A Turn in the South (22 page)

It was time for me to leave. She gave me a stapled photocopied booklet about herself, a souvenir of a celebration held in her honor six months before at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. This booklet had copies of articles about her from the Tallahassee
Democrat;
it listed her many awards and honors. The frontispiece was a full-page photograph of herself; and on the cover she was described as a “servant of Christ.”

She also gave me her card. On this card the Calvary Baptist Church was described—and again I thought of advertising copy—as “the friendly little church on the corner of Joe Louis and Arizona.” At one time that would have seemed to me very “American.” Now I understood a little more, and knew that churches like Reverend Bernyce’s were more than places of worship, were community centers, social centers, and depended on the personality of the pastor.

M
AURICE
C
ROCKETT
, a big, upright, handsome brown man of fifty-six, was the Florida Parole Board commissioner. He had been represented to me as a local black success story. That made me want to see him. He had agreed to see me, but he hadn’t understood what I was after. And when I was taken to his office early one afternoon—his desk was cleared, and he was resting his head on his crossed arms, but he was far from asleep—he was not immediately welcoming.

He said, and it was like a prepared statement, “Most people from outside see us as ethnically deprived, semiliterate.” There wouldn’t have been much in the meeting if we had gone on like that; but when he understood that I had come to listen, his manner softened. Soon his natural graces took over; he talked easily, anxious to efface the first, unwelcoming impression.

He said, “When I became a department head, over both blacks and whites, the whites were not happy, and I had to live with police protection for a couple of years.”

It seemed so unlikely now, in the general civility of his office.

“It might have been an overreaction, but you never know. There were any number of threatening phone calls and innuendos. And a lot of the whites quit.”

The fight wasn’t pleasant, but it was necessary.

“Some people try to give the impression that when we were segregated the whites were happy and the blacks were happy. But it isn’t true. I don’t think any thinking person could be happy under those circumstances. I could never have
afforded
to be happy. My choices were so limited. My son today has unlimited choices of career. I did not. When, in 1964, I thought I was due for a promotion, they came and drove me around in the car and explained that I was qualified but they weren’t ready for a colored person to do that kind of job yet. I went home and, I’ll tell you, I cried. And it still hurts.

“My son, because of my job, has never experienced that kind of rejection. In my work here I’ve been surrounded mainly by whites, and that’s the environment my son grew up in.”

His son went to white public schools, until his father put him in a black school affiliated with the local black university.

“He couldn’t take it. He had never been in an all-black situation. The music was different, the manners were different. Michael had
been listening to white kids’ music. In his scout troop he was the only black kid.”

Maurice Crockett had lived through a hard time, and had more than survived. But had some people broken under the strain?

“Some people back away. And the way you do that is you involve yourself in your church, in things around the home. So to all practical purposes you isolate yourself from reality. The church is all black, and when you go there everybody is friendly, and you aren’t threatened, and it’s like being in the womb again.”

But he had had a special source of strength.

“Most black kids have mainly a matriarchal system. But I grew up with a man. He was my stepfather. He was a role model and a guide for me. Mothers tend to be not as strict with boys. Boys need the kind of structure that a male provides. I think a lot of the black kids today would go to school if the basic family structure with the male was in place. But black males have a hard time establishing themselves, because of the lack of job opportunities.”

I asked him about his son, who had been taken out of white schools to be sent to black schools.

Maurice Crockett said, “He’s begun to be aware that he’s black, and that everybody doesn’t love him. He’s starting his third year at Tuskegee. But Michael still has his basic cadre of white friends.”

Out of success now, out of his new security, Maurice Crockett was rediscovering, reasserting, his blackness. He needed religion, but he needed a black religion.

“I’m not a shouter. But I like to be in a church where that kind of thing goes on. A lot of us want to emulate other standards, and we have to do that. But I still think that, like most ethnic groups, you shouldn’t divorce yourself from your basic culture. Especially when I go to church. The church is my salvation. The church keeps me sane.”

Salvation, sanity—I hadn’t heard the two run together. But in the job of Parole Board commissioner there were special needs.

“Some days in this job the stress of trying to keep up sends you home with pain. One of the most stressful things we have to do is that we hold the final face-to-face interview with the prisoners on Death Row. We actually go to the prison and sit down with the inmate and his attorney. Our meeting is transcribed by a court reporter. And when the world gets too much for me, I go to church. The saving grace for us black Southerners is the church.”

“Do you feel successful now? Content?”

“I’m not content. I’ll go to my grave being not content. I’ll constantly try to improve. People want to say we want to land from the trees and eat watermelon for the rest of our days. I want them to know that that kind of stereotyping is misplaced. I receive visitors a lot in my job. Most people from outside see us as ethnically deprived, nonverbal. I guess they see us as semiliterate people.”

That was where our conversation had begun. Now he had brought it back to that point, with an explanation.

“But this is false. If you come to me like that, I will let you know that I am not the kind of person you can handle in that way.”

His own truce with irrationality—how had he managed it? What was it about the past that now, from this distance, most surprised him?

“What I find hard to understand now is how I contained the anger. I suppose you have to learn that the anger doesn’t solve your problems. You sometimes have to sit down and wrestle with yourself.”

He still occasionally wrestled. He lived in a white neighborhood. He took his dog for a walk. At whatever time of morning or afternoon he took the dog, there was always, in a house at one end of the street, an old white man who sat out on the porch and watched him. It would appear that the old man was waiting for Mr. Crockett to go past his house.

“But what’s the point?”

I didn’t understand the explanation Mr. Crockett gave. “He wants me to know that he is there. He wants me to know that I’m being watched.” And Mr. Crockett made a gesture with his finger, drawing a horizontal line.

“Does he say anything? Do you talk?”

“We do. And I always have to think of something to say back. The last thing he said was, ‘I don’t know who’s slower, you or the dog.’ And I have to think of something to say, something foolish like, ‘You’re slower than both of us.’ That kind of nonsense.”

But the neighbor would have been a religious man, perhaps a Baptist, a fundamentalist. Didn’t that make for a certain kind of communication?

Mr. Crockett rejected that. “White fundamentalism”—putting it in quite a different category from the black fundamentalism he liked in black churches and saw as part of his black culture—“it is their attempt to go back to the good old days. The white church now has a school
attached to it. They call it a ‘Christian school’; the main purpose is to keep it segregated. The white-fundamentalist church has consumed these people and consumed the issues. It’s a half-baked attempt to establish a structure that has long since gone by the board.”

I
T WAS
the advice of a West Coast writer, someone originally from Tallahassee, that had sent me to Tallahassee. Northern Florida, I had been told, was quite different from southern Florida. Northern Florida, the panhandle part of the state, was part of the Deep South. But it had taken me a long time to find my way; it sometimes happens on this kind of journey.

Tallahassee, the state capital, was an artificial administrative center midway between the extremities of the panhandle, midway between the towns of Pensacola and Jacksonville. And all that I had got to know of the countryside was the few miles between Tallahassee and the beach houses on the black creeks and white sandspits of the Gulf of Mexico: a holiday landscape of food shops, restaurants, mobile homes, gas stations, places offering live bait, and churches—disposable buildings in “redneck” country, where (I was told) in the old days blacks would have been burned out if they had tried to settle, and where there were still almost no blacks.

But then, almost at the end of my time in Tallahassee, I saw something other than that holiday landscape. About an hour’s drive away, and just behind the highway—American highways make one state look like another, and one part like another—I saw old dirt roads, forest where there had once been fields, houses that had been abandoned whole, barns and garages in overgrown yards. It was a little like being in an abandoned European town in Africa, in Zaire or Rwanda.

There had been an old community here. Now it hardly existed. Farming could no longer support it; farming no longer paid. And here and there among the ruined houses—trees and shrubs and bush seeming to reach out towards them, darkening the open space of yards—were places in which people still lived, black and white, people not ready to go, holding on, people who it might be said were working out the quirks of their own character. The fat young man rocking on the low porch, for instance, was the son of a black farmer. That was the way he had chosen to spend his days; he had made that choice of solitude. I thought of the drinking man in Howard’s village, framed in
his window on a Sunday, looking out, but far from the life of his community. Here there was no longer a community; the fat young man rocked in the middle of bush.

My guide was Granger. He was white, in his forties, and he worked in a hotel in a nearby town. He did that for the ready cash, to keep his own farm going. It was a small farm, 120 acres. But it was ancestral land. It had been homesteaded—Indian land, staked out and claimed from the federal government—in the decade before the Civil War. The local Baptist church had been established in 1856; Granger was a Baptist. The land had never been worked by slaves. “We feel like we were the first Americans,” a relation of Granger’s told me. And various ancestors had migrated to this part of Florida from South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.

There were stories in some branches of the family of old wealth. There was a story that one ancestor had owned a third of a county in England. There was a later story, from a time after the calamities of the Civil War, of another ancestor who had made good in the China trade and had brought home a chest of gold coins, which, when emptied out onto the farmhouse floor, had sent up a cloud of pure gold dust.

Now Granger worked in a hotel, two days on, two days off, and looked after what was left of the ancestral farm, doing so not for money but for the piety, the debt owed his ancestors, and doing so as well because farming was for him part of the beauty of the days. Farming meant being in these fields, these woods.

We drove in his fields in his old, un-air-conditioned pickup truck. One of his cows had just calved. We stopped in the truck among the pine trees, in the thin, broken shade, among the cowpats and the pine litter, the cones, the needles, the brittle dead branches. He got out and, keeping his distance, spoke both to the mother and the birth-smeared calf struggling to its feet. He had been waiting for this event for some days. This was the kind of farming he did and liked. It had given him his gentleness.

But development was coming. People with jobs in the towns were building houses in the villages. The old farms were under threat. A cycle that had begun when the Indian land was homesteaded was coming to an end. (The tomb of Osceola, the Seminole chief who had died at the age of thirty-eight in federal-government captivity, was not far from Charleston, and within sight of Fort Sumter.)

Fifty miles or so away, still in the panhandle, building development and agricultural failure were putting an end to another kind of community, a community of black sharecroppers. Black people had lived on this land since the end of slavery. Once everyone was related; these fields bounded everyone’s horizon. Now the roads had got there; the community, exposed, was breaking up; there were pine plantations in the old fields—young pines growing out of a lot of bush. But not everyone was ready to move to a town.

The life on the land here was different from the life that Granger found on his 120 acres. There was a different idea here of ancestors, history, piety. For Barrett, the black man in his thirties who was showing me around, the agricultural life of this inbred black community was stultifying and shameful.

Barrett was middle-class, with parents who were modest professional people. He came from a biggish town where there were few black people. Until he had come to Tallahassee he had thought that black people in the South were like his family; he was still unsettled and enraged by those aspects of black life in Tallahassee that didn’t fit in with his old ideas. The idea of being in a minority was so much part of his upbringing, and so important to him, that he had had trouble, he told me, getting used to the sight of all-black streets. I liked him for saying that; not many people would have confessed to something so simple and undermining. And when his work had taken him to that old black agricultural community, he said, he had suffered from “culture shock.”

I didn’t think that what he was showing me was all that bad. But, then, I didn’t have his expectations. And, with anger building up in him again, and out of this anger wishing to see the worst again, and to show it to me, he drove me to a side road and said, “Look at that one. A house without windows.”