My Time in Alabama
By Tom Wade
Untitled (Walking Through a Field), Edward Mitchell Bannister (ca. 1870s)
I
I left home for the second and final time with my great uncle, a retired priest in his nineties. By the end of the day, we’d arrived in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The used Volkswagen Beetle I had acquired a month before, in early 1972, began misfiring on the drive. I presumed a defective spark plug needed replacing. Though I had saved enough to get by for several months, I chafed at the unexpected expense of a tune-up. I dropped my uncle off at the Fayetteville airport, and he took a flight from there to Hot Springs where he would play the horses for a week. I went from the airport to visit my friend Tommy.
My final destination was Forest Home, Alabama, the headquarters of the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association. I had learned about this organization from Harry, a former colleague I had served with in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) for a year in Georgia. When he left, he volunteered with the GPA, an organization aiming to unionize pulpwood cutters, some of the South’s most destitute workers. Despite a frustrating eighteen months as a poverty volunteer, I embraced the opportunity to work with this upstart enterprise.
I arranged to spend the weekend with Tommy and his wife, Carole, before continuing to Alabama for two months with the GPA. Tommy, a law school student and former civil rights activist, had organized cooperatives for four or five years in the North Georgia mountains, where I met him.
After hearing about my faltering car, Tommy took me to a garage where his brother (a graduate student) worked as a mechanic. His brother told me the car needed a tune-up, which I had foreseen and agreed to. While I hated paying for it, I figured addressing that annoyance would relieve one headache. But the stopover didn’t get better.
That weekend, I met Tommy’s dad, or his “old man,” as he called him, and a couple of their friends. From one of his old man’s anecdotes, I became versed in the provenance of the LD (Limp Dick) Club of Russellville, Arkansas. But I kept quiet, not having a story-telling bent (or arresting experiences). Despite the company, I grew lonely, like an outsider. I worried they would regard me as aloof or shy.
Tommy had heard about the GPA and knew a couple of its organizers. Sunday evening, he called one of them who lived in Jackson, Mississippi. The prospect of getting inside information excited me. After ten minutes on the phone, he returned to where I sat in the living room with an uneasy expression. Bill, the organizer, informed him the association had fallen into internal conflict. James Simmons, the president, ran the operation in Alabama, and the other organizers, including Bill, worked with the chapters in Mississippi. He urged Tommy to send me to see him before going to Alabama. Although I hesitated, Tommy convinced me a brief stop wouldn’t hurt. The next day, on the way to Jackson, the VW engine began misfiring again a few miles beyond Fayetteville. I had wasted my money and fretted over what lay ahead.
II
I found Bill’s house in a working-class Jackson neighborhood. He greeted me with a friendly handshake. He was in his late twenties, had light blond hair, and a smooth Southern accent. He introduced me to his wife, who grew up in Delaware and came to the South as a VISTA volunteer. Although Bill had requested that I stop by, his wife hadn’t counted on my coming at suppertime. She apologized for having liver for dinner, but her inflection sounded more irritable than contrite. I interpreted her apology as masking a complaint about having to feed me, creating a discomfort I did my best to hide. Bill elaborated on what Tommy had reported, and he added a refrain that would be repeated over the coming twenty-four hours: only Southerners can effectively organize in the rural South. Interlopers can’t do the job.
The following morning, I went to Laurel and, over the day, saw three more individuals involved with the association. The first person was a young guy about my age, in his early twenties. We chatted for an hour before he had to leave. I mentioned that I came from Missouri. I don’t recall his phrasing, but he alluded to how this work required someone from the region. Still, he seemed pleased to hear I grew up on a farm, as he did. I had lunch with another organizer, a former postal employee who had attended Southern Mississippi University for a year or two. In his mid-twenties, he didn’t hold back on his criticism of outsiders working as field staff in the Southern labor movement—“I can’t see how someone from New York can organize in Mississippi. It seems they should work in New York.” He spotted collards on the menu and raved about how he enjoyed a good plate of greens. I probably had a sandwich. I did not have collard greens.
After lunch, I returned to the headquarters house to meet Bob Zellner, a well-known civil rights activist. He was dressed in a plaid short-sleeve shirt, slate gray slacks, and brown cowboy boots, looking more like a real estate agent than a dissident. I gave a quick rundown of my day, and I don’t remember him offering any additional information. He invited me to go with him to “wet a hook,” but I begged off the fishing trip, saying I had to get on the road. It was late afternoon and a three-hour drive to Forest Home, but another concern stemmed from his suggestion to go fishing. Having fished only two or three times in my life, once as a five-year-old, lures, casting rods, and bait intimidated me. Our conversation lasted less than thirty minutes.
As I navigated the unfamiliar roads to Forest Home, I fixated on the detour to Jackson and Laurel. Though cordial, the Mississippi organizers offered no signs of acceptance (should I have gone fishing with Zellner?). In my swirling thoughts, unappetizing liver segued into bitter collard greens; the tongue-tied visitor in Arkansas melded into the unwilling angler. How will I get this hiccupping car repaired? I brooded. I got to Forest Home, tired from the drive and tense from the idea of going to work for an unstable organization. Harry greeted me when I pulled in.
III
Harry grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. A rangy, former William and Mary basketball player with ruddy-cheeked good looks, he had a quiet, earnest demeanor punctuated with a sense of humor that charmed and engaged most people. Though not close, he and I respected one another. That evening, I revealed I had encountered the Mississippi organizers, downplaying the content of our conversations. He wasn’t pleased.
Harry introduced me to James Simmons, who reminded me of a particular type of farmer who presented himself as a manager rather than a tiller. He had a deep voice; his drawl twisted his utterances into what I first thought was a speech impediment, his words clipped and nasally. Simmons stood a little over six feet and weighed over two hundred pounds. A big guy, as a younger man he would have been a powerful athlete, but now he bore a middle-aged paunch that softened his physique, stretching his shirt over his belt buckle. Simmons wore a uniform of khaki pants and white shirts. In his forties, he had lost all the hair on the top of his head, yielding a blond ring below the crown.
Simmons didn’t smile often, but when he did, it had a stingy aspect, as if, forced to part his lips, he didn’t want to show his teeth. His blue eyes had the same piercing color as my dad’s, evoking another similarity—while James verbalized more than my dad, they each kept their distance. Gazing at his fleshy face, I couldn’t discern if he was angry, uninterested, or content. However, I quickly learned that the intonation of his speech revealed his sentiments and unvoiced opinions.
Within a day or two, I became aware of Simmons and Harry’s take on the schism in the association. The gist was Zellner and company lied and took credit for the organization James had built. Cognizant that communications with them had ceased months earlier, I anticipated displeasure toward the other side, but not to the level of hostility Simmons displayed. He recounted anecdotes ridiculing their sexual competence and their organizing wherewithal. His ad hominem attacks stunned me. While Simmons didn’t make eye contact, I caught furtive, darting glances in my direction that caused my face to flush and my hands to sweat. I became consumed with the impression that he’d marked me as an ally of Zellner’s.
Simmons had constructed a Jim Walter prefab house about fifty feet from his home, where Harry and another staffer resided. The other person, a conscientious objector assigned to the Southern Conference Education Fund, the entity providing most of the support for the GPA, including organizers and publicity, spent his days typing a mailing list of supporters. I slept on the couch because they had only two beds, but Harry indicated a bed would become available when the conscientious objector completed his obligation in a couple of weeks. However, just before the typist left, I learned another volunteer, a freshman at Antioch College, would be coming. He got the bed, and I languished on the old, frayed couch, moldy, with crumbs between the cushions.
Although I seldom interacted with Simmons the first few weeks, he did allow me to accompany him and Harry to chapter meetings, call on members, and attend gatherings of local civil rights organizations and Black churches. We rode in a roomy, late-1960s car with a white body and emerald-green roof. I sat in the back, listening but not invited into the conversation, like a private in the presence of a general and his favorite lieutenant.
IV
I recall coming across just two white pulpwood cutters in our travels through the Alabama pine lands. One owned two trucks and had a crew of workers. He had been active in the association for three or four years. A pamphlet from 1970 claimed the GPA had a membership of about six thousand with a sixty percent-forty percent Black-white split. Yet James acknowledged that by my time there, Blacks constituted ninety percent of the active members. James didn’t air racist positions, but some of his political preferences and personal choices mystified me, not jibing with his position as the head of a union with a multitude of Black members.
Like my favorite uncle in Missouri, Simmons believed in the segregationist George Wallace, the former governor and then-current presidential candidate. He maintained Wallace brought credit to the state and could solve the country’s problems.
Simmons hired a woman who lived nearby to cook and clean their house. I guessed her age at around thirty. Self-effacing, she broke her silence only when she responded “Yes sir” or “No sir” to our directives or questions. Dark-skinned and stout, she stayed in the background. In rare moments, I wondered why Simmons never acknowledged her as more than a menial, but I knew better. Black servants manifested status. I seldom thought about her situation other than she needed the work. In my recollection, adopting Simmons’s lead, we treated her like a piece of furniture.
Her son, thin with protruding front teeth, was the same age as James’s oldest boy and served as his companion. He often shared a tractor seat with the skinny Simmons boy while the Simmons kid plowed a field. Like the other Black children and many adults in the area, he stared at the ground when I, or any other white adult, spoke to him. He delivered his monosyllabic responses in a soft, almost inaudible voice. Witnessing this degrading behavior unsettled me, and I avoided him. While in the late afternoons and on Saturdays, he and the Simmons kid spent hours together in the field, they didn’t attend the same school during the week. Simmons and his wife placed their children in the all-white Christian school, like the other white parents. Their side-stepping of integration made me feel squeamish. I chalked it up to a reality I couldn’t fathom and tried not to think or talk about.
While I attributed these instances of racial callousness to upbringing and place, James bemused me by not fitting my stereotypes. He revered Wallace but didn’t hesitate to support Charles Evers, the first Black mayor in Mississippi and brother of slain civil rights icon Medgar Evers, for governor of Mississippi. James didn’t hesitate to speak at Black churches or fish fries in Lowndes or Marengo Counties about the importance of the listeners getting their fair share. He didn’t hesitate to go on a fund-raising trip to Chicago with two Black pulpwood cutters and two Black family members, the five of them relating their stories and seeking support for the association. At times, I thought Simmons’s actions disingenuous, the pulpwood cutters providing a backdrop for his ambitions. However, for the most part, I found his inconsistency bewildering, thus complicating my attempts to mollify my misgivings about his leadership, not to mention my struggle for acceptance.
V
I encountered only one friend of James’—a white man who grew up with him who found work as a jack-of-all-trades. In a chat he and I had on a sultry afternoon in the prefab office, he asserted that while James was hardheaded, a person could work with him if they figured out what he was after. With the sober countenance of a professor, he leaned back in his chair as I puzzled over why he made such a banal point. After a short while, Simmons entered and sat on the couch. His buddy had a proposal: if Simmons put up money to purchase a few hogs, the friend would raise them, and they would split the proceeds from selling them. James agreed to the two-minute porcine pitch without asking a question.
Small adjustments on my part— glossing over minor complaints such as the dirty couch I slept on and making supportive gestures like giving affirming nods and exhibiting attentiveness—patched up some of the holes in my relationship with Simmons. Though a person with a large ego, he didn’t require us to kowtow, relieving me of blatant sycophancy.
In the first part of each day, I attended to written inquiries and donations and took phone calls. In the evenings, I went to meetings. But my routine changed when I got on a big John Deere tractor with a disc plow attached and plowed a small plot of land for Simmons. His twelve-year-old rode with me to a field where I disked the dry, sandy dirt, likely getting it ready to plant cotton. I’m not sure why Simmons made the request. I supposed he had fallen behind in his planting schedule. The next day, James described his son’s startled reaction to my skill at driving a tractor. Hearing this account, I saw I had also impressed James, which baffled me. Why the surprise? Where I came from, farm boys mastered this task by the fifth grade.
Over the ensuing weeks, I plowed parcels scattered over the thousand acres he owned. I remember once James brought me lunch in the field, and I asked if the yellow glob on the Styrofoam plate was squash. He said, “Yep,” and added, in a warm murmur thatI recognized it because I came from the country. Squash was never on my family’s dinner table or the tables of any of my country relatives or friends. Yet, at that moment, I grasped the crucial factor in my favor: my rural upbringing.
I didn’t ask for it, but he paid me minimum wage, writing checks from funds in a Voter Education Project account. Taken aback when I saw the fund source on my first check, I mused over what, if any, stipulations were attached to these monies. I wasn’t involved in voter education. Although I received less than a hundred dollars altogether, my qualms didn’t allow me to divulge the origin of my wages to anyone. With payments in hand, I perceived my place not as an organizer but as a field hand.
Once established, I stood in Simmons’s good graces, despite the occasional misstep. For instance, on an errand to Montgomery, I drove one of James’s old cars, and the transmission went out about forty or fifty miles up the interstate. James sent a guy in a pickup to pull the vehicle home. But before hooking it up, he got in the car, turned on the ignition, and put it in gear. The moving vehicle dumbfounded me. Though glad we would not need to tow it, I became nervous about how James would react. I felt inept and foolish.
The next day, James sat down with us at the breakfast table, his pale brow wrinkled. In a quiet delivery, he said we wasted time on a nonexistent problem the day before. I cocked my eyes to observe him glaring out the window as he admonished me, clenching his jutting jaw after having his say. His tan cheeks tinged with pink. My head filled with confused babbling, out of which I relived the demeaning scoldings I got when I disappointed my dad. I grew dizzy, and my stomach churned. Straining to regain my composure, I mumbled an excuse and returned to my eggs and grits.
VI
During the last two or three weeks of my stay, James offered to spruce up an old house on his property, saying, “you and your girlfriend can live there.” I declined without uttering “no,” noting I had to return to school. But his overture stirred a reaction, evoking my teen years hauling hay for my favorite uncle and in the evenings sitting in the kitchen with him, my aunt, and sometimes their family and friends, uninhibited by my shyness. Despite our differences, my uncle, the Wallace devotee, didn’t treat me like a know-nothing, lefty kid. While he and I didn’t have a similar bond, James’s invitation contained a subtle enticement I couldn’t explain.
James said several times he knew I would leave and not get back in touch. “He’ll get busy and won’t write or call,” he said, addressing, in my presence, his five-year-old “chap,” as he called his children. His melancholy tone, belying his dispassionate expression, made me ill at ease. I protested (and believed) that I would remain in contact.
On a late spring morning, I drove away in the sputtering VW. I had intended to keep my promise to call or write. But as the decades passed, I didn’t attempt to reach James. I had excuses: school, marriage, work, kids. Not a phone call or a single letter.