A Turn in the South (23 page)

It was extraordinary, a much-patched-up and wretched old wooden house, standing by itself in a bare yard, with no trees around, and with bush in the field at the back.

I thought I understood now what Maurice Crockett wished to save his son from: growing up “white” and then having, like Barrett, to make adjustments.

Barrett didn’t think as Maurice Crockett did about black religion. Barrett didn’t think that the shouting religions were part of his own black culture. After he had got married, he said, he and his wife had
talked about what church they should go to. They had talked very seriously, and they had decided to go to the Presbyterian church.

He was twenty years younger than Maurice Crockett. He didn’t have the older man’s needs.

At the start of our drive I had noticed his racial passion. He wished to blame someone first of all; but then his own words had led him away from that, to a more general irritation. I had asked him about his racial passion; it seemed to be so much his main subject. He had acknowledged my question, but not replied to it. Now, when we were almost back at the hotel, he returned to the question.

He said, “You asked me about that. I’ve been thinking about it. I suppose I am angry because I am black. I don’t know whether that’s a good enough reason, but that’s how it is.”

It was a good reply. It was part of his honesty.

In the driveway of the hotel there was a black figure I had grown to recognize. He wore a black turban and a cream-colored Indian-style long shirt. He was reading aloud, chanting, from an Arabic book, perhaps a Koran. He paid no attention to the coming and going around him. He read aloud like a student; he held the fat book close to his face; he sat on a low wall; he could not be ignored.

R
EVEREND
Bernyce Clausell, Mr. Crockett, Barrett—they were all aspects of a developing black movement forward. And Jesse Jackson came to Tallahassee one day, looking for support for his presidential candidacy. Even if the man himself was not seen by many, his presence was felt. His entourage nearly filled the Golden Pheasant restaurant. Later that evening a limousine with its hood up waited outside a club where the candidate was meeting local people. Such style, such expense; and this was just one day, and not a very important one, in the calendar of a presidential candidate.

It would have been historically satisfying, and simpler to manage intellectually, if this movement forward was, broadly, all; if black people, their legal rights won, were now becoming masters of their own destinies. But at the other end of this movement, and close enough to threaten this movement (in spite of the mighty presence in the Golden Pheasant restaurant of the men and women of the Jackson party), there was irrationality and self-destructiveness, and despair of a sort perhaps not known before.

It is like the final cruelty of slavery: that now, at what should have been a time of possibility, a significant portion of black people should find themselves without the supports of faith and community evolved during the last hundred years or so. In the Caribbean islands, in the most settled days of slavery, the slaves played at night at having kingdoms of their own: a transference to the plantations of West African beliefs—still current in the Ivory Coast—that the real world begins when the sun goes down, and that at night men change or reverse their daytime roles. No fantasy even like this, no African millenarian dream, supports the new denuded black element. It is hard to enter into their vacancy.

“I’m nothing. I’m just existing,” a young black in a detention center said. “Your hands soft,” another said, using words that seemed to me to come from a long time ago. “Your hands soft like cotton.” His own hand was gentle. He had the intelligence and dangerous attractiveness of a kind of delinquent. But he was horribly lost; he couldn’t be reached. Another man said, “It is very hard for a black man to make a very small step.”

They were all going to be released in a few months. But there was nothing for them in the world outside; they insisted on that. And they all spoke as though their lives had been predetermined, and were already over.

“Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third of its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing … the body politic.”

The words read like special pleading. And they were. They come from the speech Booker T. Washington made in Atlanta in 1895, when he was only thirty-nine: a famous speech that established him in his reputation, and in which he did two apparently irreconcilable things—calm Southern white people down, and offer hope to black people at a time of near hopelessness. Special pleading, overstated; but those words of the 1895 Atlanta speech now read like prophecy.

TUSKEGEE

I
HAD
got to know
Up from Slavery
when I was a child. My father had read me a story from the book, and I believe I then read more of the book on my own. My father, born poor, and in spite of his ambition always poor, liked stories of self-help and of men rising from poverty. He suffered in Trinidad, and I would have known that
Up from Slavery
had racial implications and could be related to the way things were on our own island. But I was too young to do anything with that kind of information. I received the Booker T. Washington story my father read me almost as a fairy story, and in the part of my consciousness where it lodged it was stripped both of race and historical time.

Within the larger story of a man rising and making good, the story in question was the story of a test. The young boy, alone in the world, and just starting out in the world, had been asked to make up a bed (this was the way the story lived in my consciousness). And what was at stake, what depended on the correct making up of the bed, was the young boy’s entire future.

It was hard to forget that story (and every time I made up a bed it hovered in my consciousness): the fairy-tale test, the doing of a seemingly trivial or irrelevant thing supremely well. Like the story of a temptation to an honor-bound knight or a saint who had made a vow; like magical tests in other fairy stories: picking up the grains of rice, guessing the name of the dwarf, spinning straw into gold.

But the story I carried in my consciousness was wrong in one detail. The ragged boy, born a slave, who had walked many days and nights to a particular school in order to be educated there, had been asked first of all not to make up a bed, but to sweep a room. The boy had swept the room four times. The woman who had set the test hadn’t then simply said, “All right. You pass.” She had run her fingers over the walls and floor, to check. The boy had judged rightly, after all. He had done the deceptively simple task very well; and in this way he had won over yet another potential tormentor, and turned her into an ally on his magical journey.

There was a reason why, in my memory, the story had changed from sweeping a room to making up a bed. Beds were important to the slave boy. In the one-room slave cabin, also the farm cookhouse, where he had lived with his mother, the boy had slept in rags on the earth floor; and when, in his rise, he was first presented with a made-up bed, he didn’t know how to use it. He didn’t know whether he had to sleep on both sheets or between them or below both of them. (I would have been sympathetic to that predicament, having at the age of eighteen moved to temperate England from tropical Trinidad, where we made beds in our own way: one sheet spread on the bed, another sheet or blanket folded, to be used as a loose cover during the night if it was needed. I might even have transferred an early personal embarrassment to my memory of the book.) And in the school he had later established at Tuskegee in Alabama for people who, like him, were not far out of slavery, Booker T. Washington was concerned to teach his students how to use beds, and concerned in a more general way to teach good domestic manners as he had grown to understand them.

A moving story, and a fabulous one: the boy who had slept on the floor of a slave cabin had become one of the most famous Americans of his day, had dined with the president, and had never ceased to serve the cause of his people. It is easy to see how
Up from Slavery
could have worked on a self-made man like Andrew Carnegie and drawn great sums of money from him for the school at Tuskegee.

At the same time the very fabulousness of the Booker T. Washington story had made it seem separate from the grimmer aspects of the Southern or American racial issue people wrote about in books and newspapers. What had the great fame of the man served? What had happened to the great achievement? And so the book had receded, leaving only a memory of the bed-making test (which in my mind ran
together with the story of the middle-aged Tolstoy, in a peasant phase, wishing to make up his own bed). And then its very title had been undermined by the William Buckley parody title,
Up from Liberalism
.

It was only when I began to plan this journey, and had been given the idea of Tuskegee, that the book became real again for me. It became especially real when I went to see Al Murray in his apartment in Harlem.

Al Murray was the first person educated at Tuskegee whom I had met and spoken to about it. He it was who began to give me some idea of the grandeur and complexity (and anguishes) of Booker T. Washington; gave racial attributes to the neutral fairy-tale figure—the slave boy’s father might have been a white man; and fitted him into historical time. When the school had begun in 1881, as a simple trades school, black men had the vote, and the school had been given some small subsidy by the state of Alabama. Twenty years later, when
Up from Slavery
was published, black men had been virtually disenfranchised in the South. It was against this background, of increasing legal disabilities, that Booker T. Washington had built up his school. What would have been hard enough in a time of stability had been made much harder, with the walls of prejudice, segregation, and humiliation constantly shifting, closing in. Booker T. Washington did what he did, Al said, because he understood the way capitalist America worked; he knew how to present himself to that side of America. What was important to remember was that Booker T. Washington was a nineteenth-century American, the counterpart of the Carnegies and others whose wealth he tapped.

Al Murray’s admiration for his university and its founder made the old black-and-white photographs that he showed me, in the two volumes of Louis R. Harlan’s biography, especially moving: the stately photographs of Booker T. Washington; the formally dressed young blacks, men and women, doing domestic work and agricultural work which, just a few years before, would have been slaves’ work, but which was now (like their teacher’s own room-sweeping test) a step to better things.

It was to a special kind of romance, then, that I was traveling when I left Tallahassee and its drugged, asthma-inducing pollens, and made for Alabama and Tuskegee—going up through the plains of Georgia and then through the extensive flat neon confusion of the camp-following town of Columbus, Georgia: sex shows and pawnshops and fast
food restaurants; crossing from that into quiet, rural, seemingly left-behind Alabama.

Tuskegee became a name on the highway boards; became the name of a forest—speaking then of a pre-1830, preplantation, Indian past, giving another association to the unusual name; and then at last became the name of a town.

I was expecting a town like some of those on the way. This was smaller, shabbier: small eating places, few of the great fast-food names (I missed the tall, bright, competitive signs, roadside commerce’s equivalent of the joust and the pennants of chivalry), grimy garages, small grocery shops—a place still poor, hardly the setting for the great man’s success story. But then came the campus, and it was grander than anything I, and I am sure my father, had imagined. My father, reading self-help books in Trinidad, no doubt compared himself to poor boys who had become engineers and bridge-builders in industrial England; and though my father might have found aspects of his own story in the beginnings of Booker T. Washington, a man’s possibilities depend on the possibilities of the place where he finds himself. There was nothing slavelike or Trinidad-like about Tuskegee; nothing to be excused. However little one had known about it, it was real, and it was achievement on the American scale: scores and scores of dark-red Georgian brick buildings set about landscaped hilly grounds.

“You should understand,” a very old lady said to me some days later, and she had spent almost all her working life at Tuskegee, “that until the 1930s Negroes in the United States simply did not have money.”

And the effect on me of the first sight of the campus must have been like the effect on people who had seen it in the days of segregation, when it would have represented one of the few ways forward for a black person, and when to people who had little it would have appeared dreamlike.