A Way of Life and the Times

 

I had some cockamamie idea after reading Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman that I would make some lucid comments about the book. I was only nine years and many thousands of words too late. However, in the several reviews and academic commentary, laboriously comparing it with To Kill a Mockingbird, many pontificating in overwrought prose, I think most of them missed the real theme. Wring their hands over early writing style and the characters as much as they would like, the real story of Watchman is Brown v. Board of Education, the impact that had on a way of life, ordinary people, and how it changed them.

         I was there as a witness to those times as an immigrant to the South, fresh from under the shadow of the Empire State Building. On the surface all was well, unchanged for generations, but the Jim Crow south of separate but equal was only on paper. In truth, the local high school serving blacks, Lucy Laney High, in Augusta, was deplorable. I can only imagine the lack of resources and teaching skills available to students. The separate public drinking fountains and bathrooms in some stores were shabby at best, and blacks often had to enter through a back door – if they were allowed in at all. Blacks lived in one particular area of town, and the roads were the only ones not paved. Public conveyance did accommodate them, however; how else were they going to get to their jobs as maids and yardmen for white homes?

         But like Maycomb, there was enormous resistance to the concept of integrated schools, complete with the same fears Harper Lee described. For many white people, spoken only in trusted circles, they wanted blacks kept down, in their place. For others, the benevolent ones, the common theme was ‘they are not ready yet’. The fact is they had a point. The counterpoint was, if not given a chance, would they ever be ‘ready’?

         The truth is many of that generation would never be ready, and in some communities there would not be a leader to step up. Allow me to digress for a moment. When Lyndon Johnson was crafting his legacy legislation to be presented as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he turned to his good friend, the highly influential Richard Russell of Georgia, to help him bring in the southern votes in the Senate. Russell couldn’t help.  His comment: “They are not ready yet”.  

An objective reading of Sherman’s act of giving ‘possessory title’ of 40 acres and a mule under “Special Field Orders No.15” to newly freed slaves on the coast of Georgia, and South Carolina is instructive. The program was a dismal failure, even though much of the land was rich and fertile. Freedmen had no experience whatsoever in making their own decisions, let alone the right ones to make a farm pay. Andrew Johnson put a stop to it anyway. But the point is things did not get better for rural folk. If they left the land and moved to town there were no services to provide for them, schools to instruct them, jobs to pay them beyond being cooks, cleaners, and yardman if they were lucky. They had no skills other than the ability to tend a crop. There was no leadership, no conception of a democratic process, and without money, no financial wherewithal.  Worse, if the vote were available to them, they voted as a bloc. In Harper Lee’s fictional account of the Maycomb Citizens Council, as in real life in the rural south, there were frequently more blacks than whites in a community. That alone caused angst. Now the Supreme Court had ruled that schools nationwide were to be integrated.        

         Are things better today? Maybe. Certainly at the civic level blacks are very active, and in cities and towns across the south they are competently running political subdivisions at all levels. Savannah’s black mayor is outstanding.  He is in his second term, and many wish he could continue on.  As entrepreneurs, corporate, professionals, and national political leaders, and in academia there are no doubt growing numbers. That is a far cry from my time in graduate school in the early 1970s, where there was only one.  In a business law class, he turned in a final paper with the title spelled incorrectly.  It was overlooked by the professor.  That happens even today, as I can attest from my own experience as an academic. No one wants to fail a black student. I remember clearly trying to convince one young black lady, one of my best students, to leave our less than rigorous academic environment for a challenging school. She needed it. She deserved it.

         Today in the south, in polite company, African Americans are spoken of as blacks, or African Americans. Behind closed doors or locked in a private mind, a distinction is often made between those blacks which are respected and liked on an individual basis, and niggers.*  Fuel for this fire is a massive culture clash, and many whites cannot relate.

Although it is always overlooked in these discussions, poor whites, (a.k.a. ‘white trash’, ‘rednecks’, ‘crackers’) indigent sharecroppers and tenant farmers, shared much with poor, illiterate blacks, and their participation in civic life would be unwelcome, and barely tolerated, if at all. That, of course, does not justify racial discrimination, but it does suggest that these biases, so clearly hinted at in Watchman, were, and still may be in some ways as much about class as about skin color.

 

Coda

For the uninitiated, Watchman predates Mockingbird as a literary effort by Harper Lee. It was rejected by her publisher, and she was urged to develop the characters in accordance with flashbacks to a youthful Jean Louise (Scout). Unlike her masterpiece, set in the 1930’s, Watchman was in the moment, placed shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case to desegregate schools; one more nail in the states’ rights coffin. The turmoil and angst of the time was real. And the ‘Dixiecrats’, as they were known, began a unified flip to the Republican Party across the southern tier of states. The lasting impact of that political shift is another story.

In addition to my 68 years of personal experience in this part of the world, there are some books from which I further derive the right to comment on this touchy, complex subject. For those who wish to learn more from experts rather than an observant octogenarian I have listed them below in no particular order. They cover the times and the plights of both poor whites and blacks. Finally, it goes without saying, if you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird yet, what the hell have you been doing?

 

Non-Fiction

·      The Promised Land – Nicholas Lemann (the great migration)

·      Now is the Time to Praise Famous Men – James Agee and Walker Evans (sharecroppers)

·      Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 – Eric Fromer (academic)

·      Caste and Class in a Southern Town – John Dollard (academic)

·      Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era – James McPherson

·      The South and the Southerner – Ralph Mc Gill

·      The Humane Propagandist – Roy Stryker (extraordinary photograph of the Great Depression)

·      The Great Depression Photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans – Library of Congress online

·      The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson (the great migration) - Sloppy and poorly written. The Promised Land is significantly better.

 

Fiction

·      The Sound and the Fury – Willam Faulkner

·      Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neal Hurston

·      Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin

·      Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell

·      The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

 

* The word ‘nigger’ was not originally a pejorative term.  It described a job, a field hand. In Britain, prior to WWII, its use was not uncommon. Two examples: Joseph Conrad titled a story The Nigger of the Narcissus, and Agatha Christie wrote Ten Little Niggers.  When this last book was released in the U. S. it was rebranded Ten Little Indians, but in short order that was deemed politically incorrect as well, and dropped for And then there were None.