A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (11 page)

My mother and siblings decided to sell me some of their portions of land from my father’s estate, and we were able to buy additional farms, including those that had been owned by Rosalynn’s family. She and I accumulated about 3,200 acres of land, divided roughly into two tracts, one acquired by our ancestors in 1904 and the other in 1833. My mother and brother, Billy, became minor partners in the farm supply business, and our three sons, when big enough, drove trucks and helped with the handling of peanuts and other crops. I built enough warehouses to hold about fifteen thousand tons of peanuts, which were stored from harvesttime in the fall until we shelled them for commercial use or for seed. I bought a cotton gin and built storage facilities for cotton, corn, and small grains. I learned to blend specific formulae of liquid fertilizers and could fill a “prescription” for a given tract of land to match its needs after samples of the soil were analyzed. By the early 1960s, Carter’s Warehouse could provide almost anything needed by local farmers, and we could purchase, process, and market the crops produced in our area. It was a family operation that evolved over twenty-three years, until I was elected president and put all our commercial affairs into a blind trust.

Producing seed peanuts evolved into a major source of income and I was soon contracting with other farmers to produce seed on their land for me to process in a shelling plant of my design.

I became reasonably proficient in farming, forestry, business management, and leadership in statewide organizations related to these duties. I also tried to master as many skills as possible, including construction with wood, steel, and concrete, and the maintenance of our equipment. It was hard work, twelve months a year, but I enjoyed the challenges, and our multiple businesses prospered. I became deeply interested in environmental issues by meeting challenges on our own land and working with others.

We moved out of the housing project after the second year, and in 1956 rented what has always been known in our community as the “haunted house.” It is about a mile west of Plains and on the road that goes by the farm on which I spent my boyhood. Just a couple of hundred yards from the local cemetery, this was a place to be carefully avoided after nightfall, and the people who lived in our rural community would evade the danger zone by walking down the railroad tracks instead of the dirt road. The house was built about 1835, when the first white settlers came into the area to replace the Native Americans who had been forcibly moved west to Oklahoma and beyond during the administration of President Andrew Jackson. There were reports of abnormal activities there, including numerous sightings of a white-gowned woman wandering around in the attic, holding a lantern.

A man named Tink Faircloth, who worked as a mechanic for Rosalynn’s father, had lived there for a few years. I went hunting at night with him and his hounds for raccoons and opossums, and he said he was wakened several times by strange canine noises. From the bedroom window he could see a large black dog with his hounds, but each time he went through the back porch and opened the screen door, the visiting dog had disappeared. Finally late one afternoon the dog remained in the
yard, looking up at Tink as he approached, wagging his tail in a friendly manner. Somewhat cautiously, Tink reached out to pet the black dog, but there was nothing there.

The owner of the haunted house later was Dr. Thad Wise, the oldest of three brothers who were physicians and owned and operated the hospital in Plains, where my mother had come to be trained as a registered nurse. The head nurse was Ms. Gussie Abrams, my godmother and a good friend of my parents. Married to another man, she had lived there for several years with Doctor Thad. Their cook, Inez Laster, reported that all of them would see a strange woman approach the house, but when they looked at her directly or spoke to her, she would turn and disappear. Inez claimed that this went on for more than a year, and that often there would be knocking on the front door but no one would be there. She would have quit, she said, but her employer reassured her about safety and she needed the income.

When Doctor Thad became quite ill, Ms. Abrams asked me to come out and stay with her, and she and I went into the kitchen one evening so she could fix me some supper. I remember that she liked to make a hole in a thick slice of bread, put it in a greased frying pan, fill the hole with a broken egg, and cook it. As I was watching this process, Doctor Thad’s dogs outside began making noises I had never heard before—something like a pack of wolves howling in concert. We looked out and saw them all sitting on their haunches, looking at the sky, and producing the weird mournful cry. When we went into the bedroom, we found that Doctor Thad had just died. Somehow, the dogs were grieving for him.

Rosalynn and the boys reported many strange events and unexplained sounds while we lived there, but we never had any serious confrontations with creatures of the spirit world. One day while playing in the attic, our sons discovered a hidden room between the floor and the ceilings of the rooms below, with almost six feet of headroom. There was only a small chair in the space. We surmised that there had been a mentally impaired woman kept there by the family in earlier times, who may have wandered around with a lantern.

Rosalynn and I now had time for some recreational activities, which
had rarely been possible during my navy years. We bought golf clubs and began hitting balls in the field behind our house. After a few weeks, we joined some friends and drove to Dawson, where we played on the nine-hole course that was operated by the American Legion. We heard about a square dance club that met every Friday night and were soon enjoying these sessions with almost a hundred other members from the surrounding rural area. The club’s name was Meri Legs, from A
meri
can
Leg
ion. Dancing was strenuous and challenging, as one or two new steps were added each week to our repertoire. Wearing distinctive attire, we joined other clubs at state conventions and made many new friends. This membership was to change my life.

We were also active in Plains Baptist Church, and soon both of us were teaching Bible lessons every Sunday morning. I was elected as one of the twelve deacons who were responsible for the affairs of the congregation, always submitting final decisions to be made by the assembled members. Rosalynn had been a Methodist, but she joined our church and was immersed in Baptism.

During the time I served on the Sumter County Board of Education, the schools in Georgia were still racially segregated, but within these rigid social boundaries I wanted to equalize educational opportunities as much as possible. I suggested that we five board members visit all the schools so we could better understand conditions in the classrooms, and the other members agreed. Our first visits were to the white students and faculties, and we were quite satisfied with the two schools that included students at all levels and three others in rural areas that had only elementary students. They were nice brick buildings with adequate desks, recreation, music and art facilities, and up-to-date textbooks.

The school superintendent informed us that there were twenty-six schools for black children, the large number necessary because buses were exclusively for white students and classes had to be within walking distance of black children’s homes. When we visited them we quickly learned that students had to share textbooks, which were tattered hand-me-downs from white schools; classes were conducted in rooms in churches and in some of the larger houses; there was no music or art instruction and few
desks. I remember most vividly that many older students were sitting on tiny stools or chairs. Absenteeism was prevalent because attendance standards were quite low and not enforced since many children had to work in the fields during school months or because their parents were illiterate and saw no benefits from classroom teaching.

After a few of these visits, the other board members declined to make any further excursions. With the advent of the civil rights movement, the state legislature began to make an effort to show that the “separate but equal” national policy was becoming somewhat more equal in order to preserve the separate. School buses were finally authorized for black students, but there was a legal requirement in Georgia that their front fenders be painted black so that everyone would know that the passengers were not precious white children. In 1955, with the first stirrings of racial unrest, the Georgia Board of Education fired all teachers who were members of the NAACP and directed that no teacher could serve who did not support racial segregation.

Although the school integration decision of the Supreme Court in
Brown v. Board of Education
came the year after we returned home, “separate but equal” was not challenged or changed in our community. Having witnessed President Truman’s end of segregation in the military, Rosalynn and I supported in a relatively unobtrusive way the evolutionary process of ending the more oppressive elements of racial distinctions in our community. I volunteered to head an evangelism effort sponsored by Billy Graham, using a motion picture that encouraged all people to work together as equals in our Christian faith. I formed a biracial steering committee and was not very surprised when no white church would permit us to have racially mixed planning sessions. We met in an abandoned schoolhouse in Americus, the county seat, and followed the rules and procedures that Billy Graham prescribed, including the use of radio and newspaper advertisements. On the final evening of the crusade, hundreds of black and white people watched the film in the local theater together, and several dozen viewers accepted Jesus Christ as savior. Some of the more conservative white men participated without restraint. There were a few other prominent citizens in the county who shared our more
moderate beliefs, including the president of Georgia Southwestern College, the county attorney, and the owner of the only local radio station.

As the race issue and civil rights protests became more prominent, Rosalynn and I found our previously ignored progressive attitude to be more controversial. One morning when I drove into the only service station in town, the owner refused to put gasoline in my pickup truck. I had to install an underground tank and pumping station to service our private vehicles and farm trucks. Later, about a dozen of my best customers came to my warehouse office, reminded me that they had been close friends of my father, and offered to pay my annual membership dues in the White Citizens’ Council. This organization had been formed in Mississippi, rejected the violence associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and was publicly sponsored by Georgia’s U.S. senators, our governor, and all other statewide political officers. I refused to become a member, and they told me I was the only white man in the community who had not joined. A sign was put on our office door one night,
COONS AND CARTERS GO TOGETHER.

Our oldest son finished high school in 1965, and our family took a two-week automobile trip through Mexico. When we returned, not a single customer came into our office, and I finally learned that members of the John Birch Society had been to the county agricultural department, obtained a list of our customers, and informed each that I had been away in a Communist training camp to learn how best to integrate the public schools. I quickly visited each one and explained what we had been doing, and most of our more loyal customers returned. The college president and radio station owner remained under such pressure that they moved away. I briefly considered leaving Plains too, and accepting one of the many offers I had received from shipbuilders that would have utilized my knowledge of nuclear power and my top secret security clearance, but the economic pressures dissipated as we capitalized on the wide geographical area now covered by our seed peanut sales and other business contacts. These racial struggles now seem like ancient history.

After five years in the haunted house, we bought a lot on the edge of Plains and built a home of our own in 1961. An architect produced a design on which Rosalynn and I agreed, two skilled local carpenters
supervised the construction, and some hired hands from our farming operation and I helped with the manual labor. The plans called for no moldings around the doors, windows, or at the tops of walls, so each board had to be cut to an exact fit, but the total cost was only ten dollars a square foot. With good crops, we paid off the mortgage in three years.

As the years passed, I achieved the status of an accepted community leader, as a Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher, Boy Scout leader, chairman of the county board of education, a member of the regional hospital authority, and district governor of fifty-six Lions Clubs in our region. I had also been chosen to fill statewide positions of leadership in my farming and seed business. Unlike in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other Southern states, our public schools in Georgia began to integrate without violence or disruption. White parents who still opposed racially integrated classrooms sent their children to one of the many private academies that sprang up throughout the South. The bitter debates and animosities subsided, and eventually almost all our customers resumed their trade with our warehouse. Throughout the 1960s, however, public school integration remained a demagogic issue among political candidates in Georgia, and Plains High School, like most others, did not enroll its first black students until 1967.