A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (4 page)

Of more practical use was the ability to construct barns, small homes, sheds, and storage bins of different sizes. We learned how to make plans and cost estimates, and we competed with other FFA boys at the local, congressional district, and state levels with quite complex carpentering tasks. One that I remember was cutting a rafter from a two-by-six or two-by-eight board that would fit on the slanted dormer portion of a cottage roof. There was an intimate and almost constant interrelationship between what we were learning in school and what we were doing on the farm—and between my father and my ag teacher. When I had a project of raising a young calf to a grown steer, Daddy let me design and build, with as little help as possible, a shed on the back of our smokehouse. This included, of course, the feeding trough, a swinging door, and a wooden window.

As a child, I never thought about social or legal distinctions between our white family and the African-American families that surrounded us in Archery. I knew, of course, that our house was larger than theirs, that my father gave the orders on the farm, and that we had an automobile or pickup truck while our neighbors walked or rode in a wagon or on a mule. I assumed that these advantages accrued to us because Daddy worked harder and was fortunate in owning the land on which we lived. I took for granted that having separate schools and churches was just a matter of
custom, and when I went to St. Mark AME Church in Archery I could see spirit, sincerity, and fervor in their worship services that we lacked at our church in Plains. I didn’t realize that only white people could vote in an election or serve on a jury, and in those days I never heard anyone comment about these legal differences.

My concept of racial discrimination was confused by the dominating presence in our rural community of a distinguished black man, who was the richest and most sophisticated person I knew. Bishop William Decker Johnson owned and operated what was considered to be an excellent school for black children across the railroad track from St. Mark AME Church, and I remember that at Christmastime he always had a nice gift for every child who attended the church or school. His charge was all the African Methodist Episcopal churches in five Northern states, and there was a lead article in our county newspaper whenever he came home to spend a few days in Archery. Bishop Johnson always rode in the backseat of a large black Cadillac or Packard, with his chauffeur driving, and there was a well-known photograph of him in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. For me and many others he was the epitome of prestige and success.

It was not the custom for a black person to come to the front door of a white family’s home, and when Bishop Johnson wanted to speak with my father he conformed to the mores of the time without acknowledging any difference in status. His chauffeur would come to our house and determine that Daddy was there, then go back and bring the bishop to the front yard. He would blow the horn, and my father would go outside to talk to his guest, either through the car window or with both standing under a large magnolia tree. My mother paid little attention to these distinctions, and she was impervious to criticism because of her independent temperament; also, as a registered nurse, she was a member of the exalted medical community. The bishop’s son, Alvan, was a student at Harvard University and Mama’s friend. When Alvan returned home on vacation he would come to our front door and knock, and my mother would welcome him for a conversation in our living room or on the front porch. If Daddy was at home at the time, he would quietly leave the house and
go to the barn or workshop until Alvan left. I never knew my parents to discuss the issue, at least within earshot of us children.

When I was six years old I went to Plains High School in town, where about 250 white students attended grades one through eleven. Our school, although small, won honors as one of the best in the state because of our outstanding superintendent, Miss Julia Coleman. She encouraged all of us to write themes, learn about classical music and art, read a long list of books, debate, and act in stage plays. Every day began with a half hour of chapel services, where we heard announcements, sang hymns, recited Holy Scripture, and listened to a brief religious homily. A small bus picked me and later my two sisters up in front of our house and took us to and from school. It had been wrecked in its earlier life, and the narrow body sat at a distinct angle from the main frame. Some of the students derided it as the “cracker box,” which it resembled, but we were proud of the free ride each day. I made new friendships with my white classmates, of course, but I still felt more at home in Archery with my black friends, with whom I spent my late afternoons and school vacation times. There were never any rankings among us except those derived from who caught the biggest fish, picked the most cotton, had performed better in the last baseball game, or prevailed in a wrestling match or footrace.

I recall vividly a seemingly minor incident that has profoundly affected the rest of my life. When I was about fourteen years old, I had been working with two friends in a field north of our house and barn. As we approached what we called the “pasture gate,” they stepped back to let me go through the opening ahead of them. I was surprised, and immediately thought they must be playing a trick on me, with perhaps a trip wire near the ground on which I would stumble. It was at about this same time that I had begun to play varsity basketball, attend weekend parties in Plains, and become interested in girlfriends. I never mentioned this to anyone at the time, but as the years passed I surmised that this first indication of the unearned deference of my black playmates toward me was the result of a cautionary word from their parents that the time had come to conform to the racial distinctions that were strictly observed among adults.

Much later, I wrote a poem after visiting Archery:

The Pasture Gate

This empty house three miles from town

was where I lived. Here I was back,

and found most homes around were gone.

The folks who stayed here now were black,

like Johnny and A.D., my friends.

As boys we worked in Daddy’s fields,

hunted rabbits, squirrels, and quail,

caught and cooked catfish and eels,

searched the land for arrowheads,

tried to fly the smallest kite,

steered barrel hoops with strands of wire,

and wrestled hard. At times we’d fight,

without a thought who might be boss,

who was smartest or the best;

the leader for a few brief hours

was who had won the last contest.

But then—we were fourteen or so—

as we approached the pasture gate,

they went to open it, and then

stood back. This made me hesitate,

sure it must have been a joke,

a trip wire, maybe, they had planned.

I reckon they had to obey

their parents’ prompting. Or command.

We only saw it vaguely then,

but we were transformed at that place.

A silent line was drawn between

friend and friend, race and race.

Mama was a full-time nurse during my early childhood, at first employed by Wise Sanitarium for bedside duty with patients, and she was paid a regular salary of four dollars a day for twelve-hour duty. My parents were living in an upstairs apartment early in their marriage in what is
now a bed-and-breakfast, and their former room has a plaque on the door reading
THE CONCEPTION ROOM.
Dr. Sam Wise was the chief surgeon, and my mother had become his assistant. As she approached delivery time, Dr. Sam suggested that they move to a ground-floor apartment so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs, and there happened to be an empty room across from the operating room when it was time for her first child. I was the first president born in a hospital.

After we moved to Archery and our daddy’s farm income improved, Mama began serving increasingly as a private nurse—almost a doctor—in the homes of her patients. It was relatively easy work if the patient was the father or one of the children, but if the mother was incapacitated the nurse was expected to be responsible for the household affairs, sometimes helped by a female relative. Mama worked almost exclusively among our black neighbors in Archery. The prescribed payment was six dollars for twenty-hour duty, so her normal routine was to come home at ten o’clock at night, take a shower and wash her uniforms, leave us children a note outlining our duties for the next day, and go back on duty at two in the morning. We children would see her only during the intervals when she was changing from one patient to another. Her pay was spasmodic during those Great Depression days, usually in the form of chickens, eggs, pigs, or perhaps work around our house and yard by members of the family. It was a time of hardship and sharing, and she never let ability to pay be a factor in whom she served. Mama would take vacations on occasion, especially during lay-by time in the early summer, when she and Daddy would travel to big league baseball cities, and during November, when she gathered a group of helpers and harvested and sold all the pecans from trees on our land. Nuts on lower limbs could be knocked down with a long bamboo pole, and someone had to climb to higher branches to knock or shake the nuts to the ground. From her income she bought my sisters’ clothes and met their other needs.

Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me. Whenever possible I worked side by side with her in the fields and tried to emulate her extraordinary speed and dexterity. She could pick more cotton and shake and stack more peanuts than anyone else in the Archery community. When field work was not available, she would take me fishing with her in the nearby creeks, and during these excursions she gave me gentle lectures about wildlife and my proper relationship with God and with other people. She had the aura of a queen, but was gentle and modest, and always sought ways to be helpful to others. As often as possible, I spent the night in the Clarks’ home, where I slept on a pallet on the floor. Rachel moved it close to the fireplace on cold nights.

My mother, Lillian Gordy, left her job as a postal clerk in Richland and moved eighteen miles to Plains (population about five hundred) in 1920 to become a registered nurse. She married Earl when she finished her training, in 1923. I was born in October 1924. This painting shows her at age seventy, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in India.

One of our favorite people during my high school years was a pretty teenage black girl named Annie Mae Hollis. She was very close to my two sisters, and they spent a lot of time together. She stayed on with my family after I left for college, and later had a job with a wealthy couple who owned Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood. Throughout her life, she remained in touch with us, and she returned to Plains in 1953, when she heard that my father was ill.

Even when I was a child, my mother was known within our community for her refusal to accept any restraints on her treatment of black citizens as equals. My sister Gloria would report that there were critical remarks made by some of the other women, but Mama laughed them off as inconsequential. We children just assumed that registered nurses were different, but I believe it is accurate to say that all four of us siblings tended to share this attitude toward our black neighbors. My father always treated his African-American customers and employees with meticulous fairness and respect, but he believed completely that the two races should be segregated. Like all other men that I knew in and around Plains, he accepted this as a premise ordained by Bible scriptures and confirmed by a century of Jim Crow laws that were reversed a year after his death with the Supreme Court ruling that racially segregated schools were no longer legal.

Daddy was deeply involved in local and state politics, with all public offices being held by Democrats. The Republican Party in Georgia comprised some African-American leaders in Atlanta and a few isolated white cliques in the rural areas, and they dealt only with national politics. They handled federal patronage when there was a Republican president,
including postal employees, revenue agents, and U.S. attorneys. The regional center for South Georgia was in Rhine, which still has a population of about four hundred. This was before the Hatch Act, which was designed to remove political activity from federal government employees, was passed in 1939 and required several more years to become effective. When Democrats lost a national election, it was necessary for a rural mail carrier or other government worker to make a trip to Rhine with a roll of bills in his pocket. If financial arrangements were successful, he kept his job. My mother’s father, Jim Jack Gordy, was adept at making this accommodation, and worked for most of his adult life as postmaster and revenue agent under both major parties.