The Grace of Silence (17 page)

Patsy Quarles, who married into the family, learned of the story from news clippings she discovered while cleaning out her in-laws’ farmstead. “It was hush-hush,” she said. “I was married thirty years before I even heard it mentioned. At that time a newspaper article turned up and I said what was this about and [my husband] said it is not something the family talks about.” Quarles told me that she wants to know more but is afraid to press the subject.

Hugh Shull, who lives in Lexington, South Carolina, is a nephew of Shull’s. His father, Cothran, was the youngest of the six Shull siblings; Lynwood was the oldest. When I asked
Hugh if he had ever heard of Isaac Woodard, he said, “Never heard a word of any of this, and I am fifty-seven years old.” In one of the most uncomfortable conversations I’ve been party to, I read Woodard’s affidavit to Hugh Shull on the phone; he gasped time and again at the other end of the line.

“He is my uncle Lynwood,” Hugh Shull said. “It is a shock to me. Yes, ma’am. Not so much a shock that things like that happened in that period. But a shock that he would do that.” I explained that my father was a black veteran also wounded in a police shooting, and that he, too, had kept the story to himself to avoid passing his pain on to his loved ones. Shull told me, “They say that was the greatest generation, the ability to try to protect their family, and I guess that is what they did. They protected their families.” The Shull family had also been burdened, it appears, and in some way shaped, by the weight of silence. Hugh Shull seemed conflicted about what he’d heard. “It makes me feel ashamed that something like that happened, and I don’t know if I should apologize or what, but I just don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Davis and Betty Shull live in nearby Aiken County, South Carolina. They were not close to Lynwood Shull; they last saw him at a livestock market years before his death. They, too, were in the dark about Lynwood, but, as they see it, the connection of their family name to the Woodard scandal is no cause for apology. “It does not bother me,” Davis Shull, Lynwood’s cousin, said. “I did not know it. I would assume the man could have been at fault. If he [Shull] was acquitted, [Woodard] probably did something.”

Davis Shull is troubled by the notion that all Shulls—all southerners, for that matter—should be besmirched by any one incident. “We’re all supposed to be haters,” Davis said. “But hey! We have relatives who are black. We know who they are. Goes back to my great-granddaddy. We knew who they are and one of them was even raised up in the same house with my
grandmother. In some ways we see things more clearly.” His wife, Betty, noted that the South’s tortured history vis-à-vis race makes it hard for whites to wade into racial discussions. “Nowadays everything is racist,” she told me. “No matter what you say. You can’t tell the truth without being racist. You can’t say anything.”

Listening to Davis and Betty Shull, I couldn’t help but think of the newsreels from the civil rights era’s most vicious conflicts. Lynwood Shull is dead, but many of the people who threw bricks at college students, or spat at ballplayers, or yelled awful things at schoolchildren are still alive. And if America is as determined as it appears to be to have a frank conversation about race, these very people, who’ve been denounced and derided—demonized—must have a seat at the table, so that they can be a part of that dialogue. For often discussions about race are one-sided, driven only by those who have experienced directly or through family ties the burden of rampant and vicious discrimination. The “success despite oppression” trope is quite common in politics, business, and the media. Less common—more muted, perhaps—are the viewpoints of people who enforced, enjoyed, or evolved past presumed white privilege. Their stories and sentiments, too, must be considered for greater understanding, as all of us try to explore and explain a country that has moved from the legislated marginalization of people of color to their predicted attainment of majority status in less than forty years.

It was my need to hear from the other side, as it were, that spurred my quest: to search out either the policemen involved in Belvin Norris’s shooting or their relatives. From the police docket and the court records, I knew the names of the officers. I knew what they looked like, having examined their faces in Alabama law enforcement convention programs. I knew
what they wore to work: a shiny dark uniform, with a gold-colored badge affixed. I knew where they lived in 1946. I knew their wives’ names. And, with not as much success as I had hoped, I tried to track down their children as well as distant family members because, while I was obsessed with piecing my father’s story together, I also needed to know as much as possible about who these policemen were as human beings and what they told their children, if anything at all, about that fateful February night—fateful, at least, for me and my family. I would encounter mostly dead ends and death notices. All five men involved in the incident had passed way.

Bradley Pate, Carl Baggett, and Tremon Lindsey were married to women with names that seemed to spring from southern popular fiction. Names that adorned a lady like a brooch or a bouquet. Zelphia. Aleen. Ruby. Even though the policemen’s families had lived on the opposite side of the color line, I was surprised by how similar their lives were to the Birmingham Norrises’. Carl Baggett, for instance, lived on Avenue Z in Ensley, not far from my grandparents’ house. George Neil, who died in Florida in 1967, was one of six sons, like the Norris brothers. The officers had moved to Birmingham from rural areas and lived in squat one-story wooden bungalows on the West or South Side, most of which, like my grandparents’ house, have since been torn down.

They were older men who’d stayed behind in Birmingham while thousands of youth headed off to war. They worked for a police department riddled with corruption and subject to derision. A detailed examination of the department by the Birmingham Citizen’s Committee found that the four-hundred-member force suffered from “impaired morals” in the late forties and early fifties, partly because large companies like the steel giant TCI had their own police unit and tended to siphon off the most qualified applicants with better pay and benefits. Starting pay for a Birmingham police officer was $259.88 per
month, slightly less than what could be earned in the mills or the mines.

The men were required to provide their own flashlights and pistols. The resulting motley array of firearms confused ballistic analysis whenever officers were involved in a shooting. New police recruits often got their pistols from pawnbrokers, which is to say that firearms used by criminals could easily wind up in police holsters. And when policemen got their guns through conventional retailers, they often used money borrowed from loan sharks, a practice that the Citizen’s Committee understandably found troubling, noting, “We see the possibility of serious detriment to the service when young officers are forced into such contracts.” The Citizen’s Committee’s investigation of the Birmingham police concluded that “most of the force are decent, well meaning men who earnestly try to be fair and considerate in the discharge of their duties”; but they also determined that its leadership left much to be desired. Bull Connor, then a thin man with slicked-back hair and a salty tongue, was sternly criticized. He was rated as “deficient in executive ability” and charged with practicing favoritism.
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Of the five officers involved in Belvin Norris’s shooting, so far as I know, two left the force early to pursue other work. George Neil moved to Panama City, Florida, where he became the city clerk. Detective Macon Espy moved to Joplin, Missouri, to work for a company that hauled dynamite, and later ran a motel with his wife in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Espy had a notorious career as a policeman. In 1940, he was mentioned in a “Goofy Gazette” newspaper column for having served his own wife, Eleanor, a warrant for reckless driving. And in 1948 he was suspended from duty for thirty days; it appeared that a handcuffed suspect he was driving from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Birmingham had managed to reach over to the front seat and snag Espy’s pistol sixty miles or so outside Birmingham.

Espy’s sister-in-law Betty Koonce is one of the few relatives directly connected to the officers who was willing to talk. In her eighties, she still lives in Birmingham and describes herself as the “sole survivor” of her family. Betty remembers when William Macon Espy started courting her older sister, Eleanor. Once married, they lived in a house next to her parents’. He was a simple man, she said. Not very tall and not a real talker. He liked straw hats and fiddle music. And, Betty said, he was a good friend of Bull Connor’s, one of “Bull’s boys.” He’d get a call from Bull, she recalled, and he would be off running at all hours of the night.

As was to be expected, Espy never mentioned a shooting involving young black men in a downtown Birmingham office building, Koonce said. He never talked about his work at home, period. Betty Koonce did remember reading about him in the paper once. She was fuzzy about the details but recollected that the item involved a shooting at the courthouse. Indeed, in 1938 the
Birmingham News
carried a story about a shooting: a thirty-five-year-old salesman named H. E. Coburn shot a “negro” being escorted through the Birmingham courthouse by Espy, shortly after the “negro” was convicted of a crime against Coburn’s daughter.

From Betty Koonce I learned little of factual relevance about the Birmingham police officers who’d confronted my father in the Pythian Temple, but from what she said I was able to etch the arc of their lives. My conversation with her and other relatives helped me to understand segregation from the other side of Birmingham’s color line.

Betty has seen a lot of changes in her life and was at first reluctant to talk about the role of the Birmingham police during the push for racial equality. She referred to it as “the unpleasantness,” revealing discomfort about discussing America’s version of apartheid. “It always makes us look so bad, but
it is just the way it was,” she said. “You know, we didn’t know anything else.”

“I am from the old school,” she added. “I had to accept these blacks as my next-door neighbors. It used to be easier. Back then, we had our own. But you know things changed, and some of the best friends I ever had were black. I don’t have anything against them, only the ones who are snooty or trying to prove themselves.”

I asked Betty to clarify what she meant by the ones who are trying to prove themselves. “It is still a shock for me to pick up a paper for the last year and see that a black man is a leader of this country.… I just can’t get used to it. But they have accepted it. The people I never thought would stand for it have accepted it. You can’t stand in the way of progress.”

It’s what she wants to believe, and she does, but she also has an inkling of a reservation that she just can’t shake. “I have a gut feeling—and I have had it for a while—when they brought up Obama, I thought, ‘Oh me! Some of those rednecks are going to get their sights on him.’ I have a feeling that boy better watch his back because someone is going to put their sights on him.” When I asked her to be more expansive, she told me, “I’ve said enough.” To make sure I got the point, she added: “No more!”

I still wanted to know more about the role police officers played in Jim Crow Birmingham. The Citizen’s Committee report suggests that Birmingham’s police department was defined by Bull Connor’s rough-and-tumble leadership long before the 1960s. What is not clear is whether all the men under his command subscribed to his politics or his tactics. After realizing I would never be able to confront any of the policemen involved in my father’s shooting, I turned to someone who knew more than a thing or two about the Birmingham police force in the 1940s.

On a hot July afternoon I sought Justice—Aubrey Justice,
one of the very few forties-era policemen still residing in Birmingham. For a time, his partner on the squad had been a patrolman whose last name was Crook. Crook and Justice. No kidding. When I flew to Birmingham to meet Aubrey Justice, I stopped at the rental-car counter, where the women at the desk greeted me like an old friend. “Here on business again?” “Yes, ma’am,” I said almost instinctively. Funny, how I tend to slip into southern niceties only minutes after stepping foot on red clay. “I can give you an upgrade,” she said. “Something you might like.” Since I’d booked a budget rate, any upgrade would likely offer more legroom and perhaps windows you didn’t have to roll down by hand. But I stiffened when she perused the list of available rental vehicles and pointed to a racy Mustang. “It’s a red one,” she said. “Candy-apple red. Very sleek.” And ostentatious. Testosterone on wheels. I heard my father talking to me.

During summer visits to Birmingham, whenever we left Grandma’s house in Ensley to go downtown, he would say, “Don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t be loud or rambunctious.” As we got old enough to care about our outward appearance (the moment, Grandma said, we’d start to “smell ourselves”), he would add, “There’s nothing wrong with being proud. You just have to know the difference between being proud and being highfalutin.”

I took the keys to the candy-apple red, highfalutin, powerful driving machine and daydreamed about Dad as I rolled through English Village and then on to Mountain Brook, the toniest neighborhood in Birmingham. As I drove through these streets, I was struck by how inconceivable this ride would have been during my visits to Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s. I was now headed for Crestline Village, a neighborhood of neat homes and aggressively landscaped yards, just down the hill from the Mountain Brook mansions where Birmingham’s corporate titans raise their families. Real estate agents in Crestline
refer to the area as “Mountain Brook–adjacent.” Aubrey Justice lives in a crisp white Cape Cod–style home surrounded by well-tended perennials. As I exited the car and walked to the front door, I had the feeling my every step was being watched.

I should have listened to Dad’s voice; the Mustang had been an impulsive but foolish choice. A simple sedan, such as the one in Justice’s driveway, would have been more appropriate. I thought of what Mom would have said: “Well, you know why she offered you that fancy car? She thinks black people can’t help themselves when it comes to fancy cars. I’m surprised she didn’t offer you an upgrade to a Cadillac. You should have taught her a lesson about our values by choosing something suitable instead of stylish.”