A Turn in the South (10 page)

“I don’t view the Klan action as just racist,” the
Journal
reported him as saying three days after the big march. “These are the desperate acts of people who find that history is leaving them behind. Basically what we need are some job training programs that help people get into the mainstream. What we are dealing with in Georgia now is a problem of the underclass—black and white. The black underclass gets caught up in drugs and crime. The white underclass gets caught up in drugs, crime and Klan. You can march until your feet drop, but you ain’t going to change it that way.”

The point wasn’t taken up. It wasn’t made again; it was lost in the good, safe cause.

A
KIND
of victory had been won. But little had changed. The message of Forsyth County was also the message of black Atlanta. It was of this special frustration that Marvin Arrington, president of the Atlanta City Council, spoke or appeared to speak.

Our meeting was not a good one. I had telephoned his law office just before going over and he had said I was to come right away. But when I got there he wasn’t in. He was said by his secretary—who gave me a Coca-Cola—to have stepped out. And he didn’t return for half an hour. The offices of his firm were impressive. They were in a nicely refurbished old building in downtown Atlanta; an article in the
Constitution
had said that the building had cost $1 million.

When he came back he took me into his own office. It was sunny, overlooking the street, and warmer than the inner rooms. It had many diplomas and family photographs on the wall; and African statuary, tourist curios, on the windowsills.

The failure of the occasion was partly my own fault, because when Arrington took off his jacket and urged me to begin, just like that, I could think of little to say. I had been hoping for a little chat beforehand; and hoping that during this chat I might see ideas or themes I might want to follow up. But this blunt request to get started filled my head only with what was most obvious. It didn’t help that he was restless. He often got up and walked about; often spoke to his secretary through an open door; looked through papers on his desk. He said he did forty things at once.

And all that came out of this unsatisfactory meeting was what might have been gathered from the
Constitution and Journal
file and from his own publicity: a man of the inner city, growing up when all facilities were segregated, father a truck-driver, much of the ambition of the children being derived from their mother. “I broke out.” An athletic scholarship helped him break out; he thought of all those who couldn’t get such scholarships. And little had changed. Little economic power had come to black people with their political power; even the black business street, Auburn Avenue, was now neglected. Black people needed opportunity; opportunity could be provided only by the system. So that he seemed still to be laying responsibility on others. No thought here of the internal revolution Michael Lomax had spoken about. Still the rage.

When I said that there had been movement for black people, he said, “Wait for another 350 years?”

He smoked a big cigar; stubbed it out and created a cloud of aromatic smoke near where I was sitting. He apologized for that; there were, with his brusqueness, always these little moments of concern for me as a visitor. A colleague came in and was more interested in me
than Arrington had been. His son came in, and Arrington momentarily softened at the sight of the big, confident boy, who told me he had been to England and had spent two and a half weeks there. After a time the boy went out. Arrington later referred to him. The world would be different for people like his son, he said. But that was the one touch of softness and optimism in his general spikiness.

A spikiness about race. About the Atlanta newspaper that had tried to destroy him, he said—and he took me to an attached room to show me the attack on him in the Atlanta
Constitution:
he had had it framed, together with a printed protest, signed by Martin Luther King’s father among others, about the attitude of the press to black elected officials. And there was a spikiness, above all, about Michael Lomax, who was his opposite in so many ways: Arrington big, heavy, strong, brown-black, self-made; Lomax slender, light-complexioned, of an educated family, and conscious of his charm.

Arrington had defeated Lomax for the Atlanta City Council presidency some six years before. And it was said that if Lomax ran for mayor in 1989, Arrington intended to run against him. He wanted me to read a profile of Lomax that had been written for an Atlanta paper. He spoke to someone in his office on the telephone and asked in an executive way for a copy of “the Lomax profile.” Later again he spoke on the telephone to someone in his office, to ask for a copy of his own publicity pamphlet,
The Arrington Commitment
. Eight pages, sixteen photographs; professionally produced.

He made other telephone calls. And once, while I was reading something on the wall—the past laid out in diplomas and photographs and newspaper columns—I heard him talking firmly to someone on the telephone, perhaps about the thing that had called him out of the office just after he had told me to come over. It was as though that day he had found many things to abrade him.

He spoke again about his son. That softness led him to thoughts of London, where his son had been. But: there were riots, he said. And when he was there: “I didn’t feel at ease in London.” He added, “I went to the Shakespearean theatre. Didn’t understand it, but I went for the culture.” I would have liked to know more. But this was one of the many threads that were broken by his getting up and walking, his looking for papers, his smoking, his little bursts of courtesy. This trip to England—it would have been interesting to see
the country through Arrington’s eyes—was something we never got back to.

I felt soon that there was nothing new for me to ask, that all the points I might raise would founder on the subject of black disadvantage.

It was something I had worried about: that these figures of Atlanta, because they had been so often interviewed, and though they might appear new to the out-of-towner, might in fact have been reduced to a certain number of postures and attitudes, might have become their interviews. Like certain writers—Borges, to give a famous example, who had given so many interviews to journalists and others who, in the manner of interviewers, had wanted absolutely the set interview, the one in the file, had wanted to leave out nothing that had occurred in every other interview, that he, Borges, had finally become nothing more than his interview, a few stories, a few opinions, a potted autobiography, a pocket personality. Which was the way, I had been told, the media created two or three slogans for a politician and reduced him to those easily spoken words. I had worried about this, about not being able to get through the publicity; and with Arrington it had come to pass. I had not been able to go beyond the file.

On the wall was a framed saying of Abraham Lincoln’s: A lawyer’s time and advice are part of his stock in trade.

I got up to leave. He was courteous, and as a farewell offering he gave me a little tour of his firm’s offices. The people I met were friendly and attractive; there was a white office manager. The quality and mood of people in an office or in any organization tell you immediately about the employer or management. So there would have been a much better side to Arrington than the side he had shown me that afternoon.

Going down into the street, where the people were black, and Atlanta as a result appeared different from the areas I had so far seen, with a Caribbean, Latin American aspect to the crowd—and even to the city, since downtown Atlanta is not a city of solid, built-up blocks but, rather, a city of tall buildings and empty spaces, parking lots, so that it quickly acquires a semiderelict look—going down into the street, I was assailed by a very old feeling of constriction and gloom.

I was taken back to some of the feelings of my childhood in Trinidad. There, though most of my teachers were Negroes (brown rather than black), and though for such people (as well as for policemen,
Negroes again) I as a child had the utmost awe and respect, and though in my eyes people like teachers didn’t really have racial attributes but were their professions alone, yet the minute I found myself in an out-of-school relationship with them I became aware—a child from an Indian family, full of rituals that couldn’t be transferred outside the family house, rituals and attitudes that had day after day to be shed and reassumed, as one went to school and returned home—I became aware of the physical quality of Negroes, and of the difference and even, to me, the unreality of their domestic life.

Something like that had happened in Arrington’s office. His spikiness, his stress on race and the inner city (“Inner city is my ball game”) and the strength he drew from the poor among blacks, had put up that old barrier around him.

The spikiness was understandable; rage was understandable. But I also felt that rage and spikiness could make demands on other people that could never be met. He had said, “I’d like to be free. I cannot fly like the bird.” Many people could say something like that; not everyone could make it a political statement. And I felt, especially in the Caribbean-seeming streets outside as I walked back to the hotel, that there were two world views here almost, two ways of seeing and feeling that could not be reconciled. And this was depressing.

I had with a part of my mind been trying to find in the black politicians of Atlanta some of the lineaments of the black politicians of the Caribbean. In Arrington, for the first time, I thought I had found someone who might have been created by Caribbean circumstances. In the Caribbean such a person, proclaiming his origins in the people (like Bradshaw of St. Kitts or Gairy of Grenada) and claiming because of his early distress to understand the distress of his people, might have gone on to complete colonial power, might have overthrown an old system and set up in its place something he had fashioned himself.

But here in Atlanta—though, as president of the City Council, Arrington had power of a sort, the power to say no—the power was circumscribed. And perhaps the very dignity that the politics of the city offered a black man made him more aware of the great encircling wealth and true power of white Atlanta. So that the politics of Atlanta might have seemed like a game, a drawing off of rage from black people. Just as civil-rights legislation gave rights without money or acceptance, so perhaps city politics gave position without strength, and stimulated another, unassuageable kind of rage.

H
OSEA
W
ILLIAMS
, after picketing the CIA in Washington about drugs, was to have gone to Europe to do some work about apartheid. Either he didn’t go; or the trip was very short. Because a few days later Tom Teepen arranged a meeting for me with Hosea in Atlanta. The meeting was to be in East Atlanta, in one of the “neighborhoods,” Tom said; and he drove me there to introduce me.

The building we stopped at looked like a small factory or warehouse, and it stood next to a broken, three-walled shed. There was a central corridor, with people sitting at a desk. Stickers printed
HOSEA
were on walls and doors, and gave the place the feel of an election campaign headquarters. We were shown into an inner office, past a room with a secretary at a full desk.

The walls of the inner office were hung with many big black-and-white photographs of the civil-rights marches: Hosea, much younger, in some of the photographs, with his amazingly young leader, Martin Luther King. There were photographs of arrests by police. But the most moving photographs were those that stressed simpler things: the overalls of the marchers, and the mule carts—the twin symbols of the movement, affecting, and inevitable, and right, like the Gandhi cap and homespun of India. Tom Teepen, looking at the photographs with me, said that when Martin Luther King was killed it was decided to carry his coffin on a mule cart; but the only one that could be found—and was commandeered—was in a museum or a fairground.

Also on the wall were many shields and plaques given to Hosea for various things. And there was a poster with a Black Power twist on the Aunt Jemima theme. The big black woman didn’t smile; she offered a big black fist; and the words were “No More” and “Net Weight 1000 lbs.”

Hosea (he had been busy somewhere in the building) finally came in, a man in his own place now, deferred to by the people there, and stiller than when I had seen him, in the federal courtroom.

Tom Teepen introduced me; told him of my interest in Forsyth County. I saw in his eyes an immediate acceptance. And right away, even before Tom left us to go back to his paper, Hosea began to talk, began unaffectedly to act out the story, giving off energy, walking about, coming right up to me sometimes, while I sat at the long board table that was there in the big office in addition to the office desk.

He took the story of Forsyth back to the beginning of the year, when the karate instructor from California had decided to have a Walk for Brotherhood to mark Martin Luther King Day in Forsyth. Hosea heard about that on television, and became interested.

“He didn’t know that violent and rabid racism existed up there. They came after him so vicious he began to realize, ‘I mightn’t get out of this town alive.’ In places like that the major weapon is fire. Burn them out, burn down their houses. A martial-arts student from the next county came forward to help this fellow. The martial-arts fellow has the reputation of being a tough guy. He said to the Californian, ‘We are white males. They can’t do this to us.’ He’s a tough guy. But they not going to go after
him
. What they’ll do is go after his family. So he began to reach out for black help. He became more shaky.

“When I heard of this the first thing that hit me was this: ‘Every movement we have ever been in, some whites came to our defense. Here are these white boys in trouble. If Dr. King was here, what position would he take?’ I said, ‘Hosea, pack your bag. We’ve got to go to Forsyth.’