A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  I spent most of my time at my seat, staring out at the rolling landscape and trying to memorize some of the strange and faintly stenciled names that appeared on the trackside shacks of the small towns and hamlets we passed. I imagined that my father must have felt some of what I was now feeling when he was seventeen, twenty-five years before, and had left home in uneasy anticipation of a new life in a new land. Alabama, to me, was foreign territory.

  Since I could not sleep, I read a few chapters from the novel I was carrying, The Young Lions, by Irwin Shaw, and I also perused the Alabama registration catalog that had been mailed to me in New Jersey a few days before my departure. I planned to major in journalism. Although I was still not convinced that this would become my career, I believed that taking journalism courses would challenge me the least in an academic sense. I wanted every chance to remain in school and protect my student-deferment status from the clutches of my draft board.

  After the train had arrived at a city in central-western Alabama that was called Tuscaloosa, where I was the single departing passenger, I handed the two cracked leather suitcases I had borrowed from my father down to a top-hatted black man who drove a jitney, and who soon transported me into what could have been a movie set for Gone With the Wind. Stately antebellum buildings loomed wherever I looked from the jitney’s windows; mansions, and smaller homes with columns, and all with sprawling lawns, lined both sides of the wide tree-lined boulevards of Tuscaloosa, which had been the capital of Alabama until the 1840s, when it had been succeeded by Montgomery. The campus of the University of Alabama, founded in 1831, adjoined Tuscaloosa, and while it conformed to it architecturally, many of the older University of Alabama buildings had been renovated many times since being attacked and torched by the Union soldiers who had advanced through the campus during the Civil War.

  My dormitory was half a mile beyond the main area of the campus, and it stood in wretched contrast to all that I had seen earlier from the jitney. It was one of several unadorned single-story wooden barracks that had been hastily built on the lowlands, near a swamp, to serve as temporary housing for some of the freshmen within the overly populated student body that was still crowded with veterans on the GI bill. My quarters consisted of a small room with a single cot, a wooden table, a chair, and an armoire with a lower drawer. As I would soon discover, my surroundings would be penetrated throughout the day by a windblown musky odor emanating from a paper mill located beyond the campus near the main highway. My dormitory was also invaded by the nightly return of ex-GIs from the beer halls that flourished beyond the “dry” county that encompassed the campus—serenading revelers ready to begin playing cards and shooting dice with the vigor I had seen exhibited by those other veterans in the club car.

  But far from being disturbed by the nightly commotion—though I contributed very little to it even as I began making friends during the succeeding weeks—I became drawn to these older students more than to my contemporaries. In my comfortable role as an observer and listener, I liked watching the veterans sitting around a card table in the dormitory’s common room playing blackjack and gin rummy, and hearing their war stories, their barracks language, their dirty jokes. Up half the night, and rarely cracking a book, they rose daily to attend classes, or cut classes, with no apparent fear of ever failing a course—an attitude that left some of them open for surprises. Not all of the survivors of the war were academic survivors in their classrooms.

  I, of course, did not follow their example, lacking the confidence at this point to take anything for granted. But being around these older men loosened me up a bit, spared me from having to compare myself exclusively and perhaps unfavorably with my age group, and it seemed to have a favorable effect on my health and schoolwork. My acne had all but vanished within six months of my arrival, a cure I could attribute to the friendly and diverting spirit that pervaded my dorm. I earned passing grades in all of my freshman courses, and near the end of the term I had my first coffee date, then movie date, then my first French kiss from a Birmingham-born blonde who was studying journalism, but later transferred into advertising.

  As a journalism student, I was usually ranked in the middle of the class, even during my junior and senior years, when I was the college weekly’s sports editor and “Sports Gay-zing” columnist as well as campus correspondent for the daily Birmingham Post-Herald. The faculty tended to favor the reportorial style of the conservative though very reliable Kansas City Star, where some of them had previously worked as editors and staff writers. They had definite views of what constituted “news” and how news stories should be presented. The “five W’s”—who, what, when, where, why—were questions they thought should be answered succinctly and impersonally in the opening paragraphs of an article. Since I sometimes resisted their approach, and might try instead to communicate the news through the viewpoint of the single person who observed it from the sidelines, or might adopt some other narrative technique learned from reading fiction, I was not a faculty favorite. But unlike my English teacher in high school, the journalism faculty at Alabama complimented me at times for the outside writing I did for the college newspaper and the Birmingham daily. One story they liked was my interview with a lumbering seven-foot-tall student from the hill country of northern Alabama who, in spite of many pleas from the school’s basketball coach, refused to try out for the team. He explained to me that he preferred devoting his out-of-class time to trimming trees. Another article that my teachers praised was my profile of an elderly black man, the grandson of slaves, who was the football team’s locker room attendant and was also considered to be the players’ good-luck charm; before each game, as they lined up to trot onto the field, they would take turns stroking the black man’s head. Without overstating the situation, it was evident to most of my readers that I was describing one of the rare examples of interracial physical contact that then existed within the segregated world of Alabama athletics.

  The admission of black students in 1963, ten years after I had graduated from Alabama, did not mean that black athletes were immediately accepted into the school’s sports system. The football coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant, was advised by the alumni’s reactionary element to abstain from any kind of “race mixing” within his team, and between 1963 and 1968, Coach Bryant did not offer a single scholarship to any graduating high school football star who was black. Either the leading black prospects were considered insufficiently gifted to make the team or the players themselves decided to accept scholarships to play football at more hospitable colleges in the Midwest or the far West. But in 1969, after the color line had long been broken by football-playing colleges in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Florida—and as Alabama’s interstate rival, Auburn, had also recently accepted a black player—Coach Bryant received permission to follow the trend, and thus in mid-December 1969 a black schoolboy star named Wilbur Jackson from Ozark, Alabama, was invited to the campus and was issued a uniform.

  But since freshmen players were not eligible for varsity competition in those days, Jackson was sitting in the stands with more than 72,000 other spectators in Birmingham’s Legion Field on Saturday night, September 12, 1970, when the all-white Alabama team was overwhelmed, 42-21, by a University of Southern California squad led by a 215-pound black fullback named Sam “Bam” Cunningham, a nineteen-year-old sophomore reared in Santa Barbara, California. Also in the Southern California backfield that night was a Birmingham-born black player named Clarence Davis, who scored two touchdowns. But most of the damage was done by Cunningham, who scored three touchdowns, rushed for 212 yards, and almost single-handedly demoralized the pro-segregation faction among the Alabama fans, who up to that point had believed that Bear Bryant could continue to be a winning coach of an all-white team that resisted the emergence of black athletic power. Through the annals of Alabama football there has never been much tolerance among its fans, including its fans affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, for unsuccessful seasons on the gridiron, and in the aftermath of the trouncing by Southern
California, a sportswriter later suggested that the state’s best-known racist, George Wallace, had privately vowed that Coach Bryant’s team would never be “outniggered” again.

  There was little doubt that Sam “Bam” Cunningham’s awesome performance against the Alabama defense accelerated the pace of black recruitment at the University of Alabama. Three years later, when Coach Bryant’s team completed the 1973 season with eleven victories and only one defeat—it lost by a single point to Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl—one-third of Alabama’s varsity starters were black.

  “Cunningham,” said Coach Bryant, “did more for integration in Alabama in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King did in twenty years.”

  12

  HAD I MYSELF POSSESSED AN ADMIRABLE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE AT the University of Alabama, I might have honored my student days there with a valiant denunciation of racism that would have predated by several years the appearance of civil rights activists in the state; but whatever egalitarian sensibilities I possessed as a student were stifled by the gratitude I felt toward the university’s administrators, who had allowed me access to the only campus in the United States that agreed to have me.

  I am not saying that I was immediately welcomed everywhere with open arms, or that I could have joined one of the better Christian fraternities (I joined the worst, Phi Sigma Kappa, the one most accepting of students from the North), or that I could have fulfilled my senior-year ambition to become the editor of the student newspaper. I guess I knew but was not yet ready to accept the fact that the most prestigious positions for which students vied at the ballot box would go to one of the southernborn students affiliated with the leading fraternities that had the most influence within the political “machine” that controlled the campus. When I applied to become the editor, I was told by one student political leader that the job I wanted had already been promised to someone else; furthermore, if I did not immediately withdraw my application, I might not be able to continue as the paper’s sports editor and columnist during my senior year. So I complied without delay or argument. I knew my place. I was an outsider, a token Italian Yankee. On this campus not yet ready to accept blacks, it got its “diversity” and “affirmative action” quotas from people like me and other olive-skinned out-of-staters whose ancestry might be Jewish, Arab, or Greek—students whom the Tuscaloosa chapter of the Ku Klux Klan saw as borderline whites. And yet I also believed in those days, and I would continue to believe after I had graduated and moved to New York, that racism in many unacknowledged and unreported ways was as present in the North as it was in the South.

  It had been so casually accepted in my hometown on the New Jersey shore during the 1930s and 1940s that I grew up virtually unaware of it. At our Village cinema on the boardwalk, it was customary for black people to view movies from seats in the balcony, and, without any directional signs or signals from the management, they did so without objecting. While black students joined the whites in our town’s public schools, there was little social contact between the races outside the classrooms and athletic fields. The racial divide in real estate was maintained from one generation to the next by various rental and home-loan banking policies that, no matter what laws might exist, ensured black residents were essentially banned from white neighborhoods, thus creating a century-old black quarter in my hometown that was decrepit with decay and deprivation.

  In my hometown and in other cities throughout the state and in New York as well, there were secret chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Except in my town, at least during my boyhood in the late 1930s into the 1940s, the Klan’s presence was sometimes quite obvious. I remember seeing white-sheeted figures gathered in public for such ceremonial functions as the installation of new members, or the mourning of older members, and, for whatever reason, there they were, all in white, assembled on the greensward of the Methodist Tabernacle Society’s campgrounds, or on the boardwalk, or along the beach, doing their thing—which was mostly standing around and conversing among themselves as casually as if they were a group of chefs discussing menus for an outdoor cooking class.

  The general public paid little attention to them. Pedestrians would stroll by, blacks included, and keep walking. My father told me with certainty, without ever explaining why he was so certain, that he knew the identity of three of our town’s Klansmen. He said that two of them were local firemen, and the other individual, a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, owned our leading drugstore. This man and my father attended once-a-week dinners together as members of the Rotary Club. While my father conceded that there were no conversational references to the Klan at these dinners, he went on to suggest that he and the other Rotarians behaved toward this pharmacist with the same unobtrusiveness that is often adopted by residents of large cities like Philadelphia or New York when they have a neighbor who is in the Mafia. As long as the violent activities of organized crime remained outside the neighborhood—or, parenthetically, as long as white-hooded men did not burn crosses on our beach or hang blacks from our trees—it was possible in such places at such times for good and evil citizens to coexist closely.

  As I ponder this now, more than half a century later, it is remarkable only in a contemporary context that in those days white-sheeted men, doing next to nothing in public, could be so persuasive for so long in maintaining the status quo in towns like mine, while the rest of my townsmen acquiesced. Perhaps a majority of these townsmen were interchangeable with the people under the sheets. But then again, I recall seeing newsreels in the 1930s showing crowds of Klansmen marching unchallenged through Washington, D.C.; and while the capital of the United States in the 1930s was very different in its democratic spirit and its racial consciousness from what it would be in the 1960s when it welcomed the words of Dr. King, I am reminded by Coach Bryant’s later comment that it was Sam “Bam” Cunningham who made the most meaningful impression on people who might otherwise have remained in step with the Klan. In any case, when I left home for college in 1949, I did not find Alabama to be as foreign as I thought it would be from what I had known. I, as an Italianate outsider, attended classes with fellow students whose family history in the American South was in many ways similar to my own family’s history in southern Italy. In fact, when I first explored the southern Italian countryside, beginning in the spring of 1955 while on furlough from my army unit based in Germany, I often thought that I was traveling through rural Alabama. It was not only the similarity in climate, the simple beauty of the land, the slow pace of the country people trekking along dusty roads amid the surrounding sounds of farm animals, and the sedate though occasionally festive town squares with their centerpiece statuary—built in Italy to memoralize martyred saints as in Alabama to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers—and their rows of old men who sat in the shade wearing peaked caps and holding canes, and who with their sun-creased faces stared in quiet wonderment whenever a stranger passed before them, a stranger who was at times myself; no, what most connected these Italian southerners with American southerners was, in my opinion, their lingering sense of separateness.

  When the American South was under attack from Northern armies in the 1860s, the southern part of Italy was also under seige from northern militants led by Gen. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had planned his strategy in northern cities with northern money and troops and then sailed south into the Mediterranean Sea to launch his invasion through the island of Sicily up into the southern peninsula, penetrating my father’s native province and finally conquering the southern capital city of Naples. General Garibaldi achieved victory with such expedience that President Abraham Lincoln tried without success to enlist him to lead some of the Union’s divisions in their continuing campaigns against the Confederacy.

  The capitulation by the people of southern Italy and those of the American South in the 1860s was followed in both places by periods of military occupation that spawned rabid and ruthless bands of local resisters (led by the Mafia in Italy and the Klan in America) and that in the end did nothing but r
einforce the disparity and disunity between the South and the North because natives whose homeland is governed by conquerors are guided by a spirit of defiance. In Italy nearly a century and a half has passed since General Garibaldi’s invaders and their northern civilian leaders took over the south, but during my many visits to Italy since the first one in 1955, I have found the average southerner to be stubbornly resistant to change, to be relatively poor and deprived and generally pessimistic. The southern dialect spoken in my father’s region during his boyhood lacked a future tense. General Garibaldi’s lasting achievement was not national unification but, rather, the destruction of the southern kingdom’s autonomy and the resulting departure from Italy of southerners fleeing to America. As they embarked from the port of Naples, they left behind a city distinguished for its chipped and tarnished baroque palazzos built by the aristocracy that Garibaldi drove from power in the 1860s. Many of these buildings have since been renovated and maintained by later generations of old-family southerners who have remained in Naples and who are the spiritual cousins of those Americans in Alabama and elsewhere in the South who continue to restore and revere their antebellum mansions.

  When I saw Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs of some of Alabama’s poor white sharecropping families—several of these photos appeared in a book that Evans and his collaborator, the writer James Agee, published in 1941 under the title Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—I thought I was seeing some of the same grim, gaunt faces that I had seen while traveling around my father’s area of southern Italy. These faces in Alabama reflected what Agee called “the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” While the publishing effort of Agee and Evans presented a memorable and compelling portrait of their subjects, their book, which Lionel Trilling reviewed enthusiastically, did receive a bit of his criticism for its failure “to see these people as anything but good,” and for its underemphasizing the “malice or meanness” that often accompanied the racism that was omnipresent in the share-cropping community as it was throughout the state.