A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.
Toward the end of my college years, my girlfriend Eileen and I were befriended by an African American couple ten years or so older than us. Walter worked part-time as a butcher in a neighborhood grocery store. Lillian was a custodian in an elementary school.
We met through a mutual friend, Anthony. He and Walter had grown up in a small town in central Georgia. Walter moved to Atlanta for employment. Anthony, a veteran with medical issues, had moved there to be near the VA.
It was a bright winter afternoon when Anthony took us over to meet his hometown friend. After a short walk from his apartment we turned onto a pothole-pocked street lined with small houses. In front of one, a short dark man stood waiting. This was Walter. We talked a few minutes, and then his wife Lillian came out to see who this new couple was. The critical question was, did we play cards? If not, would we allow them to teach us?
Eileen and I had moved South to Atlanta to organize for a communist group. We were committed to following leads on prospective recruits wherever they led. Not many days passed before we took Walter and Lillian up on their offer.
We arrived in the early evening to find the house very still. At the dining table, four children bent over their homework. When they were done, Lillian had them bring their papers into the small sitting room so Eileen and I could look over their work, a scenario repeated on subsequent visits. Only after we’d commented on each child’s papers did Walter break out the beer and the cards. Years later, when I looked back on the friendship and wondered what made it work from their point of view, I wondered if our encouragement of their children might have had something to do with it.
Walter and Lillian had been married about a dozen years. Their affectionate bickering immediately put us at ease. Lillian needled Walter by interrogating Eileen about our living arrangements—“Do you really get Charlie to cook for you? How do you do that? Whatever you do I want to try it on Walter. He know how to cook but you can’t get him to go in the kitchen.”
“I done my part, Charlie,” Walter retorted. “Who you think bring the meat home? Who you think snuck those pork chops out the back door when Bossman go out to take care of his errands?”
We couldn’t help laughing. Petty theft was right up our alley. Bossman was rich. Walter and Lillian weren’t. Expropriating a few pork chops on a Friday night to even the score was simple justice.
Lillian, too, had stories that played to our political views. As school custodian in inner-city Atlanta, she saw things the teachers and principal didn’t acknowledge: fights, belligerence, disorganized classrooms. The perpetual chaos she described vividly illustrated the communist claim that poor children, especially blacks, were deprived of educational opportunities suburban families enjoyed. Eileen and I were preparing to be teachers, hoping to challenge capitalist miseducation from inside the system. Hearing Lillian’s tales of teachers’ ineptitude and administrators’ complaisance whetted our appetite for our future activist role.
As we learned more from Walter and Lillian, we discovered that their stories didn’t fit our ideological mold as neatly as we first thought. To be sure, Bossman was the classic exploiter. He expected Walter to work irregular hours for low pay and no benefits. But Walter had previously had a much better job as a union meatcutter in a large grocery store chain, receiving higher hourly pay and decent benefits. Why would anyone give up a job like that to work for parsimonious Bossman? I would have liked to ask, but I sensed this was a sensitive subject. After one brief mention, the chain-store job never came up again.
Bossman, however, loomed ever larger in the day-to-day rhythms of family life. “He needs his whiskey tonight,” Lillian would inform us. “It was a hard week with Bossman.” “He let me go twice on Thursday,” Walter explained. “He say, ‘pick up your knives and get out of the store,’ and I tell him ‘I ain’t going nowhere till I grind up this here meat like you told me,’ and then he forgets till he come back after lunch and sees me out in the back washing down that old wood counter that he got there. He say, ‘I thought I told you to get out of the store,’ so I say ‘If you want me out of the store now, you got to pay me through lunch time.’”
Many a night, in between hands of cards, we laughed together over the Bossman tales. It would have been hard not to join in. They were the emotional highlight of our evenings together. Lillian seemed to recognize Walter’s need to unburden himself to someone other than her. She would nearly always sit quietly and let him tell the whole story, even though she’d undoubtedly heard it before, perhaps more than once. Sometimes I wondered if the stories were exaggerated for comic effect, not that that would have mattered to me and Eileen. We were communists. A colorful exaggeration was as good as the truth, if not better.
Only once did Lillian question one of the stories. Walter had explained that he’d been temporarily “fired” a few days earlier—sent home and later told to return—for telling Bossman that some of the meat was old and it’d be off soon and needed to be put out in the trash and not go in the grinder with the rest of the beef he was grinding. He was about to elaborate on Bossman’s greed when Lillian spoke up. It wasn’t about Bossman’s greed or the meat going bad, she replied tartly. It was about Walter not coming to work on time.
“Now tell me, Eileen,” she demanded, driving the point home, “you got a store that open at eight in the morning, do you want to hire a man who come walking in at nine or maybe nine-thirty or ten and he don’t even put on a clean shirt?”
Eileen caught my eye. Neither one of us had any idea how to respond, so we waited. Walter shrugged.
“Charlie, you know sometimes you drink a glass or two of whiskey at night, could be in the morning you have a headache and you don’t want to get out of the bed at six thirty? Boss man don’t care what time I come in, he ain’t got enough work to carry me through a whole day no way.”
Lillian signed histrionically. Walter chortled. We laughed in relief. Both things were true. The banter went on several more minutes—a humorous, even loving exchange. But now it was clearer than ever there was something else under the surface, something they had to live with but didn’t talk about. Not to us, at least, even though it wasn’t exactly a secret, since we knew all about Bossman and were aware of the chain store job.
The friendship with Walter and Lillian lasted three years. Every few weeks I would call them up and if they were free Eileen and I would go over there. Early on we invited them to political meetings, but neither showed any interest and we soon dropped any idea of recruiting them. The pleasure of those evenings, the relaxed, unguarded banter among us, was in some ways more satisfying than hanging out with our comrades and trying to promote communism. For a few hours at least, beer and whiskey and cards trumped changing the world.
Eileen and I stayed together a little more than a year after we met Walter and Lillian. Throughout that time they were a part of our world. After we split up, they remained part of mine. When I finished my college degree and began teaching, though, the impulse to call them did not come so readily. With lessons to prepare, I had much less free time. Toward the end of my time in Atlanta I did not own a car. Getting over to see them by bus at night was an ordeal.
There was something else, too, that made those evenings less appealing, and me more reluctant to ride a bus over to visit. Throughout our friendship, Lillian had talked freely about her work as custodian—about the challenges of trying to keep the school clean, despite inconsiderate teachers, complaisant administrators, and unruly children. In the early days, Eileen and I chuckled sympathetically at her stories about “my day in h***,” or “the week that just about carried me off.” They fit our political views to a T.
When I began teaching, though, I began to feel differently. At St. Jerome’s, a Catholic elementary school, a knowledgeable and assertive principal, Sister Anastasia, took me under her wing. She taught me how to set expectations for children, how to insist rules were followed, and how to stop disruptive behavior. After a year of her tutelage, I couldn’t understand why all schools weren’t run the same way.
I now knew, or thought I knew, the answer to the chaos Lillian observed every day. On one of my last visits, I tried to explain how teachers ought to manage their classrooms and how a principal ought to hold them accountable. After I finished there was a brief silence. I had expected Lillian to reply, but she didn’t. Had I come across as a know-it-all? Based on Lillian’s description and my own teaching experience, the truth about city schools seemed as plain as the nose on my face, but had I expressed it in a way that highlighted my education and diminished Walter and Lillian?
That night we smoothed over the awkwardness with beer, whiskey, and cards. Looking back, though, I suspect this episode created a distance between us. I certainly felt it. I suspect Walter and Lillian felt it as well.
A half century later, with the perspective of hindsight, I can see a change of this kind was inevitable for a young man finishing college and going out to make his way in the world. Through most of the friendship I’d been an open vessel, setting aside my own emerging hopes and ideas and gratefully receiving whatever they offered. I couldn’t have gone on like that indefinitely. What strikes me as wonderful now is that for several years I was able to set aside the aggressive, questioning part of myself and simply absorb what I saw and heard in their presence. Those few tranquil hours of self-forgetfulness were an oasis during that tempestuous time, a reprieve from my incessant, misguided, and ultimately futile efforts to make the world better.
Soon after the friendship with Walter and Lillian ended, I cut ties with my communist comrades and moved back to New England. I got a job in a small rural school. In this peaceful setting, I tried to make sense of where life had led me. I wasn’t sure why, but I sensed that friendship had influenced my trajectory out of communism and toward the more tranquil world I inhabited now. Trying to understand how it had shaped me, I found myself mulling over an episode that remained particularly vivid in memory.
It was a midsummer Saturday morning, a few months after Eileen and I were divorced. Feeling listless, I called Walter. Yes, he was free that night, but right now he was busy repairing his roof. Could I come over and help?
At that point I still had a car. I put on my oldest jeans and a ragged tee shirt and drove over. Walter hauled out a rickety wooden ladder from the crawl space under his house. We began lugging up tar and the shingles. It was mid-afternoon before we got all the supplies in position. The sun was blazing and there was no shade. We were drenched with sweat before we even started spreading tar and replacing shingles.
We worked several hours until at last Walter said he thought we were done and we lugged the remaining supplies back down the ladder. I couldn’t ever remember being so hot, parched, and exhausted, but at the same time it was a relief to have lost myself in exertion. The physical challenge provided a respite from the lost, aimless feeling of being alone and uncertain about what lay in the future.
We went into the kitchen and drank some water, and then Walter said he was ready for beer. Since I hadn’t brought any, we decided to walk down to the neighborhood liquor store and buy some. It was early evening by now. The streets were quiet. An eerie stillness hung over the small houses and treeless parched lawns that had baked all day in the sun.
We approached a cinder block store with steel shutters drawn back from an entry door. On the shady side of the building a few older men drinking from open bottles in paper bags ignored us. Inside the store it was dark and airless, just a few degrees cooler than outside. An older white man at the register stared at us as we entered. I could feel his eyes on our backs as we made our way to the beer cooler. With studied nonchalance I pulled out a couple of six-packs and cradled them in my arms for the cold. Walter picked out a pint of whiskey and we returned to the front.
The man at the register frowned at some figures on the back of an envelope. As we approached, I got a better look at him: a gaunt man in his mid-sixties with a lined face and a pencil mustache. Though the three of us were alone in the store, he didn’t look up. Only a slight stiffening of the upper half of his body betrayed his awareness that we were now within a few feet of him.
Walter set down the whiskey a few inches from the envelope. I set down the beer.
“You two together?”
A question, but also a statement. Walter glanced at me with an incredulous grin. We both knew what this was about.
“I drink half, he drink half.”
The man banged in the prices on the register and told us the total, making no move to open a bag. Walter pulled out his wallet, counted out a few bills, and laid them on the counter next to the beer. I handed over the rest of the money. The old man just stared at us.
“He carry half, I carry half. Give us two bags.”
Very slowly, the man pulled out a bag out from under the counter, snapped it open, lowered one of the six packs into it, then paused and repeated the routine more slowly with the other six pack and the bottle of whiskey. Then he put his hands on the counter and stared at us. I wondered uneasily if Walter would say something to respond to the challenge, or if I should. After a second’s hesitation, which felt like an eternity, Walter but put one of the packages under his arm, flung open the door, and motioned me to follow.
“That there Cracker Joe,” said Walter, half a block from the store. “That’s how folks in the neighborhood calls him. What you think about Cracker Joe? You think he like seeing white and colored drinking together?”
He chuckled. I couldn’t help laughing. When I laughed Walter laughed more. Little by little our hilarity dissolved the tension and sense of the man’s loathing.
“We ruint the day for the cracker down to the store,” Walter told Lillian when we got back to the house.
“Hush, Walter, don’t talk like that around Charlie. Charlie don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”
“Charlie OK. Charlie know. Charlie see where Cracker Joe coming from.”
And that was all that was said about the encounter. We opened the beer. We sat down to the pork chops and green beans Lillian had prepared. Later we broke out the cards and opened the bottle of whiskey. Around midnight I returned to my apartment, exhausted but deeply contented, still reeling from the hilarity and suppressed anger of the scene I had witnessed and swathed in the sense of belonging prompted by Walter’s offhand assurance that I was OK, that I knew, that I saw where Cracker Joe was coming from.
Amid the snowy fields of New England, where I first tried to make sense of the activist years, the memory of that evening hit like a freight train. I thought a lot about the liquor store and its aftermath. “Hush, Walter” was not just about Cracker Joe. What I witnessed that night was somehow connected to the covert war against Bossman and the suppressed anger of a man who felt trapped, an anger I experienced only through shared hilarity. From Walter and Lillian I learned more about the human plight than from all the counsels of communism.
What continued to puzzle me, though, was how Eileen and I found them and why they responded to us as they did. My perplexity about this continued for decades, until in my early seventies, I read the 66 books of the Bible. Tracing God’s action in the lives of His people from Eden to Patmos, I got a glimmer of understanding about His purposes in my life, and what he might have wanted to show me through the trip to the liquor store. A child could have told me there is no color line in the kingdom of heaven. But no child of man could have divulged what it feels like when barriers like that are removed. And no human agency could have orchestrated the steps of my circuitous journey from New England to Georgia and back again, from an Ivy League library to Walter and Lillian’s dining table, from the gentility of my parents’ living room to Cracker Joe’s stink-eye. The convivial nights with Walter and Lillian were a blessing, but they were more than that. They were a key to what the Lord was preparing me for in the remaining years of my life, after I came to my senses, after I freed myself of the fantasy of being in charge of the world or even of my own life, and after I recognized who it was who had been guiding and teaching me.