Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Gently, the governor reproved him, saying, “Now look here. You know, and I know, that if we asked all the Negroes in this state how they felt about integration, ninety percent would be opposed to it. Don’t you believe that?” Dr. Howard replied, “Governor, if I told you that ninety percent of the blacks in Mississippi didn’t want to go to Heaven, would you believe that?” The newspapers seized the story, with headlines that screamed: “BLACK SURGEON CALLS GOVERNOR A LIAR!” In Mississippi, a bounty of a thousand dollars was immediately offered for Dr. Howard’s head. He and his family made it out of Mississippi as rapidly as possible, sold their property, and have never returned. Dr. Howard settled in Chicago, where he reestablished his practice and, three years later, opened his Friendship Clinic, a full-service clinic offering medical, dental, and even psychiatric service, which made Dr. Howard a multimillionaire. It made Dr. Howard able to afford to become an avid big-game hunter in Africa and, with his many trophies, he turned the reception room of Friendship Clinic into a taxidermal zoo, with the animals in natural poses surrounded by pools, waterfalls and a jungle of live tropical trees.

  In retrospect—perhaps because he managed to become so successful elsewhere—he insisted that he was not bitter about the treatment he received in his former home, and that he harbored no hard feelings against white people in general. After all, he pointed out, his “salvation” came from the fact that his mother worked as a cook for a white Mississippi doctor named Robert Mason, after whom Dr. Howard was named. Dr. Mason took a paternal interest in his namesake, and put him through school, college, and medical school. As a result, he was the only member of his family since slavery to receive a higher education, and a half-brother in the South works as a manual laborer. “The whites of Mississippi and the blacks of the state were close,” Dr. Howard said. “The plantation owners were good to their people, and I was respected by the whites in the state—as long as nobody tried to rock the boat. But the whites in Mississippi don’t like to see things change. They take the attitude of ‘We’re not gonna have anybody tell our niggers anything different from what we’ve always told ’em.’ When somebody tries to do that, that’s when the feathers fly.”

  Donald Hollowell also maintains that he harbors no ill feelings toward whites, no bitterness because of the indignities he suffered during segregation days. “I’ve learned,” he says, “that if you let rancor and bitterness seep in, you lose your perspective and your effectiveness. I’ve absorbed enough negatives to rend one’s soul. But I’ve tried to maintain the Christian principle, and to forgive them their debts. There is always a day of reckoning. I couldn’t have achieved such success as I have if I’d had rancor eating away at me. Rancor is just not practical.”

  Hollowell admits that many—and he goes so far as to say “most”—blacks bitterly resent (and hate would not be too strong a word) white people. But those, he insists, are from the poor and the uneducated lower classes.

  Perhaps an ability to forgive, and a refusal to be consumed by bitter feelings, and an ability to absorb insults and rise above rancor are, in themselves, among the hallmarks of an upper class.

  20

  “Interpositionullification”

  As more and more proud blacks of the south boycotted the segregated streetcars and buses, and refused to trade at stores where they could neither work nor use the rest rooms, segregation became, to all intents and purposes, no longer “practical.” When not working quietly and peacefully toward an integrated society, blacks comforted each other with their own special sense of humor and bits of doggerel such as the one—at the time of the famous 1938 reencounter between a black fighter and a Nazi white supremacist—that went:

  White folks, white folks, don’t get mad—

  Joe Louis will whip Max Schmeling’s ass!

  Still, the daily humiliations were difficult to endure. Dr. and Mrs. Asa Yancey, for example, live in a sprawling California ranch-style house in the Collier Heights suburb of Atlanta. Dr. Yancey, a surgeon, is Medical Director of Grady Memorial Hospital, associate dean of Emory School of Medicine, and a member of the Atlanta Board of Education, and there have been Yanceys in Atlanta for over seventy years. His wife, however, was a Dunbar from Detroit, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and manager of a housing project, and was brought up according to strict democratic principles. Neither Mrs. Dunbar nor any of her children ever called a servant by his or her first name. “If one of Mama’s maids was a Mrs. Smith, that was what we all called her,” Marge Dunbar Yancey recalls. “No one was permitted to address her as ‘Mary.’ Of course Mama often became friends with some of the people who worked for her, and if that happened they both used first names, but the children never did. It wasn’t because we were stiff and formal. It was because we respected human dignity.” When Marge Yancey married and moved to Atlanta and had her first taste of life in a segregated Southern city, she found the experience “incredibly distressing.” Like most young black mothers, she tried to protect her children from the more petty expressions of segregation. But neither Marge Yancey nor her husband will ever forget the time, nearly twenty years ago, when the children first felt segregation’s effect.

  The Yanceys and their four young children—the eldest was barely six years old—were returning from a family outing, and Asa Yancey pulled up to a Dairy Queen to buy ice cream for the children. He got out of the car, and went up to the window of the ice cream stand. The counter girl scrutinized him for a moment—Dr. Yancey was so fair that he, too, might pass for white—then motioned him away. When he returned to the car empty-handed, the children wanted to know what had happened. “The place wasn’t clean,” he told them. “There were flies buzzing around.” Today he explains, “I didn’t want to lie to them. But I felt that there probably was a fly or two in the place, and so it wasn’t a real lie, just a half-truth.” The family drove homeward in silence for a while, and then the six-year-old said suddenly, “I know why we didn’t get our ice cream there. It’s that seg-reg-ation Mom is always talking about on the phone!” The Yanceys were astonished that a child of that age could already have become so sensitive to the situation.

  Dr. Yancey’s father, Arthur Henry Yancey—always called “Aytch” for his first two initials—had been a carpenter by trade. His first job in Atlanta had been to build a flight of steps, which took him ten hours and earned him $2.50—an amount, he realized, that was more than his father had ever earned in a day in his lifetime. His next job was bigger, and earned him more, and presently it began to seem to Aytch Yancey as though his future was secure. Presently, he was hired by a contractor to complete a house that another subcontractor had fallen through on, and the man was so pleased with Yancey’s work that he subcontracted with him for a new house at rates that more experienced white builders were getting. Yancey took the job, finished it days ahead of schedule, and from then on was a general contractor, hiring subcontractors of his own. This was in the early 1900s, and Aytch Yancey was prospering—so much so that the white community began to notice his prosperity, and this, perhaps, was the beginning of his trouble.

  He had signed a contract with a white man to build a small house, and the price agreed upon had been $650. During the building, the white man’s wife seemed unusually friendly, even flirtatious—Aytch Yancey was a slender and handsome young man—and she hung around the construction site, chatting, joking and making suggestions. Yancey tolerated her intrusions politely. When the job was completed, Yancey presented his bill, and the owner asked him about building a small servants’ wing on the house. Yancey said that he would be delighted to do this, and the cost would be an additional $125. “Oh, no,” the man said. “I’ve paid you enough already. You just go ahead and build the wing.” Yancey refused, and the case went to court. When the hearing convened, the white judge—who already appeared to know a good deal about the case—opened the proceedings with “Yancey, why don’t you go ahead and build the servants’ room like a good boy, and stop causing us trouble.”

  “Because it�
�s not in the contract,” Yancey replied, and offered to show the contract to His Honor.

  “I don’t care about contracts,” said the judge, waving the document aside. “This lady says that you told her, in the presence of her husband, that you’d build the extra room, and so now you’re just going to have to go ahead and do it.” And so Mr. Yancey built the added room, as ordered. His legal fees for the case had come to $150 and, of course, he made no profit on the job. He was beginning to see where he stood as a Negro contractor in the South.

  Later, under a carefully worded contract, Aytch Yancey agreed to build a house for a white policeman named E. O. Eddleman, and the price agreed upon was $883. When the building was finished to Mr. Eddleman’s satisfaction, Mr. Yancey presented his bill. The policeman demurred, saying that he wanted first to be sure that Mr. Yancey had paid all his bills for lumber and building materials. So Yancey accompanied Eddleman down to Mr. J. J. West’s lumberyard, where Eddleman was assured that Yancey owed only $81. Eddleman then wrote out a check to Mr. West for the $81 and, in the process, muttered something about “That nigger still has eight hundred dollars of my money.” Overhearing this, Mr. West said, “Now, Eddleman, Yancey is a good boy and he always pays all his bills.” Eddleman handed West the check and started to leave, whereupon Yancey reminded him that he had still not been paid. Still grumbling about “eight hundred dollars of my money,” and “damn niggers,” Eddleman wrote out a second check and tossed it to Yancey. It was for $800—two dollars short of the contract price—but Yancey, who considered himself lucky to be paid at all, made no mention of the discrepancy. Eddleman stalked out the door, and immediately Mr. West said, “Beat that man to the bank, Yancey!” Getting the point, Aytch Yancey leapt over the back fence of J. J. West’s lumber company, ran through the D. R. Wilder Candy Company’s plant, and all the way to the Atlanta National Bank, where he cashed his check. Later, the teller told him that Eddleman had appeared at the bank just moments afterward to try to stop payment on the check—too late.

  Experiences like these made Aytch Yancey conclude that he could never succeed as a building contractor for whites and, of course, there were few building jobs for blacks. He took a job at the post office, as a letter carrier. The salary was only $600 a year, but at least the work was steady. And there was another advantage: no one knew the size of his paycheck, and there was no way for a white man to get his hands on it. Still, life for a black letter carrier was not without its vicissitudes. Early in his new career Aytch Yancey learned that the white housewives along his route presented a certain peril. Because he was a handsome, light-skinned man—like others, part Cherokee, part white, part Negro—women frequently invited him in and made seductive offers and advances. Aware of the terrible consequences of a charge of “rape,” he was meticulously careful to resist these overtures. Once, on his route, he was talking with a patron when a woman across the street called to him to come over and pick up a letter she wanted to mail. When he did not immediately come, the woman cursed, threw the letter on the sidewalk, and went back into her house. Yancey did not cross the street or pick up the letter. A few days later, his postmaster received a complaint which read:

  Dear Sir:

  I want to call your attention to the discourteous and almost insulting manner in which a certain nigger letter-carrier of your office treated my wife. I feel it is only necessary to report it to you in order to make him behave properly.

  The letter was given to Yancey to reply. He wrote:

  Dear Sir:

  This charge does not state the infraction. It merely states, as a fact, that it was a certain nigger letter-carrier. Perhaps it is there wherein lies the near insult. If so, the gentleman does not expect an apology from me.

  Respectfully yours,

  A. H. YANCEY

  The letter had to be channeled through the postmaster for approval. He returned the letter to Yancey, and instructed him to apologize.

  Though his pay was small, Aytch Yancey was a thrifty man and managed to save enough to buy a lot and build for his family, in the Georgia style, a large red-brick one-and-a-half-story house, which still stands near the Atlanta University campus. Much of the work on the house he did himself, but he hired a workman to whom—as he set out on his mail route in the morning—in a joking way Yancey said, “I’ll bet I get more work done on this house between when I get home from work and nightfall than you’ll get done all day.” And he usually kept that promise. Aytch Yancey also managed to send all seven of his children through college. Three of his sons became physicians, and one of his daughters earned a master’s degree. By the time he died several years ago, at the age of eighty-eight, he had established the Yancey family as members of the black aristocracy of Atlanta.

  Though he lived to see segregation in restaurants, buses, housing, schools, elevators, and the Armed Services all outlawed, he still believed fiercely that blacks were unjustly treated in the South, that despite advances in civil rights, blacks were still regarded as second-class citizens. There was a word he coined—“interpositionullification.” He sent the word to hundreds of educators and lexicographers, urging that “interpositionullification” be included in dictionaries. Though he never got the term into a dictionary, in 1959, at the age of eighty-four, he wrote and published a book with that as its jawbreaking title. Mr. Yancey defined “interpositionullification” to mean that when a state interposed itself between federal laws and the rights of its citizens the result was the nullification of the rights of black people, that the prejudiced person could nullify any just act. As an old man, A. H. Yancey liked to gather his children and grandchildren about him, and talk about interpositionullification, how they must fight and work against it and yet learn to expect its effects when they occurred.

  Mr. Yancey lived to see one of his doctor sons killed when, working as an intern in an outdated black hospital in St. Louis, he was accidentally electrocuted by a faultily wired piece of X-ray equipment. It was impossible to sue the city, but the family was given a check for $1,500, which barely covered funeral expenses. A positive result of the accident, however, was the building of a much-needed new hospital, the Homer G. Philips, which became the finest black hospital in St. Louis.

  Mr. Yancey liked to tell the children and the grandchildren about his own childhood, growing up in a two-room log cabin with a porch and lean-to in rural Georgia. Most of the Yanceys’ neighbors were white and, because the Yanceys were hardworking and God-fearing, they were respected in the neighborhood. As a child, most of Aytch Yancey’s friends and playmates were white children but, when they reached a “certain age,” the childhood friends became distant and barely spoke. Mr. Yancey remembered when a black man could not call another black man “Mister” in front of a white without fear of reprisal. When he was six years old, Mr. Yancey remembered how he had assumed that he would be going off to school, and how he had been puzzled by the looks of deep distress that came over his parents’ faces whenever he mentioned school. He did not realize that, though there were black taxpayers in the town, there were no black schools. The nearest black school was miles away in another county. The white schoolmaster had offered “to put a few seats in the back of the room” just for the children of Green and Julia Yancey. But the Yanceys had declined this favor, fearing the reaction in both the white and the black communities if such an exception were made for their children and if even a small degree of integration were attempted. Two years later, however, Green Yancey succeeded in getting a one-room log cabin missionary school established for blacks of the area. Aytch Yancey did not start first grade until he was nearly nine years old.

  One youthful memory remained indelible. It was late December 1900, and Aytch Yancey, who was nine years old, and his brother Homer, eleven, were walking across the wooded hills with two young girls to a Christmas-tree party in a nearby hamlet called Frogtown. It was late afternoon, most of the trees were bare of leaves, and the air was cool and crisp, with a promise of frost by nightfall. The children had bundled
up against the cold, but their spirits were high and happy, looking forward to lighted candles and gifts under the Christmas tree. Then, at a turn in the narrow woodpath, four white men suddenly appeared. The children recognized the men. They were the two Cox brothers and the two Edwards boys. The men arrayed themselves across the path, blocking it to the approaching children. One of the Edwards boys was carrying a shotgun.

  As the children warily approached, the Edwards boy raised his shotgun, held it across their path, and demanded, “Where in hell you niggers gwine?” Aytch Yancey started to answer the question but, with that, the other Edwards boy walked around his brother’s gun, stepped up to one of the little girls, opened her coat, reached under her dress, and seized her breast. She screamed, slapped him full in the face, and then spun past him and ran to safety in the underbrush. In the confusion of shouts and screams that followed, the other little girl managed to make her escape also, leaving Aytch and Homer Yancey faced with four men, one of them armed. The Cox brothers seized Homer and began pummeling him, while the Edwards boy held Aytch at gunpoint. Suddenly the four men had a new idea. They would force the Yancey boys back to their house at gunpoint, and then run after and catch the girls. Aytch Yancey was never certain of what happened next, but somehow, as the Edwards boy shifted his gun from his right arm to his left, he stepped backward and tripped over Aytch Yancey’s foot. Aytch Yancey fell, and the Edwards boy stumbled over Aytch’s body, did a backward somersault and also fell to the ground. In the process, the butt of the shotgun struck the other Edwards brother in the face, and a shot went off into the air, rendering the gun harmless for a few moments. Aytch and his brother ran off in the direction the girls had taken, with the Cox and Edwards brothers in howling pursuit. Soon the Yanceys managed to outdistance their pursuers, however, and they made their way to the cabin of friends, who took them in for the night. The last shouts the Yanceys heard were to the effect that they would be killed if they ever came back that way again.