A Turn in the South

  “I wanted to be an individual, a nonconformist, a person with his own rights, opinions. But at the same time I did want an identity. And I found that in the Democratic Party. It started at high school. I got into the Democratic group and quickly became a leader of the teen Democrats. It became my religion, because I evaluated everything according to the party’s success or failure. When I left school I went straight into the party organization. The party became my community. But it wasn’t a real community. It didn’t have the caring that a Christian community should have. In the navy I had the sense of meeting Christ in reading the Scriptures, and I was touched by that. But it was isolated until I came here, which makes real on earth this relationship with God. I have found the real community here, in theology school.”

  CITY POLITICS in Atlanta were mainly black politics, and Michael Lomax was one of the up-and-coming black politicians. He was only thirty-eight, but it was said that he would be running for mayor in 1989. He was not from Atlanta, but from Los Angeles, and he had style. He was tall and slender and well dressed and educated and softly spoken. He was of a pale complexion. He did not have a black man-of-the-people reputation; but service to the black cause was in his family tradition. His knowledge of black writing was considerable; his hero was the early black radical William Du Bois, the critic of Booker Washington. And he was a dedicated politician.

  Everything about him was considered. He had the politician’s heightened sense of the self, as I was aware when, after our talk, we walked back together for a while in the city center, and on the Macy’s side of Peachtree Street. He was known; people looked at him. He made a joke about it, but this kind of public response mattered to him.

  We met in the library, for which, as chairman of the Fulton County Commission, he was responsible. The people he greeted so affably in the forecourt were architects. He said grandly, but with a smile, “I like building things.” And in the library council room upstairs there was tea: a silver service and white Wedgwood cups and a selection of pastries of small size, laid out for us by someone from the Commission, a white man, young, smiling, happy to serve his elegant chairman.

  Blacks had to look inwards, Michael Lomax said. The need now was not for marches so much as for an internal revolution.

  “The civil-rights movement distorted our conception of human relations. It made it completely adversarial. In an adversarial relationship there is a good person and a bad person, a victim and a victimizer. We were the good, we were the victim.” None of the current black leaders talked of black responsibility, he said.

  And yet for him, with all that he had become, and all his future, there was still the burden of being black. He spoke of the burden in this way (and he might have spoken the words often before): “There’s not a day, not a moment in my life when I don’t have to think about the color of my skin. And being black is not just about what I see. It’s about what I feel about myself. It’s as much internal as external.

  “I think sometimes that an exorcism has got to happen for all of us, where you pull out all of those evil demons of race. They’re still inside us, fighting with one another.

  “Ten years ago I went to Brazil. And I went to a place in northern Brazil called Salvador which has a very mixed population and where having skin the color of mine was nothing unusual. And I felt a tremendous sense of liberation and freedom. But I also felt a sense of loss because people weren’t dealing with me negatively because of my skin. That was the freedom, but I had so many expectations inside me as a black person that I couldn’t accept the ignoring of that person—it was another kind of invisibility.

  “You have to confront your own demons. For me it’s confronting the fact that I am a black person and that every time a white person sees me I may be no different for him than seeing a drunk on the street. And that colors the way I think about myself. I have been angry about being black, saddened by it. And I cannot deal with the white person or the black person until I look in the mirror and accept the man I see there.”

  IT WAS generally agreed that the correct behavior of the sheriff of Forsyth County had done much to take the poison out of the situation at the very beginning. When I spoke to him on the telephone I found him easy and businesslike; many people had been to see him. He told me how to get to his office. It was in the Forsyth County Jail, he said. And that made me think of any number of Western films.

  It was about an hour away from Atlanta. The holiday setting, of woods and well-kept roads and an enormous artificial lake created by the Army Corps of Engineers, was hard to associate with the blood tensions of 1912: the lynching of a man in the jail, the public hanging of two others, the roving crowds giving notice to the blacks. And the county town in the midst of these spring woods was very American: the fast-food places, the banks looking like churches, billboards—ordinary.

  A woman stepped out of her grocery shop to direct me to the sheriff’s office. Across the main town road, past the cemetery, and then on to a low brick structure. And there, in the busy little red-brick town, it was: a new building, not the one of 1912, but still as flat and basic-looking as a sheriff’s office in a Western film; assertively labeled (as in a film) FORSYTH COUNTY JAIL, but with a large asphalted forecourt full of parked cars—the jail and the sheriff’s office, like the fast-food places, serving a motorized community. The United States flag and the Georgia flag hung side by side from flagpoles.

  Two sets of glass doors led into the reception area, where two elderly white people were sitting on low chairs. A secretary sat at a desk with papers. And at her back, on the concrete-block wall, was a seal-of-Georgia plaque: roughly rendered motifs of civility from 1776: an arch on two classical columns, a scroll hanging loose in the space between the columns, with the Georgia motto: WISDOM, JUSTICE, MODERATION.

  The sheriff was in a meeting, the secretary said. A man in blue jeans came in to talk about a parking ticket or something of that nature—giving an idea of the day-to-day business of a sheriff’s office. The sheriff himself came out after a while, jacketless, a paisley-patterned tie on his white shirt. He said, “Be with y’all in just a moment.”

  And soon I was called into his office, where, on an old-fashioned hat-rack, at the very top, was a black cowboy hat with the sheriff badge. The sheriff said he had worn the hat only once, on the day of the big Forsyth march. Also on the rack was the very clean pale-blue jacket of the sheriff.

  He was in his forties. He said he had been twenty years in the county. He had “taught school” for some time; he had been sheriff for eleven years.

  Years ago, he said, Forsyth County had been isolated, and the folks were very clannish. The same thing could be said of “the entire North Georgia area.” “The liquor industry came along, and a few folks made moonshine here, because it was very isolated. And that was the only means of income.” Later there came the Lockheed and General Motors plants; and there also came the poultry industry. “The poultry industry brought our community out of its low socioeconomic situation. You began to see better roads, a great influx.” At the same time there was the Atlanta boom. “What we are attracting now is a lot of people.” Land had tripled in price. In 1970 there were sixteen thousand people; in 1986 there must have been forty thousand. “We are becoming an affluent suburban county of Atlanta. So we are in a boom growth situation.”

  So, though “folks threw rocks” at the first brotherhood march, the cause of the rock-throwers couldn’t really succeed in the new Forsyth. The second march, of the twenty thousand, wasn’t a racial occasion, the sheriff said. The marchers were white as well as black, and they were making clear that they didn’t want to see violence. “The American public will not tolerate violence.”

  About race as race, the sheriff said, there was nothing that could be done. “The real problem is social and economic.… There’s nothing you can do, because people migrate where they feel comfortable. They migrate to their social-economic status.” A black doctor who wanted to settle in Forsyth County might fit in. But it
would be different for a lower-class black. People needed to feel comfortable with people. “If you have two sorry black folks and two sorry white folks they’re gonna fight because they can’t get along.”

  About the big march itself, it had always been a media event, the sheriff said. A lot of people came to that march because it was the first march in twenty years. People who had missed out on the marches of the civil-rights movement in the old days wished to take part in one now. “It gave a lot of people an opportunity to take part in something they thought was going to be historical.” So there were these two “volatile” groups—the marchers, and the people who were opposed to them. What sort of people were opposed? “A lot of the people I deal with on Saturdays. Law enforcement deals with ten percent of the population ninety percent of the time.” This was how the sheriff talked: he was as much sociologist (and former teacher) as law-enforcement official. He made the affairs of Forsyth County seem much more manageable.

  And though he didn’t say so, there came out from his talk the idea of two sets of people looking for attention. The civil-rights groups, their major battles and indeed their war won long ago, now squabbling, and looking for causes; and the white supremacists looking in almost the same way for publicity and patronage. The great Forsyth march, as the sheriff described it, was like a ritual conflict, played out before the cameras, and according to certain rules. Out of this formalizing, the issue had died. Overexposure was a very American aspect of this formalizing, I also felt. Everyone had been interviewed and interviewed; everyone, including the sheriff, had become a personality; everyone had now exhausted attention.

  So, as the sheriff said: “The issue is dead.”

  And the sheriff made a further point. The marchers had won, but in the three months since then no black had moved into Forsyth. The county remained all white, proving the first point: that the issue now wasn’t racial, but social and economic.

  He was impressive, Sheriff Walraven. He was an elected official, and he saw himself representing the will of the American people—who had turned their face against violence. And though he wasn’t willing to play up this side of things, he was also doing his Christian duty, Christianity being a religion that taught love and peace. (Christianity, at one time, in this setting, stood for other things; the Christianity of the Ku Klux Klan still had to be taken into account. But the sheriff saw the events of 1912 as historical, seventy-five years old. He represented the current will of the American people. There was to be no violence; it was his duty to see that there was none.)

  Did he see a situation where that might change?

  He thought for a while and said, “If the system falls down.” But then almost immediately he added, “The system can’t fall down. Individuals might fall down.”

  To meet this educated man with an almost philosophical idea of his duties was to see how far away from the center the Ku Klux Klan groups of Forsyth were. The point had in fact been made by the black mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young.

  “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.
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  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.