ALL GOD'S CHILLUN

...Walker is completely committed to loving and forgiving nonviolence which will, Dr...

...I can remember the irony around the old black mouths, the occasional suppressed amusement playing around young lips at some "kindly" white admonition or other...

...Walker, when last I heard him, preached a rousing sermon in an Albany, Georgia, church...

...My parents were equally elated the time I put together the slant, black letters of a magazine name and cried out: "Saturday Evening Post...

...We sat by her, touched her, felt her smile...

...My dilemma was again excruciating, with the sense of betraying some mysterious morality, as I drank lemonade with them...

...We little girls were delighted when Isom came to mow the lawn or chop out the grass in the paving cracks or weed the collia and salvia beds around the house...

...His stern call was not to come to Jesus, but to freedom by volunteering for jail the next day...

...I am ashamed to remember that, from an awful sense of betraying a vague, fierce moral principle, I couldn't say "Mrs.," or "Miz" as we pronounce it, though my instincts pushed me close to it...

...her torchy old voice told us enthralling stories as she pinched snuff, endured us late, and got us to bed with no protest...

...A young member of the Indian parliament, Krishna Chandra Pant (son of the late Govindi Ballahh Pant, disciple and intimate of Gandhi, a minister under Nehru, and the deputy leader of the Congress Party), visited us recently and regarded with deep and wondering eyes the phenomenon of our change which the gentle and insistent Negroes impose on us...

...Many Southern Negroes are as wrong-headed, prejudiced, and tedious as many Southern whites, which seems inescapable since we have all been together in this mess for 300 years...

...Then he turned to burning satire phrased in pounding Negro colloquialisms, excoriating white oppressions and absurdities, until the high, musical cries and booming "Amen's" and "Well's" rose in ragged rhythm with his sentences...

...Powledge rejoined, "he's a gentleman...

...I have often wondered if Mr...

...Her voice was like a great bronze bell and she pealed out a demand for morality, self criticism, and mission from these excited youngsters which seemed scarcely attainable in this life...

...Grace was one of my first Negro friends in Atlanta, and greeted me with the generous hospitality and sensitivity at which upper-class Negroes excel and which charms innocent and unaccustomed whites out of their uneasy gaucherie...

...He was a preacher in Macon, and like most Negro clerics of that day, I reckon he had to wash white windows and hoe white gardens and mow white lawns to support his family...

...Before I was five, old Mrs...

...Brother Anthony was old and white and Methodist, and his style was roll-ingly grand and colloquially comic by turns, stressed, too, with assent from the amen corners...

...I have an admirable white friend, an energetic and intelligent woman whose devotion to our slowly-arriving free society is important to us in Atlanta...

...And we thought, "What's it all about, this white-Negro business, anyway...

...Even without Mr...

...I can see now the expression of awed tenderness—awe for her sharply worded wisdom and tenderness for her tough, loving old age—on my mother's face when they talked woman-talk about men, children, cooking, friends, spites, and angers...

...I know these generous, benevolent figures from my childhood, with their ironic laughter and easy airs of humility, are what rebellious young Negroes today call "Uncle Toms" and scorned "Old Mammy" folks whom the New Negro does not enjoy invoking...

...I somehow blend the ironed starch and clean snuff smell of Aunt Anne with my mother's redolence of violet perfume and seal fur as she kissed us goodbye, Daddy's tiny Christmas-gift diamonds glittering in her ears...

...Powledge, a North Carolina boy, fell into a roadside race discussion with a South Georgia white supremacist...

...Walker, a Virginian, is somewhere along the line kin to Mrs...

...My confusion and dismay were so complete that I don't know what I said, but it was probably something like, "Well, yes ma'am, I'm sorry...

...I am old enough to be your grandmother, so you are presumptuous and ill-mannered...

...As an eighteen-year-old cub reporter in Macon, Georgia, I was sent to the Spring Street home of "an interesting old Nigra" to gather material for an uneasy and audacious feature story on her past grandeur as the wife of a city councilman during Reconstruction...

...they are acting under orders, for one thing...

...Again, one must wonder, what's it all about, black and white preachers, and segregated churches for people who are the same...

...We also loved his children and grandchildren, black, handsome, hardworking, and entertaining "good Nigras" who gave you your money's worth and some of whom went to college...

...By three a.m...

...She accepted my ridiculous "Sellers" and gave me an absorbing interview...

...Ah, they could laugh, and they still can, having earned the sharp freedom of humor and having honed their irony on the hard edges of white fear, tyranny, and pious talk...

...Walker's—well, arrogance—but there's something about their preaching which is the same...

...It is not the Negroes, it seems to me, who are crippled, confused, and frightened by a system of oppression...

...One June morning my mother looked with a brooding puzzlement out of the window to the front yard...

...but they departed, good-looking, good-smelling, and laughing, in a chorus of Aunt Anne's reassuring farewells and our high cries of good night and have-a-nice-time, a commotion comparable to take-off on a world tour...

...I sat down, dizzy at the impact of this unknown viewpoint...

...Segregationists cite this advance to prove that colored people, though inferior and unworthy to be our peers, still enjoy such generous treatment under our separate system that "the exceptions" among them ascend rocketlike to professions, wealth, and artistic success...

...I think she told us a lot of Bible stories, but she never scared us...

...Young Mr...

...demanded the dumbfounded redneck...

...For the long pull to integration, she urged "a lot of information with your inspiration—on the history of the South, its psychology of human emotions, and its political forces...

...He was affecting a neat, cropped black mustache and beard trim on his pale-gold, black-eyed face, which made him look like an intense and suffering saint...

...I feel sure Mr...

...Cultivated Negroes I know in several Southern states seem to exhibit all the charm and ease of Southern manner which whites have exalted for generations, but which many of them have to learn all over again from Negroes in the adventure of "socializing," or "mixing and mingling...

...It was all right, but I still have some trouble with my arms...

...Mrs...

...Sellers, perhaps you might say Madame Sellers...

...He rose to high demands on the children of God...

...She has worked as a reporter for a number of Southern papers and is the author of two novels, "Louisville Saturday" and "Affair of the Heart...

...Airey," I began brightly, in the diffident and cordial voice with which nice white children address aged Nigras, "I hope you'll tell me about the Reconstruction days and your experiences after The Wah...

...Some Negroes I know can inform, delight, and enlarge, and others can misinform, exasperate, and, worst of all, bore...

...No, I don't hate them...

...They are preachers of the same school, the one calling the children of God to Jesus and the other to freedom...

...We loved his deep and melodious preacher's voice, his embracing smile, and his pleasure in children...

...You think," the white aborigine demanded, pointing to a nearby Negro, "that nigger is as good as I am...

...Because," Mr...

...I don't know, why Mr...

...She looked beautiful, in a severely elegant hat, her heavy eyes big in her fine brown face and her busty figure chic in a dark dress...

...The Reverend Isom Ivins was never a slave or a Reconstruction Negro in high political position over Southern whites, because he wasn't that old...

...domestics, clubwomen, and writers who are my Negro friends this century...

...The next time Aunt Anne came we started on my first-grade primer, and she quickly spelled and pronounced her marveling way through it, as Sister jumped and laughed at Aunt Anne's triumph...

...Don't call me Auntie or Mammy...

...Sellers was gracious...

...I can remember the bitter but delicious laughter of the nurses who accompanied us afternoons to the playground or church steps...

...And she say, look like all we done for you, Annabelle, you could git here fo' sebm-thirty...

...Extreme" liberals, or integrationists, who want us all to be not only legal equals but friends down here in the South, behold the general Negro advance, and the brilliant victory of a few over brutal obstacles, as a happy sign that all God's chillun got wings, and that the best of us manage to fly even with clipped wings...

...Walker did not weep, but some of his flock did...

...King assures us and convinces me, redeem us all in the South through Negro suffering...

...I sometimes think," my mother mused, regarding the fair child and the old black preacher, "that something is all wrong when you children can call a grand old man like Isom by his first name...

...They listened to her as children to a beloved and stern maiden aunt, and seemed as moved by her admonitions as by the heat and beat of their tremendous singing...

...There my little sister, a fair five-year-old with golden curls and great blue eyes, was tagging after Isom at his yard work in the summer sunshine...

...Nor do I forget the stubborn refusal of whites to understand the anguish behind this behavior...

...Will you sit down...

...It occurs to me that we New White Folks, or whatever we are, are entitled to much more shame at the recollection of our absurdly lordly forebears, strutting through the paces of a cruel and arrogant system, and that, as the years rolled by and the darkness is dissipating, the Negroes emerge wiser, braver, and sweeter by far than the masters they now assail with sacrificial and nonviolent demands and with their invitation to the forgiveness of freedom and friendship together...

...I think it is possible to substantiate the first notion, and now propose to do so, and even to proclaim the obvious fact that Negroes are leading the multicolored South out of our common MARGARET LONG is information director of the Southern Regional Council and editor of New South...

...I remember how her laughter rejoiced us little girls and enchanted my father...

...But I don't think this loving business comes so easy to Mr...

...As James McBride Dabbs has pointed out, the Negro student movement, supported now by nearly all Negroes in the South, embodies and demonstrates the old professed virtues of the South—courage, love of freedom, religious faith, and good manners—virtues which the white Southerners, as masters, could never achieve...

...Walker is young and mulatto and Baptist, and his style is grave and fierce and satirically dialect-shot by turns, fired by congregational ardors...

...The social grace and generosity of such Negroes is inestimable in helping strange and awkward whites over the barriers between us...

...She was Airey Sellers, whose forebears were embarrassingly rich, Ohio-educated, and said to have, at least one of them, fought on the Union side...

...My friend Ruby Doris is an indefatigable revolutionary of that incomprehensible band called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sends young Negroes sitting-in, promoting voter registration, marching, demonstrating, singing, and popping in and out of the foulest jails in the South...

...A week later, when they were out and Aunt Anne couldn't, of course, find Miss Hazel Gewinner's name in the phone book to call and tell them about a long distance call, I was proud to find G-e-w —in the directory...

...As usual, in a Negro church, the "Amen's," "Yes, Jesuses" and questioning cries of "We-ell...

...How come...

...I asked myself...

...I am aware that it is suspect and offensive to recall, with love and wonder, the "old slave-type of darkies," but I can't forget the dark, humor-rich, and generous men and women who bore their oppressions with great grace...

...Freedom calls for intelligence, real emotions, and "moral stamina," she said...

...Walker reminds me of the Reverend Bascom Anthony, a white Methodist preacher in Macon who died a generation ago...

...Dabbs said, more recently, that the Negro has the leadership in the South now, to which "the white responds, or more accurately, reacts . . . dragging his feet until he learns to cooperate," and "wherever the South is going, the Negro is taking him...

...She still does a great deal of fruitful communication with a white community which is, to put it kindly, still largely ignorant of Negro aspirations, accomplishments, and feelings...

...Of course, everything was all wrong when, in the Southern pattern of "good manners," we gently and inexorably degraded the Negroes we loved and respected most with this refusal to address them courteously or even to permit our children to accord their black betters this respect...

...They didn't give me a chance to walk, but just dragged me with these things—yes, it hurt— and then put me in the shower, with my clothes on, and they scrubbed me all over with wire brushes they scrub the floor with...

...I cannot appraise the emancipated slaves of 100 years ago, or measure or demonstrate the extent of their advance this year in Dixie, as I don't know any emancipated slaves to stack up against the Freedom Riders, Ph.D's...

...She began her Bible at home and in a few months had spelled and read her way through it, with loud praise to the Lord, and me...

...Pant's perspective, it is surely not too sanguine for us to believe that despite the fevers and fires of Oxford, the insane intransigence of Albany, and the mean-hearted fears of segregationists all over the South, our Negroes will bring us together in freedom and friendship such as no peoples of different color have had before...

...Isom, a heavy black man with an aquiline face, smiled his sweet, white smile at her as she danced around him asking questions which amused him and as he made replies which fascinated her...

...Keenan had started me...

...Their aplomb handles the confrontation on busses or at polling places, softly meets the gauche and fascinated stares of diners in an integrated restaurant, and gently and adamantly explains Negro requirements to the city politician who is suddenly astute enough to learn a fast lesson in manners and democracy...

...You see, I'd had athlete's foot and was scared of the shower and wouldn't go, and the matrons, two big women, put the things on me—they screw, you know, and can break your wrist, but they didn't turn them that hard...

...And they got to where they were kind of friendly with us...

...I believe that the Negroes, in their most abject debasement and repression, must have been bigger and more human than the whites who underpaid, overworked, humiliated, and sometimes lynched them and then proclaimed the corroding lie that this Way of Life was mutually happy...

...Reverend Walker does not exhibit the awesome depth of religious humility and pride which one feels in Dr...

...I am no relation to you...

...And, in the course of his rolling sentences, he would lapse into the Middle-Georgia vernacular with corn pone jokes and the double negative-ain't type of ironies on the sins of the congregation...

...Sellers talked so volubly, opening up a world so unsuspected, that we didn't complete the interview and I returned the next afternoon...

...I do not forget, of course, the Negroes whose drunkenness, rages, ill-tempers, and sullen humility filled the smalltown jails on weekends, erupted in wild knifings and beatings in the dark alleys, and rendered white households wretched with silent servant hatred...

...If that courtesy is impossible, then address me as Sellers...

...Everybody cried with him, and a lot of people hit the sawdust trail, or at least the red carpet in the aisle, to come to Jesus...

...Sitting in her lap, with my little sister big-eyed at Aunt Anne's effort or falling asleep with her golden head on the white apron, I'd show her the letters and she would say them, short or long, and hard or soft, after me...

...She likes and approves of all Negroes, as far as I can see, and I'm very much afraid that her rectitude and ardor have led her into another kind of racism...

...She presented her granddaughter, a pretty little lightbrown girl about my age, as Miss Sellers, and compounded the shock of presenting a Negro contemporary to me as a social equal by asking if I'd like some lemonade...

...As to my proposition, that these Negro Southerners are "superior" to the whites who resist them, it seems evident that people who suffer for what they believe, forgive their oppressors, and persist toward freedom for themselves and those who deny them liberty, are "better" than people who blindly fight so high-minded and human a change...

...Powledge...

...And with the excitement of a man beholding a great new thing, Mr...

...We have to show them, it's all a demonstration, even with the wrist-breakers, and it shows them our kind of Negro...

...Sometimes she lay down beside one or the other of us, and we loved the presence of the aged, strong body, the beloved face, and the rich, murmuring voice...

...My vivid memory of her rebuke and my confusion have obliterated all of what she said...

...She warned against "headline hunting," vanity, and action without understanding and moral resolve...

...I first encountered Miss Ella Baker at a conference of uprising students a couple of years ago in Atlanta...

...By these means SNCC advances the revolution years ahead of the plans of more conservative Negro organizations, which must follow these mad youngsters into the wilds of the deepest South with lawyers, bond money, and big-name support, as in Albany, Georgia, and McComb, Mississippi, to name only two scenes of sensational uprising...

...I think of a young girl named Ruby Doris Smith, who is "jail-crazy," they say in laughing pride...

...Pant predicted a grand and bloodless liberation for us...

...I think it is the old love, irony, and patience which is at work on childlike and bewildered white neighbors clinging senselessly to an ancient stance once held sacred, and slowly yielding it with naive elation over the new and natural freedom between two peoples who belonged together all the time...

...This social generosity is not, however, universal among militant new Negroes...

...My friend and contemporary, Grace, comes from a long line of elegant and protected Negro educators and was, for years, what a witty mutual friend of ours called "Miss Negro Communication with White Atlanta...

...We have to live with these people, and we have to teach them, and they do seem to learn...

...Sellers and Miss Sellers for a lovely afternoon and the particularly refreshing lemonade...

...Walker...

...Desegregationists and "moderates" regard this rise as comforting evidence that Negroes will not debase our white schools, befoul decent housing, or marry our white daughters and sisters if they get their rights...

...Don't call me Airey," replied the dark dowager in a heavy old voice harsh with command and rebuke...

...I remember only her painful lesson in manners...

...Already this seems a vastly better destination for which we are headed, led by better people who have ceased to hate, who risk and suffer for liberty, who offer friendship for enmity, and who embody the virtues the white South long proclaimed but could not practice...

...After a speech from Martin Luther King, with his stirring call to heroism, suffering, and the nonviolent life, and his promise of Negro redemption of the South, and a round of the glorious singing which booms and rings through the movement, Miss Baker rose to address the meeting, by then nearly drunk with fervor, courage, and aspiration...

...punctuated, lifted, and bore his sermon along, until it cracked like a whip as he described the recalcitrance of white Albany, the jailings, the job-firings, and the brutality to little children in county jails...

...The Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, for instance, next man to Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Then we would turn with joy to Aunt Anne who stood there at the age of ninety (she calculated) small, shriveled, nut-brown in her drab long dress and impeccably starched white apron and head rag...

...Keenan, a retired school teacher innocent of modern methods, taught me the alphabet, the phonetic sounds of each letter and diphthongs, and in a couple of weeks, long before school, I spelled out the words and recognized their sound with the exhilarating discovery that I could read...

...King, nor his sweetness of demeanor...

...After the Freedom Ride to Jackson, Ruby Doris talked softly, rapidly, and carefully about her ordeal: "Well, yes, they did put the wrist-breakers on me...

...But after fifteen years of occasional "mixing and mingling," as our conservative politicians call socializing friendships between Negroes and white people, I cannot, alas, conclude that Negroes can do no wrong...

...It was excellent lemonade on that sweltering August day, and as I departed I was so undone that I thanked both Mrs...

...We extremists on the human side also have a rather rabid tendency to believe and suggest, if not state outright, that Negroes are better than white people and can do no wrong...

...I don't know how long I pondered the question, finally to wonder what wickedness lurks in civility to Negroes...

...Miss Baker, I understand, pays two and three dollars for her hats, so it must be the face which endows her with such a costly sheen...

...You have to wait for Mr...

...One night we sat up all night, telling one another our life stories, Grace talking with tart wit and candor, and tenderness for both our sets of children...

...I think it was then that Aunt Anne sighed out her ambition to read the Bible and I said, "I can show you how, Aunt Anne...

...Brother Anthony preached a sermon, both rousing and intellectual, and would move himself to tears as he stood, a tall, handsome old man with auburn curls about the back of his head, his fine profile raised to God and illumined by rays from the stained glass behind him...

...She also was laying claim to all the precepts and feelings of a respectful, inviting style in human encounter—that is, of good manners, especially of young people toward their elders—with which I had been equally indoctrinated...

...She started on the newspaper with my halting help, and we corrected one another...

...Here was a Negro rebuking "my white manners with high insolence, with brazen violation of my sacred, undefined duty to suppress Negro dignity...

...I don't remember what Aunt Anne laughed at, but my feeling is that her mirth was comic and profoundly ironic...

...Walker is equally so, if he admits you to his favor...

...All God's Chillun by MARGARET LONG Tt is the Southern fashion these days to speak of the "remarkable progress" of Southern Negroes who, we all agree, have "come a lawng way" since Emancipation...

...What else could I do...

...Better," replied Mr...

...in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is a tall, slender, dapper young man capable of cool hauteur...

...I am, however, old enough to have known several former slaves who were, despite "emancipation" of fifty, sixty, or seventy years, still in a condition of real bondage, and who bore, that bondage with a spirited strength, ironic sophistication, and transforming kindness which seems to me to animate and uphold the Negro movement presently liberating the South...

...Airey Sellers, or some haughty President-General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy...

...Brother Anthony, as we all called this revered old minister, had none of Mr...

...When I ascended the steps of the cottage and entered the old-fashioned parlor, dark with ancient mahogany, walnut, and gold-framed portraits of formidable Negroes, I encountered an old woman of mulatto color and a shriveled, arrogant face with heavy lids over hazel eyes, flaring nostrils, and a wide mouth set in hauteur...

...She was enthroned in a rose-back chair...

...I don't know what advice or Biblical injunctions she offered my young mother, but I nostalgically feel them as tinged with forgiveness, cynicism, and a scorn which was high, humble, and tolerant of the human condition...

...And today, we see them all over the South, literate, illiterate, well-to-do, and poor, demanding with wisdom and grace the rights which many whites are still resisting with idiot shibboleths and crazy fears which are the wonder of the rational world...

...When I was five years old and my little sister was three, my mother and 15 father, who, as I look back on them, suggest a variation of the simple felicity of the song, "Your pappy's rich and your mammy's good-lookin" (my pappy, a newspaperman, wasn't rich but my mammy, a blue-eyed, black Irish type, was certainly good-looking), would leave us with old Aunt Anne when they went out for gala evenings...

...our autobiographies seemed nearly identical, including sins, punishments, joys, and triumphs and reactions to them...

...They are, rather, toughened, enlarged, and infinitely sophisticated by it— those who weathered it...

...I was eager and feeling grandly emancipated from the narrow use of first names for venerable old Negroes, and Mrs...

...So I did, starting with the ABC's, as old Mrs...

...And when the white barriers topple and the astonished masters regard Negroes stepping over the broken barricades, it is the Negroes whose wise, generous, and graceful demeanor soothes the trembling whites...

...Walker, or court his friendship, which is quite worth the effort...

...He reminded us that never in the long, bloody story of mankind have two races lived in the same place without oppression of one by the other, nor has a subject race ever freed itself without long violence...

...I don't know what they were talking about, and only see now the sunlit picture of the little golden girl and the splendid black patriarch in soft rapport on the grass around our cedar tree...

...Yes, I believe in forgiveness and love and nonviolence...

...I don't know if it was the gayety of Daddy's party mood, or Mother's fragrance, or the presence of Aunt Anne that made their leave-takings so delightful and beglamored...

...bondage...

...If you cannot bring yourself to call me Mrs...

...and the young women's shrieks would rise, beginning low and rich and ascending high and helpless into the summer afternoon air, as Annabelle's friends remembered "all they done for her," like "she woulda been fired if she hadn't come to work sick, that wore out dress they give her and that two dollars they took out for a broken cup...

...Brother Anthony was socially delightful in the parlor of a Sunday afternoon, and Mr...

...She enjoined them to "be a real moral movement" and to purge out "hatred, resentment, and self-seeking...

...His sermon began, grave and thoughtfully worked out, about the consecrating drop of blood on Aaron's ear, thumb, and great toe, and its strengthening call to mission...

...A trivial and clear example is the little adventure of Fred Powledge, an Atlanta Journal reporter, on one of his jaunts to intermittently erupting Albany...