The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  bell hooks

  A Place to Descend To

  When I landed in Memphis in the summer of 2011, an associate producer picked me up at the airport and drove me into Greenwood. The drive down into the Delta was more beautiful than I remembered from when I was a little girl. The freeway was surrounded by impossibly tall trees with leaves that boasted every imaginable shade of green, from a dull, almost navy-blue green to greens so vibrant they seemed to sparkle. I was in awe.

  There’s something irreverent, almost defiant, about the Delta. Even the name “Mississippi Delta” isn’t correct, because it’s not a delta at all. A delta forms at the spot where a river meets the sea. The Mississippi Delta is actually an alluvial plain, created by the Mississippi River racing downhill and depositing her collection of sediment. It occurred to me that I was traveling on land that had been collected from waterways throughout the continent.

  After driving for two hours, we finally pulled up to Greenwood’s courthouse. It was a grand and picturesque two-story building with a white clock tower rising from its roof and standing like a beacon for the town. We went inside to connect with Raymond and the film crew. My dad was already there, and after greeting each other and meeting the rest of the crew, Raymond told us he’d like to shoot the first scene at Booker’s Place.

  The drive there was sobering. The Black section of Greenwood looked like a postapocalyptic ghost town. It had a scent I couldn’t place. I imagined it to be a mixture of rusted train cars, drop biscuits, Crown Royal, cigarettes, and sweat. Every few blocks ended in an empty lot where Black men sat in broken lawn chairs, some without shirts, most with alcohol. The men and sometimes women stood on corners drinking their brew and looking out at the world through glassy eyes. With bare chests, shoulders with shirts hanging off of them, eyes bloodred with blank, black marbles in the center of them, they watched us. As our cadre of cars approached, their joyless laughter would abruptly stop, and they’d look at us as if we were aliens.

  Street after street was filled with abandoned buildings next to ones still in use. They did not have “For Rent” or “For Sale” signs on them, but wooden boards covered many of their windows. A few of the empty buildings had windows that were uncovered, and as we drove past I peered inside and saw refuse, materials left behind. It felt as if those empty spaces were looking back at me, desperately trying to scream in spite of their sentences to life in silence.

  At first, I thought all the scattered businesses that remained open were struggling to stay afloat. The signs that held their names were often so worn they were almost unreadable. Many of their windows and doors were coated with filth. I began to wonder if the businesses could get away with looking so worn down because the people living in that community had so few options.

  The roads we drove down were filled with potholes, some so large that we had to greatly decrease our speed when driving over them to ensure that we didn’t damage our vehicles. The day was just beginning, and I already felt hopeless. I remembered that this whole thing started because I believed that my two-year-old son needed to understand his history so he could feel proud. I almost laughed out loud at the thought as we turned onto McLaurin.

  The stretch of McLaurin Street where Booker’s Place was, which had once been hopping with clubs and businesses, was all but deserted. All the clubs had been torn down except for Booker’s Place, which had stood empty for years. It didn’t close immediately after his death, though. Honey managed the place with the help of family for as long as she could.

  In the end, Honey had to sell the building when bone spurs in her feet made standing all day physically impossible. It was actually her doctor who told her that she had to give it up, and it broke her heart. By then, though, Booker’s Place had already fallen from grace. The quality of the food had diminished, and the place no longer attracted customers from all over the state. Eventually a church bought it. They were planning to turn it into a youth center.

  We parked down the street so the cameraman wouldn’t get our cars in the shot. Even after all these years, the Coca-Cola sign with the words “Booker’s Place” was still there. It was missing some of its glass, but it was there. Raymond didn’t want us to go inside because he wanted to film that the next morning. He just wanted my dad and me to walk down the street together while my father shared whatever memories came to mind.

  My dad left Greenwood as a football star. Whenever he returned, people remembered him. Even people who’d never met him had heard the story about the local boy who made it all the way to the pros. We’d only been on McLaurin for about twenty minutes when more and more cars began driving by, each one moving slower than the one before it. Some of the drivers rolled their windows down to shout, “Hey, is that you, Leroy?” He’d walk over, shake their hands, and then introduce me, all while the cameras were rolling. Part of me wanted to tell my dad to stop so that we could begin the work of making the documentary, but I knew how much this meant to him. It was one of the few blessings of football he could still claim.

  As my father and I stood together on McLaurin Street, under the Delta sun, neither of us knew what was coming. That was one of his last happy summers before all the concussions he’d blown off as nothing finally caught up to him.

  * * *

  THE SUN WAS JUST beginning to go down by the time we left McLaurin and headed over to a church on Howard Street. Even though we were still on the south side of town, Howard Street was lovely. It was located a block north of Johnson Street, which in decades past had represented the farthest north Blacks were allowed to travel in Greenwood. The building that had once housed Fountain’s Big Busy Store had recently been renovated and turned into a five-star hotel and a trendy bookstore with a coffee shop on the top floor. I later learned that the owner of Viking, a company known for making high-end kitchen appliances, was a Greenwood native, and he’d recently put a lot of money into Howard Street in a revitalization effort.

  We drove up to the Church of the Nativity, which was old but well kept. It had a regal look to it. It was once the home church of Byron De La Beckwith, the man who assassinated Medgar Evers. We were there to participate in a meeting of a group called the Bridge. Charlott Ray, one of the members, explained that the group was created because “since the civil rights movement, we’ve developed basically two separate cultures here in Greenwood. We have the black culture and we have the white culture. They don’t go to the same schools, they don’t go to the same churches, they don’t tend to deal with the same businesses downtown. So, you’ve got two totally separate groups in this tiny little town that need to be meshed.”

  She wasn’t describing Greenwood of the 1950s, she was describing Greenwood of 2011. The people who were at the Bridge meeting that night were a blend of Whites and Blacks and a mix of socioeconomic levels; most appeared to be over fifty. We had food set up, and people mingled for the first few minutes. Then the meeting was called to order and everyone made their way to folding chairs facing the front of the room.

  After being introduced, Raymond stood up in front of the crowd and explained that we were making a new documentary to revisit the one his father had made in the mid-1960s. We also wanted to highlight and uncover as much as we could about Booker Wright. He introduced his father’s film and we screened it for them, to get their responses to it and to see what they remembered about Booker.

  The film Frank made about the South was a triumph in many ways, in part because it captured not only hate but fear and confusion as well. It illustrated just how far people will let themselves go to avoid a painful truth. Frank’s film revealed that a lot of the Whites living in Greenwood during the movement didn’t want to pick sides. They wished the problem would just go away or solve itself without them having to lose the way of life they’d grown so accustomed to.

  One of the most powerful scenes in Frank’s black-and-white film takes place in the home of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It begins with his three very young children climbing all over him while he sit
s in a chair, laughing. It’s an idyllic image, reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting of what a loving father and a solid family should look like.

  Later, Frank interviewed him without his children, and at one point he said, “According to history, the Klan saved the South. And I believe if it’s to be saved again, the Klan will save it.” He went on to explain his belief that God might be using Klansmen to turn back the enemy.

  Looking back on the film with the clarity of the forty-plus years that have passed since it was made, the Grand Wizard’s words sounded insane. But the man Frank interviewed was wearing dress pants, had a lovely home, and appeared to be a man of influence. He spoke without arrogance, as if he was explaining an accepted truth to an outsider. In some ways, it was his lack of passion that made the moment so disturbing. During his segment, there were a few sounds of disapproval from the audience, but most remained silent.

  I was waiting for another scene to come up, one that always left me feeling somewhat undone when I saw it. A man wearing a gray suit and a long face appeared on the screen. He had dark hair and looked to be in his forties. He spoke with an air of humility and caution, as if wanting to be honest and clear while doing no harm. Cigarette smoke rose up from off screen and floated in front of his calm expression. “Now what happened here in Mississippi happened all over the South,” he began, “and that is until 1954 there was no great outcry from the intellectuals, from the teachers and columnists about the morality of this type of social structure. Then all of a sudden, in 1954, this decision,” he said, referring to the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that made school segregation unlawful, “not only changed the whole concept of the social order but what it said was in effect that we had been living in sin for all these many years.

  “And this thing became really a moral issue,” he continued. “Now this was quite a traumatic experience for us in the South, and I think it was for the rest of the nation, to be told all of a sudden that what you’ve been doing, what you’ve been believing in, the way you’ve been living all your life, and the way your parents lived before you and forebears, is not only wrong but immoral is quite a shock, and unfortunately it’s easy to understand why the attitude of Mississippi to this new order of the day, this new change, was one of inflexibility and one of defiance.”

  Every time I watched that scene, I had the same thought. He was talking about family, about having the thing that tethers you suddenly brought into question. The South is a place of heritage. Where I lived, people moved to a different house every five or six years, but many of the Delta’s residents were still living in the very house and on the very land where their parents had lived, and their parents before them. For some, the idea that the values they’d believed in, relied upon, and built their own families on were not only wrong but shameful and that their beloved ancestors were monsters may have been too painful to bear, an idea unassimilable to their sensibilities.

  Whenever I looked into the unassuming face of the man who spoke those words, I wrestled with how to file away his testimony. Unlike the Klan Wizard, this man was difficult to dislike.

  A few moments later in the film, five White men are seated at a table in a restaurant, and a man in voice-over says, “This is Carnaggio’s Restaurant. Gathered here are five men, representative leaders who speak for Greenwood. They voice the orthodox liturgy. Hardy Lott, the attorney who defended Byron De La Beckwith; Mayor Charles Sampson; Noll Davis; Stanley Sanders; Robert Wingate.”

  The voice-over drops out and Hardy Lott can be heard saying, “. . . bothered me and it has all of my life, and that is the fact that people in other sections of the country are thoroughly convinced that we are prejudiced against colored people on account of the color of their skin.”

  Wingate responds, “I think you’re absolutely right. On the contrary, there’s a very warm feeling on the part of most Southerners toward . . .”

  The voice-over cuts in, “This is a private club; Greenwood avoided integrating its public accommodations by converting public eating places into private clubs for Whites only. No Negroes enter here, except as servants.”

  Wingate went on, “. . . the plantation owner had a colored person who had worked for him for a number of years but had gotten too old to put in a day in the field. He didn’t run him off, he didn’t fire him—he left him with a home, he gave him food, he gave him clothes, and he gave him a place to live his life out in peace and contentment.”

  Noll Davis added, “There are many instances where these older colored people are still living on plantations, charged no rent, they do no fieldwork or no other kind of work. They’re still looked after, carried to the hospital, and helped out in many ways.”

  Wingate nodded and said, “We wouldn’t do that if we didn’t like ’em.”

  Lott interjected, “But what they would come back with always and say, ‘If that’s true and you not prejudiced against ’em, why do you want to keep your separate schools? Isn’t that prejudiced?’ Of course it’s not.”

  Then Sanders explained that, “It’s difficult for me to believe that the American people, being as we know—we’re a part of them—being fair-minded people, would want to impose on any area of this nation a situation in which illiterates”—here the camera captures Wingate nodding and smiling—“would be allowed to vote.”

  Lott agreed, “That’s true,” he said. You can build the schools as we have and provide the teachers, but you can’t go round and get ’em by the neck and make ’em solve an education. That’s something they have to do for themselves. It’s difficult for me to understand why the entire country is so intent on integrating our schools.”

  The camera shifted again to Sanders, who said, “I think that they feel like we do not have adequate schools for our colored children. And I think that it would change considerably the national attitude if people could come in and see our colored schools.”

  Then the voice-over cut in again and the screen was filled with images of Delta schools. “It’s true, many Negro schools do look adequate. It’s also true many were built belatedly to give equal facilities in a vain effort to keep separate facilities. Josephine Haxton gives an unorthodox view.”

  As images of schools continue to move across the screen, a woman’s voice is heard saying, “I don’t know a great deal about the Negro school system, because of course White people don’t know too much about the life of Negroes in the towns they live in. The problem of getting qualified Negro teachers in the Negro school systems, I understand, is very hard. Probably the Negro student who graduates from the best Negro high school in the state doesn’t have as good an education as a White child in a comparable school simply because the teacher’s not as good, because he has been raised in a deprived environment and he hasn’t had as much to bring to his education.”

  The scene returned to the restaurant, where the five men were still discussing the problems with integration, and Hardy Lott was explaining how he opposed integration because of how deeply he cared for Blacks. Then Booker Wright came on and simply told the world how he felt.

  The positioning of the scene makes Lott, Wingate, Sanders, Sampson, and Davis all look like fools. They were proclaiming that all their Blacks were happy. They went so far as to look into the camera and make what felt like a challenge: find someone who disagrees with that. Frank did; he found Booker.

  After Booker’s scene, a slow-talking man who was out fishing with his son came on the screen. His eyes were filled with concern. He was clearly wrestling to find a way to reconcile his desire for Blacks to have equality with how the change would impact his children.

  “I’ve lived in this Delta all my life, my parents before me, my grandparents. I’ve hunted and fished this land since I was a child. This land is composed of two different cultures—a White culture and a colored culture, and I’ve lived close to ’em all my life, but I’m told now that we’ve mistreated ’em and we must change, and these changes are coming faster than I expected, and I’m required to make decisions o
n a basis of a new way of thinking, and it’s difficult. It’s difficult for me, and it’s difficult for all Southerners.” The camera moved back and forth between the man’s face and his son’s, a boy who looked to be in his early teens. He didn’t nod or gesture while his father spoke, but his eyes were wide as if he was soaking it all up.

  His father continued, “An example: Recently, after church, I went to my favorite inn for dinner. I was met at the restaurant door by a waitress, and she said, ‘Maybe you better not come in today, the Negroes are here.’ I went anyway, and why shouldn’t I? I have known ’em all my life. They nursed me. I’ve eaten the food that they’ve prepared, they helped raise my children and raised me. I could see no harm in that. I still don’t. There are some facets, though, of integration and such that I’m opposed to. I’m still opposed to integration of schools, particularly on a grade-school level.

  “Now these children of grade-school level know all about life. They know more about the seamier side of life—sex—than most White high school children, and I think we’d be doing a disservice to our children if we mixed ’em too early. But I’m in agreement with the theory that all men are entitled to equal protection under the law, to dignity, and I’m willing to see these things happen in Mississippi and in the Delta and in the rest of the South.”

  I squirmed in my seat and looked around the room. It was silent. Everyone was watching. That was another scene that was tough for me. The idea that Blacks were inherently more sexual was wrong, but that man believed it—wholeheartedly believed it. He did not have resentment or hatred toward the people he believed to be oversexed; he even wanted them to have better lives. He was just concerned about the future for his own children.

  When I’d first watched Frank’s film, my own children had been asleep upstairs. At the time, I was homeschooling and one of my sons was getting close to finishing first grade, but he was still struggling to read three-letter words. Everyone told me not to worry and that sometimes boys read later than girls, but I had a father who was illiterate. My younger brother was twenty eight years old and still having difficulty reading, even though he’d attended public schools. He had a kind personality, and people would hire him knowing he had struggles with literacy, yet not comprehending just how severe they were. His bosses would try to give him small jobs that required little reading, but he couldn’t complete them. I was in a panic about my brother’s future, and I could tell, even from a distance, that my mother was as well.