MY STUMBLES THROUGH THE SIXTIES AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

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Civil Rights, Football, Gloria Steinem, Low Country, Nonfiction, Pat Conroy, South Carolina, That Was The Week That Was, The Sixties

I have a great memory, but fifty years ago is a long time. If some of the people mentioned have different memories, then that is to be expected. I also depended on the valuable memories of my old friend Dicky Strozier and my brother Charlie. Charlie’s differ a bit from mine, but not in any significant way. 

At times I look back on the sixties in the deep south and see a foreign place. I think that sense of alienation may have been enhanced by the fact that I joined the Peace Corps in 1975, and except for a year or so living in DC and a few extended visits, I lived and worked in Africa until the early nineties, and only returned to live in the south in the mid-nineties. When change happens gradually you can adjust almost unnoticed, but after a twenty year absence, I experienced culture shock. In Columbus, Ga. the elderly husband of my neighbor had been rushed to the hospital, a very sweet couple. A few neighbors, including me, had gathered around her when we saw her outside to give her our best wishes. One of them said something about bearing witness for her husband. She started dancing around, flailing her arms and chanting, “He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb! He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb!” It reminded me of the time I had inadvertently stopped my truck in the middle of a female circumcision ceremony in Chad. This was alien to me, strange ritualistic stuff. Things had changed over the years. There has been a great deal of mythology and revisionist history written about the sixties. Perhaps one personalized account can reset reality for those who read it.

I was born in Charleston, but spent years 2-10 in the outer suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri being my father’s home state. Then we moved back to the Charleston area, to Johns Island, in 1959. Distance wise Johns Island is not far from Charleston, but in those days it was still mostly rural with a 70% black population, many of whom spoke Gullah. Blacks lived right down the road, any road, but there was no mingling of the races. Black kids and white kids never played together, or went to the same churches, or attended the same schools. Blacks and Mexicans harvested the produce, and white kids worked the sheds packing it. There was a palpable sense of arrogance bordering on animosity shown by all white people toward black people. The n-word was commonly used. The only pro civil rights whites were “northern agitators,” often Jews. There were no Jews on Johns Island that I ever heard of; they all lived in downtown Charleston; and I only knew of one Catholic family. As I would learn later, most of the Jews in Charleston shared the prevailing prejudices. In fact some had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. I don’t think there were any white liberals on Johns Island. If there were, they kept a very low profile. I remember asking my father why he had voted for Kennedy. He replied, “Because Lincoln was a Republican.”

I’m going to tell a little anecdote here that I have included in another story, because it provides some insight into the times. My mother grew up on a farm in St. George, SC. She had a limited education, sixth grade I think, but she was literate and enjoyed reading newspapers and such. She was ignorant of many things, but she wasn’t stupid. She had a bevy of strange beliefs and superstitions. Now the point of this is not so much the tale itself, but her absolute unawareness that there was any sexual component to it. Of course as a precocious teenage boy I saw the sexual connotations, but I never mentioned them. That was ground best not trod on.

You see there is an actual long, slender, nonpoisonous black snake in the SC low country called the coachwhip. My mother believed it would lie in wait for a young woman to walk by. Then it would rise up, head waving back and forth, and make a perfect wolf whistle, just like a brash construction worker might. When the woman looked toward the sound, the snake would stare into her eyes and hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

The black culture on Johns Island and adjacent Wadmalaw Island was quite different from the white one. Many blacks spoke the Gullah dialect, although almost all of them could and would speak something much closer to regular English to white people. They had their own music and superstitions. I remember the shack like houses with blue panted doors, window trim, and porch ceilings. That color was called haint blue. They believed that ghosts (haints) wouldn’t cross water, so the blue would keep them from entering their homes. One of my great regrets is that I never immersed myself in such an interesting culture. That was impossible for me at that time. I had evolutionary miles to go.

I was a product of my environment. I was just as prejudiced as the other white kids, used the n-word, and generally tried to fit in with everybody else. There was one difference though, I loved to read. No one ever read bedtime stories to me or even encouraged me to read, so I started out reading comic books. I later branched out to kid’s adventure stories, then sports books, and soon I was reading anything I could get my hands on. My one year younger brother and I thirsted for knowledge in a wasteland. How I envy the children of today. In those days encyclopedia publishers would send the first book, the “A” book, to people free, hoping they would go on to buy the set. We could never afford a set, but Charlie and I memorized the “A” book from cover to cover. I still have a warm place in my heart for aardvarks. Also it probably explains why I haul two old encyclopedia sets around with me every time I move. I just like looking at them.

The small sexually censored, but surprisingly philosophically uncensored, school library was my only source of literature. I read anything and everything, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, just to name a couple. These days I would probably be put on a watch list. What I discovered from reading those books was that even the most abhorrent philosophies have some appealing truths at their core, which are then warped and twisted into something evil. There is an Arabic proverb: “That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.” However, thanks mostly to my voracious reading, gradually, very gradually, I began to question my own beliefs.

Because of the association of the Republican party with Lincoln, as well as being the party of blacks during Reconstruction, almost all whites were Democrats. I never heard of a white Republican on Johns Island. That would have been a curiosity like a two-headed calf. Since blacks were kept from voting by one means or another, that meant that in South Carolina the Republican Party only existed on paper. Oh every now and again some guy with a big ego would run for office as a Republican simply because he could, but it was just token stuff. For all the statewide offices, the general election was a joke. The Democratic primary was the only real election.

During the Kennedy Administration, southern whites became increasingly alarmed and angry with the progressive tendencies of the Democratic Party. The solid south held together one last time for Johnson in 1964, only because he was a fellow southerner. Johnson’s relentless support for civil rights was the killing axe blow among whites to the Democratic Party in the south. Oh the tree didn’t fall immediately, but it was doomed. On the other hand the Republican Party was a blank slate, an empty vessel just waiting to be filled. And fill it they did. The Republican Party in the south was reborn as the party of racism and intolerance. That didn’t mean that the whites who remained in the Democratic Party weren’t racists too, most were, just of a more moderate variety, some of whom were capable of adjusting their beliefs. Also a few hardcore racists remained Democrats for seniority or other personal reasons.

The exodus to the Republicans continued over the years, particularly as the Republicans began to tone down the racist rhetoric. The fight over integration and voting rights was over. They began to couch their policies in terms of states rights, limited federal government, and the pro-life movement. The last time that I looked, around the turn of the century, less than fifteen percent of registered white voters in South Carolina were Democrats. It well might be less today. Even with the exodus of the hardcore racists, it was still difficult for blacks in the sixties, seventies, and eighties to win Democratic primaries. This was the era of Clinton, Carter, the Gores, etc. White Democrats were more progressive than white Republicans, but it was still tough for them to vote for a black person, especially one who had never held a major elected office, and almost none had. Eventually this led to the tacit acceptance by southern blacks of Republican gerrymandering, which assured that fewer Democrats would  be elected, but most of those that were would be black. Also it meant that Republican candidates in gerrymandered districts did not have to moderate their positions in order to get elected, in fact quite the opposite.

OLD FRIENDS, OLD STORIES, AND A FEW BELLY LAUGHS

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Charleston, Football, Humor, Key West, Nonfiction, South Carolina, Sullivan's Island

A collection of amusing and interesting stories. Enjoy!

I played football in high school. It was a very small school, maybe forty in my graduating class, so they needed every able body who managed to will themselves through brutal two-a-days in August in South Carolina. I was a lousy player, but Coach Biggerstaff liked to give seniors a chance to earn their letter. So he placed me at middle guard on defense, right between the two best players on our team, both linebackers on defense. Donald was the Charleston County Back of The Year and Alton was the Charleston County Lineman of The Year. Both went on to play college ball, Donald started at South Carolina, quite an accomplishment for such a small school. As a result the St. Johns Islanders were a very good team. We were undefeated at the time of our homecoming game against Moultrie, a much larger school. We were favored nonetheless.

It was third and long for Moultrie. Their QB dropped back to pass. For some reason nobody blocked me. I wandered into the Moultrie backfield and flushed the QB. He headed around left end, saw Donald waiting and reversed field. I lunged and missed the tackle as he headed around right end. Alton waited there, so he reversed field again and ran right into my arms for a fifteen yard loss. With fourth down I trotted off the field to the bench. The sizable crowd gave me a standing ovation. The cheerleaders twirled and chanted, “George, George, he’s our man!” The guys on the bench jumped up cheering. That was uncharted territory for me. Coach Bigerstaff looked at the crowd, then the cheerleaders, then my shouting teammates, then out at me trotting in. Then he looked back at the team, and in a slow southern drawl said, “Well boys, it’s like I always said. You give a monkey a typewriter, and sooner or later he’s gonna spell a word.”

For three years during the summer while I was in college I worked for The Post Office. It was one of the few summer jobs in the Charleston area that paid anything. My first year I had to compete with thousands to get the job, after that it was automatic. I would replace regulars while they were on vacation. Usually I would spend a couple days riding with the regular guy, then take over the following week. Sometimes if somebody was sick, I’d do the route cold. Those were long days. The more familiar the route, the faster you could do it. Raised on Johns Island, I only knew the main streets in North Charleston. So when I took over a drop box route in a residential area up there, I just memorized the maze like route. Drop boxes are those big stand alone boxes that you find on corners and in front of malls and such. There was one box that usually had a lot of mail in it, and I would bend down and stick my head in the box to make sure no mail was stuck in the chute. A terrier would sneak up behind me and yap loudly just at the right moment, causing me to jump and bump my head. I swear that dog laughed at me. He got me three times over two weeks.

One day they assigned me cold to a residential route in the St. Andrews area. I came to a house with a mailbox on the porch, 112 something or other. I had mail for 112½ also. There was a trailer in the back, so I headed back there. I heard one “wolf” and saw a bloodhound heading straight for me. That dog meant business, no foreplay. At five feet he leapt for my throat. I dodged to the side and he hit my shoulder knocking us both to the ground. Bloodhounds are big dogs. He rolled a couple times, then headed out in the backyard, made a U-turn, and came back full speed before I could get up. Just then the owner came out and called him off. That was terrifying. Badly shaken I continued the route. Not long after I came upon another house with the mailbox on the porch. This one was fenced in and had a Beware of Dog sign on the gate. I would have skipped it, except I had a certified package that needed a signature. I looked around the vehicle and found a billy club and some pepper spray. So I went to the front door well armed with the package tucked under my arm, one hand holding the club and the other the spray. When I rang the bell, a little white-haired old lady opened the door and her chihuahua came running out. The old woman took one look at me and started shouting, “Don’t hurt Mitsy! Don’t hurt Mitsy!”

I became friends with Dennis near the end of my college years. This is a story he told. He graduated from high school in Charleston in 1965 give or take. He and some classmates rented a house on Sullivan’s Island for an after graduation party. As customary in the low country in those days, they had several bowls of PJ (Purple Jesus), a punch made chiefly with grape juice and grain alcohol, but sometimes with rum, vodka, and fruit slices thrown in. In addition they had one bowl that was laced with LSD. It was still very early days for drugs in the deep south, and Dennis didn’t even know exactly what LSD was, nevertheless he knew he was drinking from the special bowl.

At some point he wandered down to the beach. It was a calm night and the mosquitoes were out in force. To get away from them, he decided to take off his clothes and get into the water. It was pleasant out there. As everybody who has been there knows, if you don’t fight it the current will take you down the beach. When he exited the ocean, his clothes were nowhere in sight. He started walking down the beach. In his fuddled mind about the only thing he was certain of was that he was very hungry. He had an epiphany. Houses have food in them. So he climbed the steps of the nearest beach house, jiggled the handle to the screen door, and walked right in. When he opened the frig, he found treasure — a platter of fried chicken. Now Dennis is about six three. The dentist and his wife who lived there heard noise and found Dennis in all his glory illuminated by the frig light. They yelled something. Dennis took the drumstick out of his mouth and said, “Sometimes life is like that.” Soon he realized he wasn’t welcome and left.

There followed several hours of phone calls to the police reporting “a naked stranger” wandering the streets of Sullivan’s Island. They finally cornered him, handcuffed him behind his back, and put him in the back seat of a patrol car. Dennis is double-jointed or whatever they call it and has really long arms. He had a trick he could do. When a cop looked back, Dennis had his hands in front of him and a smile on his face. They stopped and repeated the procedure, this time telling Dennis not to do that again. They threw him in the drunk tank. Dennis said that when he awoke the next morning still naked, the other guys in the communal cell had been betting on his story, most favoring the unexpected return of a boyfriend or husband. The police out there were used to drunk students, but they didn’t know much about drugs yet. Also things were looser in those days. So when the dentist didn’t press charges, they let him go. It didn’t hurt that his father was well respected.

Another friend of mine, Stanley, ran a delivery service for a while. A bunch of us used to meet at Kitty’s Fine Foods for breakfast. The best breakfast in Charleston. Miss Kitty was a plump matronly woman. Her menus had cat pictures and cats wandered around the tables from time to time. The front of Kitty’s was all plate glass. Apparently Stanley had had a rough previous night. He missed the brake on his van and it made contact with Kitty’s window, not hard contact, but enough. The window shattered spraying half her place with glass. Fortunately no one was hurt. Stanly calmly walked in, looked around, sat at a table, raked the glass off with his elbow, and said, “Could I have a cup of coffee please?”

After college for a time I shared a house with Dennis and some other Charleston buddies. It was just across the street from Johnson-Hagood Stadium, the Citadel stadium, a nice old house that had seen better days. As one would expect in a bachelor house, our furniture was improvised. Dennis had “found” some old railroad ties and fashioned a long rough coffee table, kind of neat really if you didn’t mind a whiff of creosote. Dennis had a German shepard named Bigfoot, a very smart dog. When Bigfoot did something wrong like winkle the butter wrapper out of the garbage, I would scold him and tell him to go stand in the corner and put his nose on the floor. He would do it, and then look up from time to time with remorseful eyes to see when his punishment was up. For a time we were acquainted with a Russian defector named Oleg or Oleck (I think), a sailor who had jumped overboard in Charleston harbor. At least that’s what he claimed. We never really trusted the guy. Bigfoot hated him, some deep-seated racial animosity at play no doubt. Bigfoot would spend hours slowly working his way closer and closer to Oleg, a stretch here a roll over there. Finally when he was within range Bigfoot would leap at him. It was amusing to watch, maybe not for Oleg.

In those days our favorite bar was The Three Nags, close to and later claimed by the College of Charleston. It was one of the great college bars of bygone days, ranking with The Opus at the University of SC and Chukkers in Tuscaloosa. Now we liked to throw the occasional party. We knew a guy who spent his spare time in the summer seining for little creek shrimp. They were delicious but there wasn’t much of a market for them. If you were into pre-shelling and deveining, they were a lot of work. We didn’t bother with those niceties. So we made an arrangement for him to catch and freeze shrimp all summer long. Then we’d buy the lot and throw a party. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was well under a dollar a pound for two to three hundred pounds of shrimp. We would invite friends, and also drop by The Three Nags and tell everybody to come by. The party amounted to boiled shrimp and beer and dancing to Martha And The Vandellas. By the end of the night there would be shrimp shells piled everywhere.

At one point when I was Heat Waved out, I was chatting with Nancy Barnwell, with whom I had been dancing, kudos to her bravery. She related the following story. Recently she had been jogging down Folly Beach where she and her husband had a house. She wasn’t really thinking, just sort of registering things as she passed — crab, dog, waves, gulls, peanut butter foam. Suddenly for the first time in her life, she realized that the light brown foam on the beach couldn’t possibly be peanut butter foam. Turns out as a little girl she had asked her grandmother about it. No doubt with a smile, her grandmother had explained that it came from ships at sea washing out their peanut butter jars. She had never questioned it.

Ben and I became friends at the tail end of college and beyond, since we were both from Charleston. One day he asked me if I would hitchhike with him up to Lake George, New York for the Fourth. He said we could stay with his friends there and in New York City, so off we went. The trip was pretty much a bust. His friends were not all that delighted to put us up, especially the new boyfriend of Ben’s former girlfriend. Also I think we were coming to the end of the yeah sure crash on the floor era, perhaps more so in high traffic places like NYC. One modest highlight of the trip was being picked up by two mafia guys in a Lincoln Continental. They were going to Saratoga for the races and spoke pretty freely around us, nothing incriminating of course, but a lot of “family” politics. The most interesting event happened on the way back to Charleston. We were dumped in Columbia at the USC campus just a little before midnight. That being our old stomping grounds, we both had nearby places we could crash, and we split up.

Extremely tired, I walked down Green St. past fraternity row to John Arthur’s house, another Charleston friend. It was exam time for summer classes, and he was conked out in a chair. Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman album was playing over and over with the arm up. The main door was open, but the screen door was latched. I pounded on the door and yelled, but he was out for the count. I decided to walk back through campus to the Opus Bar, my favorite watering hole. So at two in the morning, now exhausted and drunk, I decided to give it another try. At one point I passed a lone coed going the other way, then two males a hair young for college students going the same direction. I took note of the situation. Almost home I heard the faint patter of running feet and a muffled yelp. Damn. I wasn’t up for this. I turned and ran back. I got there as they were dragging her into the bushes about thirty yards from the road where I stood. She appeared to be limp, probably unconscious. I started yelling for help. They turned to face me. One guy actually smiled and pulled a knife. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to end well. Finally lights started coming on and people exited the houses. The two assailants disappeared down the hill. I went to the coed. She was semi-conscious, incoherent, her glasses broken, and her face bloody, but she still had clothes on. When the first fraternity looking guy reached me, I passed her off and got out of there. I admit one part of me was a little angry that she put herself and me at risk like that. Another part of me said maybe she had a good reason. I never found out. The second time I managed to get John Arthur’s attention.

A year or two later, Ben was working in Key West as an educational counselor on a military base. A nice gig. His father had connections. Dennis and I and my brother Charlie decided to drive down to visit him. During the last leg we picked up an attractive young lady hitchhiking to Key West. We were average decent looking guys, and we behaved like perfect gentlemen. In fact Dennis was tall, dark, reasonably handsome, and a bit of a chick magnet. So you would think she would be at least distantly pleasant. She spent the whole two hours subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, insulting us in one form or another. She wasn’t a native Conch, having lived there a couple of years, but you would have thought she went back three generations. With all the zeal of the newly converted, she made it plain that tourists like us were the lowest form of creation. I think she was terrified that we might run into her and presume friendship. It got so bad that Dennis and I were making eye contact and chuckling. When we dropped her off, I told Dennis that if we ran into her hopefully with her friends, we had to run up and give her big hugs. Unfortunately the opportunity never presented itself.

We couldn’t have picked a worse week weather-wise. A stalled tropical depression took up residence. It would wobble away and then wobble back. The locals began to call it a neutercaine. In addition to near constant rain, the storm spun out mini-tornadoes from time to time. No snorkeling, sailing or fishing for us. Mostly we hung out in bars and ate good seafood. We spent many hours listening to the not yet famous Jimmy Buffet, an acquaintance of Ben’s. He seemed like a nice guy. Ben had rented an old weathered house with plenty of character. I loved the huge arched double doors that separated the upstairs master bedroom from the living room. Space wasn’t a problem, but lack of furniture was, namely guest beds. Ben had his bedroom, and we made do with the couch, chairs and the rug in the living room.

I’ve never been fond of airport bars, but that is where we would close out every night. Ben was hitting on the lady bartender. Now to be fair this wasn’t a modern sterile chrome and glass airport bar, and security guys didn’t have to examine our tonsils before we were allowed in. In fact I don’t remember any security at all. It looked like it was in an old wooden hangar or maybe a warehouse. It had a high ceiling with fans, wooden tables and a neat long curved bar. That said, transients spoiled the ambiance. Airport bars are airport bars. Ben was a likable fellow, decent looking, good sense of humor, nice job, nice house, a pretty little sports car (unfortunately one of those British ones that were always breaking down), and most importantly for the women of Key West he lived there. The lady in question seemed friendly enough, but then lady bartenders are paid to be friendly. I had to admire Ben’s persistence. Night after night he would dance his little dance and go home with just us guys.

Then on our last night in Key West, the lady relented. Good for Ben. While the two of them disappeared into Ben’s bedroom, the rest of us tried to get some sleep there in the adjacent living room. It wasn’t easy. They were pretty noisy. I was just about to sleep when she yelled, “Careful Ben you’ll break your neck!” At that I gave up the ghost and turned on the TV. The late night movie was that Errol Flynn movie, The Charge of The Light Brigade. It was reaching its climax, with the star rising in his stirrups to shout “Charge!”, when a mini-tornado hit the house next to us, Ben’s side of the house, and completely took it off of its foundation. Transformers exploded with sparks like Roman candles as the electricity went off in a flash. The tornado shattered Ben’s window and sent his bed crashing through the double doors into the living room, with Ben and his lady sitting up naked as if they were riding a magic carpet. Quite a show.