Hellfire
Going native with a Navy vet and his friends in 1970's Atlanta
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.
At age 22, I was thrilled to be offered a job at Tenneco, a gas station and convenience store near the college where I was taking a summer course. It was 1971. Along with five other 20-somethings, I’d traveled down to Atlanta to help build the communist movement. Progressive Labor Party (PL, the group that sponsored us) had grown weary of paying the bills. We volunteers had been sent out to find jobs and earn at least part of our keep.
Tenneco catered mainly to white working-class men coming on and off work. I was apprehensive at first. As a Northerner I stuck out like a sore thumb. At a factory where we sold our communist newspapers, there’d been some ugly confrontations with white steelworkers. I soon found, however, that the people who came in to buy beer and cigarettes at Tenneco were more interested in their change than my accent. The Confederate flag decals on car windows and bumpers took some getting used to, but pretty much all of the customers were good-natured, as long as you didn’t have to remind them alcohol sales stopped at midnight.
As I became more comfortable in the new job, I began keeping a Party newspaper or two under the counter. If I thought someone might be sympathetic, I’d pull one out and ask if he wanted to buy it. One of my oddest encounters was with a young man who said he wasn’t in the least interested in radical politics, but bought a paper anyway because he thought his friend might be.
Several days later, I’d forgotten all about this incident and was caught off guard when a stocky young man about my age with short fair hair and a scar on his forehead came up to the counter to greet me.
“You the one that sold Wade that paper? I like it, man. Somebody got to do something about those bosses, they’re screwing the workers. Just like the brass in the Navy.”
It took a few seconds for me to guess who Wade was. The friend grinned and introduced himself. Jim Plante.
He was eager to talk. There was no one else in the store, so we stood outside while he told me about being a cook on a destroyer, swabbing floors and getting up at four in the morning to cook steamboat rounds so they’d be ready by dinner time. Everything had to be done by the book, but the other enlisted guys still blamed you when the meat turned out tough. Try to make anything better, even just by a little bit, the brass’d write you up in a heartbeat.
“It sucked, man. It really sucked. When they called for us to reenlist anyone with sense told them to go screw themselves.”
We exchanged phone numbers. For sure we were going to get together and talk more. I’d been sent out to earn money, but I’d found something far more important—a potential recruit. It looked like I might have pulled off the most difficult feat for a radical activist in the South—won over a white worker. Eventually it would turn out I hadn’t, but by the time I realized that I didn’t mind. What I did do was launch a 50+ year friendship that helped to heal wounds, both in Jim’s life and mine, and to set me on the path that led ultimately to becoming a Christian.
Back at the apartment, news of my new contact caused quite a bit of excitement. Our leader Peter was all over it, asking me daily if I’d seen Jim again and urging me to make the first move and call him. After a few days I gave in and later was glad that I did.
Jim and I agreed to meet for a burger at a nearby Waffle House after my shift. That restaurant chain became our standard meeting point. Wherever you went in Atlanta and much of the rest of the South, there’d be one nearby. For a dime you could get a cup of coffee with unlimited refills. More often than not, that’s what Jim and I did.
On that first night, I didn’t want to dive right in with my recruiting pitch, so I asked what he did before he went in the Navy. That turned out to be exactly the right question.
For as long as he could remember, he’d never had a real home. His mother was mentally ill. His two older brothers had been placed in mental institutions. Social Services had taken Jim out of the home when he was seven “after she had one of her fits and I like to got my arm broke.” The first few foster placements didn’t work out too well. “None of ’em could control me. Charlie, you’re college educated. You know you can’t put a kid somewhere the grown folks don’t know what to do with him, can you?”
The hot coffee kept coming, and along with it the tales of his troubled upbringing. Every so often I would try to slip in a word about the meetings we held and how important they were in getting the working class ready for a mass violent uprising. He agreed readily: the bosses are bloodsuckers, man, they want to work you to death and not put any safety equipment on their machines to stop you from cutting your hand off. You better believe it, he knew about bosses better than most people. Count on it, he’d come to one of those communist meetings sometime.
And then before I knew it he’d shift gears again, and I had to change gears as well, slipping out of my political activist role and into the role of just listening. Heaven only knew what PL leaders would say about me just sitting there, letting all this wash over me. The one thing I knew was that I stop him from telling his story.
After a few years with foster parents who couldn’t control him, he had ended up with an older and more experienced couple, the Harmons. They’d taken in the worst of the worst and knew how to instill the fear of God in them.
“Let me tell you what it was like, Charlie. My foster father, he was what they call a lay preacher, and he knew something about hellfire. If I done something he didn’t like, he’d take his belt off and put such a whupping on me, he’d be clean out of breath. He’d have to sit down and breathe for a while till he had the strength to get up and whup me some more.”
Harsh as the punishments were, though, the Harmons loved him like one of their own. He hadn’t seen them in a pretty good while now. They’d retired to a little house on some farmland out in Covington. He knew he ought to go visit, but Covington was way out in the country—40 minutes or more. He’d got the directions from one of his foster brothers, but it was a long drive. What if he got way out there in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t find it?
I rode home on the bus that night in a fog of exhaustion. The belt, the whipping, the foster homes, the brothers, the arm that like to got broken—the images swirled around me like some horrific kaleidoscope. I couldn’t get the querulous sound of his voice and the taut expression of pain on his face out of my mind. When I got home Peter was out at some meeting or other. I was relieved that none of the others asked what progress I’d made winning Jim to PL.
He must have enjoyed that first night we sat together and talked. Soon afterward he called to ask if I wanted to go to a double feature at the drive-in with him and some of his friends. I had no idea what the friends would be like or how they would react to a communist college student from the North. Peter, though, had been urging us to spend time with the workers we were trying to recruit. A double feature horror movie at a drive-in was pretty far down the list of how I wanted to spend my free time that summer, but if Peter found out I turned down this invitation, there’d be trouble.
There were five us when we set out for the drive-in. I needn’t have worried about the reception from Jim’s friends. He told them I was a radical activist, pretty much communist when you got right down to it, and they hastened to assure me that they, too, were anti-establishment and hated all bosses, the war, and the government. I was the perfect audience: a fellow rebel meeting them for the first time.
Wade, who had bought the paper for Jim, was just out of the Air Force, living with his divorced dad, drinking beer out of the fridge when he wasn’t looking, and searching for work in security. Johnnie worked in a mill and lived in his parents’ trailer. His dad drank day and night and his mom hung around bars. He’d come home to find his dad passed out on the floor and have to clean up after both of them. Hank had had cerebral palsy. His speech was a bit halting and he walked with a limp. Though his impairment didn’t seem all that severe he was on disability, lived with his parents, and didn’t go to college or work.
It was oddly soothing, just sitting there listening to their stories. I was more than content not to have to tell them about me. When the horror movie began, Jim and his friends broke out the first six-pack of beer. I’d brought along a flask of martinis. A cup of ice from the concession stand, refilled several times that night, made this the perfect accompaniment to the fellowship of the misfits.
The alcohol and the grizzly scenes of the movie did their work on us. Jim and his friends regaled me and each other with stories of high school days. I heard all about the pranks they’d played in gym, the gross noises they’d made in algebra class, and the snobby, stuck-up girls who wouldn’t go out with you if you didn’t have a new car. Where were all those cheerleader types and their sports-star boyfriends now? Divorced, in jail, stuck in dead-end jobs and dead-end marriages. Nowhere good. So whatever gave them the idea back in the day that they were better than anyone else?
I slouched down in my seat and laughed till I cried at their tall tales. I remember thinking how far I’d traveled on my journey of self-transformation. In my private high school, I’d been a star student, Ivy League bound. Who would have thought I would feel this much at home with this extraordinary group of outsiders? Somewhere along the path of radical activism, I’d become someone new and entirely different. It didn’t occur to me that the change in myself wasn’t complete yet, and wouldn’t be for many more years, until a time came when I recognized and acknowledged the one who created me.
Midway through the second show, conversation flagged. We were exhausted. I finished the gin, sank lower in the back seat of the car, and eventually drifted off into sleep. From what Jim told me afterwards I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one. I guess if you had been there, you wouldn’t have thought much of it—five young men in their twenties getting drunk at a horror movie. I didn’t think much of it either in the immediate aftermath. It felt like just one more crazy experience in a long series of them strung out through that whole crazy summer.
Jim eventually did attend one or two Party meetings, and I got credit for bringing him there. He was never active in PL, though, so I don’t have to regret entangling him in the fruitless, arrogant quest for violent upheaval that might have been as hard for him as for me to extricate himself from.
At summer’s end, when I decided to stay on in Atlanta, Jim helped me find an apartment and used furniture. He took me out into the cotton fields to meet his foster parents. I was by his side when he reconnected with his biological father and (only once) with his real mother, reliving, through memories shared after those visits, the painful tumult of his childhood. It was during that time that he began referring to me as his brother. All these years later, now that I’ve been baptized, I’m proud to call him my brother in Christ. We still call one another every few weeks, and have made a solemn promise not to die any time soon, so we can keep each other company as we grow older.