A Prayer for Our Enemies
by George Balgobin and Sarah Scheckter
Governor Roy Barnes once described parts of rural Southern Georgia as “third world.” While he was probably drawing an analogy to the economic disparity within the region, the rural South has long seemed foreign in many other respects. Having never lived there my adult life, I tended to paint the people and their conflicts—especially racial ones—in broad strokes. Not feeling satisfied by much of what I read on small towns in the U.S., I decided to write letters to 20 families in a randomly picked Georgia town asking them to describe their lives. This is how I met Delbert Barber, a farmer in his mid 40s. He wanted to answer my questions and set the record straight, from his perspective. His answers complicated my assumptions, especially about racial tension in America, and the idea that it could be treated as something other than a problem among people. Delbert was always candid, and I learned in the first moments I met him that few subjects—no matter how controversial—eluded this treatment.
“I’m not going to go sit down at some black person’s table to eat. And I’m not going to have them come sit down at mine,” Delbert says, walking into the kitchen. “That don’t work. Just the way I was brought up. They’s certain things that are my heritage, that are passed down through generations.” He asks his wife Becky about what’s for dinner, then peers into the oven to discover pork chops.
He walks into the living room and picks up the remote. The older of his two sons, seventeen-year old Derek, is on the phone. Delbert is short, all belly and muscle, with darkish brown curly hair. Tonight he’s wearing a gray Supersod T-shirt and black jean shorts. “You see,” he continues, “blacks and whites got different values in they life, Bible says stick to your own kind, your own race. I just leave the rest up to God.”
Derek is pacing the room, while Delbert meanders through his DirecTV selections. “I been invited around to black people’s houses for dinner. I just say, ‘if I get a chance I’ll stop by.’ If they ask where you been, I just say like, ‘I drove by, saw you all was drinking and having a good time, and I don’t drink,’ or some other little white lie. They’s no harm in making something up so you don’t hurt nobody’s feelings.”
He pops his recliner out horizontally, settling in for some Discovery Channel. Brad, who’s 12, is standing by the couch, pestering Derek about when he’ll be done with his conversation. Brad seems to get more phone calls than anyone in the house. I’ve noticed that both the kids are always on the phone with girls, rarely boys. Delbert anticipates my question: “I know my kids see all kinds of things going on at school. But what about if one of them wants to start dating a black girl? Unh-uh. I would think I raised ‘em better than that.” Delbert’s eyes grow serious: “You socialize with people, that’s one thing. Living their lifestyle, letting them in your house, that’s something else.”
In late January 2001, Governor Barnes was instrumental in the Georgia legislature’s vote to remove the Confederate Battle Cross from prominence on the state flag. The move stoked the racial ire of many in the rural refuges of the state. It was not that most people had particular affinity for the actual flag; it had only existed in its present form since the 1950s, adopted as a sort of thumbing of the nose at desegregation. No one really knew that, though. As local historian Julian Williams noted, “Most people around here probably couldn’t have told you when that flag went up.” Still, many, like Delbert, believed that its removal was a direct attack on their heritage. And though he could never precisely define what this heritage is, that didn’t erase the palpable sting of personal slight. Perhaps the lack of definition even inflamed it, like he had the subtle feeling that he was just beginning to comprehend the magnitude to which his values had been compromised by powers beyond his control.
My conversations with Delbert about the changing of the Georgia state flag inevitably veer onto the rockier road of race relations in general. His tone is not hostile, but protective. Indeed, much of his life has been about defining what’s wrong, more than affirming what’s right. His own upbringing has stood as something of a challenge for him, not only to overcome, but to end the cycles of poverty and abuse that texture his family history.
Growing up, he knew it was time to leave home when he turned around and saw his father pointing a pistol at him. “When you see a shot go past you and through the wall, you know it’s time to go,” he remembers. It was the mid seventies and Delbert packed up his belongings and struck out on his own. The gun was just the last straw, the manifest evidence of a childhood both torn apart and held together by his father’s abusive hand. His home life had never been supportive—his father was a military man and had transplanted the family up and down the Eastern seaboard. The geographic disruptions in the family’s life were mirrored by a similar loss of cohesiveness among family members. His father’s uncharted mood swings severed him from his wife and the children, and Delbert, because his mother said she saw his father in him, became the third point in a triangulation that has kept the family estranged to this day. As soon as he could, Delbert escaped to the more predictable authority of the military. It was only after gaining a sense of self-determination and realizing that nothing was improved at home, that he knew he would have to change, because no one else around him would.
When he talks about his childhood, the expression on Delbert’s face best captures his myriad emotions of anger, resolve, and pride. Because his father’s naval tour of duty encompassed Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam, his injections into Delbert’s life were punctuated and intense. Delbert doesn’t seem to separate the days of rebuilding a Model A with his dad from the nights of alcoholic beatings. It was the threat to his life, however, that finally forced him out.
That was 1978. Today Delbert lives in Coffee County, Georgia (where he owns 8 guns) only a few miles farther away from his parents than he did when he first left home. The rural county has remained removed enough from outward pressures that it has traversed the twentieth century on its own course. Schools didn’t integrate here, in earnest, until the 1970s, and prayer continues in the classrooms and hallways on a formal to informal basis depending on who you ask. Housing patterns chart a rough course of unofficial segregation. And there are 108 churches for a county of 37,000, a testament to the area’s stubbornness as much as to its religiosity.
The county is a flat expanse of green, which operates around the economic axis of Douglas, a town of 10,000. Smaller communities, such as West Green where Delbert lives, splinter out from the town. Defying the fate of many isolated towns in America, the city of Douglas has retained much of its population, and has even been growing in recent years.
The buildings, like the terrain, are flat. Most are single story affairs, and the tiny downtown square with drug stores and nail shops lends the scene a small town feel, though one that seems carefully orchestrated. The town is a curious admixture of northern professionals brought in to manage homegrown companies; a class of wealthy Southerners who may claim they won’t shop in the county yet still choose to live there, and remnants of the Old South model who, to varying degrees, suggest that it wasn’t broke, so they didn’t fix it. This last group, though perhaps not a clear majority within the city limits, still predominates in the region. Delbert is best described as a member of the last group. The African American community, which makes up half of the city of Douglas, but only one fourth of Coffee County, also has a large segment still living in the shadow of the Old South.
There are those in the community like Arlis Burch, a retired dentist, who actively oppose the residual elements of a segregated society. When Arlis began practicing in Douglas in the 1960s, he locked the building’s back door, abolishing segregated entrances. He was the first to integrate his waiting room. Such pioneering steps, it seems, have been jagged and slow moving. Arlis notes that another local dentist who retired only a few years ago never got around to locking his back door. On the other side of the coin, I remember a local black pastor explaining how he took his father to a diner that had recently desegregated. His father said he didn’t feel right coming in the front door, and throughout the meal, he kept peering uncomfortably toward the other black patrons, all eating in the back room.
Despite its lagging progress towards social equity, the area’s economic vitality has been well sustained through Douglas’s overzealous commitment to compensate prospective industries with city services and auspicious absence of union activity. Here, agriculture has been overwhelmed by agribusiness and small assembly industry dominates the job market. City Manager Danny Lewis better illustrates exactly the type of economy in force, “For companies looking at Douglas, it’s either us, or Mexico.” Delbert had a job in a local factory making boats before he switched to working in agribusiness. Today, he is charged with the responsibility of cultivating sod on over 1400 acres of earth. For this, among other things, the company gives him a place to live. His house is, in fact, built on the land he oversees, making his responsibilities much more than full time, a responsibility of which he is quite proud.
From Douglas, the road to Delbert’s house stretches past three solitary gas stations, a laundromat, a corner store, and a few tattered flea markets before the landscape opens up into alternating currents of forests and farms. Church signs spark interest for little sanctuaries set on dusty paths branching from the road. Farther along, a log cabin façade has a poster out front saying “Camouflage and Hunting Clothes Sold Here.” West Green is a sparse outcropping of rural homes and pine tree plantations. Despite his disjointed childhood, Delbert shows great attachment to Southern Georgia and its landscape. It is here, on his own resourcefulness, that he grew up. And in a land that offered little in the way of upward mobility, and less to those who had come from a poor background, he has found a life. When he married his wife Becky in 1979, they started out their life in a one bedroom trailer next to her father’s house. Memories of his origins have propelled Delbert ever since. In 1981, at 47 years old, his father committed suicide, and Delbert was still assembling boats. Delbert remembers that his father once told him, “The rest of these kids aren’t going to do nothing, but you’ll make it.”
In the time I spent with Delbert and his family, I learned more by watching him than by listening to his words. Delbert operates intuitively; he puts stock in what he observes and what he has done rather than what people tell him. His racism has been sown into him by the vestiges of a segregated south, but it is also a judgment. In that way it is doubly complex; little economic mobility and the welfare state have left many in the area cyclically poor. Jim Crowism only adding to the burden, African-Americans fall disproportionately in this group.
I arrive at the Barber’s house on what seems an unfortunate day for both Brad and Derek. Report cards are in. Becky is explaining just how both boys fared at school. Her hair is thick and tawny and it falls on her bright red tank top, which looks redder against her white jeans. The soap opera “Passions” weaves in and out of our conversation. The living room is tidy without seeming sterile, with a vacuumed green shag carpet and a set of blue recliners. And on the walls hang a deer head and several clumps of pictures, all of which seem quite dated. Becky explains that there were no actual teachers at the parent-teacher conferences, so she couldn’t tell Derek’s history teacher that he works 25 hours a week. Outside we hear Delbert arrive by truck and then come in the kitchen door.
“Well, how are the grades?” he asks Becky. He stands, waiting. She says, “Well, they could be better, both of ‘em.” He says, “Brad first.” Brad grins slyly at me and goes back to reassembling a paintball gun on the couch. “Teacher says Brad’s got low grades in math. Says his head is full of girls.” She winks at him, but Delbert had only one guy show up for work today and the rain is putting him behind schedule, so he is in no mood for gossip. “All right, Brad, no dance tomorrow. And no more talking on the phone on school nights.” This seems harsh but it’s no real news to Brad, who probably expected as much. It’s actually a slight relief, as the perennial phone calls have become quite a problem, with giggly 12 year olds demanding to talk to Brad at all hours. “Some parents just don’t care at all what their kids do, calling Brad at midnight,” Delbert says. He breaks into falsetto, grinning and pretending he’s calling for Brad, “What was he wearing? And what were you wearing?”
Derek gets a similar sentence. As Becky and Delbert begin to argue over his quick judgment, Delbert decides to step outside before he overheats.
Delbert has rules for himself too. Whenever he’s going to lose his temper he takes it outside. “Gotta break the chain of abuse. I never hit my kids. Sometimes I feel like it’s coming on, but…Nope. The abuse ends with me.”
As he climbs up into the driver’s seat of the company truck, Delbert’s shoulders relax a bit beneath his yellow company shirt. His camouflage net cap presses his hair to his forehead with sweat. “I got these new guys out here,” he says, “I always have to go back over and check their work. Yesterday one asked me three times how to do something.”
Delbert’s not exactly enthused about the three new guys he’s had to take on for the job. Part of that is his zero tolerance for excuses, but the larger reason behind it is he doesn’t like needing the help in the first place. Since the doctors told Delbert he has a bad hip, he’s been fighting their orders to slow down. Over the months I’ve spent with him, I’ve noticed that the hip issue is perhaps the largest looming danger for him. He is waiting to hear a second opinion on whether he really needs surgery. And if he does, he won’t be able to work—ever again—with the same physical dedication he exhibits now. While a more supervisory role might be a relief to others, Delbert seems to say the lack of “real” work would be the problem. He wouldn’t know what to do with the time. “I can’t just sit around and watch TV all day, that’s not me. Working is who I am.”
We drive out onto the sod fields. Delbert heads for the creek that slices the farmland in two. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he says, “but there ain’t no blacks working on this farm. It’s not that I wouldn’t hire any; I have hired them, but none of them’s worked here. Once in awhile I get someone come up and knock on my door, say he needs some work. I tell him a’ight, show up on Tuesday. He don’t show up after that. And I know where he’s at. He’s down at the welfare office getting his check.”
In his mind welfare has come to symbolize the essential difference between white and black cultures; one works, the other complains so it doesn’t have to. His experiences with black people—the ones he seems to remember—have been distinctly asymmetrical. It is not only that he feels used by blacks, but that they embody the opposite of the work ethic he has labored so hard to achieve. They’re people, he thinks, best left alone. There’s not invective in his speech, just disdain, like he is talking about a brother of his who has gone to jail for something heinous and has been ostracized from the family.
We walk over to where a wooden bridge has cracked. Delbert looks concerned. “I know I told those guys to check this out,” he says shaking his head. “I know I seem a little wound up today, but did you hear all this nonsense about why they changed the flag? It really gets me going.” I have noticed that local radio shows have been feeding the flames of the issue. He continues, “You get these blacks from the NAACP coming down here and telling us we can’t fly a flag that’s part of our heritage. Bullcrap. Nobody asked the people of Georgia if they want this. And they don’t. It’s the same thing with welfare, no one asked me if I want to pay for someone who’s not going to work. Cause I don’t.” Delbert’s thoughts remind me of a recent comment in the local paper, the Coffee County News, “Maybe we should change the name of our state to “NAACP” since they are the ones who seem to be in control of everything.”
When race and politics intersect, the exchange usually produces superlatives. I begin to see that this temperament, while inflammatory, is not uncommon. Vivian Johnson, an area social worker, comes to mind. Talking about the county’s poorest trailer park, home to mainly black residents, she says, “It’s not my fault they’re like this. It boils down to personal responsibility. Every one of them lives like scum, if you ask me, if you apply my standards.” Southern Georgia has become rubbed raw over racial issues, and fighting words seem to lead less to actual fighting than to internal resentment.
Delbert makes a note to get someone on the cracked bridge tomorrow and starts to circle the field to check for other undetected damages. I notice aloud that it seems like he found something to fix his rodent problem. “Yeah, my two boys. They gave ‘em lead poisoning.” His deadpanning breaks into a grin. Delbert’s pride over his children is something he takes seriously. The image of his two boys out here at night with a flashlight and a rifle rousting armadillos out of holes puts just about the biggest smile I’ve seen on his face.
By now it is nearly dark, and my mention of that causes Delbert to eye me with a look he seems to reserve for city dwellers. He tells me that only a few weeks ago, he had to stay up for 80 hours straight putting fertilizer into his fields. Most of the time, he wasn’t doing hard labor because much of the task was mechanized, he says, but he didn’t leave the site for any of those hours. He doesn’t get much sleep as it is—6 hours at best by his count—and, routinely, he’ll patrol the house several times a night while everyone’s sleeping to check on his kids, or maybe just because he’s restless.
Cooled off from the report card news, he and I re-enter the house and see Brad and Derek talking at the kitchen table. The TV is on in the living room. Brad is emphatically jabbing a pencil into a page of his math book. “And then they got the guy in the car. I heard they was all brothers or something.” Derek shakes his head. “Stupid.” “Yeah, and Miss Stone had a bullet hole in her window this morning!” Brad whips back. In the background the news is replaying the details of the triple murder that took place yesterday in Douglas.
“You hear about that shooting?” Delbert queries. “Execution style, all three right in the back of the head. Downtown near the middle school. You see what I’m talking about? Same people who don’t want to work, make money selling drugs, get killed for it. Bringing drugs in here all over the place, murders, you name it.” He takes off his cap and scratches his head. “This ain’t the first killing, they got one out on Sand Ridge last week. That’s where all the drugs are at.”
I remember Brad mentioning that a friend, Mark, lived on Sand Ridge and had invited him over to his house recently. Brad had to turn him down. “Mom and Dad are strict about that, they have to know the parents. They say Sand Ridge is dangerous, I don’t see what’s wrong. There’s some bad kids, but that’s everywhere.”
Brad goes back to his homework. Delbert’s attitude has softened. He jibes Brad about falling asleep last night with a Snickers bar in his bed that melted onto the sheets. Embarrassed, Brad edges towards his room. There is a momentary exchange between them, from Delbert’s eyes on the phone over to Brad. And then Delbert’s face softens back into a smile.
Delbert disciplines his kids, but not out of the exhilaration of authority. To be sure, he enjoys being in charge; mostly that comes from never having gotten anywhere in his life when he wasn’t in control. He is strict because he remembers that his own family’s indifference towards him came in the form of laxness. His boys have internalized Delbert’s reasoning as well. Both Derek and Brad seem to regard being raised with strong parental intervention as preferable to some of their friends who, Derek says, “Don’t seem to know right from wrong.” Race, too, for Delbert, is a proverbial black and white issue. And he has a lifetime of “case studies” to justify his stance.
I look at Delbert, his hand clutching his hip as he tilts awkwardly in the chair. I ask if he’s bothered much by pain. “The pain I just live with,” he says. “I had worse. It’s the not knowing. Wish they’d come on now and tell me.”
***
“I just found out last week that he my kin, on Tuesday I heard.” Johnny’s hands flutter as he speaks. His manner is quite erratic, striking against his gaunt figure. His hair rises in a fade he did himself. Half-jumping off the vinyl couch, the holes in his Notre Dame shirt billow a bit every time he moves. The Jacksons, Johnny, his wife Veronica, and their four kids, live in a singlewide trailer. Sand from outside is ground into the teal carpet and a stray pink truck has wrecked itself in a hole in the flooring. Above his head on the wall there is a line of decorations: a white macramé wall hanging, a wooden sign carved with “love,” a mounted fish named “Tommy Trout,” a black and white photo in a plastic frame. The little boy in the photo looks just like Johnny’s youngest son, Kevin. “That me and my daddy, when I was eight years old,” Johnny says. “Daddy the one who tole me about it being my cousin. He work right at the school near where it happen at.”
Johnny is telling me how he knew the men who were shot recently in Douglas. “I didn’t know they’s kin, but I knowed them cause they hang round here,” he says getting up. “They come right up here behind my trailer, sometimes, dealin’. Anyways, it ain’t through yet. I see cars driving round here looking for some other guys. They gonna get them, like my cousin got it. I know where the guys they looking for staying.” Johnny stands propping the door open with his hand. He points over to another row of trailers, maybe 200 feet from his through some trees. “They was staying over there. I told them leave, you don’t never know who gonna show up at your door round here.”
The County Sheriff, Rob Smith, seems to confirm what Johnny is saying. He is holding two men in custody who fear that they might be the remaining targets of the killing spree. The sheriff chalks it up to revenge killing, though he indicates that there’s a little more suspense to this particular story. It seems a drug deal gone bad summoned the higher-ups from Miami to exact restitution. Smith tells me in a hushed tone that he is working with the FBI on this one, which breaks up the monotony of the usual workweek. When I ask him how he approaches his job he says, “You just wake up every morning and arrest everyone you can. Then wake up the next day, do the same thing. The best you can do is keep your lawnmower blade sharp, there’s no way you’re going to get out the roots.”
Outside the trailer an engine stops. Four kids spring out of a van and up the rickety steps into the living room. They are four, five, seven, and eight. Veronica, who’s been married to Johnny for 4 years, says she would have had them right down the line but she miscarried the one in the middle. She is a 26 year old full bodied woman, dressed today in a red sweatshirt and green pajama pants. Her white Tommy Hilfiger hat digs a sharp contrast to her deep black skin.
She brings one bag of groceries into the kitchen area and starts to unload it. “You know what happened last week when I brung home my groceries?” she asks indignantly. “I went over to my auntie’s trailer and when I come back to clean up and make supper, someone had come in and take them all. They come in and took my whole freezer of meat. And you know, people round here just be walking in your trailer and take whatever they want. Sometimes I come home and someone leave a plate on the kitchen table with food in it. I know my kids ain’t cooking no food fo theyselves.”
Johnny and Veronica live out on Sand Ridge, the informal designation of a square mile tract of trailers and the occasional house that County Commissioner George McIver says, “could have anywhere from 4,000-8,000 people living in it, mostly black and Hispanic.” Sand Ridge butts up against the city of Douglas on the northeast side, off the road that leads to Delbert’s house.
The entire piece of property used to be owned by one man who bought it at around $7.50 an acre right after World War II because the sandy ground was next to worthless. Beginning in the 1950s, land was parceled out among a few other people who decided to make it a low-income housing development for a growing industrial workforce. Once people realized how easy it was to take advantage of the lack of county zoning laws, old and broken trailers were brought out of retirement and turned into profit makers that housed a growing group of blue collar workers drawn to Coffee County’s fledgling industry. Because there was no added property tax for having additional trailers, Sand Ridge soon was littered with substandard housing and offered cheap refuge for the poorer elements of the county, kept out of Douglas city limits by higher taxes. In passing, Sand Ridge looks like a sales lot for mobile homes, and up close, a junkyard. The only aspects that would distinguish the area from the rougher parts of an inner city are the dirt roads, lack of streetlights, and the fact that many people living here now were born on farms.
In the early 90s, crack cocaine transformed this area struggling with poverty into a more degenerative scene. In one short decade, drugs have taken bad to worse. Veronica says that Johnny gets into drugs every now and then. It’s a point of contention for them, but not one she seems to assert much authority over.
Johnny’s eyes are beet red. He sits on the couch eating peanut M&M’s. Veronica’s still miffed about the stolen meat. “Sometimes they come in and Johnny be home, but he no use cause he sleeping. He supposed to be in bed hours ago.”
The candy chokes Johnny’s speech back a little, “I’m a go to bed. Why don’t you take these kids outta here.” Veronica shouts at two girls, five and eight, cartwheeling in the hallway, “You better git in yo room. Go watch TV.”
It’s 2pm on a Thursday. “I work the night shift,” Johnny says making his way down the hall. “It make me ill, damn those chickens smell at night. And lately they been those big chickens. And you have to catch ten in your hands at a time. Last time we was catching big chickens, my hand swell up real good where one’d peck me. It got tendonitis. I couldn’t use it for awhile.”
He disappears into one of the two bedrooms down the hall. Johnny is a contract employee for a man who drives the “chicken van.” Every evening around 8, he gets picked up for work outside his house. From 8pm to anywhere between 6 and 10am, he scoops up chickens by their feet, 10 at a time, and puts them in metal crates. He goes to farms around the county doing this five days a week. The chickens end up at Gold Kist Poultry, who pays the van driver, who pays Johnny.
Veronica picks the pink truck out of its hole. “Since I quit my job I thought I could get this trailer clean,” she says. “I ain’t even done that. So I figure I go get myself another job. Last time I was cutting chickens for Gold Kist. They pay me good, but they got a lot of pressure on you not to take bathroom breaks. So one day I had to go real bad. And they tole me stay on the job. And I ain’t gonna work no place don’t let you go to the bathroom.”
Veronica’s littlest daughter, Vanessa, walks into the room with a shy look. “Why you out your room?” asks Veronica. Vanessa doesn’t answer, she starts bobbing her head and jumping at the same time. Veronica smiles. “What you doing? Git over here.”
Vanessa sits down on her lap and Veronica starts to braid her hair. “Now I wake up, put the kids out for school, and then I just watch TV or sleep or maybe I go over to my auntie house. And we just talk about family, or we pickin at each other, she more like a sister than an auntie. It get boring. I don’t really do nothing, that why I want to get a job, I like work, it interesting. Even cutting them chickens up was interesting. And we ain’t got no money now. Johnny only bring home $300 for six head.”
Veronica ponders her daughter’s hair. “That look good,” she says, satisfied, and starts on another patch of hair. She tells me how she wants her kids to get an education, though right now, the three kids in school are all in danger of failing. The one idea she is most firmly resolved about is that for anything to change, the family needs to leave Sand Ridge. The boys burst out of their room and careen into the living room. “Stupid.” “You stupid.” “No you stupid.” “You a cakehead.” Veronica drops Vanessa off her lap and stands up. “Why don’t you go in your room? I know it ain’t clean.”
The children don’t respond. They stop fighting and start chasing each other around the room. John, the oldest, starts poking a dirty knife from the sink into a pan of meatloaf. “Git off that knife boy,” Veronica yells. “Shut-up,” comes Johnny’s voice muffled through his door. John looks stunned and drops the knife. He’s only wearing underwear and no shoes. He runs out the front door.
Veronica disciplines Kevin, the smaller boy. He has a cheeky smile on, but is subdued without his brother. She sits down with a sigh. The kids are too little to sell drugs, she knows, but not for long. People ride around her trailer park all night, and sometimes she and the kids have to lie on the floor to avoid errant bullets.
Little Vanessa and Reshaunda are fighting over the TV in their room. “Shut UP!” Johnny yells again. “Get in here, you kids! We going to Auntie’s.” Veronica is smiling. “He not asleep anyway.”
She takes her keys from the sticky kitchen counter and slides her feet into blue plastic sandals. The kids tumble into the living room, shoving each other. Veronica holds the warped screen door open for them. They jump down the steps. She says, “John, git in this van.” Shirtless John is nowhere to be seen. She yanks open the van door, the other kids file in, and she drives out down the sandy road.
Veronica says she wants her kids to grow up somewhere safer. She wants to see them do well in school. She even wants to be able to take them to the store with her so when they inevitably ask her for things, she can buy them. Her words have a sense of vacancy. As if she is answering questions to a TV game show that she’s not actually playing.
Later in the evening, I am back at their trailer to take Johnny to work. He rubs his eyes as he opens the door. In the dusk, the only light on Sand Ridge comes from people burning broken furniture and unclaimed trailer siding in heaps in their yards. Johnny grabs a pack of Beef Jerky and nods to Veronica who is heading back to the bedroom. “Man, I ill tonight. Gotta find me another job.”
In the car, Johnny rolls down the passenger window and stretches out his arm. He’s 38 and says he’s been catching chickens for 20 years. “Right now we got about nine head out there, go to different farms like this one in Nicholls. We get paid by the truck load. Handle ten chickens at a time. I catch ‘em in my left hand, put ‘em in my right, sometimes I carry em six-four, or seven-three.” Johnny pantomimes scooping up chickens from the passenger seat.
He waves his hand out the window. White scars are scattered on his forearm. “Work been getting slack, got us working only 4 days this week and next. I been thinking about taking another job too, in the day shift, maybe farm work or work for the landlord. Ronnie say I’se too old to hold two jobs, but I been done it when I 18 and I do it again, for a while. Don’t sleep but 4 hours as it is. Just get boring sitting around, when I get home from work in the morning. I come up working, my whole family work.”
The only time I see Johnny smile is when he’s drinking, or when we’re talking about his kids. His face takes on unexpected glow when he tells me he is teaching John and Kevin to plant butter beans and okra in the yard, like he did when he was growing up sharecropping with his father.
We arrive at the chicken farm, which has four long, white buildings with semis parked at one end. The “chicken van” has just pulled in. A few men mill around the doorway of the closest chicken barn. Even in the barnyard there is a dusty odor of ammonia and chicken manure. Johnny cracks his knuckles. “I don’t want my kids to grow up and catch chickens. They gotta get a education, get a good job.” He shuts the car door and walks, double time, towards the other men.
***
“You ask most twelve or thirteen year olds around here what they’ll do for work when they get older. Most of them will tell you ‘I’m going to catch chickens,’” says Vernon Talkington. “That’s what men do here, if they work. But the drug trade is a big employer. And they say some contractors just pay the chicken crews with a rock or two of cocaine. That’s cheaper than wages.”
Vernon is 48, with buzz-cut brown hair. He wears a tan polo shirt and has serious gray eyes and an occasional wry smile. His desktop computer is covered with sticky notes, and a paperback about community development and faith is poised next to him. There is a rustle at the door. A tiny Hispanic boy runs into his office grinning. “Hey, little man,” Vernon holds out his hand for a high five. “Hi!” the boy exclaims, slapping his hand, and runs out again. He disappears around the corner into a classroom.
Vernon and his wife Angie run the Hope Center, an operation that serves as a surrogate parent for the children of Sand Ridge. The two modular structures of the Center look like an outpost; literally, the Hope Center is the dividing line between the trailers and the houses. Vernon is an ordained minister without a church, though the people of Sand Ridge are the true subjects of his outreach. Although he stresses caring for the neglected children, his grander goal is to have every trailer removed from this area and residents relocated into real housing.
The center offers after school programs and summer classes in anything from cooking to Bible study to academics, but mostly what it offers is a safe place for the kids to play, off the streets. The Talkingtons started the center three years ago, after realizing just what was happening on Sand Ridge. “There are hundreds of kids out here with parents who may or may not be present, on drugs, or just too overwhelmed to take care of them. It’s incredible that this area can exist, in what is otherwise such a prosperous, and religious, community.”
Vernon’s allusion to the parental scene is best understood through the example of magnitude. Hundreds of kids do their homework, eat meals, learn to read, and play safely each week under his watch. Before he arrived three years ago, presumably, no one was doing that for these kids. And Vernon only sees a small percentage of the children that live on Sand Ridge.
The lack of real intervention and involvement from local churches is one of Vernon’s biggest frustrations. “If the church actually got up off its theology and did something, this country would be a different place. But these days, church is like a mirror of our lives; we want to dress up and then go home, to write a check to others in a foreign country but not to see the poverty and neglect a few miles from where we live. We want our pastor to have a nice suit, but we want to minister to those in need with a ten foot pole.”
Vernon and I patrol the main hall passing a few classrooms on each side, labeled, “1st-2nd Grade Boys,” “High School Girls,” “Computer Lab.” I hear one girl ask, “Miss Angie, can you quiz my times tables?” Vernon continues, “Most folks who want to help, God bless them, have the idea that charity is throwing clothing or food at the much more complex problem of poverty, the problem not just of physical, felt needs, but of what poverty does to you, mentally, emotionally.”
Vernon’s thought calls to mind a picture of Veronica’s oldest son John, unresponsive, agitated, almost at a loss with what to do with all his energy. Veronica says he just cries sometimes at night, and she doesn’t know why. So many kids at the Hope Center possess a similar sense of frustration and blankness. Sometimes John and the other Jackson children even show up at Hope Center on their own recognizance, as if there is the intuition to gravitate towards stability.
When I ask Vernon what role race still plays in keeping areas like Sand Ridge neglected, he chuckles. “From 11 to 12 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week,” he says. “This is rural Southern Georgia, and if a preacher wants to start talking about race, well, that’ll be the last sermon he gives at that church.” He and I have discussed numerous times how he feels the church really needs to be speaking out against racism. Vernon’s speech weaves fluidly through Biblical references, but he runs rings around the prevalent fundamental analysis, insisting that by staying silent, the church yields tacit approval to the reigning social order.
In the many church services I attended in the area, most sermons came across as variations on a central theme: Relationship to God is a personal endeavor, God sees your heart, not your actions, and only God can help you when you are in need. The essence, it seemed, of the church’s message to its parishioners is that you’re on your own. The only entity who can really help you is God. Listening to these messages, I was reminded of Delbert’s refrain about the self-made individual.
Even though he is an advocate for change in Sand Ridge, Vernon doesn’t sugarcoat. He is frank about the failures of many Sand Ridge residents. “Even if we paved all these dirt roads and handed everyone a job, there aren’t very many who could hold one. The drugs, the childhoods of neglect, many people around here aren’t just currently unemployed—they’re unemployable.” Crack has now thoroughly ingratiated itself into Sand Ridge, and the situation has grown worse than it was in past decades. In an area at least half as populous as the city of Douglas itself, confined to 1/13th the area, only 30% of people, at best, work legitimately, compared with a nearly 96% employment rate only a few blocks away.
Vernon and I walk out the door over to where kids are eating their snack. The basketball court is full with teenage boys playing and girls watching. He tells me a story of some people who came to see what he was doing out at the Hope Center. There was, as now, a court full of employable youth. People were rebuffed. There are elements of the community that continually question what he’s doing on Sand Ridge. But when the rumors turned uglier—unfounded accusations of child molestation and drug trafficking—he realized some folks probably prefer Sand Ridge the way it is. “When people hear us talking about the larger social issues that are going on out here, no one wants to know us. You getting to talking about how no one should be living out on Sand Ridge, you’re not just a day care anymore. That’s challenging the social order.”
***
When I asked Veronica about the Hope Center, her reply was quite flat. “It good. It give me a break from these kids sometime. They get in too much trouble.” She said it with the same tone she would use about how she liked shopping at Wal-Mart, without giving it much attention.
Sitting in Veronica and Johnny’s trailer this afternoon, I realize what feels different about the place: it’s much lighter than usual. I don’t see any lamps at all in the living room, but Veronica has moved the flowered bed sheet that normally shrouds the kitchen to reveal a sliding glass door and a narrow porch. Johnny is relaxing outside with his brother and a cousin, drinking cans of Budweiser. Someone is fixing an El Camino in the yard. It’s Friday so Johnny has two days off.
The three older kids have just gotten off the school bus. They don’t pay me much attention. Veronica is telling me that Reshaunda and John have started taking Ritalin on the recommendation of the school psychologist. And according to his pre-K teacher, it seems that Kevin is showing signs that he may need to start taking Ritalin next year. The kindergarten teacher is too strict, Veronica says. Indeed, this teacher has been strict with John, and this is his second go at kindergarten. Veronica seems resigned that next year will be his third.
The drug’s effects are not readily apparent. Reshaunda is singing and dancing around Kevin who is teetering on a kitchen chair to reach the freezer. John appears in the living room every few minutes and deposits toys and papers on the coffee table. Veronica warns them to do their chores but none react. A minute later, Kevin, popsicle accomplished, is running the length of the trailer with Reshaunda in hot pursuit.
Veronica seems less enthused about parenting than usual, and she looks tired. Her hair stands in an uncombed fringe about her forehead. She takes minor satisfaction in applying a new set of fake nails. I ask her if things are going all right with Johnny working two jobs. She wants to get a job soon, because even though he’s double-shifting, they still see too much of each other. “He complain too much, always say something to set me going.” But she’s not much in the mood to talk about Johnny. She throws an occasional fed-up glance at him on the porch, but his back is turned. Her exasperation, in any case, seems justified. Johnny just spent much of this week’s food money on cocaine.
There is a knock at the door. Kevin yells, “Who dat?” and runs out of the room. Veronica’s cousin Allison comes inside. She sits down on the arm of the leatherette couch next to Veronica and picks up a bottle of black nail polish and starts to paint her nails. “You got a dollar I can borrow till tomorrow?” Veronica says she doesn’t and calls Johnny in from the porch. He walks inside quietly and hunts around, finally appearing from the bedroom with a wrinkled bill. He wears an airbrushed T-shirt, the kind you get at amusement parks, emblazoned with two blue hearts that read “Veronica” and “Johnny.” Allison thanks him as he is walking back to the porch. She holds out her hand, admiring her nails. “This color look good on me, because I more white,” she says, comparing her skin to Veronica’s. Veronica laughs, a little. “Girl, you got a ways to go before you white.” A car cruises by, too slow. Veronica peers out the blinds. “Only people who drive that slow on this street looking for trouble.”
To get to the Jackson’s’ trailer, I drive that same route, Spanish Oak Street. I take the dusty, uneven roads past roosters crowding cages made of bent wire and sheet metal. Ditches are cluttered with piles of trash and furniture half-burned, and one trailer’s front yard is entirely filled with chairs, some nearly buried in sand. The trailers themselves are haphazardly arranged, not in straight rows. Some have steps, some cinder blocks, a few porches, one wheelchair ramp. There are occasional trees, scrub pines and live oaks hung with Spanish moss. A large dog lies dead at one intersection. The ground of Sand Ridge bears up discarded toilets, abandoned Fords, scattered clothing. There are thousands of people who live here, and whose children are growing up.
Their life on Sand Ridge seems much like frontier living spun into modern epic where the perils are societal and not as elemental. Veronica’s trailer has no heat source, so they use the stove. She locks the kids and herself in the house after dusk to avoid calculating stares from the slowly passing cars. Johnny slips between drug use and the demands of work. In many ways their lives are focused on trying to shut out elements of their environment, yet without the resolute heart of the frontiersmen, and in many ways without the choice to be where they are. Their dogged endurance seems more alarming because I feel more concerned about it than they are.
Veronica looks at her nails, a fresh shade of black. “This’ll last me till next Friday, at least.”
***
I began to think racism was no more elemental to Delbert than catching chickens was to Johnny. Because Delbert’s entrenchment was less tangible—he had food to eat and reasonable work—his attitudes were difficult to justify on their face. His life, in any case, had been set on a racially binary track long before he consciously affirmed it. I tried to imagine living my entire life surrounded by people of a certain viewpoint, and not instinctively taking those values as my own. Then there was his hardscrabble childhood, the compounding factor that laid down gridlines of right and wrong, which seemed to coincide well with self-sufficiency and dependence. Not only did his experience equate black Americans with the tendencies of the unsuccessful, he also had a sense that no one had come up harder than he had. His success, measured against a just, albeit difficult, societal standard made it even more difficult for him to believe that American society isn’t working equitably for some, white or black.
Because his words did not feel venomous, I could not simply toss them off. It was clear to me why politically correct entreaties on issues like the flag so riled him. In his perception, why were white Americans forced to pander to the demands of the unsuccessful? It was a vexing spot, because I could neither deny that people like Johnny existed, nor convey to Delbert a sense of understanding beyond his own experience.
It was appropriate to say, as Vernon would have, that society had failed Johnny and Veronica. But it seemed to have failed Delbert as well. To me, the changing of the Georgia flag seemed something of a Pyrrhic victory. Such cases of racial strongarming operated on the idea that racism was born of intrinsic hatred, when in many people I met it appeared to be much more a result of socialization. I thought of Delbert, and how I had abruptly entered his life and psychologized his every word, and meanwhile he had extended me nothing but courtesy. The most complex problem I faced was liking Delbert and having respect for his triumphs over circumstance, all the while feeling that his racial views were too gross and inattentive. Issues like flying the Confederate flag on state property that had risen to symbolic salience remained shallow struggles when set against the layers of history and rationale I saw in Delbert. To ignore this logic, and trudge ahead with superficial reforms, seemed not only perilous, but perhaps detrimental.
I thought of Vernon, and of what was essentially a one-man stand against the myriad problems of Sand Ridge. Perhaps my consternation with Delbert’s views was an impasse Vernon faced implicitly each day. He was working against the grain in a community still very much caught in the undertow of a divided history. People like Delbert, raised with embedded resignation, seemed just as much at fault for Johnny and Veronica’s downward spiral as any failed governmental safety net. And yet the efforts to defang the racial animus of the state of Georgia, if not fomenting increased tension, seemed to only paper over who Delbert was, and how he had decided what was appropriate for his family. And it could be said that steamrolling over Delbert’s value system failed Veronica and Johnny yet again.
Toward the end of the time I spent with Delbert and his family, it seemed the community’s focus on ‘heritage’ grew stronger. The last church service I spent with him was no exception. Camp Creek Missionary Baptist drew a consistent crowd of fifty or so and by the sight of all the pickups splayed on the lawn when I arrived, everyone had turned out this particular March morning. There was a major question hanging in the Sunday calm: how soon Delbert would need surgery. It seemed that they were waiting on a chip of bone to reposition itself. After that, they would decide whether his whole hip would need to be replaced or he could simply have the chip removed. After more than six years of pain, Delbert was visibly exhausted, and the uncertainty of the future of his job was clearly nagging him. That hadn’t kept him from working 98 hours in the last week, though, he told me proudly.
The church was small inside, two compact rows of wooden pews eight deep and a few to the sides flanking the pulpit. A wooden signboard noted last week’s attendance at 41, and last week’s offering at $352.42. The service itself was colorful in true Pentecostal spirit—people impassioned in prayer swiveled between coherence and speaking in tongues; “Amazing Grace” was belted out with the inclusion of a last verse containing only the lyrics, “Praise God.” Then it was time for the altar call, when members of the congregation would ask the church to pray for them or others who were suffering. Brother George, the pastor, came to Delbert’s pew to anoint him with oil, and prayed personally for the healing of his hip. “Now Brother Delbert, the doctors say you better just take it easy, and only one’s can do that is you. With help from the Lord.” Delbert nodded quietly, his left leg extended awkwardly. Someone prayed a prayer for Dale Earnhardt, the race car driver who had recently died.
During the altar call, after Delbert had been anointed, a slight, middle aged woman in a bright floral dress made her way to the front of the church. She knelt down at the altar, facing the congregation. After a moment, she raised her head and explained tearfully that her brother had died and that she was worried because he and other family members had not accepted Jesus as their savior. “They just falled in with the wrong crowd,” she said. “I always heard you should pray for your enemies, but it’s so hard. I know there’s people keeping my kin folks away from Christ, and I want to pray for them.” She took the Kleenex Brother George offered, and wiped her eyes. Her gaze was focused on the church’s ceiling tiles. “We have to pray for our enemies, because when we do that, we’ll all get better.”
After the service we filed into a fellowship hall to eat covered dishes each family had prepared. Vernon’s comments about the church were still in my head. The church members, all white, all with deep southern roots, were, in fact, reflections of each other in many ways. It was not only the outward characteristics of clothing and speech patterns, but a certain surefootedness about how life unfurled which echoed a deep sense of insularity. This insularity, I believe, was something Delbert and many others in church that day felt pride in, and was linked to their urge to protect their heritage.
The meeting hall was a long room with utility carpet and picnic tables flanked by rough wooden benches. The tables were lined with jugs of very sweet iced tea, pans of prepared meats, macaroni, green bean casseroles, and layer cakes. People sat in family groups and didn’t seem to mind my stranger, non-Southern status. They were, in fact, glad to offer their ideas, explaining that Southerners have good morals and family values, and mainly enjoy a peaceful country life, with hunting and fishing as their favorite pastimes. Many agreed with a sister in law of Delbert’s, who told me, “I’ve lived around here since I was a little girl. I love every inch of this land.”
She had, it turned out, written a 452-page manuscript about the land and the people who lived there. She said many parts of the unpublished book were devoted solely to descriptions of the animals and landscape. Her affection for the terrain, Delbert’s ritual hunting expeditions, and the general expanse of space one could call his own, brought tighter focus on what Delbert meant when he talked about his heritage. Though he never articulated it directly, it seemed that, beyond his possessions, his house and family, there was great value in upholding the honor of the land itself, and what he perceived as its history. It was now several months after the flag had been changed, and I asked Delbert whether people were still incensed about the issue.
“People just aren’t going to take this kind of thing.” He paused. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of people are starting to fly the old state flag and the regular old Confederate flag too. That’s a sign, that we ain’t gonna let someone just take our heritage away.” Indeed there were many old Georgia state flags and Confederate flags flying atop houses I passed. Sometimes, in fact, I saw them both emphatically mounted on the same pole. While Delbert’s tone seemed to imply a sort of fatalistic urgency to local racial tensions, no such dynamism seemed to loom. What could be expected, and perhaps even more insidious, was a hunkering down of ethnic battle lines with no prospects for change in sight.
“Down at the Quick Gas in town, in that store, they’s a T-shirt,” Delbert said. “Got every last one of those people who voted to change our flag on it. Even representative Charles Simms from our district did. It’s got the real state flag on the front, and all their names on the back. I hope the blacks don’t think they gonna get away with this one. Now I don’t wanna step on nobody’s toes or nothing, but if they don’t like our flag, well, there’s plenty of other states to live in.” On my way I home I checked out the T-shirt. The woman at the counter said they were going to have to get more. They were a big hit.
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