by Andrea Lee
Now at first, as I sat in the bar watching the foam evaporate on my Guinness and trying to shut my ears to the yammering of some Winthrop House oarsmen in the next booth, I felt annoyed by this story. How unsubtle, I thought, to try to seduce a black girl with tales of your youthful prowess in the civil rights movement. I myself, with a battling Baptist minister for a father, and siblings who always seemed to be integrating some school or other, had been weaned on civil rights legends. So I wasn’t the slightest bit charmed, and was tempted to invent a morning conference with my adviser that would allow me to end the evening even earlier than usual. But for some reason I kept listening.
What intrigued me at first, I think, was just how ordinary a story it seemed. Ordinary like a fable or a page from a reading primer, something I seemed to have heard many times before. And how the voice in which he told it, with its flat California vowels and suburban syntax, suited the words as an instrument suits a particular melody. It began in fact as a fabulously commonplace story and a proper way to approach the sixties, a period about which it is almost impossible to reminisce without entering the realm of myth or parody. Y.F. made no attempt to paint pictures with language, yet whatever he said spurred me to fill in the spaces with my own visions.
He said: We drove, and I saw a stretch of desert highway and a battered Volkswagen carrying a pair of teenagers with faces out of the great Anglo-Saxon diaspora. Beautiful boys, almost twins, with long hair the color of the bleached flatlands around them, and straight teeth, and bodies whose rude health had just previously been the province of conscientious mothers and pediatricians. And carefully tattered jeans patched like Appalachian quilts. Boys who listened to the car radio as if their lives depended on it; which in a sense was true, since the radio poured out the statistics of the faraway yet curiously intimate war that in a few years might devour those healthy bodies. From the radio, too, came some of the best music of all time, rock, country, and soul masterpieces, which they accepted casually as the soundtrack to their own inimitable adventure. Of course they felt themselves to be on a mission, burning with a pure revolutionary flame, yet on the road they acted like fraternity brothers, stealing dips in motel pools, lifting cheeseburgers from indignant carhops, hanging moons at girls in passing cars. They’d been friends since childhood, but their friendship was not important to the story.
Their conversation I imagined as a torrent of leftist politics that was neither as superficial or as muddled as both of them were later to pretend, in times when it became fashionable to jeer at oneself in the sixties. Something else easily mocked in later days was the uncomplicated belief both of them had that the bad old world could be hammered to pieces and then put to rights. Already at the beginning of their trip this belief had been severely tested in a Tucson park, where they tried to engage in a bit of comradely dialogue with a group of Mexican kids. When their new acquaintances—in an efficient but not acrimonious fashion—knocked them down and relieved them of their watches, Y.F. and McGinty had the good sense not to discuss the matter. They put their reflections on hold and drove on to Alabama.
They’d expected to be foreigners in Tenlow County, but what actually happened was that, for the first time in their lives, they became minorities. The powers-that-were in Montgomery and Washington had bowed to the pressure for separatism that was already fragmenting the civil rights movement, and had channeled most other young white volunteers out of the field. At the first meeting of the voter registration volunteers, held in the county seat of Barreville in the Tinley Temple African Methodist Episcopal church, the two arrivals from California were the only Caucasian faces in the crowded pews. And those faces turned red as Chinese flags when the Reverend Emmanuel Basnight, pastor of Tinley Temple and local head of the voting drive, suddenly paused in the midst of an emotional invocation of justice to point his finger at the two of them. “The world is watching Tenlow County,” he thundered. “And the proof is that these two white boys have come all the way from California to help us win the vote! Stand up, boys!” They tottered to their feet, grinning feebly as the congregation burst into hallelujahs. And for the rest of the summer, as if they had been formally christened, Y.F. and McGinty were known, to their concealed irritation, as the White Boys.
When I heard that, I sent an innocent smile down into my mug of Guinness.
As the story went on, it was easy to picture Tenlow County. Just the deep South, a part of the world as contaminated by myth as the late sixties period itself. A region I’d never visited, but which was familiar to me from books and newspapers and my parents’ dramatic reminiscences. Familiar as the dark woods in every fairy tale. A sea of cotton in the boll, strewn at intervals with plantation houses, moribund Greek Revival towns, shacks clustered in the unchanged patterns of slavery. Crushing heat that felt more like doom than weather, and a halo of buzzards over every tree. Dirt roads, kudzu, juke joints, and the lingering perfume of original sin. Black earth and—everywhere, everywhere—black people. Neither Y.F. or McGinty had ever before sat at a table or in a classroom with a black person, but that summer there were days when the White Boys felt a shock of surprise at the sight of each other, and at glimpses of their own wan faces in mirrors.
They lived for two months in a shotgun house on the outskirts of Barreville, guests of a widow who was half blind with diabetes. There they learned to appreciate pigs’ ears and collard greens, and helped out their elderly hostess with an officious gallantry that would have amazed and enchanted their mothers back in California. Each morning they shoveled down a plate of grits and raced over to the storefront headquarters of the voter registration project, where they received marching orders from Reverend Basnight. This gentleman, since baptizing them with their nickname, had remained a remote, awe-inspiring figure who made it clear that his public enthusiasm had nothing to do with his private feelings. It was clear, in fact, that he was disposed to like or trust the White Boys about as much as he did the white men who spat tobacco in unison outside the town hall. Tall and thin, with skin the color of an old penny and a face as angular and humorless as that of a Byzantine saint, he would hand out the day’s assignment while regarding them with a cold skeptical eye that left them shuffling and itching to be off. Then they’d take the battered dusty Volkswagen bumping down back roads and pull up in front of a cluster of shacks. “Good morning to you,” one of them would call out. This was usually the glib outgoing McGinty, who had mastered a theatrical Southern accent. Old people, children, and anyone else who wasn’t working in the fields came out to stand in the dust and stare at the long-haired white visitors and their outlandish little car. “How do, we’re working for Reverend Basnight over at Tinley Temple, and for the election. We want to make sure that every grown man and woman in Tenlow County gets to vote. We’re going to have a revolution here! Going to put you in power.”
Old and young, their audience stood with wary faces while the visitors spoke of education and jobs and black people in charge, and handed out leaflets that displayed the proper ballot symbol, a red rooster. The blinding sunlight and those shuttered faces gave Y.F. a feeling of vertigo. At times, though he never told his friend, he was overcome by the impression that a fundamental mistake had been made: that it was really he and McGinty who needed information and hortatory phrases. That the black strangers standing barefoot in front of him had a secret hoarded strength that made talk of power and revolution simply presumptuous. And that no election would ever bring to an end the old sad story that lay like a dark river between them. These gloomy thoughts sometimes became so pressing that he had to go back to the car and pound his head to dislodge them.
At the ends of the long exhausting days, the White Boys hung out with the other young volunteers at backwoods roadhouses that throbbed like funky hearts in the night. There they could buy beer without showing ID, and argue about Fanon and Marcuse with black college students who, in their Afro hairstyles and city clothes, drew as many stares from the locals as the White Boys themselves. Though many of
the black volunteers did not approve of their presence, or even of their existence, the boys had such a winning eagerness to heap ashes on their own heads for the sins of their race that a grudging camaraderie sprang up. Even romance made an appearance. McGinty flirted with the belle of the summer, a doe-eyed Spelman sophomore, who galvanized the male population of Tenlow County with tight leotards and armloads of silver bracelets. And Y.F. yearned after Reverend Basnight’s daughter Nicolette, whom he did not describe to me, but whom it is easy to imagine as one of those wayside flowers one finds in rural ministers’ households. Nicolette almost certainly had a pretty, virginal face the color of rosewood and a genteel straightened coiffure held back by a stretch hair band. She didn’t frequent the juke joints, of course, but chattered with prim vivacity to Y.F. as she worked the mimeograph machine in the office. Mostly she expatiated on her love for the novels of Pearl Buck and her dream of studying medicine at Howard University; and she never let Y.F. so much as touch her hand.
In its last two weeks, the campaign went into overdrive. A New York, Washington, and Atlanta delegation swept into town, and suddenly Tenlow County was indeed watched by the rest of the country. Y.F. and McGinty were no longer the only white faces in the campaign, which the national press was describing as one of the test cases of the decade. Famous journalists and political luminaries arrived at rallies or sauntered into Reverend Basnight’s Sunday services, appearing and disappearing as casually as the restless Olympians in the Iliad. An atmosphere of marvels hung in the thundery August air. Rumors about the opposition grew daily more sensational: it was whispered that Governor Wallace had issued a secret order for the bombing of black schools and churches, that the Klan was preparing a preelection night of terror. In reality, their opponents put up little resistance. Perhaps the powers of Tenlow County were simply confident that white rule was part of the climate on their ancestral soil. But most likely the lack of opposition sprang from dawning pragmatism, for after nearly two decades of bitter struggle the most obdurate segregationists had begun to recognize through the smoke the lineaments of the second great lost Southern cause.
In any case, the campaign had from the start the feeling of being directed by a conscientious Providence. On election day the biggest problem was not harassment but a fearful inertia on the part of the new voters. Y.F., McGinty, and the other volunteers had instructions not to let anyone stay home and spent hours cajoling people out of their houses and ferrying them to polling stations. In the early evening, when Y.F. was on his own in a hamlet in the eastern corner of the county, trying to talk a particularly reluctant old man off his front porch, he saw a van pull up and two men get out. One of them was a photographer, and the other he was stunned to recognize as a great civil rights leader, a legendary figure who was the right hand of Martin Luther King, and whom he had seen in newscasts parting ravening mobs like Moses dividing the Red Sea. And, because it was a day of wonders, this hero clapped Y.F. on the back and boomed—in a mighty voice, like a bell cast in a supernatural foundry: “Good job, son. We’ll take it from here.” And in a grand popping of flashbulbs he escorted the old man into his van.
Of course they won. Everything happened the way it is supposed to happen in a saga of the good fight and summum jus. The poor, the downtrodden, the orphans of history triumphed, as two thousand new voters swept into power the first black officials since Reconstruction. The next day hundreds of sharecroppers, dressed in their Sunday clothes, poured into Barreville for the victory celebration, held in the newly integrated high school. In the front of the auditorium, the great civil rights leader stood at a pulpit lectern transported from Tinley Temple AME. Beside him stood a white senator from New England. They took turns telling the ecstatic crowd that the world was going to change, that with prayer and hard work you could wipe out injustice the way you could erase an error in arithmetic. Then they embraced, black and white, as the delirious spectators roared amen. Choirs from five black churches sang thunderously. Reverend Basnight, his lean face radiant and softened, raised his arms to heaven and thanked the Lord in strenuous panegyric. Then came an epic fried chicken banquet, and then a famous deejay arrived from Montgomery and the party started. It was a love feast. Dissolved in the sweltering mass of celebrants, the White Boys boogied, for the first time that summer feeling invisible. Y.F. found the prim Nicolette and managed a heated slow dance and a kiss: another victory on this night when no star was unreachable.
The next day was the last in Alabama for Y.F. and McGinty, and it was then that occurred the small mishap upon which hinges this entire story. A minuscule tragedy, especially in light of the magnitude of joy still hanging in the air, but a tragedy nonetheless in that it pointed out a mysterious flaw in the scheme of—what? Of everything. But I am getting ahead of myself, as my suitor in the college bar did not do. In a few words he sketched for me a picture of that last morning after the party, when the volunteers, bleary-eyed and hungover but still euphoric, were set to cleaning up. When the school had been swabbed down and every empty bottle collected, the White Boys had one more task: to transport the pulpit lectern from the school auditorium back to Tinley Temple AME. They set out driving an ancient flatbed truck, and a few minutes outside town met with a slight mishap.
It is easy to imagine the two in the cab of a dinosaur of a truck out of a Walker Evans photograph. Behind them on the flatbed, lashed with a clothesline in McGinty’s special bowline hitch, lay the tall lectern Y.F. drove, McGinty propped his feet up in the passenger seat, both talking eagerly about the election and the party. Then a lurch, Y.F. struggling with the archaic clutch, as the old truck gave a fierce jerk to the right and took a lumbering bound into the drainage ditch. The boys catapulted onto the dashboard, realizing simultaneously that they were unhurt; the engine gave a series of elephantine shudders and stalled; and at the same time there was a rumble and a splintery crash as the pulpit lectern, bursting free from its clothesline bonds, tumbled off the flatbed and onto the blacktop. There followed, one imagines, an almost reverent moment of silence.
When they’d said fuck! about a hundred times and scrambled out of the cab, Y.F. and McGinty found the lectern lying in the road. It was hard to believe that so short a fall could have caused so much damage. The impact somehow had been perfectly angled to split the varnished pine boards that made up the sides, and the whole thing, still attached by nails, but with strips of raw wood showing, lay collapsed as if flattened by a giant thumb. The White Boys stood there for a second, digesting the fact that they’d smashed up part of Reverend Basnight’s church, a central part, one that famous men had been clutching and making speeches over just the day before. And because five minutes earlier they’d been adrift in pure exaltation, the wreck took on an apocalyptic significance. It seemed to Y.F. that the lectern was the pulpit itself, the heart of the church and of the people who had sheltered him for two months. And the accident had resulted from a kind of violence he’d had inside of him without even knowing, like some dupe tricked into carrying a briefcase that held a bomb. The thought of telling the news to Reverend Basnight, and watching that angular brown face lose its glow of triumph and harden into grim exasperation, was unbearable. As was the thought of the others, of Nicolette. Y.F. didn’t say, but I am sure the two boys had tears in their eyes. They were not many years out of childhood, after all.
Anyway, that was the moment when I fell in love with your father. As he sat in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, telling me the story, and also seven years earlier, when he stood on a road in Alabama beside a broken pulpit from an African Methodist Episcopal church. Don’t ask me why, but it’s a fact. There was something that caught my heart—abruptly, the way catastrophes and miracles occur—in the picture of the two White Boys standing and staring at what looked exactly like the ruin of all good intentions. And in the image of how they must have picked up the pieces, tried to start the truck, kicked at weeds, and then begun jogging miserably back to town.
Of course the story doesn’t end there. Tha
t same afternoon they got the truck out of the ditch, and the pulpit to a carpenter in Barreville. The carpenter was a Tinley Temple member who promised to rebuild it free of charge. To their amazement no one was angry with them—not even Reverend Basnight, who actually stretched his Byzantine mouth in a dry smile and joked that even the Liberty Bell was cracked. And Nicolette said nothing but slipped Y.F. a piece of pink stationery inscribed with her address. It was only Y.F. and McGinty who were crushed: all their gorgeous sense of accomplishment had collapsed like a card castle, and suddenly they couldn’t wait to get home to California. Late that night, without saying good-bye to anyone, they took off out of Tenlow County, racing as if the Klan were after them. It was strange how it turned out, that the only white men who scared them in Alabama turned out to be themselves.