A Southern Line

By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - February 17, 2002

We die of cold and not of darkness.
~Miguel de Unamuno

Supposedly travelers on the trains of the Southern Railroad Line taunted departing passengers by parodying Patrick Henry’s patriotic words, Give me Liberty or give me Death. . .I’ll take Death! as the train started slowing to stop at the small town of Liberty, North Carolina.
To paraphrase Tennesse Williams, the “Milk Train” does not pass through Liberty anymore. It was before my time anyway, the era of the steam locomotive pulling into the old "Depot" that still stands on the tracks in the center of town as far as I know.

The taunt (a bit unfair perhaps) doubtless derived from the perceived dullness of the town, a place whose greatest claim to fame was the tying of the mayor’s race in the early ‘60s. While the name, Liberty, fairly rolls of the tongue, recalling visions of Lexington and Concord, I cannot help but wonder if I could have pronounced that name without dripping sarcasm if I had been a black living there prior to the '70s.

There were perhaps five stoplights, a rather large water tower visible for several miles, a town cop who drove around in a converted Buick most always chomping on a cigar; he was called “Lop.” He mostly chased teenagers driving hot rod Chevies or Fords; sometimes he caught one too, hair slicked back in a "ducktail" with large, plastic dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.
I am not sure how many black folks lived in the town where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. Actually, my family and I did not live in the town of some 1400 souls, but resided instead on a small farm about four miles down Highway 421, the real Tobacco Road, that if followed another 15 miles leads to Randleman, home of NASCAR legend, Richard Petty. Keep on going another few miles or so and you wind up in Greensboro where a number of black students from North Carolina A&T initiated sit-ins at the Woolworth Cafeteria in 1954.

In those Jim Crow days in which I grew up, I seldom saw black people shopping in the small downtown. Of course, there were never a lot of people shopping in downtown Liberty anyway, though the funeral home did a good business, having a monopoly on the business of death for a radius of several miles. Every member of the owner’s family drove a Cadillac; still do.
I remember the blacks sitting up in the balcony of the Curtis Theater; they had an entrance separate from us white breads. I especially remember Saturday matinees with Gene Autry or Roy Rogers features and maybe a Flash Gordon or Three Stooges short; sometimes I would get up and go for popcorn or candy and happen to glance up. There were throngs of children floating like little dark balloons over the auditorium.

In reflection, what I remember most about those Saturday matinees is the silence from that dark upper story. Little children are not quiet; they are boisterous; they yell and scream and laugh. It must have been a tedious nightmare to sit in almost total silence, sometimes the whispering between friends or a suppressed snicker at a Stooge drifted down into the first floor melee.
Movies were very cheap in those days; for a while only nine cents for a child. Town children used to stand outside the theater asking for pennies from their friends and neighbors so they could “go to the show.” I never saw any of the black kids doing that. And of course there were two sets of bathrooms, one for the whites and one for the “coloreds.”

Sometimes I would see a black child going in the special side entrance; It didn’t strike me very hard at nine or ten years old. I barely noticed and went back to my chemistry set or astronomy books or rode bikes with my brother around our grandparents’ farm.
In growing consciousness by junior year in high school, I had begun reading James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and especially Ralph Ellision. I read Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a novel that shows only too well what was going on in those days prior to civil rights movement. That book is far scarier than the most horrible blood sucker or acid-tongued alien because the characters in the novel are us, we who need as a species to grow in the consciousness of our connections at all levels, racial, soul or otherwise.

“I am an invisible man, this classic of the American experience begins. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If he registers on white consciousness at all, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."

I never really knew any black children until I was about fourteen, when my father hired two black teenagers to help us on the farm in the summer, harvesting. . .what else. . .tobacco. My brother and I really enjoyed James and Benjamin though. Being lonely country kids we were always on the lookout for playmates, and we all dearly enjoyed trying to hit each other with corn cobs or dirt clods when the adults were not around.

We were always sad when James or “Benny” were no longer around after the harvest in late summer, and in fact, we became friends. I lost contact with the pair after I went off to college, but I understand that Benjamin went on to finish college, and James had stayed around Liberty and eventually had a fine family of which he was very proud.

Let’s be clear about something here. I certainly do not pretend to understand the black experience in the United States. I am just offering some memories and reflections about growing up in a segregated town in in the South where the people were neither good nor bad any more than people in any other place in any direction of the compass--just people caught up in a vicious, negative pattern that had existed for centuries.

With the innocence of growing up in the country in those times, my brother and I were only dimly aware of the poverty of the black people who lived in the shanties in that special section of town that began with the “N” word. We knew the children went to one of those “separate but equal” schools, but we never had any contact. Every now and then at high school basketball or football games, it ran though my mind that maybe we should play the other Liberty High School.
I don’t go back to Liberty very much though it is not a reflection particularly of the people who live there; they are like people eveywhere. There’s just too much past in those parts for me, though white attitudes toward African-Americans have changed somewhat as far as I can tell.
Since the civil rights movement the schools are now successfully integrated. White people complained for a while, but in the end things worked out. The adults had the problems, not the children. From my sparse visits I saw for a couple of decades that blacks and white worked side by side in the furniture factories and sewing mills that used to predominate the area. Not the best work, but that was all that was available. Now, there is not much in the way of work around the town at all; most people commute to Greensboro or Burlington. There are few farmers left; many of them rich gentlemen “hobby” farmers.

Sometimes I think the South gets a bad rap; sometimes I don’t. For a long time I put the region down when talking with friends from other parts of the country. As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that the “redneck” mentality is everywhere; Southerners just have that hick-sounding accent.

The recent release of the movie, The Monster’s Ball, has placed the issue of southern racism and ignorance front and center in our consciousness. Debate rages on Internet forums about just how bad it is “down South.” Have white people in the South really changed? Certainly the South still remains the “whipping boy” of the country, especially for educated Americans.

These questions are too complex for so short an essay, though I as I mentioned previously, I do see many positive changes for minority opportunities both in my former home town and elsewhere in the South. These are just some thoughts and experiences that I have been wanting to express for a while.

I write only from my experience of those times and places as a white boy growing up in a rural environment in the South. Perhaps this quote from the poetry of Claude McKay, an influential literary and political figure of the Harlem Renaissance sets the boundaries for white expressions--however personal and even tangential--of the black experience:

So what I write is urged out of my blood.
There is not a white man who could write my book,
Though many think their story should be told
Of what the Negro people ought to brook.

Copyright 2002-2010, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.