When the ride came to a stop and the door of the cage opened, Daddy’s Brylcreemed hair was akimbo. “You shouldn’t let children ride this thing,” he said to the carnival worker, scrambling around the cage to collect the contents of his pockets. Then he stepped from the platform and threw up all over his scuffed-up Sunday shoes. This put my mama into stitches. And the more she laughed, the more infuriated he became. He had never been gracious about being the brunt of a joke.
Warm salt air rushed through the open windows of the car as Mama drove us back to the cottage. “Cut the giggling, Lurleen,” Daddy said. His head was in his lap. “Pull over. I’m gonna vomit. That damn thing should be illegal. If one of those coupler ties had broken, we could have been flung across the entire beach and into the water. You should have never let me, much less your daughter, get on such a murderous contraption.” On and on he went—even in his sorry condition, my father wasn’t at a loss for words. The next morning, we packed up, helped Daddy to the car, emptied an ice tray into a beach towel for his head, and went home.
The next time I saw a Bullet Ride was at the Alabama State Fair in Montgomery. I was the mother holding the stuffed animal prizes, and my son and his friend were swinging in the metal cage. The Bullet Ride I took with Daddy in the summer of 1957 returned to me as a parable. It was a lesson learned of what a man like my father, who always had to be in control at all times, becomes when that control is wrested from him. It unmasked an ultimate truth—the deep insecurities that were behind his bravado.
I sometimes forget that as a child, Daddy grew up in a house of rage, where his alcoholic father was violent and out of control. His mother refused to fight back for herself or for her children. Daddy’s tempestuous spirit always sat on the tip of his tongue. Perhaps it was always ready in case his insecurities attempted an escape. There are those who admire politicians who focus their energy on power rather than compassion, whose words spark anger and fear rather than the reconciliation and peace for which we all deeply yearn.
The politics of today plays to that same sense of fear and anger. Make America Great Again is not a plan. It is an insinuation that America is not good enough to be proud of. It is a pledge of allegiance to discrimination. It makes people feel that their way of life is under assault, and their deepest values are being trampled, no matter how misguided, hurtful, or destructive those notions are. It makes hating right.
In 1957, when we lived in Clayton and I rode the Bullet Ride with Daddy, the angry face of history had yet to show itself to me. But show itself it eventually did, and I knew I had to do everything I could to advance another vision of who we are and what we stand for. It is John Lewis’s “work of loving peace,” and that work is ongoing and as vital today as it was when my father threw up on his Sunday shoes. As I write this I hear my daddy say, “Uudlum Scuudlum, you’re doing just fine. I sure am proud of you.”
5
The Race
If I can’t treat a black man fairly, I don’t deserve to be governor.
—George Wallace
Daddy’s departure from the Alabama house of representatives and his election as a circuit judge were calculated steps toward the governor’s race in 1958. Daddy needed a position of influence and a lot of free time to roam around and politick. According to his biographers, he spent much of the time he wasn’t adjudicating—hours and hours—in the lobbies of the Exchange and Jefferson Davis hotels, ingratiating himself to passersby. And while he was running for governor, Uncle Jack could run for the seat on the circuit court Daddy was vacating. Two Barbour County Wallaces on the ballot at the same time would pile up votes for both brothers.
During the early years of his political life, Daddy had been for the most part ignored by the “highbrows,” as he called the men who inherited a fortune rather than earned one. “They are the ones that hold their pinky finger straight out when they take a drink of whiskey at the country club,” he would say. Although he had mostly contempt for their good fortune, he made it a point to ply them with an aggressive and sometimes fawning attitude, the proverbial fox in the henhouse. They misjudged him. To them he was just another small-time politician from south Alabama who was always running around trying to find a hand to shake.
In March 1958, in front of the county courthouse in Clayton, Daddy announced that he was running for governor. Although it was a straight shot of less than three blocks from our house, we drove—Mama and Daddy up front, my brother and sister and me in back. The town square in front of the courthouse was packed with Wallace supporters from Clio, Eufaula, Midway, Union Springs, and the countryside. The Clayton high school band began to play and majorettes twirled batons as our car approached. Farmers with weatherworn faces and country women with their arms folded over Sunday dresses belted at the waist made up most of the crowd, along with a few women in fashionable summer frocks and men in business suits. Our maid, Bernice, stood with the black men, women, and children gathered on the periphery.
We all stood behind Daddy on a flatbed trailer spanning the width of the courthouse steps. U.S. flags, Alabama state flags, and Confederate flags rustled in the sighs of a spring breeze. The central square in Clayton, like the center of most towns in Alabama, had a monument—a statue of a Confederate soldier, facing north.
The sound of stomping and cheering emanated from the hyped-up crowd. The unbridled and unruly energy of their adoration made me uneasy. It was as though they were “pitching a fit,” as Aunt Betty Jean would say. Daddy knew how to roust people up, make them shout and raise fists. Women fanned themselves with their hands as if they were in the middle of a hot flash.
“He’s just good old people like us. Don’t put on no face, puts his pants on one leg at a time. Grew up just like us,” Daddy’s people would always say. “You know his daddy drank himself to death. His poor mama, Mozelle, she just sat there and took it, doing the best she could.”
Daddy stood transfixed as the mood of the crowd enveloped him. He had waited all of his life for a moment like this.
Holding his hands up, Daddy stepped close to the microphone. His speech started out with God and country. “Us small-town country folks deserve a voice just like those rich folks that think they are better than us,” he said. Class warfare and, years later, race warfare were Daddy’s aces in the hole—the source of his power. His cadence began to pick up as his forefinger and voice stabbed the air. I felt the power of his oratory, although I didn’t pay much attention to what was being said. Our instructions were to stand quietly. Don’t fidget! Mama smiled, applauding when she thought it was necessary. There were no visual cues or nods toward us to let us know what to do. I stood straight with my hands clasped in front of me. Daddy’s speech ended abruptly. “God bless the great state of Alabama,” he cried. The crowd stood still as if stunned. Then roars of approval rose up and floated up and over us. People moved toward us with hands outstretched and eyes filled with adulation. The band played “Dixie.” Mama stepped up beside Daddy, and they both bent over with their hands outstretched. Volunteers passed out bumper stickers and collected donations (mostly pocket change) in metal buckets. Seale’s Café, across the street from the courthouse, set up card tables with punch and cookies.
From somewhere behind me, our maid, Bernice, called my name. “I’ll take you back to the house,” she said. I held her hand as she navigated us through the crowd. An African American woman waved and called out to Bernice. “Bernice! You tell Judge Wallace if black folks could vote, we would be voting for him.” The reason black folks couldn’t vote was because of Jim Crow laws. They were systemically disenfranchised (and still are). Many African Americans in the South became disheartened and gave up trying to register to vote. They knew the deck was stacked against them by literacy tests and the requirement to produce certain forms of ID and other arbitrary barriers set up by the local boards of politically appointed registrars.
Nevertheless, Bernice was proud and moved to be working for a man who was running for governor. It’s always complic
ated in the South.
Bernice was short and stocky. Her hand in mine felt weatherworn. Her round face was placid. Her body and the way she moved were more expressive than what she said. “Now you have to yell for me to hear you,” Bernice would sometimes remind me. Her hearing loss was a result of the beatings her mother, Eva, gave to her when she was a child.
Her relationship to our family was typical across the South. Bernice had a daughter named Alice and a grandson named Tommy. Around the time my father announced for governor, I remember being awakened in the middle of the night. Bernice was at the door with Tommy, who was perhaps two or two and a half years old, in her arms. He had a fever and was in pain from an ear infection. Mama took Tommy from Bernice and rocked him through the night. Mama, Bernice, and Tommy were at the doctor’s office before it opened the next morning. On the way back home, Mama stopped at the drugstore and paid for the medicine the doctor prescribed.
I loved Bernice. During summers, I spent more daylight hours with her than with Mama and Daddy. From Monday to Fridays and sometimes on Saturday mornings, Bernice took care of us and listened to what we said. On most weekday afternoons, she covered the food for supper on the stove with a clean dishrag, gathered up her purse and sometimes a paper bag with food or things Mama had given her, and disappeared out the back door to walk home or ride with Mama when it rained. In the confines of our house on Eufaula Street, Bernice felt like a second mother to me. After we left Clayton for the last time in December 1961, I never saw Bernice again.
Now I look back on my childhood with Bernice from a different viewpoint, relating to the culture of paternalism toward African Americans during that time. “They were just like family,” we said.
Some would say that paternalism is just a softer version of racism, but in truth there is no difference. And sometimes it is even worse than harder-edged bigotry (we have plenty of that kind too). What I know is that in the age we live in now, a compassionate America seems in mortal danger. The Edmund Pettus Bridge still stands. But we, it seems, have regressed.
The memory of my mama rocking Tommy as Bernice asked her, “Is he going to be all right?”—and African American men and women sometimes knocking on our front door to talk to Daddy about locking someone up or getting someone out—is conflated in my memory with an encounter with an African American seamstress from around this time.
Mama handed me several items of clothes that needed mending and gave me directions to the seamstress’s house in the colored section of town. I found my way there, and as I climbed the steps of the front porch, I heard a woman’s voice coming from inside the house. “George Wallace don’t want his daughter to be up in no nigger house,” the woman said.
I stopped, then turned around. I didn’t understand what she meant. Why? Why wouldn’t she want me in her house? I was bewildered. What did her words have to do with me?
That memory and the memory of Bernice holding my hand as we walked through the crowds when my father announced his candidacy for the governorship of sweet home Alabama are somehow forever tangled up like so many kudzu vines climbing up into the trees on the winding roads of the deep South.
Throughout the days that followed Daddy’s announcement, Mama spent hours at the kitchen table writing letters and postcards to addresses given to her by Wallace campaign volunteers who had gathered them at rallies or from distant relatives or the rolls of church memberships. It was done by hand, voter to voter—a laborious, painstaking outreach.
Daddy's first campaign for governor, 1958.
Wallace rallies were boisterous: gales of laughter from the antics of Minnie Pearl, twanging chords of steel guitars, young girls slapping tambourines against their thighs. Election officials and hometown notables paraded from one end of the platform to the other. Starstruck women with beehive hairdos clenched their hands beneath their double chins. “Dixie” blasted from car-mounted speakers. Daddy made his way through outstretched arms, strutting across the stage and saluting. This salute was one of his characteristic gestures, like his pointing finger stabbing upward. “How you doin’, pardner?” he said, singling out people in the crowd, one hand in his coat pocket. He was cocky, snapping and strutting, a small, slight man with dynamic energy and tremendous charisma, the Confederacy’s very own Napoleon. The Wallace campaign bounced from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf of Mexico through the sultry spring. Daddy ripped the microphone from its stand. He quelled the crowds with the palm of his hand. They hung on his words. They sizzled with excitement.
Political prognosticators agreed that the 1958 Democratic primary would not be won without a runoff. In 1958 and for four decades after, becoming the Democratic nominee was tantamount to winning the race. The November elections were only to make it official.
It’s strange that perhaps more than any other single factor it was Daddy’s opponent, John Patterson—a young, handsome lawyer from Phenix City, Alabama—who would shape our family’s future and impact national politics and race relations. None of us could possibly have foreseen that.
Patterson seemed congenial but he was a racist in his heart. He had been thrust into the consciousness of the Alabama psyche when his father, Albert Patterson, was assassinated by local gangsters following his attempts to shut down their illegal gambling operations. Following his father’s death, John took his place on the ballot and was elected. The loss of his father endeared John to the people of Alabama.
Although Daddy knew Albert Patterson, he was less familiar with his son, John. Patterson was not one of the movers and shakers, the Jefferson Davis Hotel lobby sitters who influenced Alabama politics. At first, Daddy was dismissive of Patterson: “All that kid has going for him is his dead father. That ain’t enough to get him to the governor’s office.”
Daddy had yet to come to terms with the notion that Patterson’s real appeal was his blatant racism. As the campaign began to tighten, and Patterson’s racial rhetoric began to attract the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists, Daddy scoffed at the notion and shrugged off suggestions that he needed to solidify his support with the Klan—which was especially active in the late 1950s in south Alabama, where the state’s largest black population lived—by taking a position to the right of Patterson on the issue of integration.
Daddy continued to think that his best chance was to rail against income inequality and large corporations while promoting public education and promising roads, roads, and more roads. He targeted the concerns of the common man and headed to vote-rich north Alabama during the final weeks of the primary election, leaving Patterson to gin up the racists in the south.
Patterson and Daddy headed toward election day neck and neck. Daddy’s pace was frenetic. His campaign workers and volunteers were pushed to the limit, and Mama joined him at rallies in North Alabama. He was on the verge of collapse: his voice was always hoarse and his suits hung slack on his gaunt frame. The only race he ever lost was as a college freshman when he bucked up against the college fraternities and ran for president of the Cotillion Club.
On June 3, Daddy came in second place: 162,435 votes, or 26 percent, to John Patterson’s 196,859 votes, or 31 percent; the rest of the votes went to third-tier candidates. Daddy had three weeks to turn it around.
During the runoff, Patterson campaigned fiercely throughout the southern part of the state and continued to rely on racial rhetoric and his promises to keep Alabama white. He “was honored,” he said, to be running with KKK support. He reminded white voters that as Alabama’s attorney general, he obtained a restraining order to bar the NAACP from operating in Alabama on the grounds that it was not registered as an Alabama corporation. He made much of his suit against the Tuskegee Alabama Civic Association, a negro group that instigated an economic boycott in Tuskegee in protest of white attempts to gerrymander the town to protect white control. He did everything he could to remind the KKK and white voters that he was on their side.
On the morning of the runoff, my parents mingled with supporters on the courthouse steps in Clayton be
fore going inside to vote. Daddy dropped Mama off at the house before heading to Montgomery. Mama fussed with her clothes as she packed her bags to travel to meet him. There was excitement in the house: a “we just know he is going to win” attitude prevailed. Mama’s friends dropped by, sipped coffee at the kitchen table, and gave Mama fashion tips on what they thought a First Lady should wear. There were giddy discussions about what it would be like to live in such a grand place as the Alabama Governor’s Mansion with cooks and handsome men in uniforms to drive Mama around.
When we arrived in Montgomery, the mood was festive. The air in the Greystone Hotel’s ornate lobby was thick with cigar and cigarette smoke. Mama took us to our rooms. Daddy was with a small group of his campaign advisers, phoning county courthouses and campaign workers across the state.
“Peggy Sue, where are you?” Mamaw’s sister, my aunt Bill, yelled out in her singsong way when she walked in our room. “I brought something special, just for you.” She handed me a brown paper sack that was folded at the top. She looked over her shoulder at Mamaw. “I know I should’ve wrapped it, but I just slam ran out of time.” I reached into the bag and pulled out a pair of pink plastic play high-heeled shoes. “Sugar,” Aunt Bill said, “put those Cinderella shoes on and let’s go downstairs and priss outside while your mama gets dressed.”
The Broken Road Page 4