Because my father was an outlaw, I was hyper-conformist in my youth, a straight-A student of “acceptable behavior” in the Deep South of the sixties. Belief in the superiority of the white race was given, but there were major class distinctions among the bigots. I was a Goldwater Girl; Papa was a George Wallace Democrat: #mortifying.
A rascal father — along with the identity of my hometown as the most segregated city in America, according to Martin Luther King Jr. — made a writer of me in a way that talent did not, certainly. My daughters still make fun of my fifth-grade diary’s running ode to the classic grape Sno-Kone (“Boy, was it good”) and commentary on what “crumb bums” my brothers were.
Belying that “Dear Diary” drivel, though, was the heroic monologue going on inside my head. I was the star of my own Orange Biography, the series we were all reading about the random childhoods of future luminariesLike Alec Hamilton: The Little Lion., with spunk (tossed hair, a temper) usually standing in for greatness.
In Why I Write, George Orwell looked back on his juvenile habit of mentally narrating “a continuous ‘story’ about myself” as essential training — converting action into words, pretending to be the oracle. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was creating a record of what it was like to be a “normal white person” during a civil rights revolution. Specifically, I was soaking up the rites and attitudes of the white elite of Birmingham, Alabama, from which my father had seceded into a life of downwardly mobile derring-do. Even in those final days of American apartheid, upper-middle-class whites didn’t believe they played any active role in the system. Indeed, we wore the tragic air of martyrs, unfairly tainted by what we saw as “hooliganism” on both sides, whether from civil rights activists or the Ku Klux Klansmen bent on stopping them. Like ordinary Germans, who blamed Nazism’s crimes on the SS, well-mannered Alabamians did not cop to any connection with the Klan’s whuppings, castrations and bombings — or even with the politicians we elected. They were all contemptible buffoonsThe only substantive entry in that fifth-grade diary was about my Camp Fire Girl troop’s field trip to the state capital, describing my chagrin at having to meet Governor George Wallace’s wife, Lurleen..Twenty years later, when I began writing the story I had lived, I suspected there must be a link between the country club and the KKK klavern. I couldn’t comprehend how the bombers of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church — murderers of four black Sunday school girls around my age — could have gotten away with it if they had been the redneck losers the community insisted they were. (One of the killers was convicted fourteen years after the 1963 bombingRobert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss did seem on the surface to be the essence of a lunatic-fringe misfit, but it turned out that he was the protégé of the city’s top elected official, Eugene “Bull” Connor, who himself was the ward of an eminent member of the country club. ,
but his co-conspirators had remained free.) I feared that a clue to the “kountry klub” dynamics might be contained in my father’s journey from prep school to a beer joint that my brothers and I called the “Shoot ’Em Up” after some unfortunate gunplay there. His romance with danger, combined with arch-segregationist politics, might well have urged him toward the Klan’s more spectacular missions.
Curiously, during the research trips south from my adult home in the Northeast, I wasn’t that focused on my murky past. My conscious reportorial anxiety hovered around the black history, which most white southerners were simultaneously molded by and oblivious to. The challenge of mastering the excellent scholarship on the civil rights movement — not to mention making an original contribution (while dodging the charge of “appropriation”) — distracted me from whatever psychic block I faced in writing about “my people.” (Plus the African-American saga had an uplifting payoff: Despite all the rebuke and scorn, Birmingham’s black people did pull off the overthrow of a centuries-old system of legalized racism, nonviolentlyThe mass demonstrations in the spring of 1963, led by Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth, prompted President John F. Kennedy to introduce segregation-abolishing federal legislation, which was passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. . ) Also, I doubted whether I would be able to prove the complicity between my crowd and the Klan, though I assumed any evidence that did exist would be in the FBI files on the 16th Street bombing — “BAPBOMB” — an unredacted (FBI speak for uncensored) set of which I knew to be secreted away in Birmingham. Since I needed to rally quite a bit of civic muscle to get access to them, I kept putting it off, as I postponed interviewing the bloody-handed Klansmen whose names were on the source list I updated every time I went home, continually amazed to find them there in the phonebook just like any ordinary citizen.
The manuscript took 18 years to complete. Most of them were excruciating. Back then, when there were still bookstores as well as phonebooks, I would torment myself browsing the “new releases” table, marveling at how many books — big, complicated books — managed to get written. I couldn’t understand why mine, about one medium-sized city, seemed so impossible. Only toward the end of the process did I figure out how to begin the book. (Structure is the hardest of literary chores, for which the author gets least credit: If it’s working, the reader doesn’t notice it.) That was a load of worry to carry while also making peace with one’s shortcomings as a writer. I loved character and backstories-to-the-backstories (“nuance”) at the expense of pace. In fact, I loved everything.the difference between basic and Bessemer steel, the origins of folk schools (in Denmark), John L. Lewis’s rivalry with FDR, the capital financing of Gary, Indiana. Except physical description, meaning that I had to force myself to render faces, the cityscape, the sound and smell of exploding dynamite.
Eventually I had to cut two-thirds of a 3,400-page manuscriptThis piece has gone through five drafts. Millennials, if you need to know who Barry Goldwater and George Wallace are, please Google..
Perhaps because I was stupefied by the mechanics, I didn’t recognize till the book came out that its most original component was the intimate narrative of the segregationists, sort of a grown-up version of the voice inside my young head. That white story line hadn’t provided the exhilarating sense of discovery I felt researching the Movement, with its mind-boggling Birmingham protagonist, Fred Shuttlesworth, and the vivid intra-racial class conflict. Because I “knew’ the white history at some cellular level, the details I accumulated seemed more like confirmation than revelation. And no wonder they had remained buried so long. Every time I unearthed a new atrocity — Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering assassination attempts against Reverend Shuttlesworth, city fathers bankrolling anti-Semitic propagandists — I supposed it couldn’t get any worse. It always did. By the time Carry Me Home came out, nothing the segregationists did could surprise me.
Though “harsh” had been the literary effect I was striving for, I didn’t expect material I had come to take for granted to shock the imagination of Birminghamians, who had lived through it too, after all. Not that the reaction was “you can’t go home again” DEFCON 1. The grande dame who informed me at a debutante ball that there were “about ten people here tonight who’d like to kill you” is famous for exaggerating. My own white Birmingham cohort, old enough to have experienced segregation but young enough to disown responsibility, regarded the book rather impartially — as though it were the answer key to a test flunked very long ago. Some had been haunted by the failure, while others had been affected not at all; either way, most were glad to have the truth. What struck black readers, who had thought of segregation as “just the way things were,” was how much trouble the whites went to in order to keep them “in their place.”
As for the backlash, I am reminded of a friend’s withering dismissal of one of my favorite novels, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, because of its absurd premise that a suicide could result from a drink thrown in someone’s face at the country club. So it is with disclaimers of disproportion, and cognizance of the real suffering once standard in Birmingham, that I report “the treatment” I got in the genteel neighborhoods exposed in Carry Me Home. The resistance was indeed ice-cold and mostly took the form of furious disbelief, studied indifference, assertions that I had made it up. It was not lost on me that I was fulfilling my father’s traitor-to-his-class legacy in the very milieu I had once conformed so hard to be part of.
It wasn’t lost on the milieu either: At the country club where my grandfather had been a charter member, one of the elders said by way of discrediting my work: “You know her father was the black sheep of that family.” (“That’s what the book’s about,” she was told.) But true to the parable, my father embraced his prodigal child, even though our non-conformism had taken us in opposite directions and my homecoming penitence was less filial than historical — the title of my orange biography would have been Girl Segregationist. After reading my account of his time on the wrong side of the revolution, Papa said, “I had no idea my life had that much meaning.”
Ultimately I had to accept that no amount of documentary evidence was going to convince the Old Guard that Birmingham had special “meaning.” Their hurt feelings had the rawness of a soul fracture, the abiding civic handicap that had inspired one of our town’s early nicknames, “City of Perpetual PromiseE.g., right now Birmingham is a cool food and music mecca — kind of a Dixie Brooklyn, without the smug hipster vibe..” The “Why us?” consensus was that we were always getting a bum rap. Why open old wounds? I was constantly asked. What have we done?
Eventually I landed on what seemed like a satisfactory response. Would you wonder why historians are so hung up on Gettysburg? I said, and pointed out that Birmingham was the Gettysburg of the second civil war. Then came an even pithier declaration that Birmingham mattered, a Pulitzer for Carry Me Home.
If someone had told me in advance that there would be a life-changing prize at the end of the hard, hard slog, I would have enjoyed every minute of itWell, half.. Looking back, in fact, I can nearly persuade myself that I did. In that mind-trick lies a lesson relevant to the impossible epic I’m currently in the midst of not finishing, about the moon-landing. All those important people I’m tracking in the primary sources — Lyndon Johnson, Wernher von Braun, Neil Armstrong, Tom Lehrer? They don’t know the outcome of the history they’re in the thick of making! Few people, especially writers, can tell what trajectory they’re on, whether it’s toward success or quagmire, but are bracing for reversals, guarding their flanks, going back to the drawing board, neglecting loved ones, hoping their flaws don’t catch up with them, and longing for the lucky break that will pivot them toward what in retrospect will seem very much like destiny.