Praying for Sheetrock Read online

  Praise for Praying for Sheetrock

  “A luridly entertaining nonfiction debut . . . a cautionary tale as wonderfully knotty as a plank of Georgia pine . . .”

  —Newsweek

  “Melissa Fay Greene has written a superb account of life and struggle in a tiny place. Because of its themes and the brilliant way the author has handled them, this book could stand as a metaphor for the halting American effort to become something better than we have been . . . Most of all, it is a story of simple black people enduring and rising very, very slowly and then a little faster on the broad back of a flawed leader who ultimately breaks because he is human and has aspirations and burdens that push him past his limits.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Greene’s achievement recalls Jane Austen’s description of her novels as fine brushwork on a ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory’. . . What Greene has written is political history of a rare kind . . .”

  —The New Yorker

  “The facts and much more spring to life in Melissa Fay Greene’s dazzling first book . . . The civil rights movement will never look quite the same.”

  —The Nation

  “No, Praying for Sheetrock isn’t a novel: it is a highly original work of [nonfiction], with elements of what we seek in serious fiction. There is a landscape of mystery in coastal Georgia: a Robin Hood–like sheriff who owns four houses and his own airfield but is otherwise a charming good old boy; the first black county commissioner since Reconstruction; a handful of heroic white Legal Services lawyers charging into town. . . . The personalities in this remarkable book are like Faulknerian characters.”

  —The New York Times

  ALSO BY MELISSA FAY GREENE

  There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children

  Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster

  The Temple Bombing

  Copyright © 1991 by Melissa Fay Greene

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2006 by Melissa Fay Greene

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters (e.g., Sheetrock, which is a registered trademark of United States Gypsum Company).

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Silver Jingle Music for permission to reprint previously published excerpts from “The Saga of the Great Sapelo Bust,” by Vic Waters. Copyright 1978 by Vic Waters. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2006

  Originally published by Addison-Wesley

  ISBN-13: 978-0-306-82495-1

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  http://www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail [email protected].

  3 4 5 6 7 8 9—12 11 10

  To my mother, Rosalyn Pollock Greene

  To my husband’s mother and father, Ruth and Howard Samuel

  To my father of blessed memory, Gerald A. Greene

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One

  One The Old Way

  Two Off the Road and Far From Money

  Three The Education of Thurnell Alston

  Four “Howdy Folks, This Your Lucky Day”

  Five Deacon Curry, Deacon Thorpe, and the Little Deputies

  Six Praying for Sheetrock

  Part Two

  Seven Shoot a Man in Broad Daylight?

  Eight The Three Musketeers

  Nine Circuit Riding into the Past

  Ten The White Boys’ Bible

  Eleven The Boycott

  Twelve “Got to Go Vote for My Little Thurnell”

  Thirteen The Old Fox Gets Away Again

  Part Three

  Fourteen Commissioner Alston

  Fifteen “Through the Ocean of the Sea for Her Child”

  Sixteen The Music Man

  Seventeen “Head in the Lion’s Mouth, Got to Ease It Out”

  Acknowledgments

  A Reader’s Guide

  Author’s Note

  “Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague, vague,” wrote Mark Twain. And so it is with historical epochs.

  After the fact, historians may look back upon a season when a thousand lives, a hundred thousand lives, moved in unison; but in the beginning there are really only individuals, acting in isolation and uncertainty, out of necessity or idealism, unaware they are living through an epoch.

  McIntosh County, on the flowery coast of Georgia—small, isolated, lovely—experienced the same grand historical tremors and transformations as the rest of America in recent years as long-entrenched authority began to yield to the democratic demands of social and political outsiders.

  But in McIntosh, “entrenched authority” was not numberless white men, generals, captains of industry, and vast hierarchies of elected and appointed officials: it was one white man, Sheriff Tom Poppell. And the demands of social outsiders and political new-comers were not expressed by hundreds of eloquent leaders rising from the churches and universities, nor by hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets: the new demands were worded by one stammering, uneducated, local black man, Thurnell Alston, a disabled boilermaker, standing in front of a hundred quiet country people.

  The official history of the civil rights movement is told like a litany at times, as if well-anticipated goals were achieved in a series of distinct and strategic skirmishes: Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, Albany. But it happened in McIntosh County, too. Whether you see the place as a footnote or as the front lines, it happened here, too.

  In order to see how it happened—how old Southern political traditions faded into modern times; how the U.S. Constitution eradicated local county customs; how people faced the issues of the day not by race alone, but according to their inner moral compasses—one must drop down to the level of the sidewalks, kitchens, and backyards. What were people saying? Who was saying what? How did their own histories, biases, and perceptions inspire them? And why did an epoch of social change play differently here than in New York or Detroit, Atlanta or Memphis, or in the small county up the road?

  This is a chronicle of large and important things happening in a very little place. It is about the end of the good old boy era and the rise of civil rights, and what that famous epoch looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like in a Georgia backwater in the 1970s.

  McIntosh County is pretty country and it’s got some nice people, but it’s the most different place I’ve ever been to in my life.

  —Harry Coursey, GBI Special Agent, Savannah

  Prologue

  1

  June 1971

  Two trucks collided on the crisscrossed highways in the small hours of the morning when the mist was thick. The protesting squeal of metal against metal and smashing glass silenced whatever small noises were afoot in the dark county at that ho
ur, the little noises of munching and grunting that arose from the great salt marsh nearby. At seventy miles per hour, the two semitrailers suddenly had found themselves in the coastal lowlands; the blacktops of the rural state routes were slick; and the truck headlights merely illumined the fog from within as if sheets of satin were draped across the road.

  The trucks exploded into each other without braking. After that blast of sound and its fallout of hollow chrome pieces dropping onto the road and rolling away, the quietness of the rural county flowed back in, and the muddy sucking and rustling noises arose again from the marsh. The cabs of the big trucks began to burn, pouring their own heavy smoke into the fog.

  The McIntosh County Volunteer Fire Department truck arrived first, unfurling a long red scarf of sound on the country roads behind it. It was the night’s second accident. The young firemen drenched the burning cabs, while the county ambulance veered into place and departed with the truck drivers. East of Highway 17, the country itself ran out, softening into marsh on its way to the sea.

  The county sheriff, awakened by a phone call for the second time that night, stood alone on the highway in the fog and directed cars with a flashlight around the circle of spilled oil and shivered glass. For fifty years before the construction of modern Interstate 95, on the east coast, old U.S. 17 through McIntosh County was the northerners’ main route to Florida. Traffic, even in the middle of the night, was fast and constant.

  Soon the sun came out of the ocean, the mist dried up, and shrieks of long-necked birds flew back and forth across the breezy morning marshes. The sheriff, a thin, blue-eyed, silver-haired man of fifty, rolled up his sleeves, removed his sunglasses from their case, wiped them with a handkerchief, blotted his face and neck, and prepared for the daylong siege of the white heat of June along Georgia’s subtropical coast.

  The High Sheriff, Thomas Hardwick Poppell, was five foot nine and 150 pounds, a slender and nattily dressed man in this coastal population of fishermen and lumberjacks. He was a self-made man and was going to die rich. He cursed like a sailor. “He was a little old dried-up fella,” said a former state trooper. “He wasn’t your typical south Georgia sheriff. He didn’t have the potbelly and all that people think of when they think of a south Georgia sheriff. He never dressed the part. He would have on things like white loafers with a pair of bell-bottom slacks during the years when those things were in, a nice-looking pair of bell-bottom slacks. He’d have on an Izod shirt, maybe a white belt. He was a sharp dresser. And of course that hair was just as white as it could be.”

  “The sheriff could walk in and sit down anywhere in the county,” said one local man, “even if it was your own table and it was suppertime.”

  And others said, “You weren’t scared when you saw him coming, but you could feel the power.”

  Sheriff Tom Poppell, born in McIntosh County in 1921, was in the midst of a thirty-one-year reign. He had inherited the office from his father, old, cranky, tobacco-chewing Sheriff Ad Poppell, who died in 1948. The sheriff’s eighty-year-old mother, Janey Poppell, was the county jailer, lived on the top floor of the city jail, and cooked for the prisoners. The sheriff’s sister, Maude Poppell Haggard, was the county clerk, and his brother, A. S. “Junior” Poppell, was clerk of superior court. Sheriff Tom Poppell was to be reelected to office every term until his own death, completing the longest-running sheriff’s dynasty in the history of Georgia, and after he died the county commission would try to make his wife sheriff.

  “If he hadn’t died, Tom’d still be sheriff,” many people said in the 1990s. And others remarked, “Yeah, and he died unindicted.”

  With daylight Sheriff Poppell knew, and the firefighters knew, and the deputies knew, and the people in the cabins in the surrounding woods knew—and if the truck drivers had realized their trucks had crashed in McIntosh County, Georgia (431 miles of swamp, marsh, and forest: population 7,000) they would have known—that it was nearing time for a little redistribution of wealth. It was one of the things for which Tom Poppell was famous across the South. It was one of the things that invariably put the sheriff in an excellent mood.

  In midmorning the local black population began to gather at the crash site. They parked their cars down the road near the sheriff’s jeep and walked north along the highway, shielding their faces against the spray of steam and ash stirred up by the firefighters. The people chatted as they came. Women wore shoulder bags and immense flowered dresses; men in sleeveless undershirts and beaten old fedoras led small children by the hand. The wreck had occurred at the crossroads called Eulonia in the deeply wooded north end of the county. This had been the dark, rich territory of the black people since the end of the Civil War, when William Tecumseh Sherman himself had waved a pistol at the district and given it to the newly freed slaves. Thus, it was a black crowd which assembled that day. Had the crash occurred fifteen miles to the south, closer to the majority-white county seat of Darien, a white crowd would have gathered.

  “Good morning, Sheriff!” called the black women in their musical voices, and he, on the road, unsmilingly raised one hand at a slant to return the greeting.

  One of the two wrecked trucks had overturned and spilled its cargo onto the highway, and it was around this unidentified heap of goods that the people congregated. The sheriff watched in the distance as a few black men stopped to straighten out and tear open the tumbled-out cartons and learn what he himself had discovered in the dark that morning: the truck had been transporting shoes. The country people sedately divided up the shoe cartons and opened them with a pop-pop-pop of pulled-apart staples, then passed around the fresh shoe boxes. They hummed with pleasure at the beautiful new shoes—red leather, black leather, green leather—lying two-by-two in tissue paper wrappings. The people stacked the purloined shoe boxes in their arms and walked carefully along the highway back to their cars. They drove home to their cabins and house trailers deep in the pine woods, and sat on benches under the trees, calling for the grandchildren to come try some on, and pointing their toes this way and that.

  All day long under a sky like white coals the High Sheriff stood spread-legged on the highway, directing traffic; the road crews swept and shoveled; and hundreds of local families quietly harvested shoes. Some called out, “Thank you, sir!” as they left, and others caught the sheriff’s eye and nodded or touched a finger to their hats; and Poppell turned his glittering sunglasses and sunburnt face in their direction, his thin lips a straight white line, and as before raised and dropped one hand in response.

  “It was the spirit of fleecing the Yankees that was tolerated by even the law-abiding citizens, I suppose,” said Woody Hunter, dean of the Emory University Law School and a former resident of McIntosh. “Tom Poppell was Billy the Kid. He was Robin Hood.”

  “It wasn’t like the sheriff encouraged it,” said a former volunteer fireman, a white native of McIntosh who had helped to fight the blazing shoe truck twenty years earlier and had watched the people come for their shoes. “We had the postwar South, the poorest-of-the-poor South right here in McIntosh County. It was the dirt-poor type of people swarmed the place like ants, and Tom wasn’t about to stop anybody from getting a pair of shoes.”

  “The sheriff knew people can’t walk a damn straight line,” said Archie Davis, owner of a restaurant called Archie’s, in Darien. “He wasn’t a chain-gang recruiter. You’re talking about a time when people had no money. Every one of us, if we’d look back, we’d change things—we’d like a clean slate. I don’t know how to say it other than he was a regular person. If someone’s house burned, he’d be the first one there to help him.

  “He had a lot of charisma. He was the kind of guy you might fight him politically, but when it was over and you were in trouble, he was the first one to help you. You build a base with that—I’m talking local people, 95 percent born and bred here. He didn’t walk on water, he was just good people. If you weren’t careful, he’d be your best friend.”

  “He would handle everything just as cool an
d brilliant, just country brilliance is all I know how to describe it,” said a Darien lawyer. “Amazing what he could get done with a couple of phone calls. Now the court system is full of all sorts of little junk, but back then the sheriff was judge, jury, and monarch. He’d help a young man out of trouble the first time. But then a lot of people he flat run out of the county because they wouldn’t abide by his law. We lived under Poppell’s Law, I guess you’d say. He just wrote his own law.”

  In 1971, Tom Poppell was a dinosaur, the last of his kind. Statewide observers called him “the last of the old-time political bosses in Georgia.” Georgia State Troopers, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, FBI agents, DEA agents, and U.S. Customs agents up and down the southern coast all agreed with the words of a Brunswick police detective: “The only crime that existed in McIntosh County was Tom Poppell’s. He was the last of the great old-time High Sheriffs.”

  2

  The shoe truck was not the first wrecked or sabotaged truck on Highway 17 to be looted under the supervision of the McIntosh County Sheriff’s Department, nor was it the last truck or even the best, but it was a fine truck and is fondly remembered.

  It was the first crash site attended by a local black man named Thurnell Alston, who trudged among the others that day and filched a few shoes. He was a boilermaker living with his wife and children in a narrow cinder-block house ten yards from U.S. 17. He was a tall, thin, chain-smoking black man with bushy, blue-black hair; a long, rather sorrowful face; slate-black skin; and elegant, long hands. He had lived in McIntosh County all his life, and was related by blood or marriage to probably a third of the black community there.

  Before the decade was out, Thurnell Alston was advanced by the black community to challenge the rule of Sheriff Poppell. But on that summer day in 1971, with politics the last thing on his mind, Thurnell idly drifted alongside his neighbors north on U.S. 17 to the overturned truck and rummaged through the boxes. “Sure I got shoes, we all got shoes,” he said. “Word just got out there was a truck wrecked in our area. People coming by with shoes. Guys had boxes of shoes all in the woods: ‘Come get you a pair of shoes!’