Georgia On My Mind
It was my first journey into those great southern states, and while I may have thought of myself as a native New Englander departing from Cambridge, heading to the Faulknerian environs south of the Mason-Dickson Line, imagining I was a reverse (optimistic) image of Quentin Compson (Absalom, Absalom!). A more truthful description would be a seventeen year old Italian-American kid from Boston, hitchhiking, with no money, into a part of the country that was as foreign as any I would later find myself in once I’d crossed the pond and landed in Europe. But we will not get bogged down in mere details, as I’m a writer of ‘political fiction’ not an historian, and therefore, licensed to reinvent – especially myself – something I have been doing for as long as I can remember.
It was the summer of ‘68 and everywhere in America was hot. In the spring of that year Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony of a motel he’d been staying at and two months later Bobby Kennedy would be shot at a political rally in California. Tension was high and a lot of people were jumpy. Young black men, with some having done a stint at university, as opposed to the county jail house or a more prestigious maximum security facility, were meeting in Oakland and forming a radical political movement known as the Panthers, while middle class white kids were openly opposing a war in South-East Asia and some, moreover, walking out albeit in the middle of the night, from a secure suburban America to arrive on the streets of Boston, New York and San Francisco. It was a hot summer and people were restless.
One needs to back-up just a few years to better place the summer of 1968 into perspective. In ‘63 when President Kennedy was shot in a motorcade while driving down a street in Dallas Texas, I was in ancient history class, and the name of Nebuchadnezzar is forever etched in my mind. Lyndon Johnson stepped in as president and Robert Kennedy served as his Attorney General for nine months until they broke over their opposing positions on Viet Nam. The Kennedys were Irish Catholics and Boston Democrats, with what some people considered uppity Yankee airs, what with sending their sons to Harvard; while LBJ was a Texan Democrat that grew out of the old-boy system of the hill country with its payoffs, backhanders and political cronyism. Of course, Joe Kennedy got rich with inside tip-offs from the numerous politicians he owned over the timing of the lifting of prohibition and being first in line with cargo ships stocked with Irish whiskey, and was as much of an affront to the old Boston Brahmins (all but extinct before the outbreak of the Second World War) as his oil-rich Texan counterparts. The fact was that Vice-President Johnson, soon to be President Johnson, and his Texan political posse couldn’t stand the Kennedys, while they were obliged to get into bed together to beat the Republicans in the race for the White House.
There is one more bit of background that needs filling in before I can stick my thumb out and start hitching south. In 1968 George Wallace ran, unsuccessfully, for US president. In fact, he made a few runs at the presidency, three times as a Democratic Party candidate and once as an Independent. But it is as Governor Wallace that he is most remembered, four times elected by those people of the State of Alabama, and bulwark of the pro-segregationist position that dominated the entire southern part of the United States. It was 1963 when then Governor Wallace stood on the steps of first, a university, and a few weeks later on the steps of a high school, where a cordon of the National Guard (that’s the army), accompanied by the US Federal Marshal himself, who personally came down from Washington to tell the Governor to step aside, as four black youngsters passed into that school. Later in life, confined as he was to a wheelchair, after being shot and left paralysed, Governor Wallace reversed his position on segregation.
Now it’s too easy to project from hindsight a clear view of something one did not have the slightest clarity on at the time the particular event took place. Since I was at school and could read a book, I declared myself a firm supporter of Thomas Jefferson, who supported State’s right and fervidly opposed private banks taking control of issuing both currency and credit (which was in direct contravention to their Constitution) while on the other hand, I saw little more in Alexander Hamilton, with his fancy signature, than a pawn in the bankers’ pockets, doing their bidding, as the Federal Government would enjoy the noose of private banking interest around their necks. The banks always said that they “supported” a strong Federal Government. Like a rope supports a hanging man? Now it was one hundred years since the American Civil War ended, and with it, to a great extent, the defeat of State’s right over and against an omnipotent Federal Government.
I was adamantly opposed to the war in Viet Nam and would not be drafted, nor would I run. On top of that I had not gotten over the fact that Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, who in 1959 I saw with my father, with both of us standing on our feet cheering in Boston Garden (now torn down), bring yet another world championship to that city, and was one of my very first real heroes (something I have always taken very seriously) who on three occasions when trying to buy a house with his wife was told by an estate agent that she was so terribly sorry but that the family had decided after all not to sell.
It was the constitutionality of State’s right that vehemently opposed the forced desegregation of southern schools by the Federal Government. I was a very young fellow who, nevertheless, thought he knew everything, without realising how damn little I did know. But the idea that black kids couldn’t attend proper schools with adequate facilities (regardless of my admiration for Thomas Jefferson and his supporting State’s right) was not ever going to be acceptable. It would only be many years later after reading a comment made by William Faulkner that I obtained, partially at least, some long awaited clarity.
Faulkner was the first major author to do what had never been done. He certainly did not romanticise the American Negro, but what he did do was humanise them in a way that was unprecedented. The abolitionists in England were a hundred years ahead in terms of romanticising the ending of the African slave trade. Faulkner, particularly in the novels set in the mythological land of Yoknapatawpha County, superimposed over Lafayette County, Mississippi, created fully developed characters, both men or women, who were coloured people. Some certainly had egregious faults, others had rich and noble qualities and some had tragic flaws comparable to those of characters found in the stories of the ancient Greeks. But they were human beings with all the complexities and contradictions that have made up some of the most memorable characters ever conceived within that vast opus of world literature that has come down through the ages.
There is a collection of short stories called Go Down Moses and one story in particular of the same name. There is a lawyer, Gavin Stevens, who is asked to help bring the grandson of an old Negro woman, a woman whom Gavin had know all his life, back to Mississippi, as he was scheduled to be executed that very evening at midnight in Chicago for the murder of a policeman. There is a sense of such pathos, dignity and courage in this woman. Gavin got a pledge from a Roth Edmonds and another from the local newspaper editor, whom he’d also roped-in, to help pay the cost of the box and the train from Chicago, and “my word flowers!” as well, and, if that weren’t enough, a promise he’d not print the story in the local paper, so that what kin Beauchamp had would not have to read about the execution, and would only be told later that Butch Beauchamp was dead and coming home to Jefferson to be buried. And old Miss Worsham was stronger and more stoic than Hecuba when she mourned her son Hector and her husband, King Priam. “He dead,” she said. “Pharaoh got him.” “Oh yes, Lord,” Worsham said. “Pharaoh got him.” “Done sold my Benjamin,” the old Negress said. “Sold him in Egypt.”
The 1960s Civil Rights Movement latched onto Faulkner and attempted to use his literary notoriety to advance the cause of Northern liberals, with some going so far as to join the March on Selma, while Faulkner was clearly difficult to handle. At one such gathering where he was being honoured as America’s great literary genius he had, as was not too unusual, gotten pretty drunk and said that if there was to be a show-down between the North, who had little or no empathy, nor understanding, of the coloured people, while advocating their ‘rights’ to rise up as long as they kept their distance and didn’t try to move next door (which surely would bring down property values), and the Southern States, who Faulkner believed were directly accountable for the most unconscionable injustice before both God and those Negro people with whom they had so long lived, he would raise the Confederate flag and arm himself against the North. The Yankee do-gooders were beside themselves and Faulkner was out as their literary icon.
The journey that would begin in the North would take me down through Washington D.C. and on to Savannah George where, on a humid late afternoon, I found myself in front of a small local diner. Having done a bit of restaurant work myself, I thought I’d walk around back and just maybe, there would be a young fellow like myself who could possibly get me something to eat from the kitchen without it causing too much of a fuss. I saw a black boy; he looked about my age, some seventeen or eighteen years old, who was scrubbing pots. I can still see him clearly, his face coal black and something gentle in his nature. I approached him, greeted him and then proceeded to tell him that I was hungry. He nodded as if to acknowledge he understood and put down his work and went in through the back screen door of the kitchen.
It was not too long before I saw a matronly white woman walking towards me with the boy I’d spoken to following behind. Damn it, I thought, he sold me out. He went and told the owner there was some long-haired beggar ‘round back aksin’ for food. I never thought, I mean I just didn’t see that in his face and was more shocked by having so misread him than whatever lay ahead from this woman coming straight at me. She motioned to the boy, not at all unkind but with directness, to go back to his work. She took me by the hand and walked me around to the front of the diner and straight in through the front door that made a bell ring every time it opened. She sat me down at a long counter, sitting on one of those round swivel stools and placed a menu in my hands. “Now darl’n, ya’all have whatever you like. You be skinny as a tooth-pick.” Well, I ordered meatloaf with mash potatoes, sweet peas and extra gravy. After that I had a big slice of that famous Georgia pecan pie and a cup of coffee. You could say I’d struck it rich and that there was no more I could want after a meal like that. Now that was real southern hospitality, and me being a Yankee clear as day. And far from selling me out it was the boy from out back that I had as much to thank as the proprietor of that local diner (well before MacDonald’s would put them all out of business). But everything wasn’t fine. My stomach was full but I’d be the worst hypocrite that ever lived if I said I did not enjoy that meal. For there was that sign, the sign in large bold letters that I could not ignore let alone pretend I’d not seen: FOR WHITES ONLY.
The Power Template by Robert Luongo (Dallas College Press 2011) is now available from Amazon Kindle and will be available as a physical printed book in early August from Amazon.com and Create Space. It is a study of Shakespeare’s political plays that discovers corollaries between politically contentious issues within Elizabethan England with themes that were explored through the early English history plays as well as Shakespeare’s Roman plays. The author then views more modern political events, some leading up to today’s current affairs, through the perspective of Shakespeare’s timeless insight into the human motives behind the machinations of what we understand as politics. Nevertheless, the work is far from being a polemical study that marginalises the wit, dexterity and delight of Shakespeare’s language.
