Stephen Cranes" classic, “The Red Badge of Courage,” will always be one of my favorites because I lived through some of the experiences, sort of. Like many a boy born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I felt stuck away in that corner of God's Country and had the urge to travel. After doing so, most people realize what they had and return quickly, but I was not so lucky.
So a friend and I drove to Southern California in 1963, struck East from there, and after days of driving through the southwest wastelands, woke up on what seemed to be another planet, the lush green of Louisiana. We stopped for gas and a bathroom break along a wooded stretch of highway and I was confronted with my first “colored” only bathroom, jolting me into the realization of the segregated South.
I dropped my friend off in Jackson, Mississippi three days after Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in that fair city, and drove on to Huntsville, Alabama. I was in that fair city for two weeks when I heard about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four little girls. So, after a couple more weeks, I moved to Birmingham, which up to that time was a hotbed of racial tensions after Martin Luther King had lead demonstrations.
After hearing almost daily reports of National Guard mobilizations and violence in the streets, Birmingham was relatively calm on the surface after the church bombing. It seems surreal how the cowardly destruction caused by a bomb, and the killing of innocents, can defuse generational tensions and cause people to stop and think seriously about what was happening in their lives.
For some reason I thought it would be safer to sleep over night in my car near a National Guard Armory. As dusk descended, I continued reading “The Red Badge of Courage,” immersed in the vivid detail and description of this war time classic. It was my first night in Birmingham, and I was almost certain that as I read, I could see Rebel soldiers advancing on my position, darting from tree to tree, outside the Armory fence, guarded by silent jeeps and personnel carriers. As night fell, my imagination was forcibly shut down when it got too dark and I had to close my book.
After an hour or so of sleeplessness, cars began driving into the darkened parking lot behind me, with their eerie headlight beams reflecting off the tall broadleaf trees, and then shutting down punctuated by a “Rebel Yell” or two. After a while I ventured out to view the mobilization, which turned out to be a teenage dance and my first real exposure to the “unwashed masses” of the Deep South. They turned out to be just like kids anywhere, except for this propensity to yell all the time.
I found when traveling to new places, one of the best ways to meet people was at church, so I made acquaintance with a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, his family and parishioners. (I had never even heard of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church before.) These folks invited me to stay at their house until I decided where my “quest” would take me, and I began a relationship that lasted throughout my stay in the South, thus more exposure to the “masses” in the Deep South, although these folks bathed regularly. This was an all-white congregation of people with deeply held religious convictions, whose faith had recently been challenged by blacks who were stepping outside their traditional societal roles, and they weren't sure what to do.
My first job selling encyclopedias landed me in jail for a couple hours in a small town outside Birmingham, for selling door-to-door after dark, an ordinance with which I was not familiar. Fortunately, they gave me a cell by myself, while the “unwashed” down the hall wanted to know what I was in for, and when I said soliciting, I think they got the wrong idea. The manager was picked up an hour or so later, and there he found me lying on my bunk reading my sample encyclopedia. Shortly thereafter I found another job, which was as a manager trainee in a low priced dry goods store located in the middle of downtown.
I had since found lodging in a workingman's boarding house, near the campus of Birmingham Southern College, providing more exposure to the “unwashed masses,” and I was hard at work preparing for the Christmas rush at the Top Dollar Store. It was a few weeks after the church bombing, which had served to quiet things down, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
I was ordering lunch at a nearby sandwich shop when I heard the announcement of the shooting. A broad, and I believe unconscious grin, crossed the face of the young lady behind the counter who was taking my order, and the level of nervous chatter in the shop rose several decibels. White people laughed and joked with one another, in a kind of emotional release after several years of perceived harassment by the president and his brother Bobby Kennedy, then Attorney General, challenging their racial traditions.
The guys at the boarding house were hooting and hollering, with exclamations like, “They finally got him,” or “I wish it had been me.” After several days though most of them seemed to be quite thoughtful and introspective about all the violence, and as Kennedy was being buried, several were contrite about the manner in which he died.
A few days before the Draft Board found me to say my six-month draft deferment was up, I was asked to give the annual “young people's” sermon at the church I had continued to attend. My message laid out the way I saw how the Bible taught about love, compassion and equality, closing with, “if you claim to be a believer in Jesus Christ, then social and racial equality must be part of your world view and belief system.”
A light of understanding seemed to go off in the eyes of some of the all-white congregation, while I saw a grimace of hate and rejection reflected in the countenances of others. The next day my draft notice arrived, so I quit my job, sold the little blue Simca that had brought me South, paid off a couple of bills and bought a bus ticket back to Seattle before the next weekend. So my tiny contribution to racial harmony in the Deep South was over and I was home before I could become a casualty of the racial strife of the '60s. I later found out they were killing people for saying what I said in that sermon that Sunday.
