The Last Juror

The Last Juror Page 21

Part Two

Chapter 21

In a sweeping ruling that left no room for doubt or delay, the Court ordered the immediate termination of the dual school system. No more stalling, no more lawsuits, no more promises. Instant integration, and Clanton was as shocked as every other town in the South.

Harry Rex brought me the Court's opinion and tried to explain its intricacies. It wasn't that complicated. Every school district had to immediately implement a desegregation plan.

"This'll sell some newspapers," he predicted, unlit cigar crammed in his mouth.

All sorts of meetings were instantly arranged around town, and I covered them all. On a sweltering night in mid-July, a public gathering took place in the gym of the high school. The stands were packed, the floor covered with concerned parents. Mr. Walter Sullivan, the Times's lawyer, also served as the attorney for the school board. He did most of the talking because he wasn't elected in any way. The politicians preferred to hide behind him. He was blunt and said that in six weeks the Ford County school system would open and be fully desegregated.

A smaller meeting was held at the black school on Burley Street. Baggy and I were there, along with Wiley Meek, who took photos. Again Mr. Sullivan explained to the crowd what was about to happen. Twice his remarks were interrupted by applause.

The difference in those two meetings was astounding. The white parents were angry and frightened and I saw several women crying. The fateful day had finally arrived. At the black school there was an air of victory. The parents were concerned, but they were also elated that their children would finally be enrolled in the better schools. Though they had miles to go in housing, employment, and health care, integration into the public schools was an enormous step forward in their battle for civil rights.

Miss Callie and Esau were there. They were treated with great respect by their neighbors. Six years earlier they had walked into the front door of the white school with Sam and fed him to the lions. For three years he was the only black kid in his class, and the family paid a price for it. Now it all seemed worth it, at least to them. Sam wasn't around to interview.

There was also a meeting in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church. Whites only, and the crowd was slightly upper middle class. Its organizers had been raising money to build a private academy, and now suddenly the fund-raising was more urgent. Several doctors and lawyers were there, and most of the country-club types. Their children were apparently too good to go to school with black children.

They were quickly putting together a plan to open classes in an abandoned factory south of town. The building would be leased for a year or two until their capital campaign was complete. They were scrambling to hire teachers and order books but the most pressing concern, other than running from the blacks, was what to do about a football team. At times there was an air of hysteria, as if a 75 percent white school system would pose grave dangers for their kids.

I wrote long reports and ran bold headlines, and Harry Rex was right. The newspapers were selling. In fact, by late July 1970 our circulation topped five thousand, a stunning turnaround. After Rhoda Kassellaw and desegregation, I was getting a glimpse of what my friend Nick Diener said back at Syracuse. "A good small town weekly doesn't print newspapers. It prints money."

I needed news, and in Clanton it was not always available. In a slow week, I would run an overblown story on the latest filing in the Padgitt appeal. It was usually at the bottom of the front page and sounded as if the boy might walk out of Parchman at any minute. I'm not sure my readers cared much anymore. In early August, though, the paper got another boost when Davey Bigmouth Bass explained to me the rituals of high school football.

Wilson Caudle had no interest in sports, which was fine except that everyone else in Clanton lived and died with the Cougars on Friday night. He shoved Bigmouth to the back of the paper and rarely ran photos. I smelled money, and the Cougars became front page news.

My football career ended in the ninth grade, at the hands of a sadistic ex-Marine my soft little prep school had for some reason hired to coach us. Memphis in August is the tropics; football practice should be banned then and there. I was running laps around the practice field, in full gear, helmet and all, in ninety-five-degree heat and humidity, and the coach for some reason refused to give us water. The tennis courts were next to the field, and after I finished vomiting I gazed upon them and saw two girls swatting tennis balls with two guys. With the girls in the scene everything was very pleasant, but what really got my attention were the large bottles of cold water they drank whenever they wanted.

I quit football and took up tennis and girls, and never for an instant regretted it. My school played its games on Saturday afternoons, so I was not baptized in the religion of Friday night football.

I happily became a later convert.

When the Cougars assembled for their first practice, Bigmouth and Wiley were there to cover it. We ran a large front page photo of four players, two white and two black, and another of the coaching staff, which included a black assistant. Bigmouth wrote columns about the team and its players and prospects, and this was only the first week of practice.

We covered the opening of school, including interviews with students, teachers, and administrators, and our slant was openly positive. In truth, Clanton had little of the racial unrest that was common throughout the Deep South when schools opened that August.

The Times did big stories about the cheerleaders, the band, the junior high teams - everything we could possibly think of. And every story had several photos. I don't know how many kids failed to make the pages of our paper, but there weren't many.

The first football game was an annual family brawl against Karaway, a much smaller town that had a much better coach. I sat with Harry Rex and we screamed until we were hoarse. The game was a sellout and the crowd was mostly white.

But those white folks who had been so adamantly opposed to accepting black students were suddenly transformed that Friday night. In the first quarter of the first game, a star was born when Ricky Patterson, a pint-size black kid who could fly, ran eighty yards the first time he touched the ball. The second time he went forty-five, and from then on whenever they tossed it to him the entire crowd stood and yelled. Six weeks after the desegregation order hit the town, I saw narrow-minded, intolerant rednecks screaming like maniacs and bouncing up and down whenever Ricky got the ball.

Clanton won 34 - 30 in a cliffhanger, and our coverage of the game was shameless. The entire front page was nothing but football. We immediately initated a Player-of-the-Week, with a $100 scholarship award that went into some vague fund that took us months to figure out. Ricky was our first honoree, and so that required yet another interview with another photo.

When Clanton won its first four games, the Times was there to stir up the frenzy. Our circulation reached fifty-five hundred.

One very hot day in early September, I was strolling around the square, going from my office to the bank. I was wearing my usual garb - faded jeans, rumpled cotton button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, loafers, no socks. I was then twenty-four years old and because I owned a business I was slowly turning my thoughts away from college and toward a career. Very slowly. I had long hair and still dressed like a student. I generally gave little thought to what I wore or what image I portrayed.

This lack of concern was not shared by all.

Mr. Mitlo grabbed me on the sidewalk and shoved me into his small haberdashery. "I been waiting for you," he said with a thick accent, one of the few in Clanton. He was a Hungarian and had some colorful history of escaping from Europe while leaving behind a child or two. He was on my list of human interest stories to pursue as soon as football season was over.

"Look at you!" he sneered as I stood just inside his door, by a rack of belts. But he was smiling and with foreigners it's easy to dismiss their bluntness due to translation problems.

I sort of looked at myself. What exactly was the problem?

Evidently, there were many. "You are a professional," he informed me. "A very important man in this town, and you are dressed like, uh, well..." He scratched his bearded chin as he searched for the proper insult.

I tried to help. "A student."

"No," he said, wagging an index finger back and forth as if no student had ever looked that bad. He gave up on the put-down and continued the lecture.

"You are unique - how many people own a newspaper? You are educated, which is rare around here. And from up North! You are young, but you shouldn't look so, so, immature. We must work on your image."

We went to work, not that I had a choice. He advertised heavily in the Times, so I certainly couldn't tell him to take a hike. Plus, he made sense. The student days were gone, the revolution was over. I had escaped Vietnam and the sixties and college, and, though I wasn't ready to settle down to a wife and parenthood, I was beginning to feel my age.

"You must wear suits," he decided as he went through racks of clothes. Mitlo had been known to walk up to the president of a bank and, in a crowd, comment on a faulty shirt and suit combo, or a drab tie. He and Harry Rex didn't get along at all.

I was not about to start wearing gray suits and wing tips. He pulled out a light blue seersucker suit, found a white shirt, then went straight for the tie rack where he picked out the perfect red-and-gold-striped bow tie. "Let's try this," he announced when his selections were finished. "Over there," he said, pointing to a dressing room. Thankfully, the store was empty. I had no choice.

I gave up on the bow tie. Mitlo reached up and in a skillful flourish had it fixed in a second. "Much better," he said, examining the finished product. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. I wasn't sure, but then I was intrigued by the transformation. It gave me character and individuality.

Whether I wanted it or not, the outfit was about to become mine. I had to wear it at least once.

To top it off, he found a white Panama hat that fit nicely on my shaggy head. As he adjusted it here and there, he tugged at a patch of hair over my ear and said, "Too much hair. You are a professional. Cut it."

He altered the slacks and jacket and pressed the shirt, and the following day I arrived to collect my new outfit. I planned to simply pick it up, take it home, then wait and wait until there was a slow day around town and wear it. I intended to walk straight to Mitlo's so he could see me in his creation.

He, of course, had other plans. He insisted I try it on, and when I did he then insisted that I walk around the entire square to collect my compliments.

"I'm really in a hurry," I said. Chancery court was in session and downtown was busy.

"I insist," he said dramatically, wagging the finger as if he would not negotiate for a second.

He adjusted the hat, and the final prop was a long black cigar which he cut, stuffed in my mouth, and lit with a match. "A powerful image," he said proudly. "The town's only publisher. Now off."

No one recognized me for the first half block. Two farmers in front of the feed store gave me a look, but then I didn't like the way they were dressed either. I felt like Harry Rex with the cigar. Mine was lit, though, and very strong. I sprinted by his office. Mrs. Gladys Wilkins ran her husband's insurance agency. She was about forty, very pretty and always well dressed. When she saw me she stopped dead in her tracks, then said, "Why Willie Traynor. Don't you look distinguished."

"Thank you."

"Sorta reminds me of Mark Twain."

I walked on, feeling better. Two secretaries did double-takes. "Love that bow tie," one of them called to me. Mrs. Clare Ruth Seagraves stopped me and talked on and on about something I'd written months earlier and had forgotten. As she talked she examined my suit and bow tie and hat and didn't even mind the cigar. "You look quite handsome, Mr. Traynor," she said finally, and seemed embarrassed by her candor. I walked slower and slower around the square and decided that Mitlo was right. I was a professional, a publisher, an important person in Clanton even if I didn't feel too important, and a new image was in order.

We'd have to find some weaker cigars, though. By the time I completed my tour of the square, I was dizzy and had to sit down.

Mr. Mitlo ordered another blue seersucker and two light gray ones. He decided my wardrobe would not be dark like lawyers' and bankers', but light and cool and a bit unconventional. He dedicated himself to finding me some unique bow ties and proper fabrics for the fall and winter.

Within a month Clanton was accustomed to having a new character around the square. I was getting noticed, especially by the opposite sex. Harry Rex laughed at me, but then his own outfits were comical.

The ladies loved it.