A story my father never told me ‘til today.
My father and I stayed at the Comfort Inn. When we awoke the next morning we found ourselves with very little to do, as the ceremony wasn’t until 5 p.m.[14] I decided to try and find a decent paper, at least so that I might better pass the time hanging out in the hotel’s breakfast bar.
This was a mistake. Not a serious mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. It turns out that while it is possible to obtain a decent paper in Newnan Georgia, doing so requires either the use of the car or the kind of suburban hiking that involves a non-trivial risk to life and limb. Such as one might incur while walking, for lack of a sidewalk, in the drainage verge of a state highway. Thankfully I was wearing boots, and so protected against chiggers, poison ivy, and copperheads.
I’m kidding about the copperheads. I didn’t see any snakes.
I’m not kidding about the chiggers or the poison ivy.
Despite the wildlife, I was able to procure a New York Times. On the first day. On the second day – Sunday – I had rather less luck. Not that anyone at either RaceTrack or Barnes&Noble could explain to me why, precisely, I might find it difficult to procure a Times on a Sunday morning in a small town in Georgia.
Perhaps they thought I was just another carpet-bagging dipshit, unsatisfied with the Journal-Constitution. [15]
Or perhaps they were ignorant crackers. Who wouldn’t know the Sabbath if it came up and walloped them upside the head with a “no booze on the Lord’s Day you sinning son of a bitch!” Carrie Nation-type admonition. Which is to say, maybe the Times simply doesn’t deliver outside the Atlanta metro on Sundays.
It must have been the attempt at walking in a pedestrian-hostile environment that made me cranky. Perhaps if I had done what I was supposed to do – sit in the hotel lobby and fatten myself on Belgian waffles spread with margarine and maple-flavored, caramel-colored corn syrup, washed down with reconstituted orange juice and the kind of coffee described by Orwell in 1984, all while listening to Matt Lauer or Glenn Beck or whoever tell me what I’m supposed to think about the news of the day – I would have been contentedly uncritical.
But I digress.
My father and I finished our Times and found ourselves with rather little to do. I suggested we try to find decent coffee. My father proposed that we drive towards the interstate and stake out a Starbucks. I demurred, and (this being one of the reasons I had decided to DD) pointed the car instead towards downtown, to search out an independent establishment.
We found one, on the courthouse square, in a space that clearly used to be a dry-goods store[16]. They had a long, low, darkly varnished oak counter, graceful high ceilings, and the kind of distressed brick walls that provide a suitable backdrop for displaying a collection of watercolors drawn from nature. For sale, of course, the proceeds to benefit some local committee or other. Perhaps the Garden Club, now that I think of it.
We sat against the plate-glass window, my father and I, sipping our green-tea frappes and looking out at the statue on the courthouse steps, commemorating the fallen Confederate heros.
And my father told me the story of how he went to a Klan rally, once, in graduate school. As a sociological experiment. An exercise in ethnographic participant-observation, if you will.
It was not a story I had heard before.
I thought I had heard all of my father’s stories.
How the rally was advertised in the paper (this being 1967, in North Carolina), which was how he found out about it in the first place. How it was advertised as a family event and, yes, attendees were encouraged to bring their wives and children. How my father invited all the other graduate students, some of whom even decided this might be a good idea.
But one of whom – an Episcopal priest – pulled him aside and told him that it would be a very bad idea. Not for any deep theoretical or even theological reasons, mind you. Not because to participate in rituals of evil is, in a very basic sense, to reproduce evil. Rather because he suspected that my father and his buddies quite literally had no idea what they were in for.
My father was set on this little adventure. So the priest proceeded to give him some advice; namely that if he wanted to leave, he should say so. That the Klan will always let you leave a rally if you ask.[17]
The merry band of graduate students took two cars. My father drove a ’55 Chevy, with three passengers. Another couple took their VW bug.
This was a mistake. A rather serious mistake, it turns out, compounded by the fact that the husband sported a full, untrimmed beard and the wife wore flip-flops.
As my father and his five friends walked into the rally, the security detail began methodically to thwack their long flashlights into their palms. By the sound of the metal against flesh, so my father reports, one could tell they were weighted with lead.
They then threaded their way into the crowd towards the front of the stage. Along about this time, they evidently made their second mistake. They forgot to clap.
This was the most serious mistake of all. That’s when the beating started.
In his attempts to make it back to the entrance – blocked by a human wall of security guards – my father got separated from his friends. However, he remembered the priest’s advice. And the second he said the magic words “I want to leave,” the wall opened (in his words, “the seas parted”) and he was allowed to walk through, unmolested, to safety.
My father went straight to a state trooper – parked in his car near the entrance so as to better “secure peace and order,” presumably – to report that his friends were being beaten inside the rally. The trooper did not even acknowledge my father’s presence in this world, much less his complaint. It was the reporter from the Daily Tar Heel who, overhearing my father’s pleadings and calling for his fellow photographer, yelled something like “Come quick! Someone’s being beaten inside!” This caused a change of heart in the men guarding the gate, who let the hippies on through.
Like all family stories, this one comes with a lesson: when at a Klan rally, clap as loudly as you can.
This is not the real lesson, of course.
The real lesson remained unspoken, and did not hit me until later. It is the kind of lesson that, to the degree that it can be taught at all, must be taught sotto voce. Such as an Episcopal priest might adopt when pulling aside a fellow Christian for pastoral counseling before our Christian friend goes out to witness some of the darkest rituals in the contemporary repertoire of evil. Sotto voce, because to articulate the meaning bald-facedly would be to put the wrong spin on the moral, would be to focus on a few not quite entirely extraneous aspects: “the Klan will always let you leave if you ask,” “when at a Klan rally, clap as loudly as you can” – these fly rather far from the mark, though they are neither untrue nor, for that matter, unhelpful.
In fact, even to give such advice in so many words is to render those words implausibly ridiculous. Who among us, in this day and age, expect to find ourselves at a Klan rally? Speaking personally and just for myself: if I have any say in the matter at all, I do not intend ever to be in the kind of situation where such advice may be helpful.
That I cannot imagine being, willfully, in the kind of situation where such advice would be useful should connote, more than anything else, the degree to which the lesson of this particular story is troubling. It should connote, in other words, not the degree to which this advice is “useful,” but rather the degree to which this advice is not something I am interested in hearing.
In fact, and more troublingly, this lesson may not admit of learning expect through experience. My father was told what to expect – by a man of God, no less – and still he went into the mouth of the beast.
I was in that kind of situation too, once. For four years running.
The lesson that I learned from those four years – the lesson which my father did not try to articulate to me until I myself had escaped the net of evil – was what I took away from my time in Texas. When I say I’m not sorry I lived there but I thank God every day that He let me leave, people always look at me with a cocked eye. Because it sounds ridiculous to attempt to say it more precisely: that Texas is designed, with care and exactitude, for people like me. And that it was in rejecting that apparatus of privilege that I kept (for now at least) possession of my soul. It doesn’t quite make sense when I try to explain that, for instance, sure Texas is “homophobic,” but that’s not really the point. It’s the racial, gender, and class privileges that are so poisonous. That the people with whom I dealt on a day-to-day basis did not care, really did not care, that I slept with a man. And that while that was nice and all, it didn’t make up for everything else. It didn’t make up for the fact that living there involved substantial privileges, privileges that I rejected, specifically and with full knowledge of the consequences: resigning a tenure-track position at a Research I university, abandoning mineral rights to a property at ground zero of a natural gas boom, walking away from an easy avenue into a political career, declining a potential offer of membership at a country club, resigning the chairship of the Christian education committee at my church. All of these privileges, and more[18], were offered to me. Privileges for which I had merely to clap my hands and they would appear, like dishes on a silver platter.
So.
The lesson, ladies and gentlemen, is this. If you ever find yourself at a Klan rally, you have two options: start clapping, or leave. Because there is only one way in which Klan rallies ever end. And either you participate in that ending, or you reject it. If you elect to clap, start clapping like there is no fucking tomorrow, because they’re watching. And if you’re not clapping, there are always the flashlights weighted with lead. If you elect to leave, don’t expect to do it by the back door. Because if you are there of your own volition, then you came by the front door. Which means you leave by the front door. And that means that you have to own, publicly, the fact that you want to leave. They’ll let you – you – leave. Maybe not your friends, but you. But you have to ask. You have to tell the man, to his face, “I want to leave.”
As goes without saying, this advice does not apply to everyone. Sorry.
What does one do, upon the receipt of such advice?
My father and I got up to leave the coffeehouse, to go attend my cousin’s wedding at the First Methodist Church of Newnan.
Before we did so, he remarked upon how much he liked the art. In particular, he drew my attention to one piece that portrayed a woman, seated upon the ground, facing away from the viewer and looking back towards a gate that leads to a path overgrown with wisteria. I agreed that it was the best of the bunch, noting that it was thematically similar to a piece by an artist whose name escaped me at the moment, of a woman in a similar position, on a sloped field of ripe wheat, and at the top of a hill in the background there was a weatherbeaten house.
Without missing a beat, my father said “Wyeth. You’re thinking of Andrew Wyeth. And you’re right, this is the Southern version of that.”[19]
My father plays a good game as redneck labor thug, but every so often the cultural capital sneaks out before he can hide it.
[14] In the immortal words of the bride’s mother: why on earth didn’t they move it up an hour? They then could have made it a nuts and mints reception.
[15] Random “fun fact”: The Uncle Remus stories were first serialized by a white reporter in one of the predecessor papers to the AJC.
[16] Espresso Lane (http://www.espressolanenewnan.com/home.html). Voted by the readers of Lifestyles Magazine to be the best coffee in the Southern Arc. Wondering what the Southern Arc is? That would be Carroll, Douglas, Coweta, Fayette, Clayton, and Henry counties. Or in other words, the southern exurban ring of Atlanta. The fact that my instincts led me straight to this place says, I think, something about the mystical workings of cultural capital.
[17] By “you,” of course, he evidently referred only to whites, such as my father. I don’t know if it was this same conversation, or some other, that my father mentioned to the priest that he had one great-grandmother of uncertain racial heritage. The priest stated in reply that if he thought he had one single drop of black blood running through his veins, he would eat his Colt.
[18] This “and more” might best be summed up by the phrase “Don’t leave. We’ll find you a new friend!”
[19] Christina’s World: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina’s_World.
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