Читать книгу In Love with Defeat - H. Brandt Ayers - Страница 10

The room clerk at Johannesburg’s five-star Saxon Hotel surprised us as we checked in: “Mrs. Suzman called and said you are expected for dinner.” That was unexpected, and in a way unwelcome; after the hassle of the flight from Cape Town, we looked forward to a shower and dinner at the famous new hotel’s dining room. I called Helen immediately who said to come right over, several of our South African friends were already there. As we approached the house—gated as most in Sandton are—the hotel driver was excited. I had promised to introduce him to South Africa’s most famous woman. Helen greeted us in the inner courtyard, shooing away the dogs as she let us through the gate. She focused the full power of her charm on the thrilled driver and then guided us to the living room, which was filled with smiling familiar faces from business, the professions, journalism and civil rights. They were into their second round of drinks so we were soon called to table.

Helen’s slight figure presided, seating me at her right, a small tribute that pleased me. During a rare lull in the conversation I offered a Helen Suzman story from a decade earlier (Helen was not then in Parliament but served on the Electoral Commission that would soon oversee the election of her friend, Nelson Mandela): “This was in 1994. We were having an after-dinner brandy in her darkened dining room. At our end of the table were only the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Helen and me when, in a sudden, impetuous moment I asked a prying question, ‘Helen, I have a theory about why people like you—and I too, in a comparatively minor way—have been so contrary to majority white opinion. My theory is that education and travel reveal the wider world, putting local loyalties and prejudices in clearer perspective. Is that why you did what you did?’ You replied emphatically, ‘No!’ Then, what was it, I pleaded. You paused, drew a long breath and answered, ‘indignation!’” Helen laughed along with the rest of the guests, enjoying being reminded of her feisty reputation.

At tea the following morning, a cool spring day in May 2005, she found a Southerner’s preference for iced tea a wholly mysterious process but not in the slightest tempting. As conversation soon revealed, she was just as impatient with her nation’s shortcomings as she had been in the thirteen years when she was the only opposition member of Parliament, calling for division which sent Afrikaner colleagues stomping on tree-limb legs across the aisle to vote “Aye” on some travesty against human rights. A slight woman, alone in a sea of green benches, she was a burning splinter in the body of South Africa’s ruling National Party. But those days were long past. She was now nearing her eighty-eighth birthday, still energetic, capable of outrage but a caged tiger. She didn’t hide her frustration. “I don’t have the access that Parliament gave me,” adding, as if it had just occurred to her, “I think access may be the most important word in the English language.”

When we first met in Cape Town in 1977, she had already used her Parliamentary privileges to mount a hectoring campaign that so nettled the Justice Minister that he relented and allowed her to visit Robben Island. It is a barren spot of land in the bay about thirty rough minutes by jet boat from Cape Town where political prisoners were kept in cells that can only be described as cement boxes. It was she who introduced her country—and the world—to Nelson Mandela. And it was she who made it possible for books and writing paper to be brought to the tall man in Cell No. 5. Visitors to that desolate place today get an informed view of the rhythms of life on that barren rock because your guide will be a former inmate. They seem strangely detached, without resentment or visible emotion when describing, for instance, the stinking latrine dug out of a lime-pit wall as the only place prisoners could speak privately, because the guards would not enter. In the same passionless voice, guides speak of how Mandela would teach them about the moral power of nonviolence and advise his fellow prisoners to purge their hearts of hatred.

Only one other name is spoken of there: Helen Suzman.

On the day of our first meeting, freedom was years away for Mandela, and she was to speak in the morning as shadow Justice Minister for her minority party, the Progressive Party. I had just been introduced to her on the veranda of U.S. Ambassador William C. Bowdler’s residence. She had been talking with the ruling National Party Justice Minister, a hulking tree of a man, who had been mocking her forthcoming speech, which the formality of introductions had interrupted. As I stood there, he resumed the disparaging remarks about his tiny opposite number. Helen had had enough; she did a smart left turn and kicked the Justice Minister in the shin. If there is such a thing as a tree in pain, the minister was one. I was a little shocked but curious about the tiny woman I’d just met.

At dinner, I asked Mrs. Bowdler, the ambassador’s wife, about Helen and other mysteries of South African society that I had encountered in my few days there. I was midway in a month-long speaking tour, sponsored by the Institute of Race Relations, then South Africa’s only legal civil rights organization. It had been a disconcerting journey, like flying into my own past, Alabama in the 1940s and ’50s. Our societies had crossed in time; we had begun shedding legal segregation in the 1960s, while South Africa was tightening the divisions of apartheid. “Colored” and “White” signs were everywhere. I had a lot to learn, which must have been obvious to Mrs. Bowdler. She inquired about how I had come to know Vice President Mondale, who had briefed me before the trip, and I told her about becoming friends with Jimmy Carter and his family when I headed a New South organization with the preposterous, antique name of the Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar Society.

After dinner, the ambassador sent the conversation on a surprising turn. “How are things at the Calhoun County Courthouse?” he inquired. I confessed my surprise and asked how he happened to be in the county seat town of Anniston. He explained that he had been stationed at Anniston’s adjacent Fort McClellan during World War II and had gone to the courthouse to have repatriation papers signed by the probate judge. Having grown up in Latin America where his family was in international business, they had given him the Spanish name for William, “Guillermo.” He went on, “The judge looked at the paper with my full legal name, Guillermo C. Bowdler, looked up at me and said, ‘Hay, buddy, you know you don’t have to go through the rest of yo’ liiif bein’ called Gill-er-mo.’” Spontaneous laughter greeted the near-perfect Southern country pronunciation of his name.

Not only had the ambassador linked with my hometown, the whole Republic of South Africa was an echo of a former life. I found that I was comfortable with South African blacks, I knew them from birth, and with Afrikaners, whose loyalties, prejudices and good-ole-boy hospitality reminded me of friends, neighbors and family in the segregated South of my childhood. South Africans with a British background I equated with New Englanders whose high-minded morality blinded them to the subtle interplay of hating and loving, of the shades of light and dark in a Manichean society.

How did it all begin, the locked-down loneliness of a Southern liberal who cared about but was fated to live out his life at times far apart from most of the people in his hometown? There was no illuminating moment, no Saul of Tarsus lightning revelation. If I had to choose a place to start, it would be at the end of my parents’ long journey from Anniston to Danbury, Connecticut, on the single-lane, pre-interstate roads. Eli Wilkins drove them in the family’s black Chrysler in his smart, gray chauffeur’s hat and uniform (which he hated and Mother insisted upon). The occasion was my graduation from the New England prep school to which they had sent me, and where Dad had been asked to do the principal address. It was a journey that would begin and end in the last year of normal sameness for the Old South. It was May of 1953, and I listened with mingled embarrassment and pride as Dad, the late Colonel Harry M. Ayers, gave his address at the Wooster School in Danbury. It was entitled, “Come South, Young Man,” and seemed to have been well received by our popular headmaster, the Reverend John D. Verdery, and other adults. I guess it must have been pretty good, because Time magazine wrote about it, comparing it to the advice of another newspaper publisher, Horace Greeley’s, “Go West, Young Man.”

As we were packing the car for the trip home, the Head happened by and in the course of a brief conversation asked what I thought of a case then before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was heavy with portent, but I didn’t know anything about it—much less recognize its significance. Embarrassing. I liked the Head a lot and wanted to impress him, but I was clueless. He gave me an understanding smile, wished us a good trip and drove off. This failed legal quiz came after my roommates and I did something that turned out to be small-scale historic. We integrated Wooster. Adolescent hair-trigger justice inspired our breach of the social barrier, which came about this way: I had made reservations for Mother and Dad at the best local hotel, the Green, and tried to make one for Eli, too, but my Southern intuition moved me to explain, “He’s colored.” The reservations clerk explained that they did not allow coloreds to sleep there. It was understood Eli would have to make other arrangements, but before he took them to the hotel I wanted everybody to see our East Cottage senior suite, Eli wasn’t impressed, “Lord,” he said, “this looks like a prison,” not knowing it would become his home for an evening. My two roommates and I were offended by his being refused lodging at the less than grand Green Hotel. So we provided a cot in the suite, where Eli spent an uncomfortable night “in prison” with three white teenagers. He was the first Negro to do so on campus.

The outside world seldom penetrated the monkish precincts of a New England preparatory school, which explains my ignorance about the case the Head asked me about, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The Court’s unanimous decision was handed down the next year, my freshman year at the University of Alabama. The decision and what followed presented Southerners with a choice about which it was impossible to be ambivalent: Reason or Resistance. I ultimately chose the liberal course.

What is it like to be liberal-minded in the Deep South? It is to be pulled this way and that by complex, contradictory feelings about your own people—about yourself. It is to feel inescapably, even willfully one with a people who disappoint and hurt you, who make you laugh and bite your lip in frustration, whose charm and generosity live side by side with meanness and bigotry, who cling to the paraphernalia of the Lost Cause as self-defining symbols even as it holds them down. They so cherish the emblems and ensigns of the Lost Cause that they are literally — in love with defeat. They can move you to tears with their openhearted kindness and drive you mad with their narrow-mindedness. They will fight like crazed people to keep the Confederate flag, but won’t vote an extra dollar in school taxes. Yet they will give that dollar, even if it is their last, to a friend or a stranger in trouble. Truth be known, their granddaddies were born into a third-world nation within a nation and worked for less than a dollar a day. They work so long and loyally; you’d think the Depression was just behind them, closing fast. They have been stifled by lousy schools, gulled by demagogic politicians, and scorned for their backward ways by elites, North and South. Life has dug a cultural canyon between them and those of us who escaped the once-and-future Confederacy through luck or education and travel. To be liberal in the Lower South is to know a deep, double loneliness: An object of condescension to the “other” America and yet never fully accepted by your own.

It has been puzzling and painful to see friends and neighbors reject men you know—flawed, surely, but extraordinarily talented—who speak for the best of the South and who were chosen to lead the nation for a while. Being casual friends with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and watching the white South turn from them, crying, “Give us Barabbas!” has been wounding to Southerners who dreamed of a smart, confident South, a South with a wise heart. Certain Afrikaners and Russians know what it is like to be held by the invisible, unbreakable bonds of nativity to a society they love and despair of, to experience a brief epiphany of reform—the joyous lightness of release from scorn and separation—and then feel the old, familiar weight of depression return as bright promise dulled into the reality that the quest for a truly good society would go on beyond your own lifetime, would go on forever, maybe never be found. How could Americans born in California or Massachusetts, for instance, know what it was like?

To behold and fully comprehend the ironies and contradictions of the South, to understand how the resistant apartness of these people, my people, came to be, requires living a uniquely un-American story, a drama played out in a third-world region as it progressed through each level of development to a mature, post-industrial society—with the consequent values won and lost. The term “third world” is more literal than metaphorical. In the mid-1930s, when I was born, the per capita income of Alabama was less than $1 a day. Only one generation has lived at and beyond the intersection of the Old and New South, experienced the demise of an old civilization, and tried to define a better one—transforming and being transformed by a hard economic climb from poverty to post-industrial plenty.

This is a very personal story of that generation, my generation. I was born into a now-extinct civilization, but have lived the story as one of the leaders of that constellation of social and political forces that came to be known as the New South movement. I have taken the measure of my people—finding both confusion and common cause—in the White House, throughout the South and from foreign venues. Mainly, however, I have witnessed and lived the story from the perspective of a small-town Alabama newspaper publisher. A county-seat town is an intimate angle from which to witness a new nation emerging, decade-by-decade. It was also a place best to feel the impact of a simultaneous event—the moment when two cultures, one white, with well-worn rituals of civic and political life, the other black, new to positions of influence and power, came together as strangers. This was a moment when the old leaders experienced the shock of self-recognition and when the new leaders behaved distressingly like the old ones—like people.

Much of this journey was chronicled in the pages of my family-owned newspaper, which, with independent journalism itself, is an endangered species. At the end of World War II, almost all daily newspapers were owned by a family. As this is written, there were fewer than 300 of approximately 1,500 dailies that were still owned by families, which means an especially intense connection between a family and a community. The human dynamic of the relationship between one family and an entire community is unusual: close and caring, but sometimes jarring and painful. The emotional strings of such a relationship are tuned more like a Jacha Heifetz violin than, say, a Pete Sampras tennis racquet. The give and take, anger, celebrations, frustration, joys, sorrows and satisfactions that pass between publisher and community are acutely sensitive. And it is precisely that sensitivity that gives a family newspaper its unique personality. It may be less objective than a chain newspaper, but it is more caring. It scolds, supports, consoles and chides. It hurts and is hurt, and it loves — like any slightly dysfunctional family.

This is natural, because the publisher of a family-owned newspaper is more than likely a native son. The Ayers family has published newspapers in Calhoun County for more than a century, from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. The publisher’s fate and feelings expand and contract with the rhythms of community life. It is this primary allegiance that a family-owned paper has to a place and its people that too often is missing in corporate journalism, and may explain its low esteem in the public’s mind. Family newspapers have passionate critics, too, mine no exception. To save our friends and critics, too, from uncaring corporate journalism, our family years ago passed up a cash offer of $50 million for sale of our two daily and four weekly papers, and have since pledged our stock to a foundation. The foundation will keep our dailies and weeklies local; and, with the University of Alabama, supports an institute to further the arts of community journalism.

This newspaper has also provided a window to the larger universe: the state, the region, the nation and the world. The region is especially important to this publisher. There are many Souths but the main fault-line is between past and present, between visions of an Old South or New South. For most of my life, I have been puzzled, even contemptuous of those who cling to the dry bones of the long-dead Confederacy, who made a shrine of the Lost Cause, in effect, worshipped defeat, but in later years I had to acknowledge that the great schism in the nation’s life ought to be memorialized and that there can be nobility in defeat. The innocent enjoyment of that heritage deserves respect. That being said, I have consistently spoken for those of my generation whose vision was future rather than past oriented. A consistent core philosophy connects us New South believers: Society benefits from bridges that the less fortunate can cross over to a good life. Dad put it this way in an article for a trade journal, words we quote daily on the editorial page flag, “A newspaper should be the attorney for the most defenseless among its subscribers.” Those who would close the bridges breed turmoil, cap a social volcano that someday must erupt.

The civil rights movement was one such eruption. It grew in volume from the distant thunder of Brown v. Board of Education my freshman year at the University of Alabama. It grew louder with the lunch counter sit-ins I witnessed as a young political reporter in North Carolina, where two governors showed creative leadership, and then in Washington where I covered Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department and the March on Washington. Back home, it reached a personal crescendo—a nightrider murder following racist rallies on the courthouse steps. A major crisis was averted by rare and courageous statesmanship by Anniston’s black and white leaders.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the volcano began to cool. Looking back now, it seems as if the Old South disappeared “with deliberate speed” over the five years between 1965 and 1970, and where it had been, a wholly new place stood like a volcanic island, risen from the Gulf and the Atlantic. Even writers such as James Agee, Clarence Cason, William Faulkner and W. J. Cash could not have imagined this new civilization.

The first fruits of the new civilization astonished those of us born into the old one, but in time they became commonplace and the New South itself soon vanished. That is where the balance of my story ends, but the stunning cultural exclamation point of a black man as president requires an extended afterword.