Laments on the Demise of Tom Turnipseed

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, p. 31

I hated to see it a few weeks ago when ole Tom Turnipseed went up in flames. Turnipseed, of course, was a candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina, who lost a primary runoff to Mike Daniel.

Daniel may make a terrific lieutenant governor. Turnipseed might have been a disaster. But it seems to me that his demise–and there are those who predict this was his last campaign–is part of the depressing homogenization of modern politics.

In both North and South Carolina, we’ve always had our mavericks. Today, they’re still around in the form of Thurmond, Helms and East, but the color and the flair are not what they could be.

Helms and East are mostly just peculiar–stodgy ideologues with kamikaze instincts.

Thurmond may still be wrestling with Reconstruction–a quaint anachronism in 1982–but he’s gotten so pragmatic about it that he even voted to extend the Voting Rights Act.

Turnipseed is different. As a South Carolina state senator in the late 1970’s, he was dapper and charming, outrageous and impolite–affronting his legislative colleagues by, among other things, appearing with a couple of disc jockey buddies on the floor of the Senate and singing country songs about rising gas prices.

He was a brilliant rock-thrower with some self-destructive tendencies–declaring a war he couldn’t win on special interest groups, particularly utilities, and on a semi-corrupt system of legislative seniority.

But it seems to me that Turnipseed’s importance goes beyond the dash and color of his quixotic crusades. He made, I think, an ideological pilgrimage that’s not uncommon in the South.

As it happened, he grew up on the same street that I did. He was older, and I didn’t know him until later. But when you’re from Mobile, Ala., raised in privilege in the dappled shade of live oaks, amid people who regret the outcome of the Civil War, you’re apt to see the world in strange colorations.

You’ll have a strong sense of privilege, of your own special place near the center of things. And unless you’re extremely lucky, blessed with a quirky and aberrational understanding of fairness, you’ll also be a racist.

It’s easy and natural for sons of the Old South, and neither Turnipseed nor I escaped the maladies of our birthright. But chances are also strong that one day it will hit you, often with a shattering suddenness, that you’re hideously wrong about the things that you believe.

A way of life that seemed easy and genteel and supremely civilized becomes abruptly horrifying, and you develop a tendency toward reverse social climbing–toward a compensatory identification with the underdogs around you.

I became a newspaper reporter with a righteous impulse to write about injustice. Turnipseed became a populist politician, a champion of have-nots, whose stridency, in the end, was his undoing.

He was once the campaign manager for Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace. But the truth finally hit him in South Carolina and he tried to build a coalition of blacks and whites–of ordinary people victimized by the institutions around them.

He campaigned against the death penalty, rising utility prices and legislative apportionment plans that effectively excluded blacks. None of those causes are easy ones to win, and Turnipseed’s ratio of success was not impressive.

He was angry and shrill, and even some of the people who agreed with him finally wished he’d go away. He tried to change his style for his last campaign, but it was apparently too late.

So he lost.

That’s a shame, however, because politics can do with a little more passion. And particularly so when that sense of being right comes, as Turnipseed’s did, from a deeply felt knowledge of what it means to be wrong.

Frye Gaillard is an editorial page writer for the Charlotte Observer, where this article originally appeared.

Denial of Tenure At Vanderbilt

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 7-8

By almost any measure, the last year has been a good one for Elizabeth Langland. Her first two books, published by the University of Chicago Press and the University Press of New England, have drawn praise from the critics, and a third book–Society and the Novel–has been accepted by the University of North Carolina Press.

In addition, her teaching is going well at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Langland is the 34-year-old Chairman of the English Department. Teaching generally goes well for Langland. She was widely acclaimed by the students at Vanderbilt, where she taught until 1982, and where students lined up one hundred and twenty at a time for her British Novels class.

But Langland was forced to leave Vanderbilt. The University’s Arts and and Science Dean, Jacque Vogeli, overruled a recommendation by the school’s English faculty that she become the first woman in the department’s history to be granted tenure. That decision has sparked a federal lawsuit and a national controversy, and Vanderbilt’s image has taken a beating.

The court case will be heard sometime in October. In the meantime, Vanderbilt officials have sought to defend themselves against charges of egregious sexism, which is a difficult task, given the facts that are available to the University’s critics. At the time of Langland’s tenure vote, for example, Vanderbilt’s Arts and Science College had two hundred and ten tenured faculty members, of whom two hundred and three were male.

There were already “grumblings about those statistics. But the complaints grew louder after June 13,1981, when Langland was summoned to the office of English Department Chairman James Kilroy. “The news is not good,” Kilroy told her. And he read her a letter from Vogeli, approximately two pages of single-spaced type, informing her that her tenure request was being denied. Vogeli, who had approved tenure for twenty-nine men and one woman during his time as a Vanderbilt dean, ordered Kilroy not to show Langland the letter or allow her to take any notes on its contents. Just read it to her once, Vogeli had said.

Still, Langland got the gist of it. Vogeli found her scholarship deficient; she had failed, he said to establish “a national reputation” in her field.

Langland was shaken and dismayed. but many of her colleagues were outraged. One of the angriest was Susan Ford Wiltshire, a tenured, Southern-bred classics professor who arrived at Vanderbilt in 1971. Wiltshire knew that no woman hired after that had been granted tenure at Vanderbilt, despite lofty assurances by the school’s administration that Vanderbilt was committed to equality.

In addition, Wiltshire was familiar with Langland’s credentials as a teacher and a scholar–the three books she had written or edited during three years at Vanderbilt, a time during which she also wrote several scholarly articles, chaired the University’s Women Studies Program and taught at least three courses a semester.

“Elizabeth was widely recognized as one of the genuinely excellent teachers on campus,” said Wiltshire. “As for Jacque Vogeli’s estimation of her scholarship, there are a great many people–including the majority of her own department, and more recently, critics around the country–who clearly disagree with him.”

For Wiltshire and many others, the issue boiled down to this: Despite Vanderbilt’s atrocious record in promoting women faculty members, a University dean went out of his way–took the unusual step of overruling the recommendation of a respected department–to deny tenure to an excellent teacher and promising young scholar.

The move seems all the more surprising in view of Vanderbilt’s national reputation for excellence. The English department has long been one of the best in the South, with writers such as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom passing through in recent decades.

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And during the political and social turbulence of the 1960s, Vanderbilt’s chancellor at the time, Alexander Heard, stood up strongly for academic freedom–keeping his campus peaceful not by threats of repression, but by honest open dialogue that impressed even the most radical of students.

Vanderbilt people take pride in all that. But they also wince at the University’s shabbier moments, including its decision in 1960 to dismiss the Reverend James Lawson from its graduate divinity program. Lawson was black, and his offense, in the eyes of the Vanderbilt administration, was to lead sit-in demonstrations at Nashville lunch counters.

Harvie Branscomb, Vanderbilt’s chancellor before Heard, explained the University’s position this way: “There is no issue involved of freedom or thought, or of conscience, or of speech, or of the right to protest against social custom. The issue is whether or not the University can be identified with a continued campaign of mass disobedience of law as a means of protest.”

Susan Wiltshire and other critics argue that the same institutional defensiveness and startling lapse of vision have characterized Vanderbilt’s handling of the Elizabeth Langland case. As proof, they cite Vogeli’s recent quotes in a student publication:

“(The press) reported that I denied tenure. I do not deny tenure. I sometimes fail to concur with a department recommendation. There is a difference. Deny has a pejorative ring. Deny implies that tenure is something that rightfully belongs to a faculty member, and that I am preventing that member from receiving it. It is like saying your professor denied you an A.”

Wiltshire, Langland and many of their colleagues were unimpressed, at the least, by Vogeli’s stance, and they formed an organization called WEAV (Women’s Equity at Vanderbilt) to push the Langland case and to raise the larger questions about women’s equality. Regardless of the outcome of the Langland suit, the WEAV members are convinced their efforts will have a long-run effect.

“The history of this institution will be significantly altered by what has happened in the last year and a half,” concludes Wiltshire. “Elizabeth Langland and Jim Lawson each said ‘no’ to the ‘no’–and that makes all the difference.”

Frye Gaillard, a Southern author and editorial writer at the Charlotte Observer, is a graduate of Vanderbilt, class of ’68.

It’s Jesse Again

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 1-3

Relying on $14 million worth of accusation, racial invective and unrepentant lying, Sen. Jesse Helms has been reelected.

He defeated North Carolina’s popular governor, Jim Hunt, by fifty-one percent to forty-nine percent of the vote. Thus, a state once considered the South’s most progressive has offered–once again–a solid vote of confidence to one of the most radical spokesmen for the American rightwing.

For a time, it appeared the result would be different. Just over a year ago; Helms was trailing badly in most opinion polls. But like many a Southern politician with his back to the wall, he knew where to turn. Even in a state where the two largest cities have elected black mayors, and where one of them, Charlotte, has become a national model for successful school integration, the issue of race still cuts to the bone. So Helms seized upon the national debate over a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, and he began to sound the themes of thirty years ago.

“I think,” he declared on the floor of the Senate, “most Americans would feel that the participation of Marxists in the planning and direction of any movement taints that movement at the outset . . .

“The fact is that Dr. King’s program at least in part was conceived and aided by men and women who were not loyal to the United States. I refer specifically to members of the Communist Party of the United States, a revolutionary action organization funded and directed from Moscow. Although there is no record that Dr. King himself ever joined the Communist Party, he kept around him as his principal advisers and associates certain individuals who were taking their orders from a foreign power . . .

“King’s patterns of associations show that, at the least, he had no strong objection to communism, that he appears to have welcomed collaboration with Communists, and that

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he and his principal vehicle, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were subject to manipulation by Communists. The conclusion must be that Martin Luther King Jr. was either an irresponsible individual, careless of his own reputation . . ., or that he knowingly cooperated and sympathized with subversive and totalitarian elements under the control of a hostile foreign power.”

Those kinds of guilt by association echoes of the late Joe McCarthy are vintage Jesse Helms. With heavy racial overtones, they have been his style since his days as a radio commentator in the 1950’s; and unlike Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and others in the South who have toned down their rhetoric in response to what they perceived as changing realities, Helms is convinced that the old ways work.

He may be right. Following his posthumous assault on King, Helms rushed from nearly twenty percentage points behind, to a point or two ahead, in the public opinion polls. And from then until the voting on November 6, the issue of race remained a conspicuous theme in his campaign literature and fund-raising appeals.

One letter sent out by Helm’s National Congressional Club contained the message: “Black Power Means Black Rule and Violent Social Revolution. VOTE HELMS.” And on the front page of a newsletter paid for by the Helms for Senate Committee, there was a photo of Jim Hunt and Jesse Jackson with a headline reading: “Hunt Urges More Minority Registration.”

All of that is part of a remarkably consistent ideology that has made Helms, in the words of one Republican strategist in North Carolina, the “ideological point man” of the American right.

Helms’s position on the arms race is that America should win it. He opposes any form of arms control negotiations, l and his rhetoric concerning the Soviet Union makes Ronald Reagan’s seem mild. When the Soviets shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, Helms declared, “If that is not an act of war, it will do until another comes along.”

He criticized the State Department and the Reagan Administration for their support of El Salvador’s President Duarte, charging that Duarte is a “Socialist.” He compares Roberto D’Aubisson’s ARENA party to local Chambers of Commerce in North Carolina, and he declared at a June press conference in Charlotte:

“I met D’Aubisson down in Hot Springs, Virginia, last September, and he didn’t strike me as the kind of fella who would be connected with death squads. So I went to all the intelligence agencies in town and said, ‘Tell me about the death squads.’ They don’t have any evidence. There is no evidence. If the ARENA party were in North Carolina, it would include most, if not all, of the free enterprise folks in the city of Charlotte . . .”

The thing that sets Jesse Helms apart, however, is not only his willingness to say such things, but the way he delivers his lines. He has that impressive gift of timing, that rare politician’s ability to size up an audience, to tap into the darker moods of alienation and anger through a single word or phrase, delivered in most cases with a derisive little smile: “Ted Kennedy . . .” He will say. Or “Jesse Jackson . . .” That’s all it takes, and the sudden rumbles of laughter quickly grow into cheers, as Helms launches his assault on the standard set of enemies: big-spending liberals, domestic radicals, communist expansionists in every part of the world.

There is a sarcasm and pugnacity that plays well in the South, that appeals to bitter stirrings from thirty years ago, when the region began to bear the frontal assaults of change.

Kathryn Fulton, editor of the North Carolina Inde-

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pendent, argues that among the complicated ingredients in Jesse Helms’s appeal are his small town origins-a conception of himself and America shaped by his growing up in the town of Monroe, segregated, poor and pious, with the Depression and the triumph of World War II defining people’s thoughts on the way things should be. In that idealized world, which seems so threatened by the cataclysmic events of the last thirty years, there is no room for ambiguity or doubt, for troubling complexity or disturbing shades of gray.

Helms stands, in effect, as a beacon of certainty and a symbol of rage–lashing out at all the demons, the liberals, socialists, communists, feminists, atheists and integrationists, who have made our society such a disconcerting place.

And if on some level his supporters are troubled by the meanness and the Iying that are Helm’s standard fare, they are seduced nevertheless by the promise of victory: Total Victory over adversaries unambiguously threatening.

It is a powerful appeal.

Arrayed against it, however, was very potent candidacy of Governor Jim Hunt, who comes from the other side of Southern politics, from another whole strain in the psyche of his state. The strain is enbodied in a sporadic history of progressive politicians, of whom Frank Porter Graham in the 1940s and Terry Sanford in the 1960s were perhaps the most important. Both insisted on the moral necessity of change, and both appealed to the basic decency of North Carolinians.

Jim Hunt is a product of that tradition. He was raised on a farm in the eastern part of the state–109 acres of tobacco fields and rolling pastureland dotted with milk cows. His mother and father were ardent admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as they battled their way through the vagaries of the Depression and learned to appreciate the helping hand of government. A federal conservation grant paid for the pond on their farm; their pine seedlings came from a federal project to combat soil erosion; and Rock Ridge High School, where Mrs. Hunt was a teacher, was rebuilt by the WPA after it burned to the ground.

The Hunts were staunch believers in the racial moderation of Frank Porter Graham, and they wept in 1950 when he lost a Senate race–defeated by the racist demagoguery of a Jesse Helms mentor, Willis Smith. Jim Hunt has never rebelled against the political legacy of his parents.

He is a politician who believes in the goodness of government, and he proved to be an effective and very popular governor.

He pushed for better roads and schools, the allocation of more money for social programs; and his most recent achievement was a $300-million educational package, including a fifteen percent pay raise for every teacher in North Carolina.

The difficulty for Governor Hunt (as for any North Carolinian of good conscience), lay in the degree to which Jesse Helms has been able to push the state’s politics to the right–setting the agenda and defining the issues. Add to this the fact that Jim Hunt has always been a cautious politician, sometimes cautious to excess.

For the last two years of his governorship Hunt became extremely protective of his right flank. He failed to speak and act as unequivocally as many of his supporters would have liked on social issues. He presided over two executions. And, as he began to address issues in the senate race, Hunt positioned himself as far to the right as he could–basically endorsing the Reagan Administration’s support for the contras in Nicaragua, and Administration’s plans to build the MX missile and the B-1 bomber.

Each of these moves by Hunt, while perhaps stategically defensible in terms of appealing to the broadest spectrum of North Carolina voters, helped to undermine the energy and enthusiasm of some of his once-ardent supporters. Many other voters began to lose their clear sense of just what Jim Hunt–and the best of the state’s historical Democratic legacy–stood for. With tragic irony, it was Hunt, not Helms, who began to appear as the less-principled politician.

All the caution worked to Hunt’s disadvantage. As things turned out, it hardly mattered what the Governor’s publicly stated advocacies were. Helms had $14 million to buy TV time to distort them.

Through an assault of television commercials, Helms managed to convince a majority of North Carolinians of something demonstrably untrue: that Hunt was a big-spending liberal–a Mondale clone who, if elected would raise their federal taxes by the remarkably specific sum of $157 a month.

In many of his commercials, Helms simply lied, putting a dollar figure that he knew was midleading on tax proposals that were not even Hunt’s. He also lied, flatly and with no hint of shame, about the details of his own record. “I haven’t proposed to do away with social security,” the senator said, though in fact, he had proposed replacing Social Security with a privately managed system. In a television debate, he accused Hunt of favoring elimination of tax deductions on home mortgage loans, which turned out to be a compound lie. Not only had Hunt never advocated such a plan, Helms had.

Later, Helms denied introducing anti-abortion legislation that would also have precluded certain forms of contraception, when in fact, that was precisely what he had done.

Astonishly enough, the lying prevailed and Helms was elected.

Frye Gaillard is an editorial page writer for the Charlotte Observer.

The Avenue, Clayton City by C. Eric Lincoln. (New York: William Morrow, 1988. 288 pages. $17.95.)

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 20-22

Blind Bates began to caress the strings of his battered old guitar. This time he was playing for love. Love for a woman he had never seen, but whose love he had known not only through the meals she had fixed for him, or the shirts she had patched, but through the sharing of her time, her wisdom and her compassion.

Tears flowed from beneath the dark glasses covering his sightless eyes as he riffed the steel strings with the glass bottleneck on his little finger and launched into a song he had written in his mind for Mama Lucy. It was a sad, lonesome song.

Train done gone

Train done gone

The funeral scene stays with you for a while. The prose itself is haunting in its rhythms–as C. Eric Lincoln describes the little church, hot and crowded and overflowing with grief.

A leading black citizen has died, a matriarch of tenderness and strength, and her funeral was, as Lincoln writes, “an occasion licensed by the whole community to break down–to scream and to shout, to moan and to weep, to engage in the delirium of temporary relief from sadness, from fear, from hatred and frustration….All in the name and the presence of God.”

Lincoln is a scholar by trade, a professor of religion at Duke University, author of nineteen works of nonfiction, but never a novel until this year. Now, with the publication of The Avenue, Clayton City, he seems destined for a place in the front ranks of black writers.

The book is an alternate selection of the Literary Guild, with a large first printing of about 25,000. Paperback and movie rights are already sold, and critics are using such words as “masterpiece.”

Lincoln says he worked on the novel for more than thirty years, writing a chapter here and there and then putting it aside, and for much longer than that he has carried the stories and the characters in his head–the prototypes of life in the black rural South.

He knows the story firsthand. He was born in Alabama in 1924, coming of age in the little town of Athens, in the cotton country near the Tennessee line. He found bits and pieces of heroism there, traces of nobility during a time of segregation. But mostly what he saw–the enduring image that takes shape in his novel–was the crazy futility of life in those times, the lost and squandered dignity among his neighbors, black and white.

Lincoln was raised by his grandparents. His mother went away when he was four. She married a preacher and moved off to Pittsburgh, leaving her son in the care of Less and Mattie Lincoln.

Mattie worked for white families as a cook and a maid, and in many ways ruled her own family with a kind of ferocious generosity–quick to punish a misbehaving child,

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but ready to go to war if they were ever abused.

Less Lincoln, meanwhile, was a farmer. He did odd jobs for white people on the side, but his passion–his calling–was tilling his own field behind his wood frame house.

He was a gentle man, his grandson remembers, dignified, with iron gray hair that was tight and springy to young Eric’s touch, and the two of them were great friends. They would sit around the fire on a Sunday evening, roasting sweet potatoes on the hearth while Mattie was off at church.

For Lincoln, such memories are mingled with those of deprivation–the six-room house so cold some nights that ice formed on the floor–and also of cruelty, an ever-present possibility in time of white supremacy.

“My experiences with white people were varied,” he says. “I played with white kids and loved some of them. It was not unusual for poor whites and blacks to eat together, to hunt and fish together….Yet there was supposed to have been a hatred. I didn’t see much of that, but then, I wasn’t looking. I do remember one time that I was cheated and kicked, for the reason that I unwittingly challenged a white man.

“I was 13 or 14. My grandfather was on his deathbed, There was no food in the house, no fire in the house, no money in the house, My grandmother and I went out to the fields where the cotton had already been picked, not only our fields but those nearby, and we pulled the only bolls that were left.”

That night, he says, they picked the cotton from the bolls and the next morning, Eric put in in [sic] a wheelbarrow and took it to the gin. It was 7 a.m. when he arrived, and the owner, Mr. Beasley, was sitting on the porch.

“Whatchoo got there, boy?” he said.

“Cotton, sir.”

“Well, dump it out.”

So they put it on the scales, and the weight came to forty pounds, and young Eric made a quick calculation: At nine cents a pound, that would mean $3.60 for food, firewood and other family necessities. He was startled, therefore, when the white man casually flipped him a quarter. “Mr. Beasley,” he said, after a long hesitation, “I think you made a mistake.” Beasley’s face turned red, and he got up abruptly and bolted the door. At first, the boy merely puzzled. But then he found himself gasping, his lungs suddenly empty from a blow to the midsection, as the white man began to kick him and stomp at his head.

“He was in a frenzy,” Lincoln remembers, “and I’ll never forget his words: ‘Nigger, as long as you live, don’t you never try to count behind no white man again!'”

There are times, for Lincoln, when that story comes hard–when he tells it with such emotion that he has to stop for a moment and wipe the tears from his large, expressive eyes.

But there are other stories, too, he says–other experiences with white people of a very different kind. One man, for example, a high school principal named J.T. Wright, praised and encouraged Lincoln’s gift as a writer, and lent him $50 so he could go off to college.

“I was 14,” Lincoln remembers. “I had just graduated from high school in May of 1939, and I had an uncle in Rockford, Ill., who worked at what he called ‘an auto laundry’–a car wash, we would call it today. I was going to go there and take a job, and the principal, Mr. Wright, loaned me some money and said, ‘C. Eric, while you’re up that way, stop on by the University of Chicago.'”

Lincoln did and eventually emerged with a divinity degree. But there were some stops in between his enrollment and graduation–a couple of years in the Navy, several more at a black college in Memphis, and a singular job opportunity one summer that caused him to travel extensively across the South.

He became secretary-road manager to a Negro League baseball team, the Birmingham Black Barons. It was an outstanding collection of talent, he remembers (among its players was an Alabama teenager by the name of Willie Mays), and as Lincoln handled the team’s financial affairs, he got to know the South in a way that stayed with him.

Every town, it seemed was remarkably the same. Despite some colorful differences in detail, each had a similar cast of characters: a wise man, a fool, a chief bootlegger, a white patriarch.

They were prototypes, and they provided, for Lincoln, the images and building blocks of a novel about the South.

Not right away, however, for his major energies were soon channeled into scholarship. He taught over the next thirty years at Clark College in Atlanta and Fisk University in Nashville, at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, before finally coming to Duke in 1976. His best-known books during that time were The Black Muslims in America and The Negro Pilgrimage in America, which together sold more than a million copies.

But he also worked now and then on his novel, and last

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year sent the manuscript to his friend Alex Haley, seeking a critique. The response was encouraging.

Despite such encouragement and despite the strong prose and passion which make it easy to read, Lincoln was braced for mixed reviews.

The structure, for one thing, is unorthodox. Each of the ten chapters is a self-contained story, and, though some characters appear more than once, the chapters are connected more by theme than plot. They read almost like a collection of short stories that together produce a powerful portrait of a place.

In addition to that departure from the standard form, the novel may offend. It is as unflinching in its portrayal of blacks as it is of whites, for the people of the Avenue in Lincoln’s Clayton City are not always admirable, or even sympathetic.

There are some heroes–Mama Lucy, based loosely on Lincoln’s grandmother, or Roger McClain, a white educator who resembles the real-life principal at Lincoln’s high school. But there are also petty criminals and assorted other hustlers whose choices are self-centered and sometimes disastrous, and who only add to the debasement that white supremacy has produced.

Most of the characters, meanwhile, are somewhere in between, well-intentioned sometimes, but fundamentally bewildered, trying to survive the vagaries of the South as it was. And then there are one or two who decide to fight back, to take their own fateful stands against the order of the day.

One is Dr. Walter Pinkney Tait, an enigmatic black physician who had a profitable practice, a position of prominence among Clayton City’s blacks, and who had even grown accustomed to a certain respect among whites. Still, he hated segregation and the slow death of the spirit it inevitably produced, and he decided one day that he had had enough.

His decision took the form of a simple act of defiance, the refusal to obey the desperate order of a white man–a prominent citizen who was addicted to drugs and who wanted the black doctor to give him a shot. Tait refused, not because what was being asked would violate his principles, but because he was simply tired of the way things were, including his own life.

“If the canvas is rotten to begin with,” he thought to himself, “no matter what you paint on it, the colors will run and the texture will blister.”

Tait knew his decision, at the least, would cost him his practice and may beget him killed. But he also knew that the time had come.

All his life he had tried to walk the thin, wavering line between what it took to live in the white man’s world and what it took to hold on to some semblance of self-respect, but he had never been so bl unt with a ny white ma n be fore. Often, when his dignity was cornered, he had resorted to professional jargon to say what he would never say in plain speech, but never before had he had the temerity to look a white man–not just some poor cracker, but The Man himself–squarely in the eye and tell him precisely what he wanted him to know. It was a good feeling a liberating feeling–and he felt no fear except for the fear of not being afraid…

He sat motionless in his swivel chair and watched the evening shadows blot the dying sunlight from the room.

Frye Gaillard is an editor at the Charlotte Observer, where this article previously appeared.