” he said sadly.
“Are you going?”
“No … Dean Gandy asked me to come. I begged him to let me postpone it a while. Told him I was busy working on the book. And that understanding sonofabitch agreed; didn’t even insist. Said ‘Certainly, P.D., the book comes first. We can have you a bit later.’ It hurt my feelings.”
“Hell, he was just being nice.”
“Nice - hell.” He grimaced with pain. “He didn’t act a bit broken up because I put him off. Well - you just stay over till Monday and I’ll drive you back to New Orleans. I’ll drop by and see him and show him I could have been had if he’d just had the basic common decency to insist.”
We worked all day, going through his files. He piled research material, hate pamphlets, news clippings, letters and other items on my bed for me to study at night. We broke off at intervals to visit with his wife, Billie, and their young daughter, Karen, who, learning that I was from Texas and lived on a farm, called me “that rich bald-headed Texas rancher.” Except for two Jewish families, they are ostracized from society in Hattiesburg. Billie spends much of her time fishing in a nearby tank in the afternoons - a lonely existence. Karen is an extraordinarily beautiful blond child, the same age as my daughter and much like her. She is bright, outrageously outspoken and tender. She and her father were constantly at war over the TV programs. I could make little sense of it, except that the arguments were long and full of recriminations on both sides; but the traditional roles were reversed. She did not approve of her father’s avid watching of westerns and children’s programs, and he insisted that he be allowed, by God, to view his “favorites.”
I left them around eleven and meant to fall into bed. But the material P.D. had placed on the two bed tables fascinated me so that I studied it and made notes without sleeping until dawn. It is perhaps the most incredible collection of what East calls “assdom” in the South. It shows that the most obscene figures are not the ignorant ranting racists, but the legal minds who front for them, who “invent” for them the legislative proposals and the propaganda bulletins. They deliberately choose to foster distortions, always under the guise of patriotism, upon a people who have no means of checking the facts. Their appeals are of regional interest, showing complete contempt for privacy of conscience, and a willingness to destroy and subvert values that have traditionally been held supreme in this land.
November 16 New Orleans
Though the trip from New Orleans to Hattiesburg had seemed interminable on the bus, the return to New Orleans in P.D.’ s car was quickly done. P.D. took me to Dillard University, one of the two Negro universities in New Orleans. A green, spacious campus with white buildings, great trees streaming Spanish moss. We drove through slowly, of necessity, since the campus drives have cement ridges every forty or fifty feet that would cause your car to bump badly if any speed were attempted. P.D. cursed these richly and made the typical “Southern white” remarks about “Did you ever see such a damn beautiful campus for a bunch of nigras. They’re getting uppityer and uppityer.”
He stopped deep in the campus at the cottages provided for the faculty and we went in to meet Dean Sam Gandy. The Dean, a handsome, cultivated man of great wit, had just returned from a trip. Almost before we were introduced, P.D. launched into bitter complaints, wanting to know why Dean Gandy had not insisted he give the lecture today.
“But you told me you were simply too busy,” Gandy laughed. “Naturally we wanted you, but …”
Placated, P.D. and I confided my project to the Dean and his beautiful wife. Though we had little time to discuss it, since the Dean had to be at his office for an appointment, I promised to return and share my findings with him. We went to the car, which P.D. carefully and ostentatiously pretended to unlock.
“Why, P.D., what on earth did you lock your car for here in this cloistered atmosphere?” Gandy asked.
P.D. looked shifty-eyed, distrustful, in both directions, and then in a loud stage whisper said: “Well, with all these damn nigras hanging around, you know …”
Gandy bent double with laughter and outrage. He asked P.D. how the voting situation was in Mississippi and P.D. told the story of the Negro who went to register. The white man taking his application gave him the standard literacy tests:
“What is the first line of the thirty-second paragraph of the United States Constitution?” he asked.
The applicant answered perfectly.
“Name the eleventh President of the United States and his entire cabinet.”
The applicant answered correctly.
Finally, unable to trip him up, the white man asked, “Can you read and write?”
The applicant wrote his name and was then handed a newspaper in Chinese to test his reading. He studied it carefully for a time.
“Well can you read it?”
“I can read the headline, but I can’t make out the body text.”
Incredulous, the white man said: “You can read that headline?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve got the meaning all right.”
“What’s it say?”
“It says this is one Negro in Mississippi who’s not going to get to vote this year.”
East let me out of the car in down
town New Orleans, on Canal Street. I bought a meal of beans and rice in the nearby Negro café and then went to the bus station to purchase a ticket back into Mississippi, but this time to the coastal town of Biloxi. I did not see the lady who gave me the hate stare a few days earlier. With three hours to kill until bus time, I walked and window-shopped on Canal. The town was decorated for Christmas and I felt lost in the great crowds. A cool, sunlit afternoon. I looked at all the children coming and going in the stores, most of them excited to see Santa Claus, and I felt the greatest longing to see my own.
Once again I stopped men on the street and asked directions to the French Market or to some church, and once again each gave me courteous replies. Despite the inequalities, I liked New Orleans, perhaps because I dreaded so the prospect of leaving once more to go into the Deep South, perhaps because it was, after all, so much better here than in Mississippi - though I understand that the rest of Louisiana is scarcely any better.
At the Jesuit church, I picked up a booklet I had also noticed on Dean Gandy’s coffee table - For Men of Good Will, by Father Robert Guste. Penciled across the top in red were the words “Racial Justice.” I stood in the sunlight outside the church, noticing that passers by either lifted their hats or made a discreet sign of the cross on their chests as they came abreast the church. I flipped through the pages, noticing the dedication:
Dedicated to My Dad and Mother and to the countless other Southern parents and educators who sincerely try to instill in their children and their students a love for all men and a respect for the dignity and worth of every man.
Father Guste, a parish priest of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, born and reared in the South, wrote the book to clarify the problems of racial justice for those “men of good will” who are sincerely alarmed by “the Problem.”
I glanced through quickly and promised myself a thorough reading. Suddenly it occurred to me that I made a strange and too obvious picture there - a large Negro, standing in front of a church, absorbed in a pamphlet on racial justice. I quickly dropped it into my jacket and walked to the Greyhound station to wait for my bus.
In the rest room, I saw the remains of a loaf of French bread lying on the floor beside the waste bin. It told the story of some poor devil who had come there, closed himself in the cubicle and eaten his meal of a half a loaf. The small room was perfectly clean except for a placard attached to the back of the door. I read the neatly typed NOTICE! until I saw that it was only another list of prices a white man would pay for various types of sensuality with various ages of Negro girls. The whites frequently walk into colored rest rooms, Scotch-tape these notices to the wall. This man offered his services free to any Negro woman over twenty, offered to pay, on an ascending scale, from two dollars for a nineteen-year-old girl up to seven fifty for a fourteen-year-old and more for the perversion dates. He gave a contact point for later in the evening and urged any Negro man who wanted to earn five dollars for himself to find him a date within this price category. He would probably have success, I thought, glancing at the butt of bread. To a man who had nothing to eat but bread and perhaps a piece of cheese in a public rest room, five dollars could mean a great deal. I wondered about the Negro who had left this trace of his passing. What sort of man was he? A derelict? No, a derelict would have left an empty wine bottle. Someone who could not find work and had grown too hungry to wait for something better? Probably. If the woman in the Catholic Book Store had not cashed my traveler’s check, I might have been reduced to the same thing. What astonished me was that he had not carried the remains of the bread with him. Perhaps he, too, had seen the notice on the door and counted on five dollars for a decent supper.
A young man entered as I dried my hands. He nodded politely, with a quick, intelligent expression, glanced at the notice and snorted with amusement and derision. In these matters, the Negro has seen the backside of the white man too long to be shocked. He feels an indulgent superiority whenever he sees these evidences of a white man’s frailty. This is one of the sources of his chafing at being considered inferior. He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior.
To the Negro who sees this element of the white man’s nature - and he sees it much more often than any other - the white man’s comments about the Negro’s alleged “immorality” ring maddeningly hollow.
November 19 Mississippi-Alabama
Iarrived by bus in Biloxi too late to find any Negroes about, so I walked inland and slept, half-freezing, in a tin-roofed shed with an open south front. In the morning I found breakfast in a little Negro café - coffee and toast - and then walked down to the highway to begin hitching. The highway ran for miles along some of the most magnificent beaches I have ever seen - white sands, a beautiful gulf; and opposite the beach, splendid homes. The sun warmed me through, and I took my time, stopping to study the historic markers placed along the route.
For lunch, I bought a pint of milk and a ready-wrapped bologna sandwich in a roadside store. I carried them to the walk that runs along the shallow sea wall and ate. A local Negro stopped to talk. I asked him if the swimming was good there, since the beaches were so splendid. He told me the beaches were “man-made,” the sand dredged in; but that unless a Negro sneaked off to some isolated spot, he’d never know how the water was, since Negroes weren’t permitted to enjoy the beaches. He pointed out the injustice of this policy, since the upkeep of the beaches comes from a gasoline tax. “In other words, every time we buy a gallon of gas, we pay a penny to keep the beach up so the whites can use it,” he said. He added that some of the local Negro citizens were considering a project to keep an account of the gasoline they purchased throughout the year and at the end of that time demand from the town fathers either a refund on their gasoline tax or the privilege of using the beaches for which they had paid their fair part.
After a time I walked again on legs that grew weak with weariness. A car pulled up beside me and a young, redheaded white man told me to “hop in.” His glance was friendly, courteous, and he spoke with no condescension. I began to hope that I had underestimated the people of Mississippi. With that eagerness I grasped at every straw of kindness, wanting to give a good report.
“Beautiful country, isn’t it?” he said.
“Marvelous.”
“You just passing through?”
“Yes, sir … I’m on my way to Mobile.”
“Where you from?”
“Texas.”
“I’m from Massachusetts,” he said, as though he were eager for me to know he was not a Mississippian. I felt the keenest disappointment, and mentally erased the passages I had composed about the kindness of the Mississippian who gave the Negro a ride. He told me he had no sympathy for the “Southern attitude.”
“That shows,” I said.
“But you know,” he added, “these are some of the finest people in the world about everything else.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“I know you won’t believe it - but it’s really the truth. I just don’t ever talk to them about the race question.”
“With your attitude, I can understand that,” I laughed.
“They can’t discuss it,” he said. “It’s a shame but all they do is get mad whenever you bring it up. I’ve lived here over five years now - and they’re good neighbors; but if I mention race with any sympathy for the Negro, they just tell me I’m an ‘outsider’ and don’t understand about Negroes. What’s there to understand?”
I walked what - ten, fifteen miles? I walked because one does not just simply sit down in the middle of the highway, because there was nothing to do but walk.
Late in the afternoon, my mind hazed to fatigue. I concentrated all my energy in putting one foot in front of the other. Sweat poured down into my eyes and soaked my clothes and the heat of the pavement came through my shoes. I remember I stopped at a little custard stand and bought a dish of ice cream merely
to have the excuse to sit at one of the tables under the trees - none of which were occupied. But before I could take my ice cream and walk to one of them some white teenagers appeared and took seats. I dared not sit down even at a distant table. Wretched with disappointment I leaned against a tree and ate the ice cream.
Behind the custard stand stood an old unpainted privy leaning badly to one side. I returned to the dispensing window of the stand.
“Yes, sir,” the white man said congenially. “You want something else?”
“Where’s the nearest rest room I could use?” I asked.
He brushed his white, brimless cook’s cap back and rubbed his forefinger against his sweaty forehead. “Let’s see. You can go on up there to the bridge and then cut down the road to the left … and just follow that road. You’ll come to a little settlement - there’s some stores and gas stations there.”
“How far is it?” I asked, pretending to be in greater discomfort than I actually was.
“Not far - thirteen, maybe fourteen blocks.”
A locust’s lazy rasping sawed the air from the nearby oak trees.
“Isn’t there anyplace closer?” I said, determined to see if he would not offer me the use of the dilapidated outhouse, which certainly no human could degrade any more than time and the elements had.
His seamed face showed the concern and sympathy of one human for another in a predicament every man understands. “I can’t think of any …” he said slowly.
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