by John Berendt
Two people whose faces were just now coming into full color on the sideboard had caused other guests to stare in disbelief when they arrived at the party: Lee and Emma Adler.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” Katherine Gore had said when the Adlers appeared in the entrance hall.
The antagonism between Lee Adler and Jim Williams had gained a new dimension because of Adler’s close association with Spencer Lawton. Lawton had recently announced he was running for reelection, and Adler had cosigned a $10,000 bank loan for his campaign. That check had made Adler responsible for more than two-thirds of all Lawton’s campaign money. Adler made no effort to conceal his closeness to Lawton; on the contrary, he put a large RE-ELECT SPENCER LAWTON poster on the fence in front of his house. Lawton’s smiling face could be seen from the windows of Mercer House. If anything, Adler seemed to revel in Williams’s predicament. He hosted a Lawton fund-raising party at which he stood up and read a telegram from “a Lawton supporter” who had been unable to attend. It turned out to be a joke telegram signed “Jim Williams, Chatham County Jail,” and it wished Lawton the very worst of bad luck. Adler’s audience was not amused. “It was tacky,” said one guest. “It made us all uncomfortable, especially Spencer Lawton, who was present.”
Meanwhile, Williams waged war against Lawton’s re-election campaign from his jail cell, quietly channeling money to Lawton’s opponent. A series of full-page anti-Lawton ads appeared in the Savannah newspaper bearing the headline DISTRICT ATTORNEY LAWTON CHARGED WITH CORRUPTION AND MISCONDUCT. The ad reminded voters that in reversing the first Williams conviction, the Georgia Supreme Court had accused Lawton of “corrupting the truth-seeking function of the trial process.” The ads had been written and paid for by Jim Williams.
For their part, the Adlers were as perplexed as everyone else as to why they had been invited to Mrs. Williams’s lunch. After signing their names in the guest book, Emma Adler wrote the word “neighbors” in parentheses, as if to make the point that their connection to the party was purely geographical.
Mrs. Williams slipped the snapshot of the Adlers into the middle of the stack. “James has his reasons, I’m sure,” she said in her quiet way, “but, oh, that Lee Adler made me so mad one day. I would never tell James this. It’s been about three months ago, I guess. One afternoon he came to make a courtesy call, and I thought, Well, the man knows James is in a bind now, and he’s come to have a look around. He thinks there won’t be a thing on the walls and that all the furniture will be sold. So he came in, and he was very polite and everything. But I could see right through him. I knew it wasn’t in him to be nice to James. He told me, ‘Mrs. Williams, I saw Mr. So-and-so from Sotheby’s in New York and this, that, and the other, and if I could do anything for James, or if there’s anything he wants to sell, just let me know.’ Well! I’m gone tell you, right about that time I was fixin’ to blow up, but I didn’t say a word. I was just as calm as I could be. And I said, ‘I appreciate that very much, Mr. Adler, but even where he is now, James has got connections. He can call New York. He can call London. He can call Geneva.’ I wasn’t ugly to him or anything. But, honey, inside I was boilin’ over, ’Cause I knew he came to have a look around.”
Lee Adler’s attachment to Spencer Lawton was the very reason Jim Williams had told his mother to invite him. In Williams’s view, Lee Adler controlled Spencer Lawton. “Leopold is the power behind the throne,” he said. “He’s like the vizier in the Turkish court, the man who stands behind a silken screen and whispers in the sultan’s ear. Lawton doesn’t dare make a move without instructions from Leopold. That makes Leopold dangerous, particularly to me. I’ve given him plenty of reasons to hate me. I engineered throwing him off the board of the Telfair museum when I was president, and I’m quite sure he pushed the D.A. into charging me with first-degree murder instead of involuntary manslaughter, though he denies it. He’s dangerous. No question. But I understand him. I can talk his language if I have to. Honor among thieves, you know. It’s never too late to hold out an olive branch. With my new witnesses, my case is going to break wide open. I can feel it. And when that happens, I don’t want Leopold skulking around behind that silken screen making mischief.”
Williams clearly had some irons in the fire—an appeal in progress, possible new witnesses, and a candidate working to unseat Spencer Lawton. None seemed particularly promising, but if Williams was able to take comfort in them, what was the harm? It was unlikely that an invitation to a congenial luncheon party would convert Lee Adler to his cause. Still, Williams had summoned all the influence he could muster in the effort—the guileless charm of his mother, the delectation of Lucille Wright’s cooking, the company of friends in common, and not least of all, the mysterious powers of Minerva. Minerva had come in from Beaufort and was dressed for the occasion in a maid’s costume. For the first hour or so, she stood quietly in the dining room while the guests served themselves from the buffet. Later on, she circulated with a pitcher of iced tea. At one point she poured two tall glasses for the Adlers, while munching on a root and fixing them with a penetrating stare through the purple lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.
Williams kept informed of the party’s progress through periodic telephone calls during the course of the lunch. He reminded Barry Thomas to turn on the fountain (Thomas had forgotten), and he gave instructions to his mother and Lucille at each stage of the lunch. When the last of the guests had left, Mrs. Williams and Barry Thomas reported to Williams that the lunch had been a success. Mrs. Williams said she would be leaving shortly to bring the snapshots over to the jail so he could see for himself.
After she hung up, she lingered at the desk for a moment. The morning paper lay on the desk in front of her.
“Barry?” she said.
Barry Thomas turned back at the doorway. “Yes, Mrs. Williams?”
Mrs. Williams paused uncertainly. She glanced down at the paper and the story about the new witnesses.
“I … I’ve been wondering,” she said. “All these things they’ve been saying about James … and that Hansford boy … and now these other boys.” Mrs. Williams gestured at the paper. “I try not to pay any mind. But I don’t know. Seems like I remember hearing people say the same thing about King James of England. You know, the King James that had them to write the King James Bible? Do you know if that’s true? Have you ever heard anybody say that about King James?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have,” said Thomas. “King James did have favorites among the men at court, if that’s what you mean. He had his special friends. I think he had several.”
The hint of a smile appeared at the corners of Mrs. Williams’s mouth. “Well,” she said softly, “all right then.”
Chapter 24
BLACK MINUET
In mid-August, despite the statements made by Jim Williams’s new witnesses, Judge Oliver denied Williams’s motion for a new trial. Sonny Seiler promptly announced he would take the appeal to the next level, the Georgia Supreme Court. A few weeks later, Spencer Lawton won reelection as district attorney, ensuring that he would be in a position to fight the appeal every step of the way.
When the bad news reached Williams, he picked up the telephone and called Christie’s in Geneva to place a bid on a Fabergé cigarette case that had once belonged to Edward VII. “It cost me fifteen thousand dollars, which I can ill afford,” he said, “but it makes me feel better. I’m the only person in the world who’s ever bought Fabergé from a jail cell.”
Increasingly, Williams used little tricks to convince himself and others that he was not really in jail. He continued routing his phone calls through Mercer House and dictating letters that were typed at home on his engraved stationery. He sent several such letters to newspapers and magazines. One was published in Architectural Digest. It was a note praising the magazine for having run an article by the New York socialite Brooke Astor. “Delightful!” Williams’s note read. “Brooke Astor has given us a delicious treat by recounting her early experiences w
ith formal dining. Her recollections will serve as a lasting guide in the art of living well. My best wishes to our hostess.—James A. Williams, Savannah, Georgia.”
Williams would not submit to the notion that he was in jail. “It’s a matter of survival,” he said. “I hypnotize myself so that, in my own mind at least, I am not here.”
Wherever Jim Williams’s mind had taken him, it was clear by early fall that his body would still be in jail at Christmastime. Once again, there would be a gap in the social calendar on the night before the Cotillion ball, the night formerly reserved for his Christmas party. I recalled Lila Mayhew’s lament back in May that she would have nothing to do that night. I also remembered what her black seamstress had told her—that the night of Jim Williams’s party was the night the blacks had their debutante ball. The more I thought about it, the more I began to feel the urge, as an observer of the local scene, to know more about the black debutante ball and, if possible, to be invited to it.
Savannah’s blacks had been presenting debutantes at formal balls for nearly forty years. The ball was sponsored by the graduate chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity at Savannah State College. Nationally, Alpha Phi Alpha was the oldest black college fraternity in the country, having been founded at Cornell at the turn of the century. The fraternity was intended to be more than just an undergraduate social club, as its slogan “Bigger and Better Negro Business” suggested. In fact, the graduate chapter in Savannah, with sixty-five members, was more active than the undergraduate chapter, which had fifteen.
The graduate Alphas were representative of the upper level of Savannah’s black community. Their membership included teachers, school principals, doctors, ministers, owners of small businesses, and lawyers. Notably absent were bankers, partners of the city’s most influential law firms, directors of big corporations, and people with inherited wealth. The Alphas, unlike the members of the Cotillion, did not belong to the Oglethorpe Club, the golf club, or the yacht club. One of Savannah’s three black city councilmen was an Alpha, but it could not be said that the Alphas—or the black community as a whole—were part of Savannah’s power structure. The annual activities of the Alpha graduate chapter included a voter-registration drive, a dance to raise money for scholarships, and a series of social events leading up to the debutante ball.
The debutante ball had been the brainchild of Dr. Henry Collier, a gynecologist and the first black doctor to perform surgery at Candler Hospital. Dr. Collier got the idea for the ball in the 1940s when he heard that a group of black businessmen in Texas had sponsored a cotillion. He suggested to his fellow Alphas that they sponsor a similar ball in Savannah, and the Alphas agreed.
Dr. Collier lived on Mills B. Lane Boulevard, several miles to the west of downtown. He had built his house in the 1950s when no one would sell him property in the exclusive white enclave of Ardsley Park. It was a rambling brick structure that had been added on to over the years without any apparent plan. A modest front door opened on a double-height entrance foyer with a grand circular stairway and a bubbling, two-tiered fountain in the center. A buoyant man in his late sixties, Dr. Collier greeted me warmly and ushered me into the family room off the kitchen, where we had coffee while with great enthusiasm he told me about his brainchild, the debutante ball.
“Our first ball was in 1945,” he said. “We presented five girls that year, and we set up a system that we’ve used ever since. The members of the fraternity nominate the girls, and then we check them out to make sure they meet our criteria. The girls have to be of good moral character. That’s most important. They have to have finished high school and be matriculated in a school of higher learning. We interview their neighbors, their high school teachers, and people in their church. For a girl to be disqualified, somebody has to have definite knowledge of misconduct—that she has left home, or that she frequents lounges or nightclubs, or has been in trouble with the police. If a girl has had an abortion, for instance, that would rule her out.
“Once the debutantes have been approved, we require that they attend what we call Charm Week so that they will know how to be gracious and the like. The Alphabettes take charge of that. That’s what we call the wives of the Alphas—Alphabettes.”
Dr. Collier opened a photo album of memorabilia from past debutante balls. “This was our first ball,” he said. “We had it at the Coconut Grove, which was a black dance hall. In those years, of course, public facilities were segregated, so none of the hotels would rent their ballroom to us, and the newspapers acted as if we didn’t exist. We got coverage in the black press only. That all changed with integration. In 1965, for the first time ever, we presented our debutantes in the ballroom of the old DeSoto Hotel—the same room where the Cotillion had its ball the very next night. About that time, too, the Savannah Morning News finally decided it could call blacks by the courtesy titles—Mr., Mrs., and Miss—and they began to publish the names of our debutantes. I wouldn’t say we’ve reached absolute parity with the Cotillion yet, though. The society pages always report on all the coming-out parties that precede the Cotillion ball—the mother-daughter luncheons, the barbecues, the lawn parties, the oyster roasts, and what have you. But when we submit photographs from our coming-out parties, they don’t use them. However …” Dr. Collier waved his hand. “In time, that, too, will come.”
As Dr. Collier flipped through the pages of the photo album, year after year of debutantes flowed by. Midway through, around 1970, I noticed that a change in complexion had come over the girls. Almost all of the early debutantes had been light-skinned; now there were darker faces too. The change coincided with the emergence of Black Pride, and it seemed that the Alphas had responded by expanding the range of skin tones deemed acceptable for debutantes.
Dr. Collier continued turning the pages. “You know, some people say our debutante ball is just a copy of the Cotillion ball. Sure it is. But you know, in one way our ball is better than the Cotillion ball. And it tickles me every time. See this picture?” Dr. Collier pointed to a photograph of fifteen debutantes in a procession, their left hands resting daintily on the raised right hand of their escorts. “Know what they’re doing here?” he asked. “They’re dancing the minuet! They don’t do that at the Cotillion.” Dr. Collier laughed a delighted, cackling laugh. “That’s right. We have ’em dance the minuet!”
“How did you happen to choose the minuet?” I asked.
Dr. Collier threw up his hands and laughed. “I don’t know! I think I must have seen it in the movies. We do it very properly too. We hire a string quartet to play the minuet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. And let me tell you, it’s quite a spectacle. I’d like you to come as my guest. Then you’ll see.”
“Ooooo, child!” Chablis cooed when I told her I was going to the black debutante ball. “Take me with you as your date, honey!”
I would have been hard-pressed to imagine a more demented faux pas than to appear at the ball with a black drag queen on my arm. I was hoping to be as inconspicuous as possible and had already decided to go alone. “Sorry, Chablis,” I said. “I’m afraid not.”
Chablis saw nothing at all outlandish in the idea of accompanying me to the ball. “I promise I won’t embarrass you, baby,” she pleaded. “I won’t cuss or dance dirty or shake my butt. I won’t do any of that shit. I promise. I will be The Laaaayyy-dy Chablis all night long. Just for you. Oh, I’ve never been to a real ball. Take me, take me, take me.”
“It’s out of the question,” I said.
Chablis pouted. “I know what you’re thinkin’. You’re thinkin’ I’m not good enough to clientele with them fancy-ass black folks.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that part,” I said, “but now that you mention it, the debutantes are all rather proper young ladies from what I’ve been told.”
“Oh?” Chablis looked at me archly. “And what does that mean, if you don’t mind me askin’?”
“Well, for one thing,” I said, “none of them has ever been caught shoplifting.”
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“Then they must be real good at it, honey. Or else they don’t know what shoppin’s all about. I am serious. I can’t believe you’re tryin’ to tell me that out of twenty-five bitches not one of ’em has ever stolen a bra or a pair of panty hose, ’Cause I will not fall for that shit. All right, now tell me what else is so proper about them?”
“They’re all enrolled in college,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” Chablis studied her fingernails.
“They do volunteer work for the community.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They go to church regularly and are known to be women of good character.”
“Mm-hmmm.”
“None of them has ever been seen hanging out in bars or lounges.”
“Child, you are beginnin’ to work my nerves! Next you’re gonna be tellin’ me they’ve all had their pussies checked out, and they’re virgins.”
“All I know, Chablis, is that they have spotless reputations. That much has been checked out. And not one of them has ever been known to be guilty of ‘misconduct.’”
Chablis shot me a sideways look. “Are you sure these girls are black?”
“Of course.”
“Then all I can say is they must be reeeeeal ugly.”
“No, Chablis, they’re pretty good-looking actually.”
“Well, maybe, but anytime I wanna see a bunch of stuck-up nuns parade around in white dresses, I can take my ass to church. I don’t need to go to no ball to see that. So, you can forget about askin’ me to be your date, honey, ’Cause I ain’t goin’.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess that settles that.”
The twenty-five debutantes had been culled from an original group of fifty nominees. Some of the nominees had declined the offer for lack of interest or because they could not afford the $800 that being a debutante would cost, including the entrance fee, the price of a gown, the expense of hosting a social event, and incidentals. The prospective debutantes were invited to a meeting at the Quality Inn, where they were welcomed by members of the Alphabette Debutante Committee and told what lay in store for them in the months preceding the ball.