A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  I stood and shook hands with Betty, and as she escorted me to the door, I told her that I would be calling back within a few hours, at around 8:00 p.m., hoping that I might then return and introduce myself to Randall Miller and take the two of them out to dinner at the Tally Ho, a popular restaurant on the outskirts of town. Betty said that they had gone there in the past and liked it, and she hoped that Randall would be home when I called and would be willing to meet with me.

  19

  AS I DROVE THROUGH DOWNTOWN SELMA ONTO HIGHWAY 80 toward the Holiday Inn, which was where I and most of the out-of-town media who were here for the silver anniversary conclave were staying—along with Jesse Jackson and the other honored guests and speakers—I continued to think about the wedding and how coincidental it was that Betty Ramsey and Randall Miller would be formalizing their union at a time when civil rights proponents would be memorializing the disaffection that had led to Bloody Sunday.

  Most of what I read about race relations in the Selma paper that week focused upon the tension and differences of opinion that made the chances of cooperation between the town’s blacks and whites seem highly unlikely in the near future. There was a police report that a bomb might be planted at the base of the bridge over which the twenty-fifth anniversary participants were scheduled to march. There was an interview with Jesse Jackson in which he described the bridge as symbolizing “Calvary” for black people, explaining, “We carried the cross of oppression and suffered the crucifixion so that all would have a new hope.” But this hope, according to a white councilman named Carl Morgan, was being undermined by the contrariness of such black leaders as Rose Sanders. Her well-publicized accusations that a racist grading system prevailed within the classrooms of Selma’s public schools was a manufactured controversy, Morgan suggested, one that kept Rose Sanders in the headlines and provided her and her anti-Smitherman friends with a lively issue to rally around. It was noted elsewhere that Sanders was currently raising funds for the establishment of a voting-rights museum near the bridge; it would display artifacts and memorabilia associated with the 1960s era of Dr. King, the Freedom Riders, and the rampaging posse of Sheriff Jim Clark. There was also a guest column on the editorial page of the Selma paper by J. L. Chestnut, Jr., in which he asserted that he and his parents had been receiving many threatening phone calls at night from white people who were part of a “planned conspiracy to assault and harass.”

  With these and other articles concentrating on the grievances and ill-feelings that were said to characterize the city, it seemed to me all the more important that I emphasize in my story for the Times what was apparently not deemed to be newsworthy here in Alabama—the fact that, despite all the local reports of contentiousness, it was nonetheless possible in today’s Selma for a black man to walk arm in arm with a white woman along the sidewalks without being physically impeded. Did this not say something about changing attitudes in Selma? Was it not a step forward along the path of what Dr. King called the “highway up from darkness”? Did this not exemplify a black man’s right to choose? In this state still associated with the notoriety of the Scottsboro trials, and in this city still marked by its own prejudicial prosecution of William Earl Fikes, was not Randall Miller newsworthy for having flouted what in these parts had long been a taboo?

  The William Earl Fikes conviction, following testimony by white women about his sexual transgressions, had led in 1954 to the creation of an antiblack organization in Selma called the White Citizens’ Council, which, according to the historian J. Mills Thornton III, in his book entitled Dividing Lines, motivated white people to adopt an “unusually aggressive and unanimous commitment to an extremist racial position during the coming decade”—the decade that produced Bloody Sunday. And yet what influences had emerged in Selma since then that might explain Randall Miller’s bold and confident pursuit of a white woman? He had wooed her, had won her, and had finally obtained a license to marry her—and, except for some snide commentary uttered within the community, he had fulfilled his intentions without being challenged. He had cuckolded a white man in Selma and had gotten away with it. Betty’s then husband had returned to Arkansas feeling anger and humiliation, but, insofar as I gathered from talking to her, he had held her accountable for what had happened and not her suitor, and he had never contemplated seeking revenge upon Randall Miller.

  I thought about this as I continued to drive through the early-evening traffic toward the Holiday Inn. In my ancestral part of Italy, a husband who had been cuckolded would often get a gun and shoot bullets at his unfaithful wife and her lover, and then elude a prison term because it was a “crime of honor.” I wondered how Betty’s ex-husband was now getting along in rural Arkansas? What did his friends and neighbors say and think about the situation? Was losing one’s wife to a black man doubly deflating to Mr. Ramsey’s ego? Or did it provide him with the excuse that the failed marriage had nothing to do with him—wasn’t it obvious that Betty had to be crazy and out of control to leave her family and cohabitate with a black man in Selma? But since I had no intention of going to Arkansas to explore this matter further, I returned my attentions to my area of interest, which was Selma.

  Selma was the reason that the interracial affair represented a story to me. I would not have considered writing about it had it occurred in Toledo, Sarasota, Wichita, or Buffalo, or in any of a thousand other places, including such southern cities as Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, or Memphis. Memphis was where Dr. King had been murdered in 1968 by a white man, and yet that city had not been demonized as Selma had been after Bloody Sunday, even though on the latter occasion not a single demonstrator had been killed. But the widespread media depictions of the staggering tear-gassed protesters being pummeled to the ground by law-enforcement authorities were so riveting and revolting that Selma thereafter represented the national nadir in narrow-mindedness, the last lingering remnant of the Civil War South and of white-columned bigotry and enslavement. This city that had been identified with prejudice was presently on the receiving end of prejudice from the press.

  Even now, twenty-five years after Bloody Sunday, reporters from around the nation, including correspondents employed by news organizations in England and Germany, were here to cover the silver anniversary memorial, and Rose Sanders was raising funds in order to enshrine the area as the hallowed grounds of a quasi-Holocaust; and I was considering using the anniversary as the backdrop for the story about a local black man who had ventured across the color line into the arms of a white woman. Was I misinterpreting its significance? Was I trying to turn Randall Miller into a connubial Jackie Robinson? Would I be doing a disservice to this weekend’s civil rights gathering if, instead of producing a story that would remind readers of the black anguish preceding the congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act, I introduced into my coverage an almost contradictory scenario that focused on interracial love and was not what the Times editors in New York were expecting? How come the local newspaper had not already published something about the couple, especially after the two of them had divorced their spouses and let it be known that they intended to marry? It seemed to me that if the Selma Times-Journal had sought them out for a feature story, or had at least printed an item on the social page about their forthcoming wedding, it might have been picked up by the national media and been presented around the country in a way that would have put Selma in a good light—giving the impression that the city, in being the locale of such a ceremony, was deviating from its image and was no longer supporting principles that denied African-Americans full equality with regard to opportunities and choices.

  I considered driving over to the Times-Journal building and questioning the editorial bosses about why they had ignored this story, but I doubted that they would tell me much. Decision makers at news organizations are characteristically guarded when asked to explain why they have not published something, usually responding that it is nobody’s concern but their own. Maybe the Times-Journal’s business office had advised the edi
tors to stay away from the story, arguing that to do otherwise could indicate editorial tolerance of interracial sexual intimacy, and this might prompt some of the newspaper’s leading advertisers to withdraw their financial support. Or maybe the editors shied away for reasons of their own, perhaps out of concern that a printed story might offend readers who were hard-core segregationists, resulting in a rock or a bomb being hurled through the window of Randall Miller’s home before or during the wedding—an incident that would surely bring forth protests from black activists and more unwanted attention to Selma from out-of-state media. And, furthermore, there was no proof that the African-Americans of Selma or elsewhere in the United States liked reading about their people marrying whites any more than white people liked reading about interracial marriages with blacks.

  While U.S. census data pointed to a substantial increase in black-white marriages in the aftermath of the civil rights movement’s challenges to segregation in schools and the workplace—in 1960, there were approximately 50,000 black-white marriages; in 1990 the estimate was about 300,000—there was no evidence that this rising number had broadened or hastened the general acceptance of blacks into the white social world. And advocates of black pride could well resent such marriages, reasoning that they contributed nothing to the movement’s cause and might lend credence to the idea that a solution to racism was achievable via the gradual eradication of the black race, the watering down of black blood into the white mainstream through the repeated and prolonged process of miscegenation. The birth of millions of mulattoes before and since the Civil War had failed to have a positive impact on the historical problem of racism in America—and, more often than not, black separatists and white segregationists were generally in agreement on the undesirability of marital relationships between black people and white people. Oddly allied on this matter was the Black Muslim leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and the onetime sheriff of Selma, James G. Clark.

  In the early 1960s, former president Harry S. Truman spoke out against black-white marriages when I interviewed him as a Times reporter. It was then customary for Truman to permit the press to accompany him when he visited New York and seek his comments on topical subjects during his postbreakfast walks along Park Avenue near his hotel; and on this particular morning, since interracial conflicts were dominating the headlines, I asked him whether he thought that racial intermarriages in America might become widespread in the future.

  “I hope not,” Truman said unhesitatingly, maintaining his quick stride while I and three other journalists tried to keep pace while taking notes. “I don’t believe in it,” he continued. “What’s that word about four feet long?”

  “Miscegenation,” I replied.

  Neither slowing down nor seeming to be impressed that I knew the word, Truman turned toward me and asked, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?”

  “Well,” I said after a pause, surprised that this interview had now turned personal, “I would hope that a daughter of mine would marry the man she loved.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Truman replied sharply.

  I said nothing, walking next to him with my eyes lowered and my ballpoint pen scribbling notes along the folded sheets of paper I held in my left hand.

  “Well,” he went on more softly, “she won’t love someone who isn’t her color. You’ll edit the man she goes out with. I did, and mine married the right man.”

  He was referring to the assistant managing editor of the Times, Clifton Daniel, who had married Truman’s daughter, Margaret, in 1956. When I returned to the newsroom, I wondered how this story would be played, and if Daniel might hold it against me for asking his father-in-law such a question. But I heard nothing from Daniel nor from any other editor after I had turned in the story, and on the following morning the paper printed all of Truman’s comments. It was not on page one, however, appearing well back in the news section—under a small-size headline: TRUMAN OPPOSES BIRACIAL MARRIAGE—and in the second paragraph of my piece some editor or copyreader had added a sentence explaining that Mr. Truman was “long an advocate of integration” in other respects.

  “I don’t want to marry the white man’s daughter. I just want to get the white man off my back,” I had heard James Baldwin say often during the early 1960s, either when he was speaking out as a black man on television or when he was my dinner guest in New York. In late September 1962, a few days before the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight fight in Chicago, I drove Baldwin out to Patterson’s training camp in Elgin, Illinois, where the two of them met for the first time. I was writing about the fight for the Times, while Baldwin was covering it for Nugget magazine. After we had spent an hour with Patterson, Baldwin presented him with two of his books—Another Country and Nobody Knows My Name—inscribing them: “For Floyd Patterson—because we both know whence we come, and have some idea where we’re going.…”

  A year later, in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote:

  The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example—especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

  20

  by Gay Talese

  Special to The New York Times

  SELMA, Ala., March 6—Twenty-five years ago, after borrowing a tail-finned Cadillac hearse from the mortuary owned by his family in this onetime plantation town in south central Alabama, a young man named Randall Miller joined hundreds of other blacks as a volunteer ambulance driver in a civil rights march that was soon scheduled to head east to the state capital, Montgomery.…

  But now—a quarter century after the highway clash that was commemorated this past weekend by returning veterans of the march—Selma reflects much advancement in the quest for racial harmony. Not only interracial harmony, but also, on occasion, interracial love. Last weekend, the former ambulance driver, Randall Miller, now fifty-one years old, was married here to a thirty-eight-year-old white woman, Betty Ramsey. They were married in the presence of twenty white and black friends in Mr. Miller’s house, in an integrated neighborhood within hearing of the cheers from the thousands who attended the commemorative ceremonies.…

  THESE WERE THE OPENING PARAGRAPHS OF THE STORY I HAD typed in my motel room in Selma and then faxed to the national editor in New York, hoping that it would appear in the next morning’s Times. I did not know until the following afternoon, after buying a copy of the Times at the Atlanta airport prior to flying home, that the editors had published exactly and fully what I had written, printing the first eight paragraphs across the lower half of page one, under a three-column headline: SELMA 1990: OLD FACES AND A NEW SPIRIT.

  The rest of my 2,500-word article, which described the wedding ceremony and the reception as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary events occurring elsewhere in the city, was spread across a full page inside the paper. I was pleased by the amount of space given to my story, but disappointed that the editors had not used any photos from the wedding. The Times had sent a staff photographer from New York to work with me. On the night before the wedding, while dining with Randall Miller and Betty at the Tally Ho and thanking them for adding me to the guest list, I asked if I could bring along the Times’s photographer, Michelle Agins. An hour before, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, I had met her for the first time; she was checking in as I was heading out to the restaurant. She was a personable young black woma
n who had once worked as a city hall photographer for Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. I do not know if this impressed me more than it did Randall Miller, but, after I had mentioned it to him at dinner, he said that it would be okay if Agins came with her camera to the wedding.

  She seemed to enjoy herself on the following night as she moved comfortably and unobtrusively through the living room while photographing the guests and the two people who commanded their attention—Randall Miller, dressed in a dark suit with a boutonniere, and Betty Ramsey, wearing a white satin suit of her own design and holding a bouquet of roses and carnations. After the couple had exchanged their vows while standing in front of the fireplace, the Reverend Charles A. Lett raised his arms and proclaimed their union “an act of divine origin.” As Agins’s busy camera recorded the ceremony and reception that followed, I was gladdened by the thought that her pictures would provide the Times with confirming evidence of what I was planning to write. It was my intention to suggest that even in this city that owed its identity to racial hatred, there was nevertheless space in which black and white residents might find a common cause, and this space and cause had converged on this particular night in this living room where the newlywed couple had been toasted by an interracial gathering of champagne-drinking guests.

  Why had the Times not used a picture from the wedding? Inside the paper, where my article mentioned the silver anniversary parade and named a few of its prominent marchers and witnesses, the editors had run an Agins photo of John Lewis and Hosea Williams, two civil rights veterans, taking a nostalgic walk together across the bridge. They also printed her photograph of sixty-year-old Mayor Smitherman, posed at his desk with a row of flags hanging behind him, including one representing the Confederacy. But the main photo on page one, instead of visually complementing what I had written, depicted a black woman lying facedown on the highway, surrounded by helmeted white troopers equipped with clubs, guns, and gas masks. It had been taken in 1965 on Bloody Sunday by an Associated Press photographer, and as I looked at it in Atlanta, I wondered why this old wire-service image had been chosen over a wedding picture taken by the Times staffer who had been assigned to join me in Selma. Why could they not have shown the city in a nonracist posture for a change? Why continually represent the politics of victimization?