Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (11 page)

Inside, the church was a loud, sweet-singing haven, warmly enveloping. It was filled far beyond its normal seating capacity with people of all ages: dark-suited men, women in best dresses and flowered hats, little girls in party shoes, little boys wriggling in their stiff collars.

As the evening wore on, its nightmare quality began to unfold. First there was the tear gas, an alien and threatening odor. Next, incredibly, Reverend King was telling us in matter-of-fact tones that the mob outside was completely out of control, they had injured some of the U.S. marshals and had overturned and burned a car. The implication was rather strong that the church might be next. More incredibly, the vast, packed audience was taking it in stride. There was not a sign of panic, not a shriek, not a fainting fit. Just murmurs of “Yes, Lord,” “That’s right,” lots of singing, lots of patient confidence. It seemed to go on forever and ever. Later, it was announced by the General of the Alabama National Guard that no one could leave the church until morning because of the danger outside. The atmosphere became positively jolly—like an impromptu camping expedition, I thought, as we prepared to make ourselves as comfortable as possible for the long hours of confinement.

Searching that sea of calm, determined faces, I felt as though I’d stumbled on the very source of strength that would brace a young girl to exchange a year in Paris for a stretch in the Jackson prison, or a provincial gentlewoman to brave the scorn of her social set by publicly giving a hand to the black sit-ins.

Sometime after five o’clock in the morning, having learned that my borrowed car was the unlucky one that had been demolished earlier, I was driven home in an Alabama National Guard jeep. It was a morning of startling beauty—a soft, warm, breezy dawn in which the lovely little town looked its very best.

TRIP NOTES

Montgomery after the Freedom Riders. The Fire Marshal came round to see me about the burned-up car. I was rather hoping he might be interested in finding the vandals who had destroyed it but he only asked me whether I was connected with CORE or NAACP, whether I had made other stops in the South or had come directly to Montgomery from California, whether I had attended regular church that Sunday morning, whether I knew anyone else who was at the meeting, why I went, whether my friends had lent me the car “of their own free will.” ... An editorial in the Montgomery
Advertiser
deplores the view that mob violence will chase industry from Montgomery; it points out that Atlanta had the greatest race riot in history in 1906, six hundred blacks killed and carted off in trucks—and look at flourishing, industrial Atlanta today! ... A twenty-two-year-old English student here is in trouble. She was quoted in a man-in-the-street interview as saying, “Negroes should be allowed to go any place they wish. I am for integration of the races 100 percent.” Since when she has been dropped from, of all things, the English-Speaking Union! ... The Country Clubbers have vanished from my life like summer snow since the car burning. One of them called me (sounding absolutely terrified) to say a rumor was spreading that she had accompanied me to the meeting, that her husband and in-laws are furious with her for even knowing me, that it wouldn’t be safe for us to meet again.... Twenty-two students from Auburn University signed a letter which appeared in the
Advertiser
, first sane thing to appear locally. They’ve since been hanged in effigy on campus by counter-students.... A local white couple, Fred and Anna Gach, have been tried and convicted of disturbing the peace. They saw a black Freedom Rider being stomped by the mob, shouted to a policeman (who was standing with back to the scene, arms folded) to “do something.” He did something—he arrested the Gaches....

Just before I left, I was smuggled into one last drawing room for tea. By now there was virtually only one topic of conversation in Montgomery: the Freedom Riders, and for comic relief the case of the young English girl versus the English-Speaking Union. After the usual preliminary comments on the weather, the strawberry cream cake, and the youth and beauty of all present, our hostess patiently undertook to put me wise to the basic objection to the Freedom Riders; integration of the bus station facilities would surely lead to intermarriage. “But does one usually marry a person because one sits next to him at a bus stop?” She answered, with glint in eye and Scarlett O’Hara toss of head, “Honey, when
ah
sit next to a man—
any
man—ah jes’ caint help thinkin’ jest how he’d be, you know, to make love to. Ah might just as well come right out and say it—in baid. Now, you know yourself,
owl
women are lak that.” Later, the ladies discussed a mutual acquaintance—somebody’s aunt, I believe—who is currently in a nearby mental institution. “It’s real, real nass out there,” one of them said. “Ah declare! They have the loveliest grounds! It’s all beautifully kept up, you should see the flowers at this time of year. The fude’s fan, too, and she has such a pretty room.” She added reflectively, “It
really
isn’t so very different from the outside.”

COMMENT

The South has always fascinated me. I have dipped into that strange territory many times over the years, principally to visit Clifford and Virginia Durr, a white lawyer and his wife, in Montgomery, Alabama. In the dangerous 1950s these two were among the tiny minority of white supporters of such black causes as the Montgomery bus boycott, and in consequence they suffered almost complete ostracism at the hands of the respectable white community. Observing their life and meeting their few staunch allies, I wanted to probe further into the curious mixture of nostalgia and guilt (and, in their case, courage) that permeates the white Southern psyche. I wanted to see how that psyche was faring in the aftermath of the victorious bus boycott of the late 1950s and the sit-ins of 1960–61, so I sent a proposal along these lines to the editor of
Esquire
, who agreed to commission the piece.

Armed with a sheaf of introductions, I spent about five weeks on the road visiting various Southern cities and filling up a dozen notebooks with my findings. It was a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes horrifying, and sometimes even amusing experience. But when I got home and started to write about it, loaded as I was with material, I found that by far the worst part was trying to devise some sort of organizational form for the piece. Clearly the most dramatic incident of my trip was the beleaguered church meeting for the Freedom Riders—which could have taken up the whole article. Yet that was not my intention; I had set out to record impressions of the contemporary white South.

Where to start and where to finish? I must have used up a ream of paper with false beginnings and endings. Finally I settled on a sort of travelogue format, a straight chronological account of the journey, the people I met, the episodes—which may seem the obvious way to do it, although it was far from obvious to me at the time. I also tumbled to the idea of “Trip Notes,” to be set off in different type from the narrative, for transitions between the towns I visited. I put these down as actual jottings from my notebooks, wishing to spare the reader wearisome descriptions of train journeys, scenery, background information—and also hoping that since I single-spaced these in the typescript, the editors at
Esquire
would not notice that the article exceeded the agreed-on length by quite a bit.

Here, however, I may have outsmarted myself, for the editors cut, without consultation, the paragraph about Carl and Anne Braden, the only militantly left-wing characters in the piece. This was most annoying because the Bradens added a needed dimension to a discussion of white Southern supporters of the black cause: that of the politically conscious radical who is involved not only in the humanitarian issues, but who sees a whole reorganization of society as the only real solution. But Carl Braden was in prison at the time for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Were the
Esquire
editors still under the spell of fear cast by the then not so distant McCarthy era, hence reluctant to accord the Bradens favorable mention in the magazine? Another unauthorized change: my title, “You-All and Non-You-All,” derived from my sister Nancy’s book about U and Non-U usage, was changed to the meaningless “Whut They’re Thanking Down There,” which does not even catch the cadence of Southern vernacular.

In Montgomery I stayed with the Durrs—it was they who arranged through intermediaries for me to meet the Southern gentry, few of whom were on their own social list, and to be invited to the country club. It was their ancient car, worth no more than its value to a junk dealer, that was burned outside the mass meeting. Obviously I would have to reimburse them for this loss. When I got home, I called my insurance agent, whose sympathies were all with the Freedom Riders, and unfolded my plan for a claim: had it been my own car, whose blue-book value was $850, the insurance company would have had to pay up. Since it was just by chance that I was using somebody else’s car, could I not collect this sum? Much to my surprise this rather specious reasoning paid off, enabling the Durrs, then living on the edge of poverty, to get a fairly decent replacement for the car.

The reaction of my Montgomery hostesses to the piece, as reported by Virginia Durr, was illuminating. She said they were not in the least disturbed by my remarks about their mindless bigotry — but were exceedingly offended by my description of the FOOD as being uniformly bland and creamy: “We didn’t have cream sauce, we had roast lamb the night she came.” “She never mentioned my lettuce-and-walnut salad.”

AMERICANS DON’T WANT FANCY FUNERALS

SATURDAY EVENING POST /
November 23, 1963

Has the twentieth-century American standard of dying evolved in response to public demand, as the funeral industry claims? Do people really desire that modern technology and “know-how” should be applied to the production of ever more elaborate funerary merchandise, gaudier caskets, finer burial negligées, bigger and more beautiful undertaking establishments with softer and thicker carpeting? Is there a clamor for newer and better embalming techniques for the purpose of achieving an ever more lifelike appearance in corpses? And are people only too willing and anxious to pay for all this, as the funeral merchants insist?

Judging by the response to my recent book criticizing American funeral practices the opposite is true, and there is in fact a revolution underway by the funeral customer—the American public at large—against the funeral industry and its bizarre product.

It would seem that this is one area of our affluent society in which a great many people yearn to see an end to proliferating “improvements” and “refinements,” yearn for restraint and a return to rationality, and actively resent the fantastically high charges levied on bereaved families by the funeral trade.

The death industries—undertakers, cemetery men, florists, casket and vault manufacturers—are turning the deaf ear to rumblings of mutiny among their patrons. Nevertheless, they are in the grip of a nightmare: the deadly fear that their two-billion-dollar-a-year mortuary empire may be slipping from their grasp. At the moment, their spokesmen are rounding on “the Mitford menace” with fangs bared, refusing to see that their real trouble lies not with any one book or magazine article, nor with any one critic, but rather with large numbers of ordinary people in all walks of life who are becoming increasingly restive about the style and cost of the modern funeral.

The controversy that is taking place over my book seems to be shaping up not as a public debate in the usual sense of the term but rather as a battle between the funeral men on one side and the public on the other.

True, a small minority of undertakers are beginning to face the facts and to exhibit more flexibility in their approach to their customers, even to develop some understanding and respect for people who as a matter of principle do not want the full funerary treatment ordinarily prescribed by the industry. But the industry as a whole, and particularly the association leaders, are unable to come to grips with the situation that confronts them today because their whole operation rests on a myth: the assumption that they have the full and unqualified backing of the vast majority of the American people, that the costly and lavish funeral of today, with all its fabulous trimmings, is but a reflection of American insistence on “the best” in all things. It is particularly hard for them to grasp the idea that a person who has lived well or even luxuriously might
prefer
the plainest disposition after death.

The myopic assumption that all but a few crackpots and troublemakers approve and endorse the contemporary American funeral comes through strongly in the declarations of industry spokesmen. In the words of Mr. Wilber Krieger, Managing Director of National Selected Morticians: “Fortunately, there are tens of thousands of families in this country who, from experience, know this criticism is ill-founded. We leave it to them to judge the merits of the case put forward by Miss Mitford.”

One might have supposed, then, that many readers would be offended by my book, by the suggestion that the typical American funeral of today with “cosmetized” corpse in elaborate casket is grotesque, inappropriate, and a ridiculous waste of financial resources. The behavior of a society toward its dead is, after all, an extremely sensitive subject and criticism in this area might be expected to arouse deep emotions. Is there (as the undertakers claim) a pent-up reservoir of good will for the trade and for the type of funeral it prefers to sell based on untold thousands of satisfied customers? Would these satisfied customers rise in their numbers to defend the undertakers and their practices, to protest the suggestion of restoring simplicity to our exit from this world?

The protest, when it came, proved to be one-sided indeed, and from one quarter alone: the funeral men themselves.

Of the avalanche of letters I have received about my book from all over the country, from all sorts of people, I have yet to hear from a satisfied customer. I find it rather surprising, in fact, that not one correspondent has so far come forward to praise or justify the typical contemporary funeral, to commend the embalmer’s handiwork, or to say of a funeral in his own family, “It was worth every cent.” On the contrary, I have been deluged with new complaints, new “horror stories” about the depletion of small estates by funeral charges, new expressions of revulsion against the style in which we bury our dead.