Peachtree Road (35 page)

But under the smiling, primary-painted facades of child-tenders and tap dancers, the Negroes in Atlanta were, as they were all over that America, bringing themselves to a slow and inexorable boil. Not much of it

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showed then. In the very early fifties, Atlanta Negroes lived, as they had for decades, along a blighted east-west axis in the southern quadrant of the city, in peeling, rat-infested housing projects and sweltering neighborhoods so wasted by poverty, unemployment, ill health and crime that no Northsider who had not actually driven through them would believe they existed. Many of my crowd never did.

On the east and west fringes of the black belt a few affluent neighborhoods of quite grand homes clustered in cloistered solitude, and on Auburn Avenue downtown, to the south of the central business district, a handful of black-owned office buildings and factories and warehouses stood. But the rest of Sweet Auburn, which served as a Main Street for the black community, was given over to infinitesimal, struggling businesses and services in appalling disrepair. In the downtown proper, and indeed, all over the city and cities like it in and out of the South, “White Only” and “Colored Only” signs flourished like skin cancers on everything from churches to train stations to restaurants to drinking fountains to rest rooms. The Negroes of Atlanta were still, going into the second half of the century, as disenfranchised and disaffected as serfs in a medieval city-state.

A few recognizable black leaders emerged, in those days, to stand for their communities and petition the white power structure for the human solutions so desperately needed, but they approached, when they did, in private and in secret, after hours and with, metaphorically at least, their hats in their hands. No wonder that deep in those black waters a great tide was rising; wonder only that it did not burst free sooner and with far greater force, and that we favored white children by all that black bounty and largesse could not, in that most transparent of pentimenti, see it building. But we did not.

Our fathers saw it, though.

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“When do you think your father first realized what Glenn would be to this town?” I asked Sarah Cameron once, at the top of Glenn Pickens’s incredible trajectory.

“Probably the day Glenn was born,” she said.

She didn’t miss it far.

The great golden age of their full potency, when as the celebrated downtown white power structure the fathers of the Buckhead boys and girls would literally alter the face and persona of the city and pull it with sheer, concerted force into the mainstream of America, was still a few years away when Sarah and Lucy and I were teenagers. But the generators were beginning to hum, and the gears to be oiled and readied.

They were still young men then, in their late thirties and early forties, and for the bulk of their adult lives they had been occupied with tending family fortunes and extending personal arenas. But they knew fully, even before the city and the nation perceived them as anything more than an extraordinarily close group of wealthy men living in a northern suburb of Atlanta, that their roles would be those of catalysts, pragmatists and, most of all, alchemists. They would be required to, and would, transmute base metal into gold. I think the only thing they did not know yet, in those days, was the sheer, dizzying scope of their spheres of influence.

Literally since their births they had known each other, and moved as easily in one another’s homes and clubs as they did in their own. It was always that proximity, that mutual pool of kinship, which gave them their unique power. Its basis was always the remarkable psychological similarity of class attitudes that made them comfortable together. They were ready, but they were not yet fully mobilized. In those last quiet days before both civic growth and civil turmoil, they were largely concerned with looking around to see what they could see. Their concerted social antennae were awesome.

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They saw a city stagnant since the flurry of building directly after World War II, crying out for office space and air facilities to catch the faltering torch that the railroads had dropped. Atlanta had always been a service city, a mover of goods, a branch office town, but now they saw business and money turning away in impatience, going elsewhere, because the wheels at home were not numerous or sturdy enough to take the weight. They saw business after business come South, sniff around, find little to their liking in the way of facilities or quality of life, and head for New Jersey or Texas.

And they saw a formless black population, large and growing, with, as yet, no real political muscle, but with an enormous potential for it.

They were not stupid men, or shortsighted; they knew, even as they espoused it personally, that segregation could not and would not prevail, and that when it crumbled, they could either profit from it or be crushed beneath its fall—but fall it would. Being good businessmen, if indifferent human-itarians, they began to put their feelers out to the simmering black community. Far better to have the Negroes of Atlanta buying from their businesses than burning them. Far better to lure Northeastern business South with the promise of open, peaceful schools than put their burgeoning strength behind a last romantic schoolhouse-door stand doomed to fail before the first federal marshal appeared.

They were well-connected men, even in those early days; they knew what the tenor of the nation’s highest courts was, and knew that bullheaded defiance of a federal ruling on school integration would tip Atlanta squarely back into the somnolent quagmire from which it had so painfully struggled after the war. Mayor Hartsfield had the right idea, but the wrong syntax: It was not so much that Atlanta was a city too busy to hate as that in Atlanta, organized, official hate was bad for

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business. These twenty or thirty men who were, to us Pinks and Jells, still only our fathers put aside their menus and began, from their tables at the Capital City Club, to reel in the lines all of them had into the blasted streets and housing projects of South Atlanta.

The lines were myriad, and went deep. Many were those of master-servant; every Buckhead family had its own coterie of black familiars among the men and women who came out on the 23 Oglethorpe buses every day to serve them, and they knew, also, families of those people. And then there was the network of blacks in service at the clubs and the restaurants they frequented, and at the labor levels of their businesses and those of their friends. Being leaders themselves, they knew personally the scattering of black leaders who were visible in those days and the still fewer ones who were not, and they were on first-name basis with the administrations of the six black schools in the lustrous, Rockefeller-funded Atlanta University complex in the southwest quadrant of the city. This may have been the most important and the most fortuitous tie of all; it was the educated young blacks who administered, as well as participated in, the civil rights movement when it came, and when it did, our fathers had their contacts, if never their agents, in place.

And they kept the contacts fresh and immediate. Even during the heart of that anguished struggle, when the White Citizens’ Council and the flaming, colorful segregationists were the most vocal and the news out of Birmingham and Little Rock and Selma came smoking in over the wires, and every blinding-hot summer day dawned on another threatened riot in one embattled black community or another, the men of the Club and the black leadership of Atlanta talked. They talked daily and for hours, in black homes as well as white, and even though they met in secret, still they met. When action

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came—when the public schools were kept open in defiance of the state’s law and in compliance with the country’s; when Ben Cameron, then mayor, stood on top of an automobile in Mechanicsville for hours in the fierce heat of an incipient riot, talking, talking; when one by one the “White Only”

signs began to come down, and even that innermost of sanctums, the Commerce Club, seated Negroes for lunch—it was usually because one specific and powerful white man said the necessary words into the necessary ears, and because many of those ears were black.

It wasn’t, despite what the Chamber of Commerce did and does tell everyone who will listen, particularly exemplary handling of the matter of race; often it was not even decent handling. The motives behind it were never pure. Most of it came reluctantly and at least ten years too late. But it came, and it came without clubs and dogs and fire hoses and blood in the streets of the city. I think it came because the men who would soon make up the Club had their ears open in the early 1950s, and heard the soft mutter of the drums almost before they began.

“Remember them all together at somebody’s party, back when we were at North Fulton?” Lucy said once during one of our nightly telephone calls. “God, they were gorgeous.

Not physically, so much; but powerful. Lord! Power is just so goddamned
sexy!
”

She was right. They were an impressive group, sitting all together at one of their luncheons or in one of their bank board meetings, or even gathered at a party in Buckhead.

Young, attractive, tanned from golf and tennis, easy with one another, purposeful. They were still cadets, but they knew they would have the power of which she spoke, and they knew where it would come from: Their own fathers and mentors, for many years before them the official Club, would pass the batons on

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to them at the appointed time in an almost formal transfer of power. Even before they came into their real and final strength, they were formidable. To sit at lunch in the Capital City Club downtown on Peachtree Street, a symmetrical and mellow old cream-brick mansion rimmed about with leaning office buildings, was to see pure power in repose, drinking its ritual two prelunch bourbon and branch waters and eating its London broil. It was almost palpable in the air; you could get physically dizzy from it.

Toward the end of March in my senior year at North Fulton, my father asked me to come downtown and meet him for lunch at the Capital City Club. I was as profoundly surprised as if he had asked me to attend a burlesque show with him. And I was distinctly apprehensive. I had been to the club, of course, many times; it and the Atlanta Athletic Club were my father’s downtown clubs, and he took us all there occasionally, for lunch or dinner after football games at Georgia Tech, or for the New Year’s Day buffet in the Mirador Room. But I had never been there alone with him.

I had not been anywhere alone with my father, by that time, in several years. The last time I could remember was to see the Lone Ranger in a one-man show at Grant Field, on his great, shining horse, Silver. I think I was eleven then.

I went down on a Friday noon, parking the Fury in the lot beside the club on Harris Street and tossing the keys to ancient liveried James, who had been fielding keys ever since I could remember. I ran lightly and in earringing dread up the shallow stone steps and into the marble lobby.

“Morning, Mr. Sheppard,” fat Charles, who commanded the door, said to me, smiling as if I were his favorite nephew.

With Charles’s memory and what he must have seen of white people’s foibles over the years, he could have been a very powerful and dangerous man,

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if it had occurred to him. Perhaps it had. Perhaps even then, Charles had, in some dark closet back at his home in Southwest Atlanta, a burgeoning file marked “Indiscretions, White.” I liked the idea then, and I like it even more now.

I went along the short, thick-carpeted corridor under the mural of ecstatic darkies sitting on cotton bales on an idyllic, never-seen riverfront dock, past the glowering bust of some dour, anonymous Confederate general or other and the lined portraits of past presidents, and up the mahogany stairs to the Mirador Room on the second floor. My heart was hammering so hard under my new blue lightweight wool blazer that I thought I would hyperventilate and faint at the feet of Edgar, who opened the door into the holy of holies with the same “Good morning, Mr. Sheppard,” only minus the smile.

Dignity was the order of the day in the Mirador Room.

I could not imagine why my father wanted to have lunch with me, but I sensed that there was no hope of its being casual or even pleasant. It had about it the air of an appointment in Samarra. On the way across the gleaming parquet floor, which became, in the evenings, a little dance floor, I imagined that he would tell me that we had lost all our money, and I would have to drop out of Princeton, where I had applied and been accepted, and go to work. Or that he had cancer and was dying, and I would have to do the same.

Or that Lucy was being sent away somewhere irrevocable and distant, and I would never see her again, and he was preparing me. Even as I smiled at him, sitting at his accustomed table in the corner of the second tier, his face red under the thinning thatch of blond hair, and registered that the smile he gave me back was as ghastly as a death rictus, I was marshaling my defenses and lining up my arguments. The last weapon in my arsenal, outright refusal, seemed, in PEACHTREE ROAD / 273

his actual presence, simply unimaginable. I did not think I was going to come out of this encounter unchanged.

To my surprise, Ben Cameron unfolded his lean length from the chair opposite my father and rose to greet me, and my thrashing heart gave a mad buck of relief and subsided.

Whatever it was, I had an ally. I reached the table and put out my hand like the confident young man I was not and had never been.

“Hello, Mr. Cameron,” I said. “Daddy.”

“Hello, Shep,” Ben Cameron said, giving me his warm grin that had nothing in it but pleasure at seeing me. “Good to see you.”

“Son,” my father said formally. The fierce wolf’s smile never left his red face. He gestured at the chair next to Ben and I slid into it.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said, frowning purposefully, like a man who has set aside important affairs to keep a date. “Traffic on Peachtree was awful all the way in.”