Praying for Sheetrock Read online

  “‘Where you get them from?’

  “‘Man, they got a whole truckload down there!’”

  “There was always some truck wrecking down there,” he said. “The people around McIntosh get all the benefits from it. All our lives, people always saying, ‘Hey, the sheriff give this to me!’ These people haven’t been nowhere else. The sheriff just really had them hoodwinked. They’re just ignorant to what’s going on. When there’s somebody the sheriff wants elected, you know, you see him and his mother riding around. And these older black people say, ‘There go Miss Janey! There go the sheriff! How you doing, Miss Janey? How you doing, Sheriff?’ And all this is for votes. The people here were just happy with nothing. It was a plantation mentality. The sheriff was running this county just like an old plantation.”

  McIntosh County citizens remember fondly not only the shoe truck but trucks full of canned goods, fresh produce and meats, building materials and tools, cookies and cakes, candy and guns, and once, fur stoles and fur coats. All of the cargoes disappeared, and the trucking companies were compelled to report “total loss” to their insurance carriers. “Anything trucks be carrying from Miami to New York, from New York to Miami,” said Thurnell Alston, “whatever it was, whatever of value was in those trucks during those times, that’s probably in McIntosh County right now today.”

  Years after the movement for civil equality between the races began to transform the rest of the South, news of it barely had filtered into McIntosh County. In 1971 McIntosh County was a majority-black county with virtually 100 percent black voter registration. Yet the residents had never elected a black person to the mayor’s office, the county commission, the city council, or the school board; had never seen a black person appointed to any governing board or selected for grand jury or trial jury service; had not elected a black to state government since the end of Reconstruction; and had not seen any black person hired by any local employer above the level of unskilled laborer, maid, or cook. The black residents saw their children bussed past the white school to an all-black school furnished with used supplies and outdated textbooks.

  At the time of the shoe truck in 1971, the black community of McIntosh County was blind and deaf to issues of civil equality, equal employment, and local corruption. On the day of the shoe truck, the people were still years away from balking at Sheriff Poppell’s authority. On that day their minds were otherwise occupied. On that day the people had new shoes to try on.

  Part One

  You can’t learn anything riding down 1-95 with the Yankees. You’ve got to go the old way, 17, what we call the old way.

  —Sonny Seiler, Savannah attorney

  One

  The Old Way

  1

  U.S. 17 was an old blacktop two-lane running down the Georgia coast at sea level, never straying far from the edge of the continent.

  In Savannah it was a dirty liquor street swelling at dusk with honking cars double-parked outside the package stores. Pawnshops closed for the night, dropping latticed chains over their windows, and bail bondsmen opened for business: shirtsleeved men half-seated on desktops waited with crossed arms for the black rotary-dial phones to start ringing. On their walls hung hand-printed signs like, “It’s always SPRINGtime at Bulldog Bonding.”

  Further south, on the outskirts of Savannah, the old highway was lined by mobile-home dealerships. Further south still, people lived in the mobile homes, set back from the road with chickens and rusty swingsets in the yards, and the nearby businesses were auto junkyards. Further south, used merchandise was sold out of abandoned barns the people called “flea markets.” Miss Nellie’s Hidden Treasures displayed, at roadside, Mexican vases, shoe boxes of old vacuum cleaner attachments, gold-framed paintings of bullfights or of Elvis on black velvet, dilapidated playpens, and cast-iron black-faced jockeys in their simpering crouch.

  In Byran County and Liberty County, commerce dwindled to the occasional peach or Vidalia onion stand. In midsummer, corn filled the fields and laundered sheets and overalls stiffened on clotheslines outside the sharecropper shacks. One last bit of trade before the road rolled south into the deep country was Mama Harris, Palm Reader. Then Highway 17 dove into the great dark pine forests of McIntosh County.

  Wild turkeys, foxes, quail, and deer crunched across a pine needle floor for a hundred miles. Woodpeckers darted among the upper branches like small red arrows in the green light. The old highway lay peacefully abandoned, soft and yellow as a footbridge baking in the summer heat while box turtles scraped across it. Vultures stood on it in a circle like gaunt old card players: tall, cackling cronies with bony shoulders, divvying up the pot.

  Occasionally a brontosaurlike lumber truck erupted from a side road, spraying gravel, belching smoke, and brainlessly sashaying down the center line. It drove the felled slash pine north to the port and to the pulp and paper mills of Savannah—Union Camp was the largest paper mill in the world—or south to the turpentine and paper plants of Brunswick. In both cities a sulfurous haze, the industrial rotten-egg odor of jobs, clouded the in-town neighborhoods; but in McIntosh County, where the forests grew, the water tasted like cold stones and the air was clean and piney.

  Gradually, to the east, the forest broke open, then disappeared, replaced by vast soft acres of salt marsh. Four hundred thousand acres of marsh stretched between the dry land and the barrier islands of McIntosh County—at some places, a mile wide; at others, ten miles wide. The primeval home of every shy and ticklish, tentacle-waving form of sea life and mud life, the coastal Georgia salt marsh is one of Earth’s rare moist and sunny places where life loves to experiment. Because it is flushed out twice daily by the systole of saltwater tide and diastole of alluvial tide, the marsh looks new, as if still wet from creation.

  The wetland has been claimed in various epochs by prehistoric Indians, Spanish missionaries, Blackbeard the pirate, French and English explorers, Sir Francis Drake, slaveholders and slaves, Confederates and Yankees, the victorious General Sherman, freed slaves, and unreconstructed Rebels. Citizens at the edge of the dry land have addressed one another as Monsignor, Excellency, Governor, General, Mistress, Master, Nigger. Furies inspiring men to violence have occurred at the marsh’s edge, while in its midst the frogs simply continued to blow their round bass notes. Mastodons once claimed the coast, too, and gigantic pigs and ground sloths the size of elephants; and they all have gone.

  Once or twice a century, men stood up on their hind legs beside the swamp and waved their arms—the crown of the evolution of the shy tentacled sea creatures—and swelled with the thought of their own self-importance. A shouted word flew for miles, out to sea, and a gunshot echoed farther than that. The men who raised their voices, flashed their whips, fired their muskets or their revolvers, and imposed their own sense of order on their neighbors found it remarkably easy to do so. Just after the shout or the gunshot, there was silence; then the clicking of the fiddler crabs began again, and the people in their houses scraped their dishes clean and buttoned up their children and chopped wood into logs in their backyards and fed their dogs. So the strong men raised their voices again, fired their weapons, and again, rising to fill the vacuum of silence were not voices of protest or discontent but the sound of clicking, scraping, chopping. Thus, through minor heroics, brashness, and noise on one side, everyday life on the other, local heroes and strongmen arose.

  In modern times Sheriff Poppell was the neighborhood headman who exerted his will and shaped the county, and the people acquiesced as people do when they are not, themselves, hungry for power and when they are permitted to make a nice living far from the rumpus. With Poppell as sheriff, McIntosh County was not the sleepy backwater it ought to have been, nor Darien the homey one-horse town it richly deserved to be. Darien—population 1,800—consisted in 1971 of a few public office buildings, a few All-U-Can-Eat catfish restaurants, the county courthouse, a library, some hardware stores, an eighteenth-century British fort, a car wash, and a wide, hot main street—U.S. 17. But th
e place was jumping. Expensive cars with unsavory drivers roared through town, jeweled rings sparkled on men’s hands as they cracked open their boiled crabs at lunch; gunfire rang out; and one sensed, in sheds off the road, the late-night shuffle of fifty-dollar bills. From the late 1940s through the late 1970s, McIntosh County was a mini–Las Vegas, a mini–Atlantic City, a southern Hong Kong or Bangkok where white men came looking for, and found, women, gambling, liquor, drugs, guns, sanctuary from the law, and boats available for smuggling.

  Next door to these fearsome enterprises, just down the road from them, a straight-thinking, churchgoing white community attended to its civic needs in Darien; and a watchful, churchgoing black community made do in nameless hamlets in the pine woods. Sheriff Poppell amiably kept the peace between the black and white communities and between the law-abiding world and the criminals. From his illegal businesses and the looting of trucks, he tossed the occasional bonus to the law-abiding Darien whites and rural blacks. For most of this century, there was a strange racial calm in the county, consisting in part of good manners, in part of intimidation, and in part because the Sheriff cared less about the colors black and white than he did about the color green, and the sound it made shuffled, dealt out and redealt, folded and pocketed beside the wrecked trucks and inside the local truckstop, prostitution houses, clip joints, and warehouse sheds after hours.

  Half the population of McIntosh was white and most of the whites lived in Darien. They lived in soft blue, pale green, or yellow wooden houses, with birdbaths and day lilies in the yard. The aluminum of their screen doors was cut in the shape of marsh birds and tall grasses. “People grew up together on these dirt streets fishing and hunting,” said Archie Davis. “This was just small-town America. Four or five kids come playing down the street; the grownups knew all of them, knew their daddies.”

  Emily Varnedoe, a white woman of ninety, had lived in a little house beside the salt marsh most of her life. In the silences after a raised voice or a gunshot flew over the county—as strong men took over McIntosh and steered it this way rather than that—it was such as Emily Varnedoe who shrugged and continued to stir the greens in the saucepan, to repot the geraniums, to tuck in the child, and to settle herself under an afghan in front of the TV, knowing nothing of bullies and race and shoot-em-ups.

  She lived quietly and cheerfully, hands crossed in her lap, looking through her windows across the yellow grass sloping toward the water. As she grew old, Emily mused more and more often on one or two things, an old fact and a recent fact, and it consumed a good deal of her day—seated in a chair, clinging to its arms with all her might—just to consider and reconsider these one or two things, not analyze them in their different aspects or wish they had been done differently; no, just bring them to the forefront of thought and make sure that the facts of each case were still arranged correctly.

  Mrs. Varnedoe’s son, Jesse, went to North Georgia College where he met his wife, Glenda. This was one of the facts of Emily’s life which ceaselessly occupied her thoughts. “He went to North Georgia College, he and his wife, but they both told us they would never marry until they graduated,” she said. “And so they both graduated before they married. They live in Tampa now. He sells insurance and she worked in the insurance office, and then she left and now she is working in a real estate office. And she says there are forty people working in that office and that’s a lot! But they waited to marry, don’t you know, until after they could graduate.”

  When Mrs. Varnedoe finished a statement her jaws moved for a moment more, thoughtfully and silently, and then she looked at you to see what you made of it, offering, in case there had been any misunderstanding: “I sent him. I paid for him to go to North Georgia College. He went there and finished up there, he and the girl he married. And he said they would not marry until they both graduated.” A framed photograph of the crewcut college boy leaned backward on the mother’s small television, and one would have thought the happy twin events, graduation and marriage (they didn’t marry until after they graduated) had just taken place, but Jesse (North Georgia College, 1957) was fifty-four.

  Emily Varnedoe’s face was like a cream-colored, stained velvet bag, with a drawstring at the pursed lips. Her lips pushed out even in repose, as if to show that this was a garrulous woman who had learned to be silent—had learned that no one out there was available to listen to all her opinions.

  “It’s quiet over here except for the hummingbird season,” she said. What great stillness is possible in a life when a person is distracted from her thoughts by hummingbirds in the yard! Does she lean forward and pound on the glass: “Hey, pipe down out there fellas!”? She sat, lips pursed, hands folded, looking toward the marsh, waiting for the hummingbirds.

  There were white people in Darien who knew from which antebellum plantation family they were descended and black people who knew the location of the plantations that had owned their great-grandparents; there were close and long-time connections between the two communities unlike anything in the North. All political discourse and confrontations in McIntosh County would take place between acquaintances: when angry groups of blacks and whites faced each other, everyone would know everyone else’s names and addresses, and know their mamas.

  Because the whites got to McIntosh first, or “first” in relation to the McIntosh blacks, history itself was laid claim to, as if it were acreage of good bottom land. There were Native Americans all along the tangled coast in the sixteenth century when the wooden sailing ships first appeared, but the Europeans killed or converted the local tribes and pushed their way into town long before sending for the Africans.

  Permanent settlement first was established along the Altamaha River in 1736 by a troop of Scottish Highland warriors who built a British outpost against the Spaniards in Florida. A second embarkation from Scotland landed in 1742. The name McIntosh derived from the leading clan of pioneers.

  The colonial history is treasured in Darien. The history of the conquest and settlement of McIntosh is as full of nobility, strife, malaria, starvation, alligators, true love, and Indian wars as any student of history could wish. History, in fact, is what Darien has the way other communities have rich topsoil or a wealth of hidden talent or fine high school athletics. Coastal people understand history personally, the way religious people do, the way ancient people did. They own history in a way lost to most Americans except in a generic, national sort of way, because the rest of us move around so much, intermarry, adopt new local loyalties, and blur the simple narrative line.

  Hundreds of direct descendants of the early Scottish settlers of McIntosh still live on the very tracts of land given their families by King George II at the first embarkation in 1736 or at the second in 1742. “We’ve always known where we were from,” said Gay Jacobs, a strong and pretty, black-eyed and amiable liberal Democrat who lived at the waterfront and ran a shrimp business. “I mean this is still part of the original land grant that my—I don’t know what, how many greats back—was given. I think my family has always felt a certain responsibility to do right. About politics, about racial issues, to do right and to be right.”

  The Direct Descendants, as they are actually known, periodically hold reunions at the public library or in one another’s homes. They wear corsages and name tags, sip punch, and listen to edifying lectures by speakers dispatched from the Savannah Historical Society. One-hundred-eighty descendants of the two McIntosh clans who landed in 1736 and founded Darien still are living. “One-hundred-eighty if no one was born or died in the last three weeks,” piped up Lillian Schaitberger, a sixty-nine-year-old descendant of Donald McIntosh. She is both the treasurer of the Lower Altamaha Historical Society and the person responsible for periodically updating the list of the true and living Direct Descendants from the first, not the second, embarkation. “I have had people to get upset,” said Schaitberger: “‘If you’re going to do it, why not do everybody?’ one woman told me. She was a descendant, you see, of the second landing in 1742. I told he
r, ‘If you’d read the booklet closely, you’d have seen it listed the descendants of the first landing only.’”

  It was a fine and difficult thing the Highland settlers did, living alert and armed against a Spanish enemy mounted on heavy horses (wearing feathers, high boots, and sashes in military gaiety) who charged up the coast toward the Scottish cornfields and cabins, their muskets leveled and the hooves of the horses smashing along the surf. It required physical courage for the Scots to remain on the land, to hoe, to plant, to carry water, to bear children, to believe in the community while, in the distance, there were horses.

  It is quite another thing to survive into modern times when a new definition of community is required, to admit that within your town there are households that define themselves—that you define—as outsider, alien. Does Darien belong to the Direct Descendants alone (even generously counting the descendants of the second embarkation as bona fide DDs)? Does it belong to the Direct Descendants and their kind (for some had great-great-grandfathers planting fields in Virginia and the Carolinas, after all)? Or does it belong to more people—to more kinds of people—than that? To ask this question requires a moral courage.

  But the Direct Descendants and their fellow white citizens prefer to muse on an older and clearer time, a time of wood forts and musketry, of tall ships and cannons, of kilts and bagpipes, of enemies fleeing pell-mell out of the marsh. Contrary to stereotype, they are not nostalgic for the plantation era, though Darien was one of the jewels in the crown of the Confederacy and its planters among the richest and most refined gentlemen in the world. They do not honor slavery or mourn its passing. They honor the time before slavery, before Africans touched foot on the land beside the Altamaha River. They wish the question had never come up.