Moving Pictures (61 page)

You can get all the information there is by writing Mr. Walter White, 69 Fifth Avenue, New York City. Sec., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (The N.A.A.C.P.) I am glad you are doing this work. More power to you.

A letter to Walter White also brought a quick response. One pamphlet enlightened me as to the makeup of the N.A.A.C.P. My James Weldon Johnson was a vice-president, W. E. B. DuBois edited the
Crisis,
its principal publication, and Roy Wilkins assisted Mr. White. Another pamphlet listed the
recorded
lynchings over the past forty years. Averaging as many as one a week, in the first six months of 1931 there had been
twenty-nine.
Although rape of white women was the accepted justification, fewer than 25 percent had interracial sexual implications. “Rape,” according to eyewitness reports, could be anything from a familiar greeting to a questionable glance. Negroes had been lynched for arguing with white landowners over their share of the crops, for daring to strike back at their tormentors, or simply for being “uppity.”

The statistics shook the mind, but the case histories told in down-home language by the families of victims stabbed the heart. Klansmen and night raiders had gone out on “nigger hunts,” torturing their victims before burning them or tying ropes to their necks and throwing them over the sides of bridges. A 12-year-old had been hacked to death because a white woman had complained that he had talked to her “disrespectfully.” The few whites who dared stand up to the fury of the mob were treated with equal brutality. The N.A.A.C.P. believed in fighting for justice in the courts, inside the system. But the lawyers they sent down to defend the victims of legal lynching—the thousands of blacks railroaded to Death Row and to chain gangs for life without even the trappings of a fair trial—were themselves threatened by lynch mobs not in the hate-ridden hamlets of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, but even in the courtrooms themselves. Redneck judges openly sympathized with the white prosecutors, while the white audience booed and hissed the northern lawyers as if they were attending a 50-cent melodrama.

Most of these lawyers, it seemed to me, were from New York and had Jewish names. As I read the press accounts of their attempts to speak out for their illiterate and terrified clients, I tried to put myself in their place. After all, if I were going to write my book on lynching, the first of its kind—for amazingly I could find no single volume devoted entirely to this grisly subject—I really should attend one of those trials, and get the smell and feel of the subhuman mobs who terrorized the rural South and made a mockery of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14
^th
, 15
^th
, and 16
^th
Amendments.

In Father’s projection room we had run Griffith’s
The Birth of a
Nation,
that twisted epic glorifying the Klan in the days of Reconstruction. But I had thought of burning crosses and charred black bodies as part of the dark history of the post-Civil War period. Until I happened upon that lynch scene in the Johnson book and then reinforced it by reams of material on
this
year’s atrocities, I had not imagined that the practice was just as prevalent in the early 1930s as it had been in the late 1860s. Lynch “law,” I discovered, was simply a way of circumventing the abolitionist victory in the Civil War. And if the Negro dared complain about his condition, he was marked as a “bad nigger,” inviting the treatment that had terrified James Weldon Johnson into going north and passing for white.

The N.A.A.C.P. reports made it clear that the fifty-odd lynchings every year were only the bloody tip of a gruesome iceberg, for local sheriffs in league with the night riders were not disposed to cite the lynchings to higher authorities. And the families of the black victims were almost always terrified into silence for fear of receiving the same treatment.

But, I learned from this extracurricular reading, a new case was scandalizing the Negro, liberal/radical, and literary communities, and the European intelligentsia, even though it had been largely ignored in our regular press. The latest victims were called the Scottsboro Boys, and although I had never heard of them until that fall, they were to become a cause célèbre of the Thirties as polarizing as Sacco-Vanzetti in the Twenties. Indeed, many of the writers speaking out in support of the nine teenage Scottsboro prisoners had also protested the execution of the two Italian immigrants. I recognized Heywood Broun, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Theodore Dreiser, Lincoln Steffens, Dorothy Parker, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis…. To Mother’s and Father’s credit I was already aware of all these writers, and had met at least half of them.

I sent for everything available on the Scottsboro Boys. They were nine black back-country youths aged thirteen to nineteen, jobless and destitute, who rode a freight car in search of work in a larger town. A fistfight between them and young white hoboes who objected to sharing the boxcar had resulted in one of the white boys either jumping off or being thrown off the train and phoning the local police. When the nine “Scottsboro Boys” were taken off the train and arrested at the next stop, it was revealed that two of the “white boys” were girls dressed in baggy overalls like their fellow rod-riders.

Apparently this was all the evidence necessary to build a case that the nine black boys had raped the two white girls. The black youths had tried to explain that they did not even know the girls had been masquerading as boys. Accused of rape, the nine boys were rushed to trial in the usually sleepy Alabama hamlet of Scottsboro, while a mob of ten thousand outraged rednecks shouted for their blood. In three days they were convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. Even when one of the girls—both of them had police records for prostitution—wrote a letter to a boyfriend: “Those policemen made me tell a lie … those Negroes did not touch me … I wish those Negroes are not burnt on account of me …,” the death sentence stood.

Mother was confident that I was working my way toward a social classic like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
or
The Jungle,
Sinclair’s seminal exposé of the Chicago stockyards. But she thought I should confine my research to the pamphlets and clippings from the N. A. A.C.P. Jews were only one step up from “niggers” in the lizard eyes of the K.K.K., and she hoped I wasn’t serious about attending the next Scottsboro trial, for an appeal was already underway. I may have sounded like a teenage John Brown, but except for confiding my interest in the lynching book to the maverick Mac MacConaughy, I had been careful to keep my project to myself. I was already considered peculiar enough by the “good” boys of the school. In fact, one of them had set off a stink-bomb in my room just before Christmas vacation, and the odor it gave off smacked as much of anti-Semitism as it did of rotten eggs.

My cause had not been helped greatly by Mother’s visit to Deerfield on her return from Russia, and her willingness to address the student body on the subject of “The Russian Experiment.” There was something delicious about a Dvinsk-to-Rivington-Street-to-Hollywood socialite leading that precious New England student body and its rather stuffy faculty through the minefields of Soviet reality. But I’m not sure I appreciated the humor of the situation. I was apprehensive that her favorable reaction to Comrade Stalin’s Great Experiment would further alienate the Coolidge-minded Mr. Boyden.

But I must say this for Mom, she began with a charming anecdote. Sentimental about her first visit to her Latvian relatives since her forced departure as an infant, she pictured herself as a Lady Bountiful bestowing riches among the impoverished. Leaving behind her expensive gowns, furs, and jewels, and “dressing down” appropriately for her reunion with these backwater relations, she brought boxes of discarded
coats and clothes, and bags of canned goods, cheeses, and salamis to help her poor relatives through the winter.

Arriving at the railroad station in Riga, she was approached by a uniformed chauffeur who led her to a Rolls-Royce limousine. She was driven to a 19
^th
-century mansion far more imposing than the one she had left at 525 Lorraine. A uniformed footman greeted her at the door and helped her in with her baggage, including the hand-me-down clothes and the food packages. To her amazement, her relatives, the Schiffs, turned out to be one of the wealthiest families in the Latvian capital. The finest caviar was served before dinner, the finest wines poured by a brace of butlers for each course, and five-star cognac in the spacious paneled den. By this time it was Mother who was feeling like the poor relation as she lamely tried to explain that the secondhand clothes and tins of food were brought along as gifts for the indigent on the other side of the Russian border.

Indeed, in this Adeline-in-Wonderland turnabout, Mrs. Schiff offered Mother one of her own fur coats because she was afraid her American cousin would not be warm enough!

Mother was an exotic figure as she stood there in front of the Deerfield assembly talking of her self-propelled tour of unknown Russia, where no American civilians traveled in 1931. “I have always been something of a socialist,” she began, and I could feel Mr. Boyden wince a little. That was one of the few winces I ever shared with him. And then she adopted that vague, slightly superior tone she always employed when she ventured into subjects she had not really mastered. She mentioned her socialist friends like George Sokolsky on the Lower East Side, seemingly unaware that George had swung so far to the right that he was even in favor of Japanese aggression in China. And somehow she had convinced herself that she had met Leon Trotsky when he was a New York refugee from the 1905 Revolution. That Stalin had cast out Trotsky in a bitter power struggle did not seem to deter Mother from her feeling of identification with what might be called the Sokolsky-Trotsky-Lenin-Stalin Revolution.

And yet, she did bring us a firsthand impression of the new Russia that none of us had had before. In the Old Russia of her infancy, she explained, in the days of the Czar and the Russian nobility, there were mainly two classes, the Haves and the Have-nots—on one side the city rich and the great landowners, on the other the proletarians and the serfs. Now the upper class had been swept away. The cities of Moscow
and Leningrad looked rather drab, but no one seemed to be starving. And in this year when so many of our own people were out of work, everybody there did seem to have a job. She had visited some of their homes, and while people lived in one room or two at the most, almost everyone she talked to seemed to think life was much better than in the days of the Czar. One of the things that impressed her was the condition of women, who had been treated like chattel before the Revolution and now were able to work in factories or get office jobs on the basis of their ability. Here Mother’s old suffragist blood beat a little faster, as she spoke of having tea with a woman doctor, and also with a film technician who assured her that women were now being encouraged to follow their own careers in a way that was still denied them in capitalist countries.

Of course (Mother warmed to her subject), if you go to Russia expecting luxuries or even the middle-class comforts we take for granted, you would think life is still very hard and harsh. People have to queue up even to buy necessities, and if you travel to Russia you should bring your own cigarettes because they are impossible to buy, and also matches, soap, and even (she put it gently) sanitary tissue. But the main quality she found in Russia was hope. They had embarked on a great Five Year Plan to industrialize and modernize the country, and the people seemed to understand and accept that they would all have to sacrifice now in order to have a better life later.

Portrait of Mother as Joe Stalin’s advance-woman to New England: This may have been the most favorable talk about the Soviet Union ever made in those parts. She extolled the prison system where capital punishment had been abolished and prisoners were taught useful trades, and spoke sympathetically of the liberal divorce system, whereby a partner to a marriage could end the contract simply by sending a letter to the proper authorities. This time I could almost feel Mr. Boyden’s wince quivering through the hall.

Since Mother was identified as the wife of the American film producer who had offered to employ the great Eisenstein (his Hollywood frustrations were discreetly passed over), she had been invited to the Moscow film studio, and had met the famous Pudovkin and other talented directors. Even though their work was devoted to themes of social progress in step with the Five Year Plan, she assured her audience that these subjects did not appear to be forced on them, since they felt it their social responsibility to contribute their art to the success of the Plan. “Almost everyone I talked to,” Mother assured her politely startled but
attentive audience, “told me that no one was forcing them to do what they were doing. They were making the pictures they wanted to make and that they felt the public wanted to see.” Mother had even talked to the head of the studio about Father’s dream of making
War and Peace
as an American-Russian co-production.

As for the theater arts, Mother was happy to report, the classical traditions had not been swept away as most of us would think. She had watched
Swan Lake
from a red velvet box at the Bolshoi Theater, and traditional Russian operas like
Eugene Onegin
were intact, as well as the great plays of Chekhov and Gogol, Shakespeare, and even Eugene O’Neill. She had seen some excellent contemporary Russian theater as well, and although young playwrights she had met admitted that there was a certain amount of censorship, they had asked her if capitalist censorship would not prevent any Hollywood artists from presenting a positive picture of the communist system, or even a true picture of how the jobless and hungry were struggling to survive our capitalist Depression.

Of course she had found little holes in the garment of Stalinist perfection. The Russian ruble was not stable, and people would sidle up to her to trade their money for dollars on the black market. Even though she was wearing only a modest wool coat, Russian women would pause on the street to finger it admiringly, and one was so bold as to beg for it. On her last day in Moscow, a Jewish poet she had met at the film studio came nervously to her room and begged her to smuggle out a letter to distant relatives in Brooklyn—to evade the GPU. He also asked if she could help him get out of Russia by arranging a job for him in Father’s Hollywood studio. She had agreed to take the letter and “loaned” him some precious American cash.