Lobsters, Christmas Trees, and Sparkles Star in the New Saga of the Deep South

NEW ORLEANS--These days we youth take over buildings, we evict deans, we do verbal war with our mentors. So it goes. We didn't always play these games in particular. A long time ago before the current era and before the Age of the Hippies and Flower Children there was the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was the far-flung expedition of northern liberalism (a fine thing in those days). It was, as we all know, the first domino to fall in the chain reaction that led youth to the state of "revolution" we're in now. But there are two things about the Civil Rights Movement. First, it was an experience shared by a very small number of youths. Even at the peak of the movement there couldn't have been over a couple of thousand white northern kids actually living and working in the South. Secondly, that was all a long time ago. The Civil Rights workers were college students then. They've almost all (except for a few press-publicized movement "leaders") grown up and gotten married or something. They've drifted away. Hardly any of the new generation of rabble rousers have ever had anything to do with that meritorious Civil Rights Movement in the South.

As we were driving through the South during the past week, I could taste the glory and respectability of the old civil rights days. Parents, teachers, ministers lauded us for going down there. Life magazine spoke of heroism. When we were murdered by police, the vast majority of adults in this country turned purple with unspeakable outrage. They loved us then. And now? In our latest adventure they brought the police on us themselves, ca va.

The Civil Rights Movement benefited more the northerners involved than it uplifted oppressed Negroes (as they were called). Very little of southern life was changed in return for the vast amount of energy the crusaders put into getting there. Imagine how much money the tens of thousands of people who came down for the Selma march in 1965 spent on gasoline, motel rooms, airplane tickets, restaurants. Millions of dollars, and the cops got the firehoses out as soon as they left.

I, as Fate willed, worked for The Southern Courier, the civil rights newspaper, during its first two summers in '65 and '66. The Southern Courier represented the ultimate effort of white liberal evangelism. Started by some Harvard CRIMSON editors and funded by a lot of liberal people and their organizations in the Northeast, it was an attempt to expose what was wrong with what true with the understood result that the governmental system would then have to correct itself.

The Courier finally folded last November after it had become clear to its editor that it was hopeless to keep on trying for any further political change to stop discrimination. The newspaper wasn't a very effective weapon in pragmatic politics. The Courier, and the Civil Rights Movement, in general, brought about a great new cultural awareness, but didn't change the hands of the power.

One of the reasons Mike Lottman, who was the editor, gave for closing down the over-indebted Courier was that the Federal Government, the organization which should be most responsive, was behind the worst discrimination. Take, for example, Macon Country, an Alabama country which is 85 per cent back. For years whites held all the elected positions. Then, with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement, Negroes started working their way into the system. It was Macon County that elected the first black sheriff ever (or since reconstruction) in the South. (His name was Lucius Amerson. It got lots of New York Times coverage when it happened. It also turned out what he wasn't much better than the white guys, but you'd have to know the South to understand that.)

In Macon County, as in all other farming regions in the South, one of the most decisive government agencies in farmers' lives in the ASCS committee (part of the department of Agriculture, I believe). The ASCS tells farmers the quotas that limit how many acres they can plant with cotton and other crops. With whites controlling the committees, the big white farmers got as large a cotton allotment as they wanted while the Negroes, usually with much smaller farms, had to make it all balance by having their allotments shaved. Often Negroes are tenant farmers on a white man's land; so if they tried to complain, call in surveyors, and that sort of thing, the white man would kick them off his land. Evicted negro farmers would band together and live in "tent cities" with only patchwork canvas for shelter, and they'd slowly starve.

It took the Negroes of Macon County a three-year campaign, which cost $20,000, to finally gain control of the ASCS board in their 85 per cent black county. That was last year. It's the only one like it in the state.

And then there's the more complicated, less conscious evil of the Federal government. The U.S. isn't supposed to do business with companies that discriminate. But they've got contracts up to here with The American Can Company. The American Can Company has its own little company-run town in Bellamy, Alabama. Stores, schools, churches, and neighborhoods are segregated in Bellamy. There's no plumbing in the Negro homes, their streets aren't paved, they get paid less. It's a really tough town. Jim Peppler, the Courier's dare-anything photographer who took pictures of some of the meanest crackers in the state, just drove down the main street of Bellamy shooting his camera from on top the dashboard.

Where the U.S. government does act is in school desegregation. They used to withhold aid from high schools that weren't integrated and now the Federal courts have ordered the Alabama schools to integrate or close down. But Negroes no longer get very excited about going to the white schools. 90 percent of them are still going to all back schools. What the courts will wind up doing is to close down a lot of the really good black schools that just can't get any white kids to come. And the black schools have tried everything to be more attractive to whites. One had this huge statue of Booker T. Washington which they couldn't destroy because it practically held up the whole building; so they plastered it all over.

School desegregation was one of the Civil Rights Movement's greatest targets. Now they don't want it, and it's working against them. Voter registration is another project that used to be really up there.

But that, too, has seen its day. It seems that just about everyone's registered that wants to be. There are over 400 elected Negro officials across the state now (most of these are justices of the peace). But that doesn't seem to change anything. The big hope for the electoral process came in 1966 when Richmond Flowers ran for governor. Negroes put up candidates in more races than they ever have important offices. People don't look to the elections. It was only the most blatant and simple kinds of discrimination that could be undone by such a one-dimensional attack. And it took an unsubtle one-dimensional kind of opposition to convince powers like the U.S. to intervene. Opposition like George Wallace. He was responsible for something no civil rights group could bring about. He got the whole of Alabama under a single statewide school desegregation order from the Federal courts. Everywhere else in the South they have to bring each school to court individually. Wallace, by making his state government the antagonist, simplified everything. Brewer, the new governor, is more sly. And it's very difficult for anything like a "Civil Rights Movement" to get anything done.

I hate the glisteningly white, fat men that waddle through the narrow streets of New Orleans here. They come down from Alabama and Mississippi and upstate Louisiana to do drinking and get in their sin here. They go to strip shows and cackle and burp. They're drunk all the time in an aggressively unfriendly way. They bring their wives some of the time and swap them with their friends. They have Kodaks and stupid shirts and they never smile because they're just incredibly miserable and they come down here to reach new heights in misery. They have short hair, despicably short hair; it makes them look ugly. Sometimes I worry about your friendly suburban northern guys who get caught in the American guys who get caught in the American education system that makes them want to have TV's and stuff. But these guys here as like the evil growling germ itself. They're not the victims, they're the pure essence of unfriendlyness.

A headline from the Meridian Star, Meridian Mississippi:

A GREAT DAY TO BE AN AMERICAN;

NATION'S ENEMIES ON THE RUN AGAIN

In this same paper were editorials in favor of the oil depletion allowance in the Federal income tax, and against efforts to control air pollution.

The clouds here are wonderful. Because of the heat, they are piled up high vertically and the light then hits vertically and the light then hits them at different angles. They look like massive sand castles, and elephants, and horses, and lobsters floating through the sky. Every day like that. Then late in the afternoon, big blue-gray storms start coming up over the delta from the Gulf of Mexico. Then there's thunder and lightning all over the place. Water running down the roof and into your ear. Rain filling up our top down MG until you can float toy boats in it.

There are exactly two different kinds of peoples in the South: those who are just past the rich-enough line so they can have air conditioning in their house, their car, and their office, and those on the other side of the line who have to sweat all the time. The air conditioned ones are fatter, pale, and old. They sweat people are rugged, skinny, and tired but tough. When we were hitchhiking into Montgomery, Ala., the air conditioned guys used to zap by with their windows rolled up not even looking at us, not even looking at anything, not even existing. While we've been in the South, we've stayed places where there's been only fans. It is much better without air conditioning even if you're here in New Orleans where it's ninety something everyday with the humidity so heavy you can touch it in the air. Walking from an air conditioned room outside into the heat and then stepping back into the icebox again gives you headaches, diahhrea, and slothfulness. It feels real good to sweat: your body is keeping you cool the way God wanted it to.

Our fan belt broke outside a town called Monroe, Georgia. No one in town had a fan belt that could fit anything but American cars. (Even Volkswagens were virtually unknown in the South about five years ago.) So we wound up in a Phillips 66 station with a kid trying on all different sized belts until one fit. It took a long time. It also happens that this was the gathering spot of the local youths. In about ten minutes they all came pouring into the gas station with their GTO's and motorcycles. They were looking in at the engine of our MG crowded around until no more could fit. The younger boys, say, fifteen and sixteen, sort of hung around on the second circumference smoking and talking to each other. The older guys had been drinking, and were drinking then in their cars parked around the gas station. It was all pretty groovy, so I sat up on the back of my seat behind the wheel and leaning over the windshield answering questions about origin and destination. They were poking each other after a while and saying coded little things to each other that I really couldn't understand. I think they were making cracks about how they'd like to get the other of us, who is a girl and was standing there looking at the engine equally unable to understand what these funny little southerners were doing. It seems that people in the South like to speak very indirectly and address their remarks to a third person. Pretty crafty of them, but it puts a gap in between you and them. I wanted to ask one of them. I wanted to ask one of them. I wanted to ask one of them if he felt like becoming a hippie.

Mississippi is probably one of the only places left that nature still has control of Most of the land isn't farmed or inhabited, it's just wild jungle. We departed from the main highway and went speding through the night with top off on this up-and-down, curving, two-lane country road. We were going about sixty-five or seventy with the sound of the jungle roaring out at us from both sides. It was either five million grasshoppers rubbing their back legs together at same time or lots of big whooping birds crying into the swamp. The sound was tremendously loud. And we were the only ones on the road just screeching into this darkness and noist, full of lions and tigers whose eyes shone in the night.

This is typical of conversations that you hear all the time down here. This one in particular took place in a food store here in the vieux carre:

"Hot enough for you?"

"What?"

"Hot enough for ya?"

"Yes, it sure is mighty hot."

This is an actual thing that the other of us said right after getting up in the morning:

"I've got a headache. Let's go to the bar."

People come to New Orleans to get drunk. During Mardi Gras they close off the French Quarter and the people swell into the streets. By dawn you can't take a step without crushing a beer can. The Jax beer brewery is right here in the Quarter on the banks of the Mississippi River. Good beer that Jax. And cheap: only thirty cents in most bars. People drink it all the time. Last night I had a dream that the daily afternoon cloud burst happened to be Jax beer this time around. It was a little sticker than the usual rain, but no one in New Orleans was surprised. I can't imagine them ever being surprised.

There are lots of fags and whores in the various bars here. You can tell the fags because they all wear jerseys like the Jefferson Airplane, and they all are together in the same place at the same time having fun and smiling. The whores are all making it up to men in the bars on the stools. You can tell they're whores because they are touching the men, something that the wives never do. I feel a lot of empathy towards the whores and fags because they are oppressed people. Authorities of various badges are always trying to stamp them out and they just want to live their own lives. The worst thing is when other people try to tell you how to live your life.

In Atlanta we stayed with the editors of The Great Speckled Bird, the Hippie, underground LNS paper for there. He lived on 14th Street in Atlanta, the street on which all the hippies live. It's much more difficult being a hippie in the South than it is in the North. In the North the hippies are just normal people like you and me who hold jobs or go to school and just happen to be transcendent in their private lives. There are only about 300 hippies in Atlanta estimates this editor of The Great Speckled Bird friend of ours. The only job any of these people can get is to sell The Great Speckled Bird. They sell 15,000 copies of it every week, which goes to show how many latent hippies there are in Atlanta. They have to make great sacrifices to be what they are. They sleep wall to wall in unclean falling apart houses, all of which are in this one small area of 14th St. because no one else will rent to them. When we first pulled up in front of the Bird's offices, immediately, before we were out of the car, the nearest hippie rushed up to sell us acid-speed-or-hash. It's the first time that's happened since when I was in Casablanca last summer where the incredibly poor arabs kept trying for a cut of your white wealth. The Atlanta guys have reasons to be as desperate.

There are grusome tales in the pages of the Bird, itself, telling how longhaired people get arrested for jaywalking and then thrown in jail. The Bird is now on trial for, of all things, obscenity. I don't have to tell you that this stuff against the Bird is political suppression. But through it all I truly believe that it's the hip cultural movement that's eventually got to save the South. The South so eagerly gobbles up everything that's shiny and new in America. Right now it's Playboy Clubs and Tastees. But they drink our rock music, too. That's where we'll start to get them--through what they think of as being their fun. As soon as we convince them that it's more fun on our side, they'll want to be like us, they'll take drugs, they'll wear clothes like us, and riot at the beach on their spring vacations. The kids will. As soon as they get jobs, they become part of the air conditioned system. But we've all seen how this youth revolution can spread. It sems to be a product of our increasingly dense population that kids are becoming more and more independent. No one can protect themselves from their youths.

They have incredibly antique tax systems everywhere you go here in the South. Mostly a 6 per cent sales tax that covers everything--even food. There's no personal income tax and only low property taxes. Wallace used to attract industry to Alabama by giving them tax-free status for their first five years of operation. All of which is unspeakably hard on the poor for the benefit of the air conditioned ones.

New Orleans gives you the feeling of having the whole United States balancing on your fulcrum. I have a very strong sense of the Mississippi River being the trunk of the America tree. When the country falls over, New Orleans will drift out into the Gulf as the stump.

The military, of course, has tremendous bases all over the South. There's a big Air Force one right across the street from the MG dealer's in Montgomery. Hitchhiking back from picking up a new water pump, we got a ride from a big smiling native Brazilian para-medic in his air conditioned Volkswagen bus with two little children. During the week he flies over to Vietnam and parachutes into the combat areas to save the wounded soldiers. He does stuff for them right there while the shooting is still going on, and then flies all the way back to San Francisco with the men. Sometimes while he's on the job, they live for a while in the Phillipines, Taiwan, and Japan. He's parachuted out of airplanes over 700 times and has 11,000 hours of flying time. It's not too dangerous because they keep in training; they run about ten miles every day. He gave us a ride all the way across town to the highway, smiling and radiating happiness from his own Volkswagen-driving head and from his fidgeting, sun-tanned kids. We were happy to be riding in his Volkswagen. And he was happy to be living in Montgomery and zooming all over the world every week.

We were driving west out highway 80 towards Selma, Alabama, cruising into the sunset. Every town we passed through had been the scene of adventures four years earlier when I had been on the Courier. I remember that every time we went out to dig up information on a story I was sure we were going to be shot. Civil Rights workers were murdered all the time in '66. A lady from Detroit, Mrs. Luizzo, had been killed in 1965 near Selma for riding in a car with some Negro guys. On my first story for the Courier, I and another guy were jumped by three men who tried to beat us up. We used to be stopped all the time by the local police, who committed most of the CR murders. But the biggest change now is probably in us. Even with our hair, which seems to bother them, we're not afraid of anybody