The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  “Pure” risk or total risk, whichever, Indianapolis and Grand Prix drivers have seldom been willing to face the challenge of Southern stock car drivers. A. J. Foyt, last year’s winner at Indianapolis, is one exception. He has raced against the Southerners and beaten them. Parnelli Jones has tried and fared badly. Driving “Southern style” has a quality that shakes a man up. The Southerners went on a tour of northern tracks last fall. They raced at Bridgehampton, New York, and went into the corners so hard the marshals stationed at each corner kept radioing frantically to the control booth: “They’re going off the track. They’re all going off the track!”

  But this, Junior Johnson’s last race in a Dodge, was not his day, neither for qualifying nor racing. Lorenzen took the lead early and won the 250-mile race a lap ahead of the field. Junior finished third, but was never in contention for the lead.

  “Come on, Junior, do my hand—”

  Two or three hundred people come out of the stands and up out of the infield and onto the track to be around Junior Johnson. Junior is signing autographs in a neat left-handed script he has. It looks like it came right out of the Locker book. The girls! Levi’s, stretch pants, sneaky shorts, stretch jeans, they press into the crowd with lively narbs and try to get their hands up in front of Junior and say:

  “Come on, Junior, do my hand!”

  In order to do a hand, Junior has to hold the girl’s hand in his right hand and then sign his name with a ball-point on the back of her hand.

  “Junior, you got to do mine, too!”

  “Put it on up here.”

  All the girls break into … smiles. Junior Johnson does a hand. Ah, sweet little cigarette-ad blonde! She says:

  “Junior, why don’t you ever call me up?”

  “I ‘spect you get plenty of calls ’thout me.”

  “Oh, Junior! You call me up, you hear now?”

  But also a great many older people crowd in, and they say:

  “Junior, you’re doing a real good job out there, you’re driving real good.”

  “Junior, when you get in that Ford, I want to see you pass that Freddie Lorenzen, you hear now?”

  “Junior, you like that Ford better than that Dodge?”

  And:

  “Junior, here’s a young man that’s been waiting some time and wanting to see you—” and the man lifts up his little boy in the middle of the crowd and says: “I told you you’d see Junior Johnson. This here’s Junior Johnson!”

  The boy has a souvenir racing helmet on his head. He stares at Junior through a buttery face. Junior signs the program he has in his hand, and then the boy’s mother says:

  “Junior, I tell you right now, he’s beside you all the way. He can’t be moved.”

  And then:

  “Junior, I want you to meet the meanest little girl in Wilkes County.”

  “She don’t look mean to me.”

  Junior keeps signing autographs and over by the pits the other kids are all over his car, the Dodge. They start pulling off the decals, the ones saying Holly Farms Poultry and Autolite and God knows what all. They fight over the strips, the shreds of decal, as if they were totems.

  All this homage to Junior Johnson lasts about forty minutes. He must be signing about 250 autographs, but he is not a happy man. By and by the crowd is thinning out, the sun is going down, wind is blowing the Coca-Cola cups around, all one can hear, mostly, is a stock car engine starting up every now and then as somebody drives it up onto a truck or something, and Junior looks around and says:

  “I’d rather lead one lap and fall out of the race than stroke it and finish in the money.”

  “Stroking it” is driving carefully in hopes of outlasting faster and more reckless cars. The opposite of stroking it is “hard-charging.” Then Junior says:

  “I hate to get whipped up here in Wilkes County, North Carolina.”

  Wilkes County, North Carolina! Who was it tried to pin the name on Wilkes County, “The bootleg capital of America”? This fellow Vance Packard. But just a minute … .

  The night after the race Junior and his fiancée, Flossie Clark, and myself went into North Wilkesboro to have dinner. Junior and Flossie came by Lowes Motel and picked us up in the dreamboat white Pontiac. Flossie is a bright, attractive woman, saftig, well-organized. She and Junior have been going together since they were in high school. They are going to get married as soon as Junior gets his new house built. Flossie has been doing the decor. Junior Johnson, in the second-highest income bracket in the United States for the past five years, is moving out of his father’s white frame house in Ingle Hollow at last. About three hundred yards down the road. Overlooking a lot of good green land and Anderson’s grocery. Junior shows me through the house, it is almost finished, and when we get to the front door, I ask him, “How much of this land is yours?”

  Junior looks around for a minute, and then back up the hill, up past his three automated chicken houses, and then down into the hollow over the pasture where his $3100 Santa Gertrudis bull is grazing, and then he says:

  “Everything that’s green is mine.”

  Junior Johnson’s house is going to be one of the handsomest homes in Wilkes County. Yes. And—such complicated problems of class and status. Junior is not only a legendary figure as a backwoods boy with guts who made good, he is also popular personally, he is still a good old boy, rich as he is. He is also respected for the sound and sober way he has invested his money. He also has one of the best business connections in town, Holly Farms Poultry. What complicates it is that half the county, anyway, reveres him as the greatest, most fabled night-road driver in the history of Southern bootlegging. There is hardly a living soul in the hollows who can conjure up two seconds’ honest moral indignation over “the whiskey business.” That is what they call it, “the whiskey business.” The fact is, it has some positive political overtones, sort of like the I.R.A. in Ireland. The other half of the county—well, North Wilkesboro itself is a prosperous, good-looking town of 5,000, where a lot of hearty modern business burghers are making money the modern way, like everywhere else in the U.S.A., in things like banking, poultry processing, furniture, mirror, and carpet manufacture, apple growing, and so forth and so on. And one thing these men are tired of is Wilkes County’s reputation as a center of moonshining. The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax agents sit over there in Wilkesboro, right next to North Wilkesboro, year in and year out, and they have been there since God knows when, like an Institution in the land, and every day that they are there, it is like a sign saying, Moonshine County. And even that is not so bad—it has nothing to do with it being immoral and only a little to do with it being illegal. The real thing is, it is—raw and hillbilly. And one thing thriving modern Industry is not is hillbilly. And one thing the burghers of North Wilkesboro are not about to be is hillbilly. They have split-level homes that would knock your eyes out. Also swimming pools, white Buick Snatchwagons, flagstone terrasse-porches enclosed with louvered glass that opens wide in the summertime, and built-in brick barbecue pits and they give parties where they wear Bermuda shorts and Jax stretch pants and serve rum collins and play twist and bossa nova records on the hi-fi and tell Shaggy Dog jokes about strange people ordering martinis. Moonshining … just a minute—the truth is, North Wilkesboro … .

  So we are all having dinner at one of the fine new restaurants in North Wilkesboro, a place of suburban plate-glass elegance. The manager knows Junior and gives us the best table in the place and comes over and talks to Junior a while about the race. A couple of men get up and come over and get Junior’s autograph to take home to their sons and so forth. Then toward the end of the meal a couple of North Wilkesboro businessmen come over (“Junior, how are you, Junior. You think you’re going to like that fast-backed Ford?”) and Junior introduces them to me.

  “You’re not going to do like that fellow Vance Packard did, are you?”

  “Vance Packard?”

  “Yeah, I think it was Vance Packard wrote it. He wrote an article and cal
led Wilkes County the bootleg capital of America. Don’t pull any of that stuff. I think it was in American magazine. The bootleg capital of America. Don’t pull any of that stuff on us.”

  I looked over at Junior and Flossie. Neither one of them said anything. They didn’t even change their expressions.

  The next morning I met Junior down in Ingle Hollow at Anderson’s Store. That’s about fifteen miles out of North Wilkesboro on County Road No. 2400. Junior is known in a lot of Southern newspapers as “the wild man from Ronda” or “the lead-footed chicken farmer from Ronda,” but Ronda is only his post-office-box address. His telephone exchange, with the Wilkes Telephone Membership Corporation, is Clingman, North Carolina, and that isn’t really where he lives either. Where he lives is just Ingle Hollow, and one of the communal centers of Ingle Hollow is Anderson’s Store. Anderson’s is not exactly a grocery store. Out front there are two gasoline pumps under an overhanging roof. Inside there are a lot of things like a soda-pop cooler filled with ice, Coca-Colas, Nehi drinks, Dr. Pepper, Double Cola, and a gumball machine, a lot of racks of Red Man chewing tobacco, Price’s potato chips, OKay peanuts, cloth hats for working outdoors in, dried sausages, cigarettes, canned goods, a little bit of meal and flour, fly swatters, and I don’t know what all. Inside and outside of Anderson’s there are good old boys. The young ones tend to be inside, talking, and the old ones tend to be outside, sitting under the roof by the gasoline pumps, talking. And on both sides, cars; most of them new and pastel.

  Junior drives up and gets out and looks up over the door where there is a row of twelve coon tails. Junior says:

  “Two of them gone, ain’t they?”

  One of the good old boys says, “Yeah,” and sighs.

  A pause, and the other one says, “Somebody stole ’em.”

  Then the first one says, “Junior, that dog of yours ever come back?”

  Junior says, “Not yet.”

  The second good old boy says, “You looking for her to come back?”

  Junior says, “I reckon she’ll come back.”

  The good old boy says, “I had a coon dog went off like that. They don’t ever come back. I went out ‘ere one day, back over yonder, and there he was, cut right from here to here. I swear if it don’t look like a coon got him. Something. H’it must of turned him every way but loose.”

  Junior goes inside and gets a Coca-Cola and rings up the till himself, like everybody who goes into Anderson’s does, it seems like. It is dead quiet in the hollow except for every now and then a car grinds over the dirt road and down the way. One coon dog missing. But he still has a lot of the black and tans, named Rock … .

  … Rock, Whitey, Red, Buster are in the pen out back of the Johnson house, the old frame house. They have scars all over their faces from fighting coons. Gypsy has one huge gash in her back from fighting something. A red rooster crosses the lawn. That’s a big rooster. Shirley, one of Junior’s two younger sisters, pretty girls, is out by the fence in shorts, pulling weeds. Annie May is inside the house with Mrs. Johnson. Shirley has the radio outside on the porch aimed at her, The Four Seasons! “Dawn!—ahhhh, ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!” Then a lot of electronic wheeps and lulus and a screaming disc jockey, yessss! WTOB, the Vibrant Mothering Voice of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It sounds like WABC in New York. Junior’s mother, Mrs. Johnson, is a big, good-natured woman. She comes out and says, “Did you ever see anything like that in your life? Pullin’ weeds listenin’ to the radio.” Junior’s father, Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr.—he built this frame house about thirty-five years ago, up here where the gravel road ends and the woods starts. The road just peters out into the woods up a hill. The house has a living room, four bedrooms and a big kitchen. The living room is full of Junior’s racing trophies, and so is the piano in Shirley’s room. Junior was born and raised here with his older brothers, L. P., the oldest, and Fred, and his older sister, Ruth. Over yonder, up by that house, there’s a man with a mule and a little plow. That’s L. P. The Johnsons still keep that old mule around to plow the vegetable gardens. And all around, on all sides, like a rim are the ridges and the woods. Well, what about those woods, where Vance Packard said the agents come stealing over the ridges and good old boys go crashing through the underbrush to get away from the still and the women start “calling the cows” up and down the hollows as the signal they were coming … .

  Junior motions his hand out toward the hills and says, “I’d say nearly everybody in a fifty-mile radius of here was in the whiskey business at one time or another. When we growed up here, everybody seemed to be more or less messing with whiskey, and myself and my two brothers did quite a bit of transporting. H‘it was just a business, like any other business, far as we was concerned. H’it was a matter of survival. During the Depression here, people either had to do that or starve to death. H‘it wasn’t no gangster type of business or nothing. They’s nobody that ever messed with it here that was ever out to hurt anybody. Even if they got caught, they never tried to shoot anybody or anything like that. Getting caught and pulling time, that was just part of it. H’it was just a business, like any other business. Me and my brothers, when we went out on the road at night, h’it was just like a milk run, far as we was concerned. They was certain deliveries to be made and … .”

  A milk run—yes! Well, it was a business, all right. In fact, it was a regional industry, all up and down the Appalachian slopes. But never mind the Depression. It goes back a long way before that. The Scotch-Irish settled the mountains from Pennsylvania down to Alabama, and they have been making whiskey out there as long as anybody can remember. At first it was a simple matter of economics. The land had a low crop yield, compared to the lowlands, and even after a man struggled to grow his corn, or whatever, the cost of transporting it to the markets from down out of the hills was so great, it wasn’t worth it. It was much more profitable to convert the corn into whiskey and sell that. The trouble started with the Federal Government on that score almost the moment the Republic was founded. Alexander Hamilton put a high excise tax on whiskey in 1791, almost as soon as the Constitution was ratified. The “Whiskey Rebellion” broke out in the mountains of western Pennsylvania in 1794. The farmers were mad as hell over the tax. Fifteen thousand Federal troops marched out to the mountains and suppressed them. Almost at once, however, the trouble over the whiskey tax became a symbol of something bigger. This was a general enmity between the western and eastern sections of practically every seaboard state. Part of it was political. The eastern sections tended to control the legislatures, the economy and the law courts, and the western sections felt shortchanged. Part of it was cultural. Life in the western sections was rougher. Religions, codes and styles of life were sterner. Life in the eastern capitals seemed to give off the odor of Europe and decadence. Shays’ Rebellion broke out in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts in 1786 in an attempt to shake off the yoke of Boston, which seemed as bad as George III’s. To this day people in western Massachusetts make proposals, earnestly or with down-in-the-mouth humor, that they all ought to split off from “Boston.” Whiskey—the mountain people went right on making it. Whole sections of the Appalachians were a whiskey belt, just as sections of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were a cotton belt. Nobody on either side ever had any moral delusions about why the Federal Government was against it. It was always the tax, pure and simple. Today the price of liquor is 60 per cent tax. Today, of course, with everybody gone wild over the subject of science and health, it has been much easier for the Federals to persuade people that they crack down on moonshine whiskey because it is dangerous, it poisons, kills and blinds people. The statistics are usually specious.

  Moonshining was illegal, however, that was also the unvarnished truth. And that had a side effect in the whiskey belt. The people there were already isolated, geographically, by the mountains and had strong clan ties because they were all from the same stock, Scotch-Irish. Moonshining isolated them even more. They always had to be careful who came up there. There are plen
ty of hollows to this day where if you drive in and ask some good old boy where so-and-so is, he’ll tell you he never heard of the fellow. Then the next minute, if you identify yourself and give some idea of why you want to see him, and he believes you, he’ll suddenly say, “Aw, you’re talking about so-and-so. I thought you said—” With all this isolation, the mountain people began to take on certain characteristics normally associated, by the diffident civilizations of today, with tribes. There was a strong sense of family, clan and honor. People would cut and shoot each other up over honor. And physical courage! They were almost like Turks that way.

  In the Korean War, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-two of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-two were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.

  Detroit has discovered these pockets of courage, almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for Everyman—making their cars go 175 miles an hour on racetracks—by discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900. Of course, very few stock car drivers have ever had anything to do with the whiskey business. A great many always lead quiet lives off the track. But it is the same strong people among whom the whiskey business developed who produced the kind of men who could drive the stock cars. There are a few exceptions, Freddie Lorenzen, from Elmhurst, Illinois, being the most notable. But, by and large, it is the rural Southern code of honor and courage that has produced these, the most daring men in sports.