In November, I caught the measles. Mamaw warmed water from the well on her wood-fired stove, poured it into a large metal washtub sitting on the kitchen floor, and bathed me to bring my fever down.
There were times when I missed Mama and Daddy. But the simplicity and ease of living with my grandparents felt magical to me. The house was calm and quiet and peaceful. Sometimes on the weekends we would ride over to Tuscaloosa to visit relatives. One day we went to the picture show.
About a week or so before Christmas, Mama and Daddy came back; they had reconciled. We all waved back to Mamaw and Mr. Henry as we drove away. “They’ll be visiting us soon,” Mama said.
While we were stopped at the end of Mr. Henry’s driveway to let a car go by, I said, “Daddy, now you help me find the broken road.”
Daddy looked briefly at me over his shoulder. “Not this time, sugah. We’re goin’ a different way.”
8
You Got What You Wanted
Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn’t set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You’ve made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.
—Robert Penn Warren
In December 1959, we were back in Clayton. Daddy slept through Christmas morning as usual while Mama handed out the gifts and offered cheerful commentary. Things had improved between them. During the early months of 1960, Daddy’s homecomings were more frequent and congenial than had been customary. On Friday nights, Daddy and I had a standing date to watch the boxing matches on TV. We picked a favorite in each bout and cheered for our man as if we were in the arena ourselves. We high-fived and ate M&M’s. Daddy would often jump to his feet during heavy action, prowling around the den like a boxer himself, stabbing the air with his fists. He was ferocious and inflamed. And then he’d plop down next to me with fierce hugs, tousling my hair. He could be rough; sometimes I had to tell him to stop, although I relished his affection and attention and wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.
I found myself living on the verge of happiness. His relationship with Mama ebbed and flowed, as it always had. There were times when he brooded, looking out to the street from behind the living room curtains as if he was expecting someone to come by and save him from claustrophobic domesticity, to whisk him away to where the action was—Montgomery, the capital.
He was preparing for his next run for governor against the backdrop of Alabama and broadly Southern politics and also what was happening nationally. After his loss to John Patterson, Daddy faced the moral quandary of whether to continue his moderate position on the issue of race or take a hard turn to the right. In 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters, and restrooms used by interstate travelers were unconstitutional. The following year the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized interracial groups to ride on interstate buses throughout the South to test whether President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy would enforce the law.
On May 13, 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others expressed their concerns about traveling into Alabama. It was rumored that the KKK would launch attacks. Their warnings were unheeded. One of the buses was firebombed on the outskirts of Anniston, Alabama; in Birmingham, the elected public safety commissioner Bull Connor agreed to give the Klan a head start to attack the bus at the station before he would show up. The Klan did just that.
A week later, Freedom Riders boarded a bus to Montgomery. In light of the attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, President Kennedy secured a commitment from Governor Patterson that the bus would be protected. Patterson provided escorts for the bus from Birmingham to the Montgomery city limits, but not to the bus station itself.
When the bus arrived at the station, a mob of more than two hundred people was waiting. The riders who could not escape were severely beaten, as were news reporters, cameramen, and photographers. The Justice Department observer John Seigenthaler was beaten with a tire iron and left on the street as ambulances refused to take him and others to local hospitals—because they were black, and those whites, “they were nothing but agitators.”
Governor Patterson, who had supported President Kennedy in his presidential race, refused to speak to the president when he called. Several days later four hundred U.S. marshals were sent to Montgomery to maintain the peace. Patterson publicly objected and told them to go home and threatened them with arrest if they broke the law.
The following day, fifteen hundred African Americans gathered at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in downtown Montgomery to pray. That night more than fifteen hundred whites surrounded the church and threatened the U.S. marshals. President Kennedy forced Patterson to call out the National Guard and declare martial law. Patterson continued to denounce the Freedom Riders.
Patterson’s popularity soared among whites with each beating, burning, arrest, and humiliation of African American men, women, and children. Governor Patterson’s refusal to speak to President Kennedy when Kennedy attempted to seek his advice on the situation was seen as a victory for the South; to some, it was seen as even more so than Robert E. Lee’s victory in the Battle of Chancellorsville during the Civil War.
On June 2, 1961, Time magazine’s cover story featured Alabama and the Freedom Riders, including a cover photograph of Governor Patterson standing in front of the Confederate monument on the Alabama capitol grounds. A white carnation was pinned to the left lapel of his suit coat. While the carnation seemed innocuous, the Alabama KKK, officially named the Knights of the White Carnation, got the message loud and clear. Governor Patterson became a hero to middle-class whites, reminding Alabamians that “integration will come over my dead body.”
Daddy watched all this, calculating. And then, in December 1961, Daddy prepared to run. With the Christmas tree still standing in the corner of our living room, our lives changed and we abruptly left Clayton for the last time. My baby sister Lee was eight months old. There were no hugs and kisses from neighbors, no going-away gifts or parties; my school friends and I had no time to say goodbye. We packed our clothes, turned off the lights, and locked the kitchen door behind us. I didn’t know what was happening. To me this was just another road trip, and I regret that now. Our home on Eufaula Street was full of the things that could have brought memories back from my childhood to share with my children. That whole part of my life would disappear as if it never happened, and I had no inkling of what lay ahead.
Daddy had promised Mama that he would be with her—and uprooting us was the price. He needed to be in the capital to effectively launch his campaign.
We moved into a low-rent apartment complex in Montgomery, on the edge of the wrong side of town, with a broken asphalt parking lot, scrawny boxwood bushes, mostly dead, and patches of red dirt. We had a compact living room with dark wood paneling, a breakfast nook and a closet under the stairs, a cramped kitchen behind a swinging door, one small bathroom with cracked tiles, and two small bedrooms. The furniture was a collection of hand-me-downs; our dinner plates and glasses were mismatched.
During the first six months of 1962, we barely had enough to eat. Sometimes Mama brought food home from Wallace rallies. She walked to a small grocery store some three blocks away and bought what she could on credit to get us through.
Perhaps Mama knew what she was getting into, and she was willing to pay the price to be with Daddy. As for me, I wondered if moving to Montgomery so that I could be closer to Daddy was worth the effort, but it was not my decision. I suspected that my days of boxing match marathons and M&M’s were over.
Following the Christmas break, Mama took me to enroll at Bellingrath Junior High School. Most of the students came from the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods where modest to large ranch houses with low-slung roofs perched on manicured lawns. I walked the four or five blocks from the apartment to school. Girls stood in hallways and looked at me as I walked by. Curious stares sometimes turned into mocking eyes. “Those country clot
hes,” I heard one girl say.
Not long after I enrolled, I was cited by a crossing guard for inadvertently jaywalking. The citation was sent from the principal’s office to my teacher Clara McQueen. Upon receipt, Miss McQueen sent me to the principal’s office on a feigned mission of some sort. During my absence, she informed my classmates that I was going to be a part of Alabama’s First Family following Daddy’s election as governor, and I was to be treated as such, and under no circumstances was I ever to be cited again by any student crossing guard. Although Miss McQueen’s lecture did little to endear me to my fellow students, it made me realize that my life as a Wallace meant something to others and proved to me that I finally had someone on my side.
Miss McQueen became an important part of my life. She noticed that I could not read the writing on the chalkboard even from the first row. Each day, she allowed me to stay after school so that I could stand close to the board and copy the assignments for the next day. She called Mama to suggest that I needed glasses. Mama was both polite and appreciative and no doubt embarrassed when she asked Miss McQueen to allow me to continue staying after school until she could get the money from Daddy for a pair of glasses. Following their conversation, my after-school stays lasted for several more weeks.
By May 1962, the second Wallace campaign for governor was in full swing. Daddy’s every moment was filled with his determination to win. He was frenzied and focused; he saw this as his last shot at fulfilling his boyhood dream.
Of the nine Democratic candidates on the ballot, there were only three stalking horses, one of which was Daddy. The campaign was brutal, with Daddy constantly on the move, endlessly driving around the state, staying in the cheapest hotels, shaking thousands upon thousands of hands deep into the night.
Here is when Daddy’s vow never to be “out-niggered again” came fully into play. Supporters roared with approval at his coded talk of segregation and white supremacy. At a rally in Montgomery on March 10, Daddy stood before a packed crowd and pledged that he would “stand in the schoolhouse door,” personally, with his own body, to “block the integration of Alabama schools.” He would stand up for states’ rights. He would not allow the federal government to interfere with the customs and mores of Southern life. He promised the Confederacy all over again. In some ways, with his viciousness and negativity, Daddy defined and crystalized what has become the tenor of modern political life. He described his old friend and new nemesis Judge Frank Johnson, in Johnson’s own hometown, as an “integrating, carpetbagging, scalawagging, race-mixing, bald-faced liar.” The crowd roared. At a north Alabama rally, he proclaimed: “I will continue to fight for segregation in Alabama because it is based on our firm conviction of right, and because it serves the best interests of all our people … We shall fight the federals in the arena of an increasingly sympathetic national public opinion … I pledge to stand between you and those who would impose on you doctrines foreign to our way of life and disruptive of the peace and tranquility of our citizens. I will face our enemies face to face, hip to hip and toe to toe and never surrender the governor’s office to these modern-day carpetbaggers, scalawags, and polliwogs. Right will prevail if we fight.”
Perhaps most hurtful to me as I look back is that the Klan was on board for Daddy’s run—and he was glad to have them. Thunderous crowds gathered all across the state to hear Daddy speak while volunteers, including Klan members, worked the crowd—the same Klansmen who were against Daddy in 1958. “George Wallace is on our side this time,” KKK members would proudly say.
Was Daddy’s decision just about the price of admission to win the governor’s race, or did he believe in what the KKK stood for? Did it really matter? Either way, it was the only way Daddy could win.
Mattered to him? Maybe not. Mattered to our family? He never asked.
Daddy led the Democratic Party primary contest but was forced into a runoff, which he won on June 24, 1962, sealing his victory. The general election in November would be nothing but going through the motions.
On the night of the runoff, we stood on the stage at the Jefferson Davis Hotel. Daddy grabbed my hand and said, “Sugah, we won! We won!” Mama waved at the crowd. Mamaw and Mr. Henry stood on one side of the auditorium. Mr. Henry wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. Uncle Gerald worked the crowd, all squeezed together and cheering. Mama’s happiness was contagious: no more worries about food to eat, or mending clothes late into the night. We were going to live in a mansion with a bedroom for each of us.
Daddy waded into the crowd of excited supporters who had worked tirelessly for him. “Not like the last party we had four years ago,” he said. I heard a supporter say, “Now we’re the ones on top.”
Mama’s excitement, or just relief, was evident as she smiled and hugged all of us and then her friends. Even Mamaw managed a grin. Aunt Bill pulled out a Kleenex from her pocketbook and wiped her eyes. “Peggy Sue, you just come over here and give your Aunt Bill a big old hug,” she said.
Having a father who is adulated by boisterous crowds and lusted after by women sitting beneath oversized hair dryers in small-town beauty parlors because he stomped on the inherent rights of people he was supposed to be serving makes for a rather clouded conscience for a questioning daughter who sees the truth going a-kilter. Such was the struggle of my life in the beginning of the Wallace reign in Alabama.
My parents were suddenly celebrities. Their star power drew crowds at football games, rodeos, barbecues, and even simple outings at local meat-and-threes (restaurants serving a meat entrée with three sides). It was exciting to see menus, football programs, and Dairy Queen napkins thrust into Daddy’s hands for his almost unintelligible signature. But I was also aware of the snatches of racists’ conversations that accompanied all the hoopla:
“Governor, I gotta thank you for keeping them in their place, my whole family voted for you.” “We gonna hold you to your promises to keep them out of our schools.”
In late June 1962, we moved to an elegant rental house that was more appropriate for a First-Family-in-waiting. Mama shopped for our inauguration clothes. It was an exciting time—a summer of great expectations, no worries about our tomorrows.
Although Montgomery blue bloods shied away from our countrified family, most people in Alabama breathed sighs of relief following Daddy’s election. With Wallace in the governor’s office, they could put all that talk about integration behind them.
Though Daddy’s predecessor, John Patterson, had talked a good game about segregation and had no problem brutalizing African Americans, he was not George Wallace, and now things were really going to change. “Because George is one of us, he came up the hard way. You know he was a boxer and a scrabbler. You can’t hear him and not believe it’s the God’s truth. He’s gonna make ’em stop, look, and listen!” Daddy was anointed, and white folks began to whistle “Dixie” again.
On Christmas morning, Mama gave me a beautiful knee-length plaid wool coat, adorned with large buttons down the front, to wear on Daddy’s inauguration day.
9
The Victory Is Ours
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call, no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us in it.
—Tennessee Williams
On Saturday, January 12, 1963, two limousines stood parked, their engines running, in front of our temporary home on Thomas Avenue in the fashionable part of Montgomery. We were going for dinner at our new home, the Alabama Governor’s Mansion, built in 1907 as the private residence of Robert Ligon Jr., a statesman and attorney. In 1950, then governor Jim Folsom bought the house to serve as the residence of Alabama’s First Families. Its graceful neoclassical style befitted an official residence of governors. During the time Mama and Daddy served in office, it would become known as “the People’s Mansion.”
The limousines, accompanied by a state trooper escort, lights flashing, drove slowly through the streets of Montgomery before passing through the gates of the
mansion on South Perry Street. Floodlights lit the white facade and stately columns. I was filled with wonder. The staff of butlers and maids stood on either side to greet us. “Welcome to your new home,” said one of the butlers. He opened the pair of mahogany front doors, and we stepped inside.
A glittering crystal chandelier lit the entryway in front of a grand staircase carpeted in red and curving back on itself on either side. On the wall of the first landing, a portrait of Daddy had already been hung. Our awestruck eyes took in all the magnificence. With great excitement in her voice, Mama said, “Just think, you can have all you want to eat at any time. All you need to do is ask.” Many years later, reflecting on that moment with Mama, I wondered if it was her way of apologizing to us for the many nights we had gone to bed hungry.
After touring the mansion’s downstairs, we were led up a back staircase to our living quarters. The bedrooms with private baths were large, with dark wood furnishings and heavy drapes. In the center of the two wings, a large sitting room overlooked the main entrance hall.
We went back downstairs and sat at a table with fine china and sterling silver, where we were served a dinner of steak with baked potatoes and salads. Beside Daddy’s plate was a large bottle of ketchup. The staff had been forewarned that Daddy put ketchup on all his food and preferred to shake it from a bottle rather than spoon it from a china bowl.
The following day, the Thomas Avenue house was chaotic as friends and relatives stopped by. My two grandmothers exchanged frosty greetings before separating, Mozelle to the living room and Mamaw to the kitchen.
Mozelle was proud of her son’s accomplishments, but she didn’t congratulate Mama for her hard work and sacrifice as well. Even at such a time, Mozelle was stoic and withdrawn. She never warmed up to Mama in spite of Mama’s many attempts to make her a part of our family.
The Broken Road Page 7