Читать книгу In Love with Defeat - H. Brandt Ayers - Страница 13

A whole civilization lay dying around me in the six years after prep school, but I was too self-absorbed to notice. For four of those years, I was concentrated on the pleasures of sorority girls, bad sex, and cheap bourbon as an undistinguished undergraduate at the University of Alabama, and for two more as a U.S. Navy enlisted man. A classmate who truly was distinguished, David Mathews, later became president of the University, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare in the Ford administration, and president of the Kettering Foundation. We didn’t know each other in school but became friends when he was a dean of students at UA. Once during his presidency I asked, “David, why didn’t I ever see you drinking beer in any of the fraternity basements?” He answered, “Why didn’t I ever see you in the library?” That pretty well summed up my first wave of university life—a sensual explosion on escaping the monastic restraints of prep school and entering the relative license of college.

At the white-columned brick Phi Gamma Delta house, we paid scant attention to news of the outside world, which came to us on a black and white TV set in what was laughingly called the library. TV told, for instance, about a governor of Virginia invoking a shadowy power called “interposition” to prohibit blacks from going to white schools. Mildly interesting, but of more immediate interest were the weekend parties. The nuances of federal v. state authority gave way to defining the corporate personality of the top sororities: Kappa Deltas, bitchy but interesting; Tri Delts, too sweet for our taste; Kappa Kappa Gamma, natural and fun, good ol’ girls.

While most of us grieved at the mighty Crimson Tide football team’s losing seasons, beneath us the socio-political geology rumbled on its axis. But we could not feel or hear it. A warning tremor had been felt by Dad’s generation earlier, in Birmingham at the July 1948 “Dixiecrat” convention led by former Alabama Governor Frank Dixon. Among the delegates, five Southern governors mingled with a who’s-who of such violent racists as Gerald L. K. Smith and J. B. Stoner. They nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate to oppose the reelection of President Harry Truman, and to preserve “States’ Rights,” meaning a state’s right to deny Negroes the vote, and the minimal conveniences of dining, sleeping, or using bathrooms when and where they were needed. The 1948 Dixiecrat convention was the first in a series of “Pickett’s Charges” in the war to preserve white supremacy.

But we happy-little-idiot fraternity boys didn’t know we were playing on a social fault line that was in motion. We knew we had a genial giant as governor, six-foot eight-inch James E. Folsom, because we sang a song about his paternity problems. Well-to-do parents were embarrassed by what they considered his crudities, and didn’t care for his populist appeal. “Y’all Come” was the slogan of his second successful gubernatorial campaign, an appeal to all the bypassed working folks, urban and rural, to come visit him in the Governor’s Mansion. We chuckled at the disarming honesty of his sexual exploits: “If they bait a trap with a pretty woman, they’re gonna catch Big Jim every time.” There is a story repeated so often that, if it isn’t true, it ought to be. It stands as a metaphor for dealing with a sexual scandal that might have instructed President Clinton. In the story, Governor Folsom is confronted by reporters who ask if it is true that he slept with a “colored” girl in a Phenix City motel the night before. Folsom answered, “It’s a damn lie; not a word of truth to it—didn’t sleep a wink! “ Over beer and cheap bourbon in fraternity basements, we sang a song about our colorful governor:

She was poor, but she was honest.

Victim of a rich man’s whim;

’Til she met that Christian gentleman Big Jim Folsom,

And she had a child by him.

Now he sits in the governor’s chair,

Makin’ laws for all mankind

While she walks the streets of Cullman, Alabama

Sellin’ bits of her behind.

We also listened to the popular idol of the fifties, Elvis Presley—and we hated him. Only when his death in 1977 set off a shock wave of grief did I begin to understand the tragedy and the enduring power of the man. Elvis’s fans don’t see the fat man who died alone in his bathroom a generation ago. They only see the slim, hip-pumping boy with the glistening pompadour, heavy sideburns, and outrageous clothes who was both vaguely threatening and vulnerable. They crowned him King: sovereign in the kingdom of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and pop. They’ve made him into a memorial, a statue, totem, icon that has rendered the real man-boy unknowable. But the image fills a need in those who have to remember him a certain way. As always, those to whom we give symbolic power tell more about us than they do the object of our love or scorn.

Elvis Presley is a symbol for millions: of being born poor and making it? of fantasized fame and celebrity? Perhaps more of innocence lost. Thomas Wolfe was half right—you can’t go home again. If Elvis had survived his fame, he might have gone to the fiftieth reunion of Humes High School, his high school in Memphis, Tennessee, but at seventy, he couldn’t be that teenaged boy, raging with energy and mischief. Nor can the women who surround themselves with Elvis memorabilia go home again and revive the aching tenderness and insecurities of teenaged love, so they play the old records and blow on the dying embers, trying to recall how it was, enjoying the delicious sorrow of lost youth and innocence.

Elvis and I were the same age, and I thoroughly disliked him. I loathed what I took to be a sneering mouth—resented the attraction his rebellion had for girls our age, just as I was vexed by the appeal that the local “baaad boys” had for some girls I knew. Elvis was a shock, a threat to me and the well-protected cocoon in which I had been nurtured. We were from the right side of town—a family his people would call “rich.” He was from the wrong side of town, violated every convention I knew, and he was getting the girls. I hated that.

Now, having ventured far and wide on the discovery craft of journalism, learning the values of other worlds, plain and fancy, Elvis’s honeyed voice crooning “Love Me Tender” and the film clips of the girls squealing and swooning strike home with the combined power of innocent charm and nostalgia.

Elvis was an emotional force that attracted two small-town Southern presidents. When Elvis performed at the Omni in Atlanta in 1973, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter went backstage to meet him. In the White House, Carter took a call from the singer just weeks before he died. Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton appeared on the “Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992 and paid a musical tribute to Elvis with a saxophone performance of “Heartbreak Hotel.” The American presidency is a unique office, respected everywhere, but presidents’ popularity doesn’t match that of a dead singer. We have always needed to create heroes and kings, but we exact a terrible price from them. We demeaned Carter and Clinton, and bestowed such high-voltage charisma on Elvis that it killed him.

Our adolescent resentment of Elvis was a more potent emotional presence than the great events unfolding in Montgomery. Like a war on another continent, the first skirmish of full-scale civil combat, the Montgomery bus boycott, occurred beyond our notice on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man. The story of the determined passenger in the Montgomery bus has been told and retold so many times, it need not be repeated here, but one picture from that historic episode still surprises. It is a picture of the leader of the boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King, so slender, and so very young. Could it have actually happened? That slight, serious, twenty-six-year-old in the picture, young Martin King, could he actually have caused the sinking of an antique civilization and the rise of a wholly new society! It seems shockingly out of proportion until you remember that the Founding Fathers were mainly young men. Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Another young man in his early thirties remade much of the world, a young Jewish man with revolutionary ideas—Jesus of Nazareth.

What even fraternity boys could not avoid noticing for a few days in February 1956 at the University of Alabama was Autherine Lucy, the first Negro admitted to an all-white Southern university, and Leonard Wilson, an intense young man who led student protests against her enrollment. As student protesters’ ranks swelled with the addition of some of the state’s most diabolical racists, striking rubber workers, Ku Klux Klansmen and their allies from out of state, the crowds became more and more vehement and violent. On the morning of February 6 in New Orleans, where a fraternity brother and I had taken dates for the weekend, we awoke to radio news about the commotion on campus. We decided Tuscaloosa was more interesting than New Orleans and drove back. That night, the trustees met and decided to “exclude Autherine Lucy until further notice,” for the safety of the students. She had been a student for five days. The mob had won. Lucy later married and moved to Texas. Leonard Wilson was expelled from the university for his role in the riots, but became a celebrity racist as executive director of the Alabama White Citizens Council until it expired, along with the civilization that spawned it, in 1969.

At the time, I wasn’t stabbed by sympathy for Lucy or burning with moral indignation against the mob. I just wondered what all the fuss was about. She was just another student, a momentary celebrity whom I never saw but would have liked to have met. An amusing irony from that time, told to me by a girl from Anniston, was the real story behind the two-page photo spread in Life magazine of what appeared to be a racist thug stomping the roof of a Cadillac. As it turned out, the boy trampolining atop the car had been partying all weekend and was so drunk he didn’t know—or care—who was in the car: frightened black tourists, unaware of what had been unfolding on campus. Historian Culpepper Clark in his indispensable account of the times, The Schoolhouse Door, confirmed the true story. Historical accounts of those few days now, when African American students are so ubiquitous as to be invisible, have the texture of a distant reality like Dickens’s London or Hugo’s Paris—events from a past century, a past civilization, which in fact they were.

The White Citizens’ Council is a blur in my memory—the Klan in a business suit, with a college degree. If it had many members in Anniston, Dad was certainly not one of them. I recall his criticism of the white resistance movement, and by the time I returned to Alabama, such middle-class bigotry had been marginalized by real-man racists such as our famous fellow townsman, Asa “Ace” Carter, one of the authors of George Wallace’s 1963 “Segregation Forever!” speech. But I’m getting ahead of my story. It is 1956, and the place is Montgomery.

These were serious times, but my awareness of them remained dim as I engaged in fraternity house frivolity. Novels and trendy nonfiction such as Phillip Wylie’s sardonic Generation of Vipers fed my intellectual appetite rather than textbooks. My grades were passable, but class attendance wasn’t, and those were the days of in loco parentis—university administrators who treated us as their children. The university “family” reached an instant consensus about my value to the academy, and the next thing I knew, I was at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland, in a boot-camp company under the tender care of a man named Tarango, said to be the all-service heavyweight boxing champion.

After two years in the peacetime Navy, I returned to the University, a more serious student. The seeds of social conscience sown by family and the Wooster School were nourished and began to take root in discussions with Dr. Donald Strong. He was a political science professor who had been one of the two main researchers for Harvard professor V. O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics. Dr. Strong’s graduate course of the same title began to shape my intellectual and ideological foundation. A foundation stone was set when I asked a dumb question after class one day, “Wouldn’t society be more stable if the vote were restricted to the educated and propertied classes?” Dr. Strong answered with a question, put something like this: “Do you think a person without a high school degree should be able to make a political statement about his life?” I could not think of a good reason why he shouldn’t have that right. Which, of course, meant that my west-side classmates in junior high—even the black sailors I avoided in boot-camp—had the same political rights I had. It was so basic that it should not have been such a memorable insight. Donald Strong’s graduate seminar in a tower of the library was a high place where I could look down on my life and inbred assumptions, putting them in perspective.

Key’s text and the supplemental readings began to reinforce in my consciousness something else—the knowledge that to be Southern was to be somehow different. Of course, that distinction had been noticeable when I was the only Southerner in my prep school class, where I had organized a Confederate underground and actually raised the Stars and Bars on Wooster’s flagpole. Clues to a more complete architecture of Southern uniqueness came my way one evening in the spring of 1959. The celebrated journalist Eugene Patterson, then editor of the Atlanta Constitution, spoke to our journalism fraternity and flattered me by accepting an invitation for a nightcap in the bar of the Stafford Hotel. He advised me to read everything C. Vann Woodward had written. Eventually, I made my way through most of Woodward’s seminal series of books and got to know slightly the man we called “Marse Vann.” In particular, his slim volume, The Burden of Southern History, shaped my generation’s sense of the singularity of being Southern.

Gene Patterson’s reading list would be completed in time, but immediately on graduation from the University, I first had to announce the happy news of my availability to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald. A humbling wave of apathy greeted my applications to those great journals. Forced to live at home, under the roof of the publisher of the Anniston Star as the greenest of cub reporters at the paper inspired in me a powerful desire to . . . get the hell out of there.

Before I could escape, two reportorial diversions developed into lifelong anecdotes: the story of the ax murderess and the African prince. Every reporter remembers his first murder story, and mine was a doozie. The mystery began in the summer of 1959 with the grisly discovery in nearby Gadsden of a legless, armless, faceless torso. A day later, a couple picking berries pulled back a branch and uncovered a horrifying sight—a second legless, armless, faceless torso. Associated Press labeled the mysterious slayings the “X” and “Y” murders. We speculated that they were “gangland” murders, possibly the result of an underworld civil war between the Alabama hill-based white-whiskey ring and the Tennessee red-whiskey ring. The speculation ended when employees at the Anniston Army Depot noticed that the Harper brothers, Emmet and Lee, had not been at work for several days.

They had been living in a trailer on a farm in Rabbittown where Viola Virginia Hyatt lived with her father. All Viola said about motive was: “They done me wrong.” In fact, she was alleged to have been in the midst of a dual sexual encounter with the brothers. Her business with one concluded, something was said, and the other brother covered himself with a handkerchief in a manner she found insulting. The punishment she exacted was hardly commensurate with the offense. She stole into their trailer at night with her daddy’s shotgun, emptied a chamber into each brother’s face, and dragged the bodies outside. There, in order to fit the disposal task to the dimensions of a wooden wheelbarrow, she cut off their arms and legs with her daddy’s double-bit ax. Making several trips, she deposited the parts on a tarpaulin in the back seat of the family car. She drove through the night on a journey that touched several northeast Alabama counties, throwing an arm out here, a leg out there, rolling out the two torsos. After her arrest she took sheriff’s deputies on a ghastly treasure hunt to relocate the pieces, and deputies stated as fact that she kept more private “treasure” in the freezer. Lorena Bobbitt never attained such rank as a folk villain.

I met Viola in the basement of the old county jail when she returned from her sanity hearing at Bryce Hospital, the state mental health facility in Tuscaloosa, where she was declared sane and competent. A big woman wearing a simple, camellia-red dress and red shoes appeared in the door, dwarfing little Sheriff Roy Snead Sr. She walked past me with a dignified strut toward a tiny elevator, guided by the sheriff who turned aside my interview request with, “She’s going to jail.” Intrepid reporter that I was, I entered the elevator with them, and found myself belly-to-belly with an ax murderess. My congealed brain could produce only the question, “Are you afraid?” Matter of factly, she replied, “No. Why should I be?” She had me there. We chatted through the bars for a few minutes, but I didn’t have the experience and composure to get her to talk much about her life. Viola—ever mysterious and taciturn—pleaded guilty, was a model prisoner in Julia Tutwiler Prison, and returned home after 10 years to lead a quiet life until she died in 2000.

The saga of the prince began with a cryptic note in my typewriter from the city editor, Cody Hall: “Talk to African prince in hospital with kidney stones.” “A prince,” I thought, “How do you talk to an actual prince, especially African royalty in the segregated South?” Dr. Phil Noble, minister of the First Presbyterian Church, was already there in the administrator’s office when I arrived. Soon a dignified young West African, Majuba Lapola Setewayo, eldest son of the Emir of Upper Volta, joined us. Regal in bearing, he tapped a cigarette on a gold lighter and lit it, sending thick tusk-like streams of white smoke curling from his nostrils. He explained that he was an exchange student at Stanford and had been taking the train to Atlanta for research at Morehouse University when he had a kidney-stone attack as the train approached Anniston. He was feeling better when we met, and told intimate tales of other African rulers such as the anti-imperialist first president of an independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Writing the story, I was acutely conscious that Prince Setewayo would one day rule another nation and I wanted to make a good impression—for Alabama and for the United States. Then, a few days later, Phil Noble called with shocking news. The prince was an impostor. Majuba Lapola Setewayo was in fact Eddie Lee Woods of Waycross, Georgia. He was a drug addict who to get a fix faked kidney stones by pricking a finger to show traces of blood in his urine samples. He was a talented actor. One of his many successful performances earned him a police escort from O’Hare Airport to a Chicago hospital. Under my shamefaced byline, the Star’s second story about him began: “The African prince, who was paid court briefly in Anniston last week, actually is only the Prince of Phonies.”