A Turn in the South

  FROM SCATTERED impressions (and really more from stories of Shango and Shouters in Trinidad and memories there of black street-corner preachers and beach baptisms) I had thought of black-American religion as the religion of ecstasy and trance. I was not prepared for its formality or its communal-social side, as in Howard’s home town. I was not prepared for its purity, as in Hosea. Or, later, in Robert Waymer.

  He was a handsome man of forty-nine; formal clothes became him. He was on the Atlanta School Board. He came from a black South Carolina family. There was a family farm of fifty acres—not big, but it had maintained many of the family. And the family had been well known in South Carolina, in Orangeburg, for three generations. “Maybe four.”

  I told him that family continuity like this had formed no part of my idea of black life in the American South.

  He said, “It was a secret.”

  “Secret?”

  “You don’t tell white people everything.” And this was so strange from him, in the paneled lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where he sat confidently, fitting the setting.

  He said: “They were hostile. People who understood their circumstances and took pride in doing something for themselves knew that if you were black you were living in a hostile environment.”

  He told me about his extended family. “There was quite a resonance in the extended family. And from that resonance and cooperation my father’s two eldest sisters married brothers who were tobacco farmers, cattle farmers, general truck farmers. It was from that beginning of farming we came. And we were quite ingenious people, I think. There were sixteen of us. My mother was the oldest daughter of an A.M.E. minister.”

  He told me about the initials. African Methodist Episcopalian. The church had had its two hundredth anniversary that year, he said. African? Did it have something to do with Africa? No. It had been established by an ex-slave, Richard Allen, when he found that he was shut out of the white churches. And that was Bob Waymer’s theme: the solidarity that had come to black people from being shut out, the necessity that had driven them to found their own institutions—and the breakdown that had occurred with the ending of segregation.

  His father was the eldest son of a farmer. So there was a tradition in his family. And yet there was a certain modesty.

  “We’re really not leaders. Really not. You and other people haven’t had an opportunity to learn about blacks the way they really are. My family doesn’t consider themselves outstanding. We are good committed people, committed to helping each other. A kind of dedication that started with my grandfather and continued with my mother.

  “You got to know that you don’t know anything about blacks.

  “The civil-rights movement was great for everybody. But it freed up whites more than it did blacks. We were a closed, segregated, persecuted group in America, and we knew that. Everything that we learned, my age group, we knew that we had to be good at what we did. We had to be curious. Patriotic. Better than the other guy. Educated. And religious. And cautious too. We had to be cautious because we had to negotiate the hostile system in order to earn a living, to survive and exist with a feeling of well-being. We did well, as a general group of people. We established our institutions, educated our own. Public education is a relatively new concept. The first high school in Atlanta, the Booker T. Washington, was built in the 1940s.”

  “Do you talk much about this now?”

  “No. Not much. There is nothing to say. If you said anything you were bragging about how well you were able to survive. Which is nothing. Or you would be boasting. Which among my family and other families like mine is tantamount to sin—it’s vanity.”

  I asked him about the place of the church.

  “The church is basic. And I’m not specially religious. The church is where I learned how to have respect for myself and others. And that’s basic. And the Ten Commandments—that’s the law. That’s it. I used to think when I was a child they were my mother’s laws, and I wondered how the other children had got to hear of the same things.”

  He was calm. Yet there were others—I mentioned Marvin Arrington—who were not calm.

  He said that people like Arrington were “actors.” He stressed the word, and then he explained it.

  Arrington was a lawyer. “There is a difference in the attitudes of black Americans who were educated solely in black institutions, and those who went to higher education in white institutions.

  “Everybody wants to be successful in what they do. Learning is a very painful changing of you and your mental attitudes. If you are going to be a success as a lawyer in America you are going to be successful only if you emulate or become a white lawyer. The profession—and this is not only for the legal profession—orients you in that direction. And you become an instrument of your own demise.”

  Demise—death. That was a strong word. But he meant the death of the soul; and, as he saw it, it was the kind of death that had come to black people in some ways with desegregation and the consequent loss of community. This was the very subject that Howard—and it seemed now so long ago—had touched upon, as we were walking back from church to his mother’s house.

  Bob Waymer said, “I mean demise. Let me tell you why. In the teaching profession and the legal profession and any other profession you learn certain things from white institutions about blacks. And they are ninety percent derogatory. Frederick Douglass—he is one of my heroes—and other people have said it—says that there is no planting without the tilling of the soil. For a while, because of the love and compassion which Dr. King was able to communicate to the rest of the world, there were many people all over the world who felt that something was askew, wrong, about the race question and the treatment of blacks. But these good people always knew that. They knew that already. What Dr. King did was to act as a catharsis for white people. He was a great mental-health cure for white Americans. What he did for blacks was to make their rights legal and to inspire tremendous numbers of blacks to take action for their people and themselves.

  “But once blacks got into white institutions they found that being in their own institutions was a lot better, and that being a white American wasn’t all that great. We thought that once we had the same rights all our problems were over. What happened was that we retained eighty percent of the historical problem that we had, and that now we also had to deal with all of those things associated with being white.

  “Let me give you a comical example. If you were a domestic and you cooked dinner for a white family, you knew how much they would eat and you knew that if you cooked a little more you could always take that home with you. You always did that. It was part of the built-in economy, the hidden economy.”

  And there were other examples, which were not so comical; were in fact humiliating to think about. In the days of segregation blacks could not stay in hotels or motels or be served in restaurants. Some places served blacks at the back window; and it often happened that when the cook knew his order was a back-window order he put on, if he were serving a hamburger, an extra piece of meat. This was the origin of the cheeseburger. And since there were no hotels for blacks there grew up, in certain black families or houses, the “tourist home,” where blacks might stay. Local black people usually knew where these places were, and could direct the traveler. The “tourist home” was usually a room in someone’s house; it provided a livelihood for some people.

  “The civil-rights movement made us equal. We didn’t have to be resourceful any more. All we needed was a credit card and a good job. So, what’s lost? Mrs. Smith, who operated her tourist home, can no longer earn a living. We went from four dollars a night for a family—which included breakfast and a sandwich to take with you, and communication—to fourteen dollars a night in a Holiday Inn room.”

  Communication through the tourist homes: it was one of the unexpected fruits of segregation, and it was something Bob Waymer stressed. New dances, he said, traveled very fast between blacks because of this communication. In those days without te
levision it was like magic: blacks from different parts of the country could always dance the same new dances when they met. With desegregation this was lost.

  “There was a tremendous boost for hotels like the Holiday Inn all across the United States. I remember people who weren’t traveling anywhere who would go downtown and check into the Holiday Inn just because they had the right.”

  RELIGION WAS like something in the air, a store of emotion on which people could draw according to their need. The religious vocation could come to many. For some the vocation contained the ideas of service and community. For others, with a stronger sense of self, who had gone out into the world with a will to win but had then withdrawn for various reasons, the vocation came as a wish to expound the word, to preach, to make an offering to God and men of the life that had been lived.

  The white former businessman I met, in a group of mature students in a religious school, had felt “humbled by God.” It was only after he had made his religious decision that an offer had been made of the capital he had been looking for to keep his business going. That offer of capital had been a temptation; but he hadn’t fallen. He was a handsome man, with arresting blue eyes; he couldn’t have been unaware of his looks; he might have expected an easier passage through the world. The same could probably be said of the striking black woman from Alabama. She spoke of her beauty as of something to be taken for granted; and something still an asset. But her life after she had left the South had been one of poverty and disorder. And there was Danny, a musician. He too, like the former businessman, had felt humbled by God—he used the same words.

  Danny said, “I pictured my life as a shattered mirror—a piece here, a piece there.”

  I was so taken by that—the kind of chaos Anne Siddons had talked about—and so interested by what he had to say about the development of his religious life, that I wanted to talk to him again. We fixed a time. He didn’t come. I telephoned. He was eating; I could tell by the noises; he said he had had a lot more to do than he had thought. We fixed another time. And he came.

  He was black and stocky; in his short-sleeved open yellow shirt he looked very casual in the lounge of the Ritz, where that morning they were making a video about the hotel, with a male model, and they were shifting very bright lights about. This was the background to our talk of religion and the vanity of the world.

  I asked him about the feeling he had had of being humbled by God. And that was where his story began.

  “All my life I was such a winner, always seeking fame, even in high school. Everything I did I was number one. In music I have to be the leader. I was captain of the football team, the basketball team. I was the valedictorian of my class—I had got the highest grades of any graduating senior in my class. Even doing domestic work around the home, I would give it my very best because I knew my parents would praise me. I just loved people to brag on me. I thought I was something special in the world—I think it had a lot to do with grace and gifts that were naturally given, God-given, to me.

  “And also my parents were professional. My father was a minister and also a teacher, and my mother also. And, the small community we lived in, by both of them being professional was kind of unique. It made me proud, even as a small child. We lived in a little place in Texas.

  “I could even think we had indoor restrooms when most people in the community didn’t. And though I would never brag about anything like that, it always had an effect on me. We were the first or second to get a TV set. My father was actually like the leader in the community. The first black to be on the school board after integration.

  “I was aware of the fact that being boastful and wearing pride—letting it show on the outside—would cause people to not like you or resent you. So throughout my life I always knew how to be modest. But the purpose was for praise.

  “I had a music scholarship, a football and a basketball scholarship. And I really didn’t accept any of them because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I figured out eventually that music would be my best route. My mother taught me in the first and second grade, and my sister and I were always on program—always acting or singing solos—in the church. So music was always a way where people focused on me. It wasn’t something I was thinking. It was something I just knew—that when you sang everyone sat down and listened to you, focused on you. I even used to go down to the grocery store and sing solos for the man, to get some candy.

  “When I went off to college I went and looked at the football players—and my decision was made about music. The guys on the football field were so large and brutal. It would have been a hard way to go.

  “There was a talent show at the college. I was walking through the dormitory and I heard someone playing a guitar downstairs, and so I went down to see what was going on. I went back to my room and got my clarinet and went down and started playing with this guy—songs. It drew crowds. People started coming down to listen. After that more musicians came. And we decided from that moment to perfect a couple of numbers for the talent show. We were successful that night. A nightclub owner was in the auditorium, and he asked us to come play in his club that night. We didn’t play for money. We played for doughnuts. We loved it so much we didn’t know but those two numbers. And that was when it started. And the group became the most popular group in the city. We got a manager. We toured the country. We made a reputation for ourselves.

  “I was making so much money and was so popular, and I was only nineteen, just a senior in college, and living in a fabulous apartment, I thought I was God’s gift to women. Until all of a sudden school became unattractive. It actually seemed irrelevant, because I was already on my way to fame and fortune—and I put fame before fortune.

  “So I left school, to concentrate on being a star. And after seventeen years of being with several recording companies touring the United States and Canada, Africa—my life became shattered.”

  This was sudden, in the telling. But Danny’s hidden point was that he had misread the music world, had misread his position in it. His position had always been subsidiary, supporting. He had been too quick to see himself as a star, had allowed himself to be deluded.

  “I began to sense that I wasn’t in control of my life. Even that God was being unfair to me. Because I knew I had as much or more talent than anyone in the business. But I would always get exploited. They would take ideas from my songs and never release my material nationwide.”

  “You mean you had no manager? In all those years?”

  And it turned out that the first manager he had had, while he had been in college, hadn’t lasted. “One thing was that all my life everything had always been me. So I was everything. I figured I could be my own manager, everything. I wasn’t submissive. My pride blinded me from the wisdom of what my very first manager said to me—he was offering to support me financially if I stayed with his group. But I wanted my own name up front. And so throughout the years we floated around. The record companies and promoters know that entertainers are addicted to one thing—entertaining. So they exploited us, and we allowed ourselves to be exploited.

  “I lost my group. That was the very point when the crisis came. I was in a club and I remember thinking, ‘The time that I was most successful was the time when I was an apprentice.’ That word came to me: apprentice. ‘An apprentice to someone that had connections and money.’

  “Reflecting back, I realize that the Lord was dealing with me then. I was being in a way humbled then—to even recognize that I need to be following someone, rather than being in direct control. But I was thinking strictly musically—maybe I need to join a group that’s doing something, going somewhere, and be a follower rather than a leader.

  “Then a big opportunity came up. I remember I was in a recording studio, getting ready to do a song on an album for the company who had made the offer to me—it was like an auditioning. And I was horrible. I broke down in the recording studio and cried like a baby.

  “And I remember praying in the studio. I said, ??
?Lord, why are you letting this happen to me? How can I go to my family and tell them I have failed on my big break?’ I had phoned people all over the United States and told people to look out for me, because this was it—I was going to be a big star at last. And even though my parents never agreed with what I was doing, I could even sense that they were hoping I would make it, my dreams would come true. The main thing I dreamed of was surprising my mother with a Rolls-Royce and a million-dollar home.”

  “Why do you think you failed so badly in the studio?”

  “I just didn’t seem to have it. I was embarrassed. I was depressed. Felt like my life was over. I felt like that was the last shot for me. It just shattered everything. To have your pride fed all your life and then to be denounced was like calling me counterfeit. Maybe I never was what I thought I was.

  “So it was during that time that I began to think of another way. And that was that all my life at the back of my mind I had always like heard a voice saying, ‘If you would be a songwriter, first. Let other people record your songs—that would be the best route for you.’ I just sensed that. But I had too much pride. I didn’t want to make it as a songwriter. I wanted to sing my own songs. But now I had reached the point where that was a last alternative. Because, even though I was at rock bottom, I never totally gave up. So this was a point of humility for me—that maybe I should try being a songwriter. So I gave one of my songs to a local musician, a tremendous vocalist, and I became his producer and manager. And we, on a local level, were successful.