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In the winter of 1993, I moved back to my Louisiana hometown from Washington, D.C. One day in early January, 1994, I got a call from my aunt, who worked at one of the big plantation houses there that the tourists like to visit. She told me the new owner of the plantation, a man with the perfectly villainous name of Slivka, had announced that he was going to subdivide most of the acreage attached to the plantation house. As part of his plan, he had ordered a tiny black Baptist church off of the land. My aunt thought this was a disgrace, and asked if I could help. An evangelist had visited the plantation in the 1830s, and converted the slaves to Christianity. The tiny present-day congregation are descendants of those slaves, and they worship in a petite and unlovely red-brick 1950s-era church, on a notch of land at the edge of the plantation. Through a historical oversight, they did not own the land on which their church sat. After the Civil War, most plantation owners deeded over the land on which their congregations gathered for worship to the congregations. That never happened on this particular plantation, but nobody nowadays seemed to think it was an act of malice. It simply never occurred to people there that a landowner would drive a church off the land. But that was then. Slivka had arrived from Dallas with his own values and his own agenda. And the preservation of this Baptist church did not fit his plan. The congregation was poor, and without resources to fight him. I wrote a story about the controversy for the Baton Rouge Advocate, which ran it on its front page. This was the first most people in my town had heard of the matter. Both white and black were outraged. A few leading white citizens began a petition drive on behalf of the little church. The Dallas Morning News sent a reporter in (Slivka had a sleazy history in Dallas, it turned out), and CNN dispatched a crew. I phoned the New York Times to pitch the story, and they asked me to do some reporting for them until they could send their Atlanta bureau chief down a couple of days later. As I went around town talking to people, I learned some interesting facts. Many of the blacks with whom I spoke were cautiously optimistic about white support. One black minister told me that he wondered if the white townspeople would be so supportive if the plantation's owner were a local man instead of a monied out-of-towner. During the civil-rights era, he said, some local plantation owners who still had the deed to the land black churches were on boarded up the churches to keep the congregations from meeting there to talk about voting rights. Yet nobody could deny that something important was happening in the town, that white people were genuinely concerned about the fate of the little black church, and willing to put themselves to trouble to help their black neighbors save it. I remember going to a meeting the congregation had to strategize with their lawyer (a local white attorney, who donated his labor and expertise). In the back of the church sat a deacon from the white Baptist church up the street — the same one that more or less ran the pastor off in the 1980s, but which was by then hosting gospel-singing and ice-cream-social exchanges with black Baptist congregations in the parish. He was there to show his support for his brother Baptists. Also in the back was an elderly former official of the parish government, who in the 1960s had led the White Citizens Council, which had been tied to cross-burnings and racial intimidation. Yet here he was, inside a black church praying with the congregation, showing them he cared about them enough to stand by them in their hour of need. In the end, the little church was saved. I also recall interviewing a white lady in her sixties — Trent Lott's generation — who was one of the main organizers of the petition drive. The lady — I'll call her Miss Trixie — said something to me that revealed to me how hard it is to overcome the legacy of the past, because in so many instances we don't know what we have to overcome. "Rod," she said to me as we began the interview, "you grew up here. You know we've always been good to our nigras." That was a completely unremarkable statement for someone of her class and generation there to make. And yet: "our nigras." Like we still own them. And in fact, we haven't always been good to them; within living memory, black people were denied the right to vote, and indeed were lynched, right there in that town. A decade earlier, a white Baptist pastor was dismissed from his church in a row over his wife having invited the children of the black maid to Bible school. When I was a teenager, the Methodist minister survived a challenge from some angry congregants after he invited a mixed-race school chorus to sing in the all-white church. I didn't report Miss Trixie's comment, and I'm not sorry I kept it to myself. She was trying her best to help these poor black Christians who didn't have the money or the social status to do much for themselves. For some reason, it was important for Miss Trixie to believe in the myth of white innocence, and it figured into her decision to help the imperiled church. She didn't mean anything ugly by that remark, and would have been shocked and embarrassed by the reaction to her words, had I reported them. And the ensuing controversy would likely have derailed the campaign to save the church, which I strongly supported. So I chose not to tell the whole truth, in the service of my own agenda. Sue me. In the end, the church was delivered. Slivka asked for an exorbitant price for the church property, and one or more wealthy donors came through with the money. In all honesty, I do not think this would have happened had I published Miss Trixie's statement. The outside media would have seized upon it, magnified it, and the understandable resentment blacks would have felt over her patronizing sentiments would have stymied anything good blacks and whites there were trying to accomplish together by nullifying, at least in the public's perception, good this lady and whites like her were trying to accomplish for their black neighbors. In fact, Miss Trixie's sentiment is, in my experience, particular to her generation, a generation that's passing. You will be hard-pressed to find younger southern whites who share that view. Mind you, Miss Trixie was not the incoming Majority Leader of the United States Senate, so nothing much was lost by helping her conceal her attitude. I understand why such a big deal has been made over Sen. Lott's comments, and I do think he should step down as leader of the Senate Republicans. It's one thing for an older lady in a small town to get the recent past wrong; it's quite another for a powerful national politician to do so. My guess is that Sen. Lott believes that he and his kind "have always been good to our nigras," and that his remark comes from that attitude. It's a sin and a shame that someone with Trent Lott's worldly experience still apparently thinks this way. But not a total surprise, at least not to me. That said, can we at least recognize that people are complicated, that most of us are a mixed bag, and that few of us do what we do from pure motives? I find this hunt now for any crypto-racist thing any contemporary politician ever said to be appalling and dangerous. It's more important that we look at what people do, not so much what they say. In the 1950s, Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long, who was a greater friend to black Louisianians than just about any politician of his era, stood in the well of the legislature and denounced an arch-segregationist opponent. "Willie," he said, "one of these days you gonna retire and go back home. You'll take off your boots, wash your feet, stare at the moon, and get close to God. Then will you realize that niggers is human beings too." God knows what they would have done to Uncle Earl if he'd said something like that today. Look, James Carville is right: There has to be a place in our hearts for forgiveness, for allowing people the grace of repentance, and for recognizing the people are more than the sum of a single sin, or all of their sins. That doesn't mean that Sen. Lott should remain as Majority Leader, but it does mean that you can't judge Trent Lott, or any other politician, by a single unwise statement. And you can't judge an entire party based on a single man's unwise statement. But people will, because that's the kind of media environment we're in now. Declining to report Miss Trixie's offhand remark was my acknowledgment of this reality. There will be those who choose to hype Lott's remark out of proportion to the offense for the same reason I chose to obscure Miss Trixie's: It serves their broader agenda. How nice it would be if their agenda were constructive — like bringing blacks and whites together — instead of driving blacks and whites further apart for political gain. |
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Trent Lott affair has inspired many people to expound on their certain
knowledge of whites, southerners, and Republicans. But the truth, as usual,
is more complex and fascinating than anything you are likely to read in
the newspaper. Literature is the only medium that can do it justice. I
want to tell you a story, but it's a true story, not a made-up one, so
please forgive the limitations.
