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New Man Down South
| Article
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20202 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
3,105 Words |
| Author
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William Gordon
William Gordon, a retired foreign service officer and
newspaper editor, was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard and an Ogden
Reid International Journalism Fellow. He is currently writing
a book on the transformation of the South. |
We pulled into a filling station just off an exit on Interstate 40, west of Nashville. A neatly dressed white man rushed to our car and started to clean the windshield. "Can I check the oil and water? Can I fill it up, sir?" he asked.
White folks may not think twice about this kind of courtesy at a gas station, where, after all, courtesy is good for business. My wife and I, however, do think twice about it, and we appreciate it.
My wife and I are not new to Nashville or the South. In fact, we've been making trips through the Deep South, the land of our roots, for several years now, to search for surviving relatives, to meet old friends, to see where I, for one, while still a small boy, was able to escape the cotton fields of Mississippi.
Beale And Main
As we pulled out of that filling station--we were on our most recent swing through the South--we headed for Memphis, a little more than two hundred miles west on I-40. As we drove into the city limits, it struck me that I was entering a world vastly different from the one that greeted me when I arrived in Memphis as a young man. A simple point: I now have no apprehension about being stopped by the police and questioned simply because I am black and driving a decent-looking automobile.
That very thing happened to me once in the mid-fifties while driving through Greenville, South Caroline. I was stopped and fined twenty dollars by a patrolman, even though I was driving my late-model Ford five miles below the speed limit. When I asked why I was fined, the officer said: "You know I could fine you more, even take you in, and you can't do a damn thing about it." In those days, his word was it.
We stopped in Memphis, of our own accord, and decided to take a drive down Beale Street. Beale Street is the so-called black metropolis of the city, and white men with guns and night sticks once policed it. The big political boss in Memphis during the 1930s and early 1940s was E.H. Crump, who not only ran Memphis, but all of Shelby County.
Standing majestically in a well-kept park along Beale Street is a life-size statue of the jazz composer William C. Handy, "Father of the Blues." The statue was placed there by the city even before integration became a reality, and today people from all over the country go
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