Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  Atlanta. So far, everywhere I’ve been (Louisville, Nashville, and now Atlanta) people keep saying, “This isn’t the real South,” or, “It’s more of a border city.” Yet they look like Southerners, they talk like Southerners, they act like Southerners. I gather what they really mean is that Atlanta, Nashville, and Louisville have better newspapers, better colleges, more enlightened leadership, and consequently better race relations than other Southern communities. Therefore to say they are not the real South seems vaguely unfair.

  I met a couple of Southern belles, 1961 models. The first was a senior at a women’s college on the outskirts of Atlanta (“academically, the best school in the South,” she told me). She had the delicate look of a spring flower—yet a certain bounciness of manner—and that special softness and highness of voice often encountered in Southern women. “What made me join the sit-ins? I don’t know. I always wanted to do something about discrimination. When I saw them there, I felt I had no choice but to join in,” she said. She had not known any of the Negro participants. One day she was downtown shopping and came across a Negro picket line. “I just started picketing with them, but the tears were rolling down my cheeks.” She distributed CORE literature all over campus, and eventually about six of her fellow-students took part in the picketing. She regards herself as “neither a leader nor a follower—just an individual,” yet she conveys the impression of one who will make her mark on history.

  The second Southern belle, conventionally honey-haired and blue-eyed, was introduced to me by her mother who said, “I want you to meet my li’l ole jailbird daughter. She’s just been in and out of those jails since the sit-ins started—haven’t you, lamb chop?— and now she’s on her way to Jackson with the Freedom Riders.” Lamb chop, an honor student at a New Orleans women’s college, is jeopardizing a coveted Junior Year Abroad by making the dangerous journey to Jackson; but with her, as with a growing number of her generation, the “mewvement” (as they all pronounce it) must come first.

  The little old jailbird’s attractive and delightful mother took me to some meetings where I met the men and women of good will who were busily organizing for D-day—that day in September when the schools would be desegregated for the first time. (“Don’t ever say integration, we like to call it desegregation—it sounds so much more palatable, somehow.”) A network of committees and subcommittees with their cleverly contrived names—HOPE for Help Our Public Education, OASIS for Organizations Assisting Schools in September—were meeting almost daily, often to the background whir of a mimeograph machine grinding out the latest mailing. From the top-level planners, including Y leaders, churchmen, school board people, to the neighborhood groups and youth committees, hundreds were involved in this huge humanitarian enterprise. I heard the superintendent of schools tell a gathering that police protection for the entering students would be as carefully planned as the invasion of Japan. It was all thrilling, and heartwarming, and inspiring—with one tragicomic aspect: this great outpouring of best-intentioned energy was directed to the very modest end that nine black children (out of three hundred applicants) should be allowed peacefully to take their rightful places at school in September. These nine had survived every conceivable test known to educators. Academically, they had to be above the 50th percentile of the school to which they sought transfer, their behavior record had to be blameless, their personalities had to be declared outstanding. No such tests were required, of course, of their white classmates, which leads one to speculate whether the old phrase “separate but equal” is being supplanted for the blacks by the concept “together but vastly superior.”

  TRIP NOTES

  Montgomery. At last people have stopped saying, “This isn’t the real South.” My favorite sort of houses everywhere, white frame, two or more stories, most with nineteenth-century gingerbread trim. Even in the better suburbs, none of this split-level streamlined modern that gets so tiresome in wealthy California ... everything half-hidden by the rampaging vegetation, a Corot-Monet-Manet land ... the frescoes round the walls of the cupola in the State Capitol, incredibly like the worst examples of Soviet art, depicting scenes of Montgomery history ... one, titled “The Golden Years,” shows a group of happy slaves toting bales of something, each with delighted smile on face. No postcards of this available, to my sorrow, as I should have liked to tease my friends at home with them ... the Elite Café, Fine Food (pronounced “Eelight Cafe, Fan Fude”).... Weeds pushing up all over the tennis courts in the immense public park; a couple of years ago blacks won a court decision granting them use of the park, so the city authorities closed it up for everybody ... noses and faces being respectively cut off and spited all over ... they disbanded the zoo, too, and now if you want to take the kids to the zoo you have to go all the way to Birmingham—where the zoo is integrated!

  Social gatherings in Montgomery are full of echoes of the past. The food in private houses tends to be in the shape of things—ice-cream boats or hearts, fish-shaped aspic salads—and almost everything is creamed, not only creamed but served with cream sauce. The fare is as mild and gentle as the ladies themselves, no bitter or pungent taste to offset the bland, no crisp consistency to contrast with the soft. The very form of conversation seems more nineteenth century than contemporary. At ladies’ lunches the talk proceeds like a croquet game, with three standard opening moves: (1) the weather: “Well, is it hot enough for you?” (2) the food, about which someone is bound to declare pretty near the beginning that Rosie-Belle’s whatever-it-is is just simply out of this world, (3) the frontal-assault type of compliment where somebody declares that my you get younger-looking every day and how in the world do you manage it, and goes on to bet your husband doesn’t like to let you out of his sight for one single minute. (This sort of remark may as well be delivered to a matron of fifty as to the latest bride, and trips off the tongue as readily.) Exaggeration as a way of life may confuse the auslander. My hostess answers the telephone and is heard to say, “Why Janie, that’s just about the nicest thing I ever heard in my whole life”; upon being asked later what the call was about, it turns out that Janie has invited us over for a drink. No use to comment that my hostess must have had a rather thin time if that was really just about the nicest thing she ever heard in her whole life; she merely stares uncomprehendingly.

  As conversation warms up—which of course it does, eventually — the sense of the past is intensified, for so much of it deals with endless ramifications of family history and gossip about old times. One thing leading to another, the long-ago romances of Aunts Willie-Jo and Sarah-Marie, Cousins Robbie-Lou and Marigold, are brought out for examination and speculation. Anecdotes often end, “And the thing of it was he simply up and took a shotgun and blew his brains out.” “And of course she was found in the river. We all felt so bad and no one ever did exactly get the right of what happened.” “The poor feller just actually took to the bottle (well you know he did, and of course it’s in the family, his father died an alcoholic) and well anyway I declare one day they found him in the garage hanging from a belt....” “Of course nothing was ever proved about it, but they do say her death was not accidental.” Few seem to have died in their beds. All this, in surprising contrast to the peachy-creamy surface of life in Montgomery.

  The Montgomery country club is much like the one in Louisville—spacious, old-fashioned, French windows giving on to a long outdoor terrace, presumably for Gone With the Windish occasions. As in Louisville, good whiskey and terrible food are served by old-family-retainer types of blacks in white coats. There were a lot of young people in the crowd, girls in diaphanous evening dresses, boys in white dinner jackets. Their talk was all but incomprehensible, their “y’alls” rang out like Rebel Yells. I found myself talking to a middle-aged man, introduced to me as a member of the school board; so we discussed education—in its noncontroversial aspects, for I was a guest and on my best behavior. The topic was the difficult situation of the unusually bright child, whether he should be “skipped” or handled o
therwise. It is a safe and well-plotted subject, with enough “on the one hands” and “on the other hands” to keep one going for a while. My interlocutor explained that in his district, the problem is being tackled by grouping the children within each grade according to ability. I rejoined that the same system obtains in Oakland—and could not help adding that in our grammar school, there is a fifth-grade group of six children with I.Q.s of over 150—two whites, two Orientals, and two blacks. With genuine forehead-wrinkling puzzlement (and no apparent rancor) the school board member drawled, “Is that so? It don’t seem possible no Nigra could have an I.Q. of 150, do it, now?” I started to say, “To me it do ...” when our hostess hurriedly bore me off to talk to someone else. (A friend of mine in California, herself a transplanted Southerner, insists I have exaggerated this story, that educated Southerners do not talk like this. But I heard what I heard, and what’s more I’ve caught her talking in the same vernacular when she gets around her own folks from down home. To forestall a probable further criticism—that I have represented the whites but not the blacks as speaking in dialect—I can only say that educated Southern blacks are indeed far more particular about their diction than are their white counterparts.)

  For a breath of fresh air, I went to the mass meeting in the black community where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was to speak with the Freedom Riders. Actually the air was disturbingly filled with tear gas at one point, and no one quite knew if we’d get out of there alive. The hostile white crowd outside, which had been gathering for some time before the meeting, was suitably attired, I noted with approval, in the latest thing in mob wear. In faded cotton frocks revealing insect-bitten bare legs, or dirty shirts and jeans, they might have been movie extras assembled by a rather unimaginative director to do a corny mob scene. A well-read lot, they appeared to be, too—versed in the literature of their region. Surely that half-beaten-down half-savage look, that casual yet brutal slouch, that mean glitter in the eye could only be achieved by one with at least a passing acquaintance with the works of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Eudora Welty. There was no police protection, of course; just one or two very nervous-looking U.S. marshals. To achieve the church, I parked my borrowed car nearby and walked past the extras with all deliberate speed, as the Supreme Court would say—for, being hatted, gloved, and stockinged, I felt more than a little conspicuous.

  Inside, the church was a loud, sweet-singing haven, warmly enveloping. It was filled far beyond its normal seating capacity with people of all ages: dark-suited men, women in best dresses and flowered hats, little girls in party shoes, little boys wriggling in their stiff collars.

  As the evening wore on, its nightmare quality began to unfold. First there was the tear gas, an alien and threatening odor. Next, incredibly, Reverend King was telling us in matter-of-fact tones that the mob outside was completely out of control, they had injured some of the U.S. marshals and had overturned and burned a car. The implication was rather strong that the church might be next. More incredibly, the vast, packed audience was taking it in stride. There was not a sign of panic, not a shriek, not a fainting fit. Just murmurs of “Yes, Lord,” “That’s right,” lots of singing, lots of patient confidence. It seemed to go on forever and ever. Later, it was announced by the General of the Alabama National Guard that no one could leave the church until morning because of the danger outside. The atmosphere became positively jolly—like an impromptu camping expedition, I thought, as we prepared to make ourselves as comfortable as possible for the long hours of confinement.

  Searching that sea of calm, determined faces, I felt as though I’d stumbled on the very source of strength that would brace a young girl to exchange a year in Paris for a stretch in the Jackson prison, or a provincial gentlewoman to brave the scorn of her social set by publicly giving a hand to the black sit-ins.

  Sometime after five o’clock in the morning, having learned that my borrowed car was the unlucky one that had been demolished earlier, I was driven home in an Alabama National Guard jeep. It was a morning of startling beauty—a soft, warm, breezy dawn in which the lovely little town looked its very best.

  TRIP NOTES

  Montgomery after the Freedom Riders. The Fire Marshal came round to see me about the burned-up car. I was rather hoping he might be interested in finding the vandals who had destroyed it but he only asked me whether I was connected with CORE or NAACP, whether I had made other stops in the South or had come directly to Montgomery from California, whether I had attended regular church that Sunday morning, whether I knew anyone else who was at the meeting, why I went, whether my friends had lent me the car “of their own free will.” ... An editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser deplores the view that mob violence will chase industry from Montgomery; it points out that Atlanta had the greatest race riot in history in 1906, six hundred blacks killed and carted off in trucks—and look at flourishing, industrial Atlanta today! ... A twenty-two-year-old English student here is in trouble. She was quoted in a man-in-the-street interview as saying, “Negroes should be allowed to go any place they wish. I am for integration of the races 100 percent.” Since when she has been dropped from, of all things, the English-Speaking Union! ... The Country Clubbers have vanished from my life like summer snow since the car burning. One of them called me (sounding absolutely terrified) to say a rumor was spreading that she had accompanied me to the meeting, that her husband and in-laws are furious with her for even knowing me, that it wouldn’t be safe for us to meet again.... Twenty-two students from Auburn University signed a letter which appeared in the Advertiser, first sane thing to appear locally. They’ve since been hanged in effigy on campus by counter-students.... A local white couple, Fred and Anna Gach, have been tried and convicted of disturbing the peace. They saw a black Freedom Rider being stomped by the mob, shouted to a policeman (who was standing with back to the scene, arms folded) to “do something.” He did something—he arrested the Gaches....

  Just before I left, I was smuggled into one last drawing room for tea. By now there was virtually only one topic of conversation in Montgomery: the Freedom Riders, and for comic relief the case of the young English girl versus the English-Speaking Union. After the usual preliminary comments on the weather, the strawberry cream cake, and the youth and beauty of all present, our hostess patiently undertook to put me wise to the basic objection to the Freedom Riders; integration of the bus station facilities would surely lead to intermarriage. “But does one usually marry a person because one sits next to him at a bus stop?” She answered, with glint in eye and Scarlett O’Hara toss of head, “Honey, when ah sit next to a man—any man—ah jes’ caint help thinkin’ jest how he’d be, you know, to make love to. Ah might just as well come right out and say it—in baid. Now, you know yourself, owl women are lak that.” Later, the ladies discussed a mutual acquaintance—somebody’s aunt, I believe—who is currently in a nearby mental institution. “It’s real, real nass out there,” one of them said. “Ah declare! They have the loveliest grounds! It’s all beautifully kept up, you should see the flowers at this time of year. The fude’s fan, too, and she has such a pretty room.” She added reflectively, “It really isn’t so very different from the outside.”

  COMMENT

  The South has always fascinated me. I have dipped into that strange territory many times over the years, principally to visit Clifford and Virginia Durr, a white lawyer and his wife, in Montgomery, Alabama. In the dangerous 1950s these two were among the tiny minority of white supporters of such black causes as the Montgomery bus boycott, and in consequence they suffered almost complete ostracism at the hands of the respectable white community. Observing their life and meeting their few staunch allies, I wanted to probe further into the curious mixture of nostalgia and guilt (and, in their case, courage) that permeates the white Southern psyche. I wanted to see how that psyche was faring in the aftermath of the victorious bus boycott of the late 1950s and the sit-ins of 1960–61, so I sent a proposal along these lines to the editor of Esquire, who
agreed to commission the piece.

  Armed with a sheaf of introductions, I spent about five weeks on the road visiting various Southern cities and filling up a dozen notebooks with my findings. It was a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes horrifying, and sometimes even amusing experience. But when I got home and started to write about it, loaded as I was with material, I found that by far the worst part was trying to devise some sort of organizational form for the piece. Clearly the most dramatic incident of my trip was the beleaguered church meeting for the Freedom Riders—which could have taken up the whole article. Yet that was not my intention; I had set out to record impressions of the contemporary white South.

  Where to start and where to finish? I must have used up a ream of paper with false beginnings and endings. Finally I settled on a sort of travelogue format, a straight chronological account of the journey, the people I met, the episodes—which may seem the obvious way to do it, although it was far from obvious to me at the time. I also tumbled to the idea of “Trip Notes,” to be set off in different type from the narrative, for transitions between the towns I visited. I put these down as actual jottings from my notebooks, wishing to spare the reader wearisome descriptions of train journeys, scenery, background information—and also hoping that since I single-spaced these in the typescript, the editors at Esquire would not notice that the article exceeded the agreed-on length by quite a bit.

  Here, however, I may have outsmarted myself, for the editors cut, without consultation, the paragraph about Carl and Anne Braden, the only militantly left-wing characters in the piece. This was most annoying because the Bradens added a needed dimension to a discussion of white Southern supporters of the black cause: that of the politically conscious radical who is involved not only in the humanitarian issues, but who sees a whole reorganization of society as the only real solution. But Carl Braden was in prison at the time for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Were the Esquire editors still under the spell of fear cast by the then not so distant McCarthy era, hence reluctant to accord the Bradens favorable mention in the magazine? Another unauthorized change: my title, “You-All and Non-You-All,” derived from my sister Nancy’s book about U and Non-U usage, was changed to the meaningless “Whut They’re Thanking Down There,” which does not even catch the cadence of Southern vernacular.