Down Home Talk
SHAPIRO, HARVEY D.
Down Home Talk Evers By Charles Evers ¦with Grace Halsell World. 196 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro CHARLES EVERS, the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, is a curiously complex man who is...
...Can't nobody blackmail me...
...Can't nobody tell on me more than I've already told," he says...
...While he remains committed to a vision of nonviolence and integration, Evers understands the impact of black power: "We've got to teach our people to buy from the black man, to carry their clothes to the black cleaners, buy their groceries from a black man, to let a black man bury them—and when a black man runs for office, to vote for the black man...
...Unfortunately, she seems to have simply typed up the first 40,000 words Evers fed into the recorder...
...There he dabbled in a variety of enterprises, including gambling, procuring and bootlegging, and at one point had three women pregnant...
...But in 1963 Medgar Evers was shot, and Charles returned home...
...Although his earthy style is good in snatches—he's quite winning and ingenuous as an orator and his pithy comments make good magazine quotations—it does not wear well...
...Moreover, it delivers a preemptive strike, bringing the skeletons out of Evers' closet before his opponents can do so...
...Similarly, Evers' campaign biography is important more for what it symbolizes than for what it says...
...His gubernatorial campaign will also help to raise funds for black candidates and to create racial pride in a state where no black man has run for governor in its 154-year history...
...Evers stands very little chance of winning November 2, but his candidacy will be an important factor in getting blacks registered and to the polls, thus swelling the vote totals for the scores of blacks who will be seeking city and county offices throughout Mississippi...
...Halsell had him talk into a tape recorder...
...With his hold on the town hall in Fayette and his nearby Medgar Evers Shopping Center, Evers has done much to build this kind of power...
...I shouldn't have left Mississippi in the first place...
...Ultimately, the importance of this book lies in its timing, for its appearance coincides with Evers' decision to run for governor...
...I want people to know I've never been a saint...
...He ran for Congress in 1968, and the next year he became the first black mayor of a bi-racial Southern town...
...Since then, as field secretary of the Mississippi naacp, Evers has led blacks in boycotts and other challenges to Jim Crow...
...On his way to the funeral, Evers told his wife, "I'll never come back to Chicago, I ain't comin' back...
...He isn't too impressed with Roy Wilkins, but he thinks even less of the Panthers: "Eldridge Cleaver is a genuine talent, but a wasted talent...
...A publishing house might wisely conclude, therefore, that some sensitive and perceptive author should write a book about him—someone like Grace Halsell, who wrote Soul Sister, describing her travels through the South with her white skin chemically darkened...
...when I said, "You just want me to stay in your motel one more night," he broke up, delighted that I had caught on...
...While Medgar stayed to fight for civil rights, Charles went off to Chicago to make his fortune...
...Evers is most enthusiastic over Robert Kennedy, and respects the civil rights achievements of Lyndon Johnson...
...He has preached in churches and run a whorehouse...
...What we have here, then, is a campaign biography, a necessary accoutrement for any big-time campaign these days...
...After I finished some business in Fayette last year, Evers earnestly suggested that I talk to a few more people...
...we must have autobiography...
...But World has succumbed to Dick Schaap's vision of literature: Biography is no longer adequate...
...What good is his knowledge doing us over in Algiers or some damn place...
...In his autobiography, Evers makes it clear that the almost schizophrenic quality of his life stems from a devotion to his martyred brother...
...Evers is not a writer, so Mrs...
...Charles and Medgar Evers grew up in Decatur, Mississippi, suffering the customary outrages of poor blacks...
...We get tired of authentic but banal remarks like, "Being mayor of Fayette has been difficult, but I've enjoyed every minute of it...
...Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro CHARLES EVERS, the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, is a curiously complex man who is equally at home on the backwater hustings of the South and the liberal-chic circuit of the North...
...He devotes himself selflessly to a cause but retains a driving interest in making money...
...Same as Rap Brown with all that loud big mouth talk...
...In addition to telling his own story in this book, Evers appraises a wide range of politicians and civil rights leaders...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
