Foster Dickson's Blog, page 58

Field Trips to Nowhere

As our bus rolled down rural Highway 14, which sprawls loosely between Selma, Alabama and the iconic Sprott Post Office, we passed the sign for Hamburg, the tiny farming community where Mary Ward Brown wrote her brilliant stories and memoir, and I tried to apprise the busload of students of it. The few who heard me over the roar of the charter bus turned their heads vaguely as we passed the inauspicious left turn. A few then looked back at me, waiting for more, while others told their classmates who hadn’t heard me what I’d just said. It was hard to teach in such a setting, but I tried anyway.

We had just visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where I had my students start on the downtown Selma side and walk the arc of the bridge so they could get a physical sense how the marchers in 1965 could not see the small army of state troopers on the other side until it was too late to turn back. After a brief stop in the visitors center, they also got to browse the low-slung lobby of the supposedly haunted St. James Hotel and peer into the lush, dark courtyard at the center of that pre-Civil War structure. Now, we were rolling down a two-lane back road, moving further northwest into Alabama’s Black Belt.

[image error]When we arrived at Sprott Post Office, I loaded them off the bus as I listened to their murmurs. What is this place? Why are we stopping here? This is it? The simple wooden building with a rickety porch, made famous by photographer Walker Evans in the 1930s, still stands, all by itself, boarded up and unused, now painted white and sea-foam green, at the cattywampus intersection of two two-lane roads, 14 and 183. “Okay, what did you see on the way here?” I asked the crowd of assembled teenagers once they were off the bus and standing in the gravel lot.

“Nothing,” one of the braver students said out loud.

“Exactly!” I replied with verve, and they all gave a start, surprised, I suppose, by that being the correct answer.

The young lady had set me up perfectly: they were seeing precisely what I wanted them to see, learning precisely what I wanted to learn about this isolated locale. To gain a sense of place, they needed to experience firsthand what was here— by their standards, nothing. No movie theaters or shopping centers or Starbuck’s. Yet, here had been the gathering place for a far-flung array of farmers and their families during a now-lost era of one-mule sharecropping hardship, the place where those overworked people went for communications from the outside world, the place where they went to see what was going on, and what did we see? Nothing. Twenty-four miles of small roadside homes, mostly empty fields, hunters’ tree stands, abandoned vehicles, and the occasional sight of either a little store or heavy machinery working the land. In our age of mechanized farming, this once-vibrant landscape has emptied out.

The middle part of the day was spent traversing the short distance between Sprott and Marion, then the slightly longer distance between Marion and Greensboro. After Highway 14 breaks a hard left at Sprott Post Office and heads more westerly, it quickly reaches Marion, the county seat of Perry County, with its old town square and its Zion AME Church, where a busted voting-rights meeting in February 1965 yielded the police shooting that sparked the Selma-to-Montgomery March. But it was Greensboro that was our second destination, where Pie Lab and other new businesses and nonprofits were (and are) sprinkled in the refurbished, modernized storefronts on Main Street among ones that are still dilapidated and crumbling. What’s old is becoming new there, with a lot of hard work and vision, I told them, and I want you to see it for yourselves. (The effort is remarkable enough that The New York Times gave it a write-up back in 2010.)

[image error]Our final short trek that day took us due south to Newbern, still in Hale County, which would be little more than a smattering of houses and old barns, if it weren’t for the late Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio, an architecture program based at Auburn University. (As a side note, a few of the buildings in this area that were photographed by the late artist William Christenberry are still standing and recognizable.) Here, we were met by an alumnus of our high school named Alex, who is now an architecture professor there, and with a gracious smile he toured us through their workspace in The Big Red Barn, as well as through Newbern’s modern-looking fire station and revitalized library. This time, I listened not to dissatisfied murmurs but to proclamations such as: We ought to make our library like this! The last site we visited there was situated in the middle of a saturated vacant lot— a work of architecture/modern art, resembling a underground concrete igloo with metal rebar sticking out the top, which serves as a monument to Mockbee. (To my chagrin, the students’ main memories of Newbern have been their muddy shoes and the confusion over whether the animal carcass they encountered there was a small cat or a large rat.)

We rode home on our big charter bus through Uniontown, the site of an ongoing coal-ash dumping controversy, and back onto Highway 80. Within an hour-and-a-half, I had them back home in Montgomery.

I take students on these trips into the Black Belt – which I affectionately and ironically call my “field trips to nowhere” – for two reasons: first, because I didn’t know about this rich history until I was grown up and I want better for them, and second, because of something that William Zinsser wrote in his seminal book On Writing Well: “Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage. Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.” Even though only a few of my students have direct and immediate personal connections to Dallas or Hale or Lowndes counties, our culture in central Alabama is based on practices, attitudes, and events that were forged in those places. The Alabama Black Belt isn’t nowhere. This is where we are from.  This is our heritage. And not to know one’s heritage may be the most inhumane and most damaging side-effect of our mobile society— to be uprooted, dangling in open space, guided not by family and tradition but by pop culture and economic opportunity, with no sense of belonging to something larger and continuous and beautifully ornate.

Which brings to me now.

Earlier this month, I took my students on another of my field trips of nowhere, this time heading southwest into Alabama’s Black Belt to explore the wide-open space on the southern side of Highway 80 in Lowndes and Wilcox counties, visiting their respective county seats, first Hayneville then Camden, for a day-long primer.

[image error]In Hayneville, we stopped at the square in front of the Lowndes County Courthouse to gain that boots-on-the-ground perspective on the August 1965 killing of Episcopal seminarian Jonathon Daniels, who was in Alabama working for civil rights. It was on that square that a local man confronted Daniels then shot and killed him. Twenty five years later, in 1991, a small brick monument was erected in one corner of the square. I took the students to stand in that space, because I wanted them to get a sense of Daniels’ predicament as he faced that situation: in 1965, how do you get back to your home base in Selma when you’re stranded in Hayneville, where no one will help you? It’s one thing to read it in a book or watch it on a video, it’s something else to stand in the spot after driving those roads.

Next, we traveled further down Highway 21 then onto 28, arriving in Camden mid-morning. The bulk of the trip would be spent not in contemplation of civil rights murders, but in homage to the wealth of artistry in the Black Belt. At Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, the students got a walk-through of the region’s painting, pottery, sculpture, and craft-making, and two blocks away, they were given a personal tour of Betty Anderson’s Shoe Shop Museum, a low-slung, homespun hodgepodge of outdated cobbler’s tools, small-town local business memorabilia, and a pictorial history of the civil rights struggle in the Deep South. At the two locations, students were introduced to the hearty and vibrant creativity that was often born of necessity. It is in these places where otherwise urbane people can see the intelligent DIY spirit manifest itself in everyday use by people who have less or little in the way of economic resources. Here, beauty comes not from an excess of time after the work is complete, but from a sense that beauty is compatible with and simultaneous to work and its implements.

[image error]After a wonderful lunch at the Gaines Ridge Dinner Club with storyteller and quilter Betty Kennedy, followed by a walk around the grounds of that 1820s farmhouse, we ended our visit back at Black Belt Treasures to meet and talk with Minnie and Tynie Pettway, two of the famed Gee’s Bend Quilters. The sisters, who are now 79 and 82 respectively, were stitching away at table when we arrived, but that didn’t deter them. With humor and vigor, they answered the students’ questions and let their minds meander across subjects as varied as quilting, the farming life, segregated schools, the difficulty of gaining the vote, sibling relationships, pranks and toys, and the corporal punishment of children: “If there had been such a thing as ‘child abuse’ when we were young, our momma would have been in jail so long she wouldn’t have known us!” one of them half-joked.

These hard-working women also explained with humility and honesty about their ambivalence toward fame. While it has been good to be honored for skill and craftsmanship and for creating beautiful objects, they have also been confused by all the fuss. Ultimately, one of sisters said in her own simple way that, since conceptions of beauty are subjective, what is ordinary to her has been extraordinary to someone else. So, okay.

What I hope the students will see — and I believe that they do — is that economic poverty is in no way coequal with spiritual poverty. In the art and culture of Alabama’s Black Belt, we see that, when human beings must rise up to face hardship, they do. A viewer with only a surface-level understanding may look at the quilts of Gee’s Bend and see nothing more than a colorful blanket with irregular patterning, or at the paintings of Charlie Lucas and see nothing more than grotesque representations of mundane objects, or at the pottery of Sam Williams and see nothing more than a cup or bowl. And it would be a shame to see nothing more than that and to miss the wonderful people and the hopeful spirit behind those creations.

After nearly two decades of delving into the grassroots culture of central Alabama, I have gotten accustomed to sentiments from people who want know, Why these people? I would never respond with these exact words but my answer runs counter to glitzy, albeit wrong-headed conceptions about what is important: Because I know that they’re not nobody. Just like I know that Alabama’s Black Belt is not nowhere. For totally different reasons, passersby and locals alike might presume nothing extraordinary occurs in central Alabama, especially not in the isolated Black Belt. Quite the opposite is true. While our current culture hyper-focuses on fame and wealth and urbanity, being a teacher of teenagers who are inundated with that hyper-focus and its wrong-headedness, I feel like I have to do for them what a teacher should do: show them better. Whether that means visiting a boarded-up rural post office, walking across a bridge most Americans had ever heard of before March 1965, giving them time to wander around small-town Main Streets, or listening to two sisters who’ve done their best with what they’ve had, I want for my students to see and to understand what is inevitable in their own heritage, so that — hopefully — it will lead them to eloquence.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Summer of ’76”

I would probably never have noticed the story of Sandra Dupree and Harry Lee Dickens, Jr. but for a brief write-up on it that appeared in a July 1976 issue of Jet magazine, right next to the story I was looking for: another brief write-up about the killing of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama.

In the summer of 1976, as the nation’s bicentennial celebration was at high tide, the people of the small town of Scotland Neck, North Carolina had a racially charged killing to think about instead. In March of that year, a thirty-four-year-old white woman named Sandra Dupree, who was a mother of four and the wife of the local Free Will Baptist minister, had shot a twenty-one-year-old black man, Harry Lee Dickens, Jr., in the back (or the back of the head). Dickens died a few days later.

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#TBT: The Alabama Book Festival, 2006

Back in 2006, I thought it would be a good idea if the Creative Writing program that I teach had a display table in the exhibitor area at the Alabama Book Festival. It was a much smaller event then, and we were among only a handful of vendors. That first year, I had one student, Madison Clark, who volunteered to work the table with me, and she stayed all day. We only had a three issues of Graphophobia to sell, so we did our best to make the table look full and talked to absolutely everyone who walked by.

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(Unpublished) #Poem: “Taking Root”

Though I wrote this poem in 2004, I revised it substantially in 2014. It is a fairly self-explanatory foray into the process of gardening. The poem’s content doesn’t share any earth-shattering messages, but I still like it because it functions well as a villanelle.

Taking Root: A Villanelle

 

Pulled from the ground, the mangled roots cling

to bits of soil; this torn-loose thing will not quit.

For surviving is the goal, thriving and growing.

Green, growing upward, but it’s time for moving

to stay in accord, as the gardener’s plan is set.

Pulled from the soil, the mangled roots cling

to old nurturing Nature, demanding

to stay put; its heartiness may be set back a bit.

For surviving is the goal, thriving and growing.

What happens next isn’t for speaking or proving:

Placed in its spot, the water helps it fit.

Nestled in new soil, the mangled roots cling

to the fresh dirt in a good place, begging

for a well-suited location, a place to sit.

For surviving is the goal, thriving and growing.

Led by their instincts confused but adapting,

Like all living things that refuse to quit.

Pulled from the soil, mangled roots will cling;

For surviving is the goal, thriving and growing.

About ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Sabbatical”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Southern Soil”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “I Know”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Common”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Zero”

(Unpublished) #Poem: [Untitled]

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Reading Kenko”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Five or Six”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Curb Market, Saturday Morning”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Cycle”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “The Greatest Unknown

Not Just Them— Us Too!

It’s too convenient, too easy, too simple, and too self-righteous to point the proverbial finger. We cry out, They haven’t fixed the problems! Congress hasn’t passed gun laws, states haven’t fixed Medicaid, the National Guard hasn’t secured the border . . . What is never mentioned is this: we cause the problems they are trying to fix.

Public policy meant is to create solutions for problems that the public has caused. That’s what governments and laws are for: to manage the chaos, selfishness, and downright foolishness that abounds among the general public.

The public— that’s us.

For example, to have viable routes to move goods, to seek medical care, and just to visit each other, ordinary people need roads. But it isn’t feasible for every person to build his own roads that lead everywhere he needs to go. So, roads are public works that we all use, and we want them to be passable, safe, and preferably comfortable. (If you’d like to see some examples of what roads used to be like, look at historian Marty Oliff’s book Getting Out of the Mud.) Having roads that aren’t rutted or washed-out takes work, which takes time, and if we want a person to give up to his own time to do work that benefits all of us, then we have to give that person something that benefits him. Money. And where will that money come from? Taxes. And who pays taxes? Us, the people who want public services and works, like good roads. So, we enter into a Rousseauian social contract and have government, laws, and public policy that administrate our money into services and works that make our collective existence better.

This is why we get so furious at ineffective governance. The government’s sole purpose is creating and administrating viable public policy (that should work for all people). Because we have differing folkways, ideals, and beliefs, we all need viable and effectively implemented public policy— those of us with resources and those of us without. Yet, to return to that original assertion, ineffective government isn’t the only problem. We cause the problems they are trying to solve!

So, here’s a radical idea: rather than running amok then griping about the failures of a top-down approach to problem-solving, let’s alter our behavior and create a bottom-up approach with everyday living. Perhaps if more of us take more responsibility for our own actions, perhaps if more of us consider other people’s rights instead of only own own, perhaps if more of us prioritize the general welfare over personal enrichment, perhaps if more of us remember that Biblical admonition that it is better “not to be served but to serve,” maybe— just maybe— the government won’t have as many problems to solve. Perhaps if more employers paid a living wage, one that allowed people to pay their bills and still have savings, we wouldn’t have to have discussions about the minimum wage, Social Security, homelessness, and bankruptcies. Perhaps if more people got personally involved in their local schools and in children’s lives, we wouldn’t have to have discussions about education reform and school shootings. Perhaps if we built relationships in our neighborhoods instead of privacy fences, we might not need or want social media. Perhaps if we left the house to enjoy nature and our neighbors, we wouldn’t use so much gasoline and electricity. Perhaps if we honor our word and live up to our obligations, we would have fewer lawsuits.

I believe that, if we tried it that way, we could find a great deal of truth in that old adage: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Allman Brothers at Atlanta Pop, 1970”

It was forty-six years ago today that the Allman Brothers Band played the second of two live sets at the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival— they opened the festival on July 3 and closed it on July 5. Though the recording wasn’t released until 2003, the shows at Atlanta Pop predate the Fillmore East live show and gives us another example of the band at its peak, before the deaths of Duane Allman in October 1971 and Berry Oakley in November 1972. (The Fillmore East concert was about three months after Atlanta Pop, on September 23, 1970.)

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The ‘There’s Hope for this Generation’s Music’ Playlist”

Near the end of last school year, one of my seniors gave me a mixed CD she had made, songs she thought I should listen to, and on a half-folded index card inside was the handwritten title “The ‘There’s Hope for this Generation’s Music’ Playlist.” She and I had often talked about music during the four years she was in my classes, and she knew that most of my disappointment in current music came from seeing a steady procession of (mostly bad) new groups or singers on Saturday Night Live! Without malicious resentment or in-your-face stubbornness, she laid this shiny metallic offering on the desk of a cynical, forty-year-old Generation X-er, and just asked me give it a fair listen. I can do that, I agreed.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Where did twenty years go?”

I graduated from college twenty years ago this month. I’d like to say that, back then, I was fresh-faced and optimistic, ready to take on the world, but that’s not true. I was twenty-two, heavy-bearded, skinny, generally pale, and still lived with my mother. I had a dead-end job at a veterinarian’s office and drove a 1983 Toyota Celica hatchback, which my insurance company regarded as a “sports car,” even though it had slung a rod during the only road trip I ever tried to take it on. (The seal on the large back window had also rotted, and the rain that collected in the spare-tire well sloshed around every time I turned.) Let’s just say that the world was not my oyster— and I knew it.

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the #newschool: Don’t shit where you eat.

The Spring 2017 Alabama Public Opinion Survey, conducted by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA), shows some disturbing conclusions about the political ideas in my home state. Hardest to swallow are two graphs on page 23, which explain that 63% of the people polled “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” that they “Have No Say in What the Government in Montgomery Does” and a whopping 69% “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” that “Officials in Montgomery Don’t Care What People Like Me Think.” The polling from 2007 through 2017 shows that roughly half to two-thirds of Alabamians feel that way consistently.

Likewise, a few pages ahead of those disconcerting line graphs, we see a bar graph that explains how 76.7% of Alabamians polled answered “Yes” when asked, “Do you think the level of school funding makes a difference in the quality of education?” (Somehow, 17.3% of respondents answered “No,” and I’d be curious about how they came to that conclusion.) About three-quarters of Alabamians, then, believe the old adage that “you get what you pay for” when it comes to our education system.

In these cases, I would alter that previous adage slightly to say, “You get who you vote for.” When voters elect politicians who they immediately (or already) disdain, the effects are so grossly counterproductive as to be nonsensical, and thus, we in Alabama, and in the wider Deep South, get to keep the widespread inadequacies that we want relief from.

This trend isn’t new and didn’t come from nowhere. Nearly twenty five years ago, the 1994 book Disconnected: Public Opinion and Alabama Politics by Patrick Cotter, James Glen Stovall, and Samuel H. Fisher III detailed the state’s habit of working against its own stated interests. In the final chapter, the authors make this assessment:

Thus rather than a close correspondence, there is actually a considerable disconnection between the character of Alabama’s public opinion and the character of the state’s policies. The state lags behind others not because of its public opinion but in spite of it. Alabama would be better off if it more closely followed the preferences and priorities of its citizens.

To date, we ordinary citizens have tried pointing fingers, we’ve tried blame, and we’ve made the names of our states’ and nation’s capitol cities synonymous with what we dislike and distrust. And certainly the problems may well lie with the politicians whose actions (or inactions) we lament. Yet, the problems are also ours, and until we own them, we can expect more of the same.

There’s another old adage, this one more vulgar, that says, “Don’t shit where you eat.” Even dogs understand that. Yet, some people don’t seem to. As crass as it may be, it’s still good advice, especially when it comes to facing down the historic social and political problems that exhaust generation after generation in Deep Southern states like Alabama. Just don’t shit where you eat.

 

Southern Movie #24: “Black Like Me”

The stark black-and-white 1964 film Black Like Me offers a choppy and vague purview of the substance in the 1961 book of the same name. Directed by Carl Lerner, who also made the equally stark films 12 Angry Men and Requiem for a Heavyweight, the movie tells the story of a white journalist from Texas named John Horton (played by James Whitmore) who darkens his skin so he can travel through the Deep South as a black man and write about the experience.

Black Like Me opens on a cramped interstate bus that is wavering along a rural road. White passengers are sitting toward the front of the bus, and black passengers toward the back, though a few stand in the aisle, among them a stern-looking middle-aged white woman. When the black man sitting by the window offers her the empty seat next to him, she screws up her face and declares to no one in particular how rude and uppity black people have gotten. This, in turn, draws mild ire from a black woman sitting two rows back, but the tension quickly subsides, and the bus driver makes a stop at a ramshackle store for a five-minute bathroom break.

Immediately, the tension rachets up again when the white bus driver does not want to let the black riders get off the bus. At first, he fails when he calls “Boy!” after one black man who pays him no mind, then he succeeds on his second try when he halts the man who has just offered the seat to the white woman. The passengers quickly return, and the driver admonishes the black man who ignored him, “Didn’t you hear me call you?” to which the man replies in mock deference, “I heard you say boy, but I didn’t think you was talkin’ to me.” Just when the ride might continue, the frustrated rider whose offer was refused and who was denied a bathroom break informs the driver that he is getting off right here. We have met our protagonist, and though we still don’t know much about him, we sense that something is odd here.

As the well-dressed but yet-unnamed man enters the unnamed town, he is immediately greeted on the sidewalks by suspicious looks from white people, who stop and look hard at him as he passes. When he stops another black man on the sidewalk to ask where he can get a hotel room, his education on being black in the South begins: there are no hotel rooms for him, so he must find someone stay with. During this exchange, we learn the man’s name – John – and as the two walk down the sidewalk to find John some food and a place to stay, the hospitable local gives him a series of instructions: don’t look at that, and don’t go in there. There has been trouble lately, John learns, and as the men walk to the house where he will put John up, a wild carload of howling whites chase and harry them through the night.

The storytelling in Black Like Me jumps around a bit, employing flashbacks and asides to tell us who John Horton is. After he is settled in his temporary lodgings in the home of a black man named Doc and his family, John’s story goes back to its beginning: poolside at a swanky home, a now-white John is a writer trying to convince his publisher to let him go “under cover” as a black man so he can expose the real effects of bigotry. Reluctantly, the publisher says yes but warns him that, if he is discovered, violence will surely follow. Interwoven into this background is a scene about John agonizing over how this endeavor will affect his white wife.

When we get back to “black” John, he is trying to eat his meal and smoke his cigarette quietly in a black cafe, while a belligerent man at the counter derides the other patrons as weaklings and idiots. John is visibly uncomfortable, and of course, the strange man sits down with John in his booth, tells him that he is the only one in the place who understands, and tries to make friends. The man tells John how he was in prison but has recently gotten out, and how he is looking for Catholic church, but that seems like enough to convince John that he is bad news.

When John gets back home, Doc asks him to play something on their piano, and while John does, we get another series of flashbacks. To alter his outward appearance, John has undergone a series of medical treatments, using both drugs and tanning, to turn himself “black.” Yet, he recognizes that he must transform inwardly as well, so he asks for and gets the help of a black shoe-shine man who agrees to lead him through the right ways to behave. After those scenes lay down the facts we need to know to follow the story, we get back to “black” John. By this point, we at least understand why John looks like a white guy in black face. (Being frank, when John’s disguise is so cheap-looking that, when he is settling into his room and Doc brings him a pitcher of water for his basin, I was worried that he would wash off the stage make-up.)

The middle portions of this film adaptation, which form the core of the content, are choppy and ill-connected. John Horton meets a series of people, mostly white, who give us small glimpses into what it might be like to be black in the South: a salacious traveling salesmen who hyper-focuses on interracial sex, a wild nighttime street scene followed by an all-black rooming house, a refusal from a white grocery-store manager when John answers a help-wanted sign, a park where John sits on the wrong bench (next to white woman), another salacious old white man who discusses having sex with the black women he hires. Then, after two brief scenes when John thinks about his wife then catches a ride from a white guy who is surprisingly kind, the barrage continues: John gets accused of stealing by his gas-station employer , he goes to a black nightclub and declines to spend the night with the woman he is set up with, then is chased by two young white guys who taunt and harass him on a deserted city street.

Exhausted emotionally, John Horton pays a visit to a friend, a newspaper editor with staunch progressive courage. Here, John unloads about the horrible conditions that he has seen and experienced. This crisis of faith in a progressive political ideal leads him to question his friend: why do we do this? why do we believe that it can change? However, John is met with smiles and kindness, encouraged to rest, and chided to continue his difficult journey.

Back out on the road, the barrage continues: John is once again denied a job based on his skin color, and while eating in a desolate, empty black cafe, he listens to the proprietor, an older black woman, speak her bitter peace about being black in America. As he finishes eating, another patron has come in to have a cup of coffee. Thinking that John is black and recognizing that he is educated, the young white patron insists that John come back to his hotel room to talk more about racial issues in the South. John reluctantly agrees and finds that this white man is a progressive sociologist. But this man too is obsessed with sex, reverting their otherwise-educated conversation back to notions that black people are wildly sexual creatures. Frustrated and angry, John throws the man down and lectures him on his attitudes.

As the movie draws to a close, John Horton is near a breaking point. He knew that this journey was going to be difficult, but in the thick of it, living with these realities has proven to be too much for a white writer undercover. John seeks solace in his faith, going to visit a Catholic priest for advice. Other than the one jovial white man who offered him donuts during a brief ride, the priest is only other decent white person he has met. John confesses that he is also white and that he is a changed man: “It horrifies me,” John says of his experiences, and the priest explains that he has lost his “pride of self,” which is a good thing. As John spouts his confusion over having seen both sides, the priest asks him whether or why he thought it was required of him to take on this strange journey. But John has done it, and there’s no turning back.

After leaving the church, John has more negative experiences to come. He makes a brief visit to a beach, where he attempts to play in the sand with a little white girl whose mother shouts at her in fear. Then, he is treated hatefully by the old white lady at the bus ticket counter who doesn’t want to make change for his ten-dollar bill. Two more rejections to heap onto his psyche.

After John stops by the newsstand and picks up a copy of a magazine with his (white) picture on the cover, Black Like Me ends when John visits yet another Southern town. At the bus stop, he meets an old black man who offers to let John stay in his home. The old man is the father of a young man who is participating in a local Civil Rights demonstration, and when John meets this young activist, he reveals himself to them as being white. Unprepared for their negative reactions to his ruse, John is appalled that both father and son are angry and want him gone. John pleads with them to let him explain how he is trying to show the white world what the black world is like. But neither of the men want to hear it, and Black Like Me closes with John walking down the street as a montage of the characters and scenes rolls by.

The three main problems with this 1964 adaptation of Black Like Me have nothing to do with the validity of the sentiments or ideas expressed. Mainly, it’s just not a very good movie. It’s choppy and disjointed and does a poor job of tying the events together. The second problem is the distractingly hokey make-up put on white actor James Whitmore to give the impression that he is passing for black. But he doesn’t look black— at all. Finally, the near-complete lack of specificity about geographic locations puts John, over and over, in a town in the South. In the book Black Like Me, the main character is in specific places, like New Orleans and Montgomery. For example, I gathered that the opening scenes were supposed to be in New Orleans, but that’s not explained.

On the other hand, even though the movie itself is particularly weak, the subject matter was timely in 1964. This adaptation of Black Like Me came out during the thick of the Civil Rights movement: the year after the Birmingham church bombing and the March on Washington, the same year as Freedom Summer, and the year before the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March. The nation was wrestling with explaining to white America what it meant to be black in the South, what it meant to live under Jim Crow segregation. Though the storytelling isn’t stellar, the individual incidents ring true to those hardships, and perhaps John’s failings and frustrations mirrored white America’s: no matter how hard you try, you still won’t completely understand how it feels to be black.

To find other Southern Movie posts, click here.