Walking with the Wind Page 2
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with him, drive a load of our cotton over to Saco, sell it, then hand us each a couple of coins so we could buy ourselves something sweet. Ike and Mikes were my favorite — little gingerbread men spread thick with marshmallow cream, named in honor of Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, or so I was told.
The landscape in this part of Alabama, once you get beyond the borders of the little communities scattered throughout these forests, looks not much different from the way it was two hundred years ago, when various Indian tribes passed through here on their way north to hunting grounds up in Tennessee. Drive the back roads, many of which were once Indian trails, and you cross over rolling hills thick with oak and hickory and chestnut trees. Small creeks and streams trickle through small valleys shaded by miles and miles of pine trees. Wild oats and peas are everywhere, feeding the Alabama deer that have been hunted in these woods for ages.
The county, strangely enough, is named for a man who never set foot here: General Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the early-nineteenth-century explorer for whom Pikes Peak in Colorado is also named. With all the exploration and expansion in this country at that time, there was much to be named, and Zebulon Pike apparently received his share. After he was killed in an 1813 battle in Canada, ten states honored him by establishing counties in his name — including Alabama, which created Pike County in 1821.
There were few, if any, black people in this section of the state at that time. But that changed drastically as cotton began to replace cattle as the county’s main industry. By the middle of the century, one fifth of Pike County’s 16,000 residents were black — all but ten of them slaves. Relatively speaking, there weren’t many plantations in this part of the state — of 2,420 farmers listed in Pike County’s 1850 census, only fourteen owned land worth more than $5,000. Most of the rest were what were called yeoman farmers — people who owned modest-sized pieces of land which they and maybe a couple of slaves worked. There were, however, enough of those farmers to account for a total of more than 2,000 slaves in Pike County just before the start of the Civil War.
After the war, rather than face the new social order, many of those middle-class farmers moved away — quite a few to Brazil, of all places. The ones who remained, most of whom were now almost as poor as the black people they had once owned, found themselves competing as sharecroppers with their former slaves. The plantation owners, of course, remained rich, controlling the tenant farmers by leasing them land and furnishing their supplies, then “settling up” each harvest season at rates that put the farmer — black or white — further in the hole each year. For most men and women working under this system, it was hardly better than slavery. Everyone worked for “The Man,” and they were still working for him well into the twentieth century when I was born.
It’s hard not to think about that as I drive the back roads of Pike County today. There is a lot of poverty in this county, and it’s a poverty that is blind to color. Pass any of the rusted trailers or beat-up shacks back in these woods and you’re as likely
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to see a white child playing in the dirt and weeds as a black one. It was the same when I was a boy, except that whites and blacks rarely saw one another. If you lived out in the country back then, you lived among your Own kind. Until I look my first trip into the town of Troy with my father at age six, I had seen just two white people in my entire life — a mailman and a traveling merchant.
Much has been made over the years of the fact that a man named George Wallace was born and raised just a few miles east of where I grew up, in a little town called Clio, just across the Pike County line, over in Barbour County. I admit that there is a certain kind of symmetry, an odd sort of irony, in that fact. But the truth is that the world George Wallace grew up in as a white child living in an actual town, with a father who owned several farms in the surrounding countryside, was a universe away from mine. we might as well have been living on different planets, George Wallace and I. People who point out how close our birthplaces are usually fail to note that Wallace is twenty-one years older than I. By the time I was born, 1940, he was already a senior at the University of Alabama, making a name for himself in campus politics and on the Crimson Tide’s boxing team. Our paths would eventually collide, but back then my world and George Wallace’s were still far, far apart.
You can’t miss the poverty as you drive through rural Pike County, and neither can you miss the churches. They’re around just about every bend, modest little buildings, some of them wood, a few of them redbrick, but most of them cinder block. Their steeples are small, if they’ve got one at all. Many make do with a simple wooden cross mounted atop the front entrance. Needless to say, these churches are as segregated today as they were when I was a boy. And, in terms of the black community, they are still as central to the lives of their congregations as they were then.
I always know I’m nearing home when I pass the Macedonia Baptist Church, a beautifully plain, whitewashed, T-shaped structure perched on a knoll in the woods. The parking lot is all dirt and weeds, shaded by the pine and oak trees that run down the slopes on all sides. There’s a graveyard out back where many of my relatives are buried: my uncle Rabbit, uncle Goat, uncle Edgar. Every summer there is a gathering on the grass around that graveyard, a picnic of sorts. But it’s more than that, really. It’s a reunion, a homecoming. All the parishioners are there, joined by the prodigal sons and daughters, the friends and family members who moved away a generation or two ago, to Buffalo and Detroit and Philadelphia. They all come back for this gathering, for this celebration. It is a revival, in the truest sense of the word, and it has been going on for the better part of a century now.
Macedonia Baptist is not my family’s church anymore. There was a falling-out a few years back between my grandfather and the minister there, and my family wound up moving its membership to Antioch Baptist Church, not far from another church they once regularly attended: Dunn’s Chapel AME (African Methodist Episcopal). Both Antioch and Dunn’s Chapel are similar in appearance to Macedonia
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Baptist, with long histories of their own, including an attack by the Ku Klux Klan in 1904.
There was a practice in the early part of this century, common among the Klan, called whitecapping. Basically it was a variation of lynching. Property-owning blacks were terrorized, usually at gunpoint, run out of their homes and off their lands, which were then seized by the whites who had chased them away. The practice was common throughout the South, with the authorities typically looking the other way. In February 1904, it happened right here.
According to a newspaper account published that month in the Troy Messenger, five Pike County white men were indicted by a grand jury on charges that included burning two local black churches: Dunn’s Chapel and Antioch Baptist. The two churches were targeted, stated the report, “because they were the houses of worship of Negroes.” Rifles were fired into nearby homes as well, in an attempt to threaten the residents’ “property and lives if they did not move.”
There is no record of whether those five men were actually convicted, but Antioch Baptist still stands today, as does Dunn’s Chapel, less than a mile from my mother’s house.
It was mid-morning on this Sunday in September as I pulled into my mother’s gravel drive. My brother Edward came hiking up from the edge of the woods, wearing a jeans jacket and a Harley-Davidson ball cap, waving and smiling, followed by a small parade of little animals: my mother’s dog and four or five of her cats. Edward is deaf — he has been since he was born in 1938 — but he is one of the most expressive people I know, as well as one of the most self-reliant. He lives alone in a trailer just across the road from my mother’s house. He spends most of his time there or with her, taking care of odd jobs around both places. He left school in the fifth grade and spent the better part of his life working with his hands — farming, cutting timber, manning the machinery at a nearby pulp mill. Edward has always had a way with machinery; he can take apart a tractor or a truck and put it back together again, with no need for a manual or directions.
He was married briefly back in his twenties, but other than that Edward has always lived by himself, though never far from the family. After my father died in the late 1970s, Edward took over looking after my mother, although she really doesn’t need much looking after, even today, at age eighty-four. Just having someone around is good enough, and that’s the way my mother and Edward live, as companions, each with a place, but within a couple of hundred feet of each other’s front door.
On this morning Edward had been picking up tree limbs and branches blown down by a recent windstorm. It had apparently been quite a storm, the way Edward described it. Most people probably would not understand him if they heard him speak. But I’ve been listening to Edward’s voice my entire life, and like everyone else in my family, I have no problem understanding what to a stranger might sound like a series of grunts and moans. As he told me about the windstorm, he made huge sweeping motions with his arms to show the power of the wind and how it
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threw tree limbs against his trailer, rocking his small home with him inside it. Edward is deaf, but as he described the fury of that storm, he squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears, and I could feel it myself.
None of my other brothers or sisters were around when I arrived that morning, although they often are. My younger brother Sammy lives within sight of my mother’s house, as does my brother Grant. My brother Freddie, who lives and works in Detroit, moved his wife and children back here several years ago because he decided, as he watched his children approach their teenage years, that he would rather have them come of age in a setting like this than struggle with the challenges and influences they would face in a large city like Detroit. Freddie remains up north for the time being and commutes as often as he can to the small whitewashed, single-story home where his family now lives, right next door to my mother.
That’s a lot of Lewises right there. Holidays often bring in the others: my sister Ora, from Detroit; my brother Adolph, from Fort Lauderdale; William, from Detroit; Ethel, who lives just across the county, south of Troy; and finally the youngest, my sister Rosa, who comes all the way from her home in Richmond, California.
It’s quite a crowd when we all get together, along with our spouses and children. The energy, the closeness, the comfort — there really is nothing in the world like family. When I come home like this, I’m not a congressman anymore making speeches on national television. Nor am I a civil rights warrior quoted in history books. Or a “living saint,” as Time magazine once called me years ago, to the unending amusement of my closest friends. No, by the time I step onto my mother’s front porch, all those labels have faded away and I’m just plain Robert again, third oldest of Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis’s ten children.
My mother has never been a large woman. And when she steps out onto the porch of her home to greet me, those soft eyes of hers smiling as warmly as her mouth, she looks smaller than ever. That’s because the house she now lives in looks so large compared to where she had been living for years. It’s a new house, built just the summer before last, against her protests. She was perfectly happy in the small, simple cinder-block place my father put up for the both of them back in the 1960s, after the house I was raised in was torn down to make way for a new county road.
For years after my father passed away, my brothers and sisters and I urged my mother to allow us to sell some of the timber on those 110 acres and use the money to build a new home for her. Every time we would bring it up my mother would shake her head. No, she would say, you all may need that wood someday. Besides, she would add, she was perfectly happy in the place my father had built. This was the home she knew. This was the life she knew. Why change it?
Change, as I learned back when I was growing up, was not something my parents were ever very comfortable with. And who could blame them? They, like hundreds of thousands — no, millions — of black men and women of their generation, worked harder than seemed humanly possible, under circumstances more
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difficult than most Americans today could possibly imagine, to carve out a life for themselves and their children in a society that saw them as less than fully human. Theirs was, as the Bible says, a straight and narrow way. There was little room for change in the world my parents knew, and what change there was was usually for the worse. It’s not hard to understand at all the mixture of fear and concern they both felt as they watched me walk out into the world as a young man and join a movement aimed, in essence, at turning the world they knew upside down.
In the same way, it is not hard to understand why it took some doing to get my mother to allow us to build her this house. What finally turned the trick, I think, was pointing out how exceptionally large her family had grown, with all those children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There simply wasn’t room in her old place for all these people to fit, so, finally, she relented. The house — a simple, well-built, brick ranch-style home — was finished in the early summer of 1996, and we had a gathering there, a christening of sorts, that Fourth of July… Independence Day.
My mother had been in her new house only two months when I arrived on this Sunday morning. The place still had a newness about it, though she had been doing her best to break it in. The kitchen, for example, is 1990s all the way, bright and sparkling, from the cabinets — more space there than she’d ever had before — to the appliances. But the food simmering in the pots on that shiny modern range was the same food I grew up on, the same food my mother has always had ready for whoever might drop in. Boiled short ribs. Collard greens. Sweet potatoes. Cornbread. Good food. Soul food, in every sense of the phrase.
It’s fitting that we honored this house and my mother on Independence Day. No word better describes her than independent. She still cooks, cleans, tends her garden and cares for most of her needs herself. She still worships the ideal of good, hard work as if it were a religion. She picked her first cotton as a young girl, in the early 1920s, when Calvin Coolidge was president, and she was still picking it half a century later when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Hard to believe, but at sixty-two my mother was still out in the fields, a sack over her shoulder, pulling those soft, white puffs with her long, hard fingers.
I hated picking cotton, and not just for what it was — literally backbreaking labor: planting, picking, chopping, fertilizing, row after row, often on your hands and knees, from one end of a field to the other, sunup to sundown, year in and year out, the blazing Alabama sun beating down so hard you’d give everything you owned for a little piece of shade and something cool to drink.
I hated the work itself, but even more than that, from a very early age I realized and resented what it represented: exploitation, hopelessness, a dead-end way of life. Imagine how much cotton must be picked to total a hundred pounds. Imagine a man picking a little over two hundred pounds in a day, and his wife, working right beside him, picking almost that much. Imagine that their payment at the end of that day is thirty-five cents per hundred pounds, or a total of $1.40 for four hundred pounds of cotton — a fifth of a ton for less than two dollar bills.
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Now stop imagining. Those numbers are precisely what my mother and father were picking and earning at the time I was born.
We used to have arguments, my parents and I, about this kind of life, this kind of work. As soon as I was old enough to make sense of the world around me, I could see that there was no way a person could get ahead as a tenant farmer. One step forward and two steps back, that’s what that way of life looked like to me. Every spring you would literally put your life — your family’s life — on the line, looking at the coming year of planting and growing and harvesting crops, borrowing up front against the unpredictable disasters of disease, or bad weather, or dipping prices at the marketplace, or simply being cheated at the other end by the man who bought whatever crop you were finally able to harvest — the same man who loaned you the money to plant it in the first place. How could anyone get ahead in a system like that?
Working for nothing, that’s what I would tell my mother we were doing.
Gambling is what I would call it. I know it upset her and my father. My brothers and sisters, too, were bothered by my grumbling and complaining as we worked our way through each day in the fields that surrounded our house. I carried my load, I did my duties, but I also spoke my mind, and even today my mother shakes her head at what an irritating habit that was.
“I don’t care how good a person can work” is how my mother puts it. “If he talks against work, that gets to be kind of an aggravating thing. It kind of affects your spirit.”
My mother knows what she’s talking about when she speaks about spirit. She’s got more spiritual strength than any other person I have ever known, and that is no small statement, considering that this same strength of the spirit was at the center of the civil rights movement, fueling so many of the remarkable men and women with whom I became involved in that time of sweeping change. Nothing can break you when you have the spirit. We proved that in Nashville and Birmingham and Montgomery and Selma. But my mother and father and so many like them proved it long before my generation was even born. To understand the spirit that brought thousands of people just like me to those spotlighted stages of protests and marches, I am convinced it is necessary to understand the spirit that carried people like my mother — simple people, everyday people, good, honest, hardworking people — through lives that never made headlines but were the wellspring for the lives that did.