Parting the Waters (5 page)

All this spurred Johns to sharper criticism. The congregation liked to eat good food and buy consumer goods, so why should they dislike associating with those who provided them? He accused them of persisting in the white man's view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression, not labor, that demeaned them. On the contrary, the desire to avoid labor had enticed whites into the corruption of slavery.

Johns's three daughters soon noticed that the Montgomery atmosphere and the congregation's resistance had put a harder edge on his arguments and soliloquies, and he seemed to lose himself less often in the sheer pleasure of his musings. This pushed his temper closer to the surface, even within the family, as was frightfully demonstrated one night at home when he kept calling on his wife to support him in one of his observations. Mrs. Johns, who took delight in her husband's crusades but was as serene as he was volatile, was playing the piano. She decided to let him know that he was being repetitious by ignoring the third or fourth invitation to discuss the same point. This annoyed Johns, who began to shout, and Mrs. Johns showed her displeasure over the shouting by continuing to ignore him. Johns went berserk, shouting louder and louder, and finally, to the horror of his niece and daughters, ripping the sleeve off his wife's dress in a rage. The children would never forget how Mrs. Johns kept playing the Bach, never missing a note, saying nothing. Vernon Johns held the torn piece of dress in his hand for a few seconds, then dropped it and walked silently out the door. He returned a few minutes later with some steaks and a bubbly new mood, as though the fit had never occurred.

Johns cultivated a garden in the yard behind the parsonage on South Jackson Street and set many worshippers' teeth on edge with a running description of the cultivation process. Then one Sunday, “just to show you what can be done on a tiny patch of land,” he pulled a huge cabbage and a plump onion from behind the pulpit and held them up for the congregation to inspect. “I left the roots on them just to prove they weren't bought in the store,” he announced mischievously. Another Sunday he arrived for the service without shoelaces, probably because he had misplaced them, but when he noticed the stares of the congregation, Johns casually told them, “I'll wear shoestrings when Negroes start making them.”

But it was the fish that first got him hauled before the board of deacons. One Sunday he had a load of fish iced down on the back of a truck, and the odor, together with the traditionally low estate of the fishmonger, created a rebellion within the church. Johns complied with a formal letter requesting his presence before the deacons. When he learned the nature of their complaint, he intimidated them with a fully annotated lecture on the importance of fish and fishermen to the Christian religion, world history, and nutrition. He paid them a backhanded compliment by remarking on the summons as a sign that he was finally getting the church's attention. And he defended himself. “Gentlemen, I have a duty to provide you with the Gospel,” he said, “and I have a right to provide you with food. As far as I'm concerned, I will sell anything except whiskey and contraceptives. Besides, I get forty calls about fish for every one about religion.” When the deacons failed to endorse this license, Johns abruptly resigned and walked out the door. Nesbitt was detailed to seek him out and arrange a truce.

He succeeded, but the net result was to worsen positions all around. Nesbitt himself was further compromised. As a deacon known to be personally sympathetic to Johns, and as a member of the minority “non-teacher clique” that was less hostile toward the preacher, Nesbitt found himself under attack for failing to control Johns, who went on selling produce. Some members wanted to get rid of the pastor and had been heartened by his resignation. This stiffened their resistance to his wishes, which in turn made Johns pound on the big Bible in the pulpit. He never opened the pulpit Bibles during his tenure at Dexter, but he wore out at least three of them with his fists. On several occasions, the organist's continued refusal to play anything but the most conservative hymns made Johns walk out of the church in anger. Nesbitt was obliged to chase him several blocks down Dexter Avenue, begging him to return to the service.

Had it not been for the fact that visitors were still coming to Montgomery from great distances to listen to Johns and to praise him afterward, church opinion might have solidified against him sooner. As it was, the membership was divided over an exasperating problem: Johns was both the highest and lowest, the most learned and most common, the most glorious reflection of their intellectual tastes and most obnoxious challenge to their dignity. He enjoyed reminding them that the same Moses who talked to God on Mount Sinai also rejected his status as the adopted grandson of Pharaoh to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. Like Moses, Johns received from his people a tumultuous vacillation between the extremes of veneration and rebellion. Unlike Moses, he worked no political miracles to sustain his leadership. Another resignation was tendered and refused in 1950.

Johns often loaded the milk and cheese into his car and disappeared, driving up to the family farm in Virginia to spend a few days behind the plow. The animals or the equipment frequently dealt him some minor injury—he was nearing sixty now, and had not been a real farmer for thirty years.

 

In the spring of 1951, he drove to Virginia again. This time it was a crisis: the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross in his brother's yard to intimidate the Johns family over a school strike. The trouble had begun on the morning of April 23, 1951, at Farmville's R. R. Moton High School (named for Booker T. Washington's aide and successor), when the school's principal was informed by telephone that the police were about to arrest two of his students down at the bus station. Failing to recognize the call as a ruse, he had dashed off for town. Shortly thereafter, a note from the principal was delivered to each classroom, summoning the whole school to a general assembly. All 450 students and twenty-five teachers filed into the auditorium, and the buzz of gossip gave way to shocked silence the instant the stage curtain opened to reveal not the principal but a sixteen-year-old junior named Barbara Johns. She announced that this was a special student meeting to discuss the wretched conditions at the school. Then she invited the teachers to leave. By now it had dawned on the teachers that this was a dangerous, unauthorized situation running in the direction of what was known as juvenile delinquency. Some of them moved to take over the stage, whereupon Barbara Johns took her shoe off and rapped it sharply on a school bench. “I want you all out of here!” she shouted at the teachers, beckoning a small cadre of her supporters to remove them from the room.

This was Vernon Johns's niece, the daughter of his brother Robert. She had lived with her uncle from time to time—taking piano lessons from Aunt Altona, coping with Uncle Vernon's strict winter regimen in which all the children were required to play chess or read a book and to answer questions he might fire at them at any time on any subject. Barbara had rebelled by hiding a comic book between her knees; of all the Johns clan she was regarded as the one with a fiery temperament most like her uncle's. Now she reminded her fellow students of the sorry history since 1947, when the county had built three temporary tar-paper shacks to house the overflow at the school—how the students had to sit in the shacks with coats on through the winter; how her history teacher, who doubled as the bus driver, was obliged to gather wood and start fires in the shacks in the mornings after driving a bus that was a hand-me-down from the white school and didn't have much heat either, when it was running; how the county had been promising the Negro principal a new school for a long time but had discarded those promises like old New Year's resolutions; and how, because the adult Negroes had been rebuffed in trying to correct these and a host of related injustices, it was time for the students to protest. Even if improvement came too late to benefit them, she said, it would benefit their little brothers and sisters. With that, she called for a “strike,” and the entire student body marched out of the school behind her.

Before the Negro adults had decided what to do, and before most of the local white people had noticed the controversy at all, Barbara Johns and her little band sent out appeals to NAACP lawyers, who, completely misreading the source of the initiative, agreed to come to Farmville for a meeting provided it was not with “the children.” When the lawyers told a mass gathering of one thousand Negroes that any battle would be dangerous and that the strike was illegal, it was the students who shouted that there were too many of them to fit in the jails. When the skeptical lawyers said that the NAACP could not sue for better Negro schools—only for completely integrated ones—the students paused but briefly over this dizzying prospect before shouting their approval. A few more days into the strike, an almost surreal tide swept through the entire Negro community, overwhelming the solid conservative leadership that had always held sway. A young preacher, who called himself a lifelong “disciple” of Vernon Johns, delivered a thunderous oration at a mass meeting. “Anybody who would not back these children after they stepped out on a limb is not a man,” he declared, and the assembly voted to proceed with an attack on segregation itself. The NAACP lawyers filed suit on May 23, 1951, one month after the students had walked out of school. Consolidated with four similar suits, it was destined to reach the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the historic
Brown
v.
Board of Education of Topeka
.

Had the student strike begun ten or fifteen years later, Barbara Johns would have become something of a phenomenon in the public media. In that era, however, the case remained muffled in white consciousness, and the schoolchild origins of the lawsuit were lost as well on nearly all Negroes outside Prince Edward County. This was 1951. In Montgomery, Vernon Johns learned of the controversy by letter, as the Johns households in Farmville still had no telephones. Television was an infant, and the very word “teenager” had only recently entered common use. The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone—except perhaps the Klansmen who burned a cross in the Johns yard one night, and even then people thought their target might not have been Barbara but her notorious firebrand uncle.

There was a tense scene in the kitchen when Vernon Johns arrived from Montgomery. His brother Robert, a farmer twenty years younger than he, who had always been meeker and more practical, made no secret of his fear. Nor did his wife. Both of them were consumed with worry over the safety of their headstrong daughter—now banished to her room during the summit conference—and with all the violence and risk, they did not welcome the fact that Uncle Vernon was so plainly “tickled” by the trouble in his native county. They asked him to take Barbara home with him to Montgomery until tempers calmed. Vernon agreed, and Robert begged him to be careful on the long trip. He had always believed that his older brother was a terrible driver, especially when he was quoting all that poetry.

Barbara Johns changed from student leader to student exile the very next morning, as her parents piled her into Uncle Vernon's green Buick with the cheese and the milk and a very large watermelon, but without a word of explanation. It embarrassed her that her legendary uncle stopped on the side of the road to eat the watermelon, like the stereotypical Negro, and her resentment grew as he failed to say anything or ask a single question about her astonishing achievement. She speculated furiously about his silence. Perhaps he exhorted Negroes to stand up for themselves but really wanted to take all the risk himself. Perhaps he wanted to protect her as a family member, or as a young girl—though either would violate her image of him. She listened to the poetry and wondered whether she could ever comprehend what a person of such age and presence was really like. Finally, she decided that the most likely explanation for his silence was that he was proud of her but simply refused to compliment her, as he had refused to compliment people all his life, for fear of implying that he had ever expected less. This theory caused her pride to overtake her resentment, and she resolved never to mention her feats in Farmville to anyone in Montgomery.

The first thing Barbara Johns noticed was that pressures on her uncle were building. Rumors of plots and defections within the Dexter Avenue congregation arrived almost daily, and it was considered a bad sign that ever fewer churchwomen favored the pastor's house with cooked dishes from their kitchens. Johns, still selling produce on the street, escalated his criticism of his members for being insulated in their own individual worlds. “You don't even know each other's names!” he would exclaim from the pulpit, and he called on the congregation to repeat the names of new members out loud. If they were so separated from each other even among their own class, he argued, how could they ever hope to pull together as a race? He became obsessed with this insulation because he believed Negroes went so far as to follow the lead of the white newspapers, objectifying Negroes—especially the victims of police violence—as a faceless category apart from them. This was a violent time in Alabama—an era when a judge and jury sentenced a Negro man to death for stealing $1.95 from a white woman (commuted later by Governor Folsom) and when police officers often meted out harsher justice informally, beyond the meager restraints of a court. One Montgomery case stuck in Johns's mind: officers stopped a man for speeding and beat him half to death with a tire iron, while Negroes watched silently nearby.

Not long after this incident, Johns summoned his oldest daughter, Altona, and said gravely, “Come with me, Baby Dee. I'm going to preach a sermon.” His manner so frightened her that she said nothing as they walked out of the parsonage, across the capitol grounds, and down the hill to Dexter Avenue. Johns opened the glass case of the church bulletin board and handed the box of metal letters to his daughter. She spread the letters on the sidewalk. As was his habit, Johns thought for a moment and then directed her to post a new sermon title for the following Sunday: “It's Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery.” She fumbled with the letters in the bright sunshine, and when it was done she followed her father back up the hill as wordlessly as she had come.