Deutschland Über Mayretta (Cal) 

Having moved to Atlanta, Georgia, this new south was rapidly becoming a part of my life. In the next 10 years Coop and I would explore the states of the old Confederacy and the border states.  From Beeville, Texas, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.  Savannah, Georgia, to Louisville and Memphis.  Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery, Alabama; Biloxi, Pascagoula, and Natchez, Mississippi, and many more too numerous to count.  New friends and new places came together amid the magnolia, rhododendron, dogwood, kudzu, and pine.

Slowly, ever so slowly, through a combination of history, travel, and personal contact, I began to see this new south through a different focus.  Notice I didn't say "understand." I don't believe one can truly understand the region unless one's family predates the war between the states.  My view was clearly that of an outsider, a convert, someone who tried hard to fit in, but ultimately would move on.  My southern friends were right.  No matter how much we absorbed the culture, Coop was still a peripatetic Yankee at heart.  

The view I came to encompass was this:  The south, for better or worse is America - more so than any other region. Maybe because southerners live their history; maybe because everyone else forgets theirs; maybe because, despite the suburban sprawl and shopping malls, the south remains a separate culture; but most likely because, the most critical issue for America to come to grips with is, and always has been race.  

You see, there is no American "culture” language, or ethnicity.  Not as there is say, in France, or Germany, or Sweden.  If you are French, it doesn't matter whether you are communist or monarchist, socialist or gaulist, you are still French.  

We are American, in theory at least, until a certain orange haired barbarian forced his way onto our screens, because of a shared set of ideals. You need not be born here, you need only accept the guarantees and limitations of our institutions to be one of us.  We are all equal before the law. There are no hereditary classes. But this doesn't resonate if some are less equal because of their racial background.  How can all "men'' be created equal, if some are more equal than others, and some are not even legally, "men?"   For America to be, what her most fervent patriots wish her to be - for America to lead the way toward a future of equal opportunity, we must finally come to grips with the issue of race and our racial history. 

Both Martin Luther King and Barack Obama are credited with claiming belief in humanity’s better angels oft repeating the famous maxim, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Obama was so enamored of this quote that he had it woven into a rug in the oval office. The quote itself, as paraphrased by Dr. KIng, actually first appeared in a sermon spoken by Unitarian abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, in 1853, foreshadowing the civil war. Obama’s African American Attorney General Eric Holder cautioned that “the arc bends toward justice, but it only bends toward justice because people pull it towards justice. It doesn’t happen on its own.” 

In our current riven political environment, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act more than half a century old and racial resentment at the center of our national political debate, having recently experienced the absurd birther conspiracy surrounding our first black president, the rise of the Tea Party, and the takeover of the party of Lincoln by a wanna be demigod, who thrives in the world of racial animosity, are we so sure where that arc reaches its terminus and who is pulling in what direction?  

If race is the transcendent issue in America, the south is where it gets real. Others may delude themselves in thinking all things are now equal, southerners know better.  And the complexity of race in the south is exemplified in the man who penned those famous words - "all men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Thomas Jefferson, squire of Monticello.Third President of the United States, Secretary of State, Ambassador to France, classicist, linguist, inventor, architect, botanist.  A true man of the enlightenment.  Scourge of conservative Christians of his day. Burned in effigy for his lack of piety. Champion of religious freedom.  A man so brilliant that President Kennedy, when toasting a roomful of Nobel laureates, nearly 150 years after his death, said, "there has not been this much brainpower assembled in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone."

And with all this, an owner of slaves. A Virginian at heart. A southerner of the 18th century. In Jefferson, the dilemma that would forever block the path to fulfillment of the American ideal was there, in one brilliant package. A lightning rod in his own day, he remains so today. What does the Declaration of Independence really stand for if its author was a slave holder? Whose rights does the Constitution guarantee? James   Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, was another Virginian, and Jefferson's protégé.  The original Constitution didn't count those of African descent as people. It would take 80 long years, and the bloodiest war in American history to change this tragic omission.  And even then, this gaping wound would not heal.

And yet, Jefferson is even more complicated than the accepted "history."  Because Jefferson crossed still another line - Jefferson broke the sexual taboo. Jefferson bore children with his black slave Sally Hemmings. But to Jefferson, according to the accounts of the day, she was more wife than concubine. Modern historians and racial activists, seeking redress, cannot come to grips with this. He owned her. Nothing she did could be considered voluntary. What occurred between them was no better than rape, is the modern view. Again, it is more difficult. In his time, Jefferson could not legally cohabit with Sally Hemmings. To free her, would separate them. Contemporary accounts, tinged with outrage and scandal, indicate she was the lady of Monticello, from the time Jefferson's wife died when he was a young man.

How much has changed? In 2020 Rapahel Warnock, a senior pastor in King’s own Ebenezer Baptist Church, was elected US Senator from Georgia. Atlanta itself is a major center of black political and economic power, yet still the ugly past is not far in the rearview mirror. 

The year was 1977. As an editor of the University newspaper, Coop actually got to meet the human incarnation of the devil at his headquarters in Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia. Back when Marietta was southern, democratic, and racist and before it elected a slimy little Republican amphibian to represent Cobb in the US Congress. 

Decades before Cobb built out and integrated with immigrants from every corner of the globe, Yankee transplants, and more racially progressive suburbanites, encamping from the city, we visited the prince of darkness (or at least his near human manifestation) in his lair. Coop brought me along to either soften the mood (in theory even Klan members like cute dogs), or for protection, if the fact he was Jewish came up - or maybe both? 

The paper had just run a piece on race relations in Atlanta and interviewed several icons in the civil rights struggle to get their perspective on progress, among them John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond, all legendary civil rights icons with deep connections to Dr. King.

Coop was putting to bed next week’s issue when the phone rang. It was late, and he instinctively hit the speaker phone button while editing an article on intramural softball. On the other end was a gravelly old voice with an unmistakable and vaguely familiar north Georgia drawl. The caller introduced himself as Mistah Stonah and immediately got to the point. It took Coop only a few seconds to recognize who he was talking to. 

“Mistah Coopa, mah name is JB Stonah. Mah associates have made me aware that yew have been rahtin about race RE-lations heah in Jojah. I jes wanted to know if yew bin talkin to anyone but “nigrahs, Jews, and Commuhnists. Ah am th leadr uh th Nashunul States’ Rahts Party and thank yew du not comprehend what yew r token about.”

Coop waved over his two senior editorial writers to listen in, though he seemed pretty sure he had the real deal on the line. The man’s voice sounded threatening and ominous, and I let out an involuntary woof, before curling at Coop’s feet.

Coop cut him off. “Mr. Stoner, would you like to tell your side of the story in an in-person interview?” 

And just like that, with no preconditions, Coop had an interview with this savage, barbarous, old crank from deep in the noxious swamp of American history.

To fully grasp the absurdity of Stoner and his band of neo-Nazi misfits requires a complete picture. It also helps to fill in some of the blanks in the outsider’s view of the post-Civil Rights era in the southern mainland. Understand first that Cobb County was always to Atlanta and its immediate suburbs, what upstate is to New York City, and downstate to Chicago. 

A place where those not sophisticated or educated enough to make it in the big city cultural mecca, at least according to the urban hipsters, went to live out their lives in sotweed suburbs, not to be bothered by diversity, however one defines that postmodern term. Atlanta adds a strange twist, and Cobb was where the racial divide hit home. Atlanta, "The City Too Busy to Hate," elected black mayors, and Fulton County, black Commissioners, Cobb elected John Bircher Larry McDonald to Congress and passed laws requiring gun ownership. 

While Dekalb, East of Atlanta, home to Emory and several other Universities, gladly embraced the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) to move people in and out of their new city of glass and steel, to Cobb residents, who rejected the train service, MARTA would always stand for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta." "Weren't gonna make it easy fer city folk to come werk in Cobb, no siree." 

The fact that Cobb residents couldn't get to high paying jobs in the city absent long commutes in mind-numbing traffic seemed beside the point. Part of the whispered opposition campaign alleged that a subway to Marietta would bring an influx of “those” people. “Dark” times would be foisted on the good patriots of Cobb!

Even getting to Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia in those days required some doing. To say that "you can't get there from here" was in some ways an understatement. No freeways actually went to Marietta (pronounced, MAY-retta). After driving beyond the Perimeter Highway on Interstate 75 (to us Yankee transplants, the end of civilization as we knew it), you exited onto Highway 41, The Old National Highway. 

We headed to the interview after being provided what appeared to be somewhat nebulous directions. Coop was accompanied by Debra Jerden, a tall, blonde, Florida-raised beach girl, smart, witty, and beautiful, and Wilt Binghamton, her light-skinned African American sometimes boyfriend - brilliant, radical, sporting a Dr. J natural, the two senior editors for the school paper.

Binghamton, a journalism major, was intent on staring the demon down. Truth be told, they were  all inexperienced, and had no actual idea what to expect. I rode shotgun with Coop in the front seat of the old Pontiac while Debra and Wilt scribbled questions in the back seat.

And there she was, just as our directions instructed, a forty-foot-tall metal chicken pointing the way to cracker nirvana. Debra was reading the directions to Stoner's compound as Wilt and I were surveying the landscape. Here among the winding roads, tar paper shacks, old flatbed trucks with rebel flags, junk yard dogs, and missing teeth, country music began to make sense. 

Here was the rural South in graphic relief, stereotypes unbroken, just twenty miles and a world away from downtown A-Town. Three years below the Mason Dixon line had not quite prepared Coop for this. The learning curve was sharp. All was not as it seemed. His southern education was not yet complete.  

Debra pointed left to a ramshackle frame house up an unpaved driveway, threadbare pecan trees draped in the ubiquitous kudzu vines marking the way. Black children, barefoot, played in a sprinkler across the street. Nothing obvious about this place at all. Could be any other home in any other small, rural southern town from the best I could tell. 

But this was Stoner’s party headquarters. It was remarkable only in its unremarkableness. Before driving up the pitted, weed and garbage strewn gravel drive, we stopped and went over to the children. They were thrilled to pet me, stroking my head softly and asking me to sit and shake which I happily did to break the ice. 

“Do you know the people in the big house over there?” Wilt asked the oldest of the little gaggle, who appeared to be about 10.

“Nope, he replied. “They kinda keep to themselves. Not neighborly at all and they dress in funny black costumes and carry guns. Mama says we should stay away from there.”

I really wasn’t sure what they meant until, approaching the door with Bingham and Debra, a guard emerged from the house, rifle across his chest, dressed in the unmistakable uniform of the Waffen SS. We had entered a frightful time warp, broken only by the slow, south Georgia drawl of this acne encrusted wannabe stormtrooper, demanding to know “the nature of yo bidness he-eere!”

I growled menacingly at him but quieted down when he pointed a military assault weapon at me.

“Bettah calm that pooch down or ah will shoot,” he cried in a whiney high-pitched voice.

Coop pulled me close and whispered for me to be calm. 

“It’s ok Cal,” Coop said, and then, turning to the nervous “trooper,” he said, “Private, we have a scheduled meeting with Mr. Stoner.” 

“Ahm a corporal, not a private, I got me a PRO-moshen last week,” he proudly proclaimed in the same tinny whine. A’hl be rahht baack,” he said, spinning and clicking his heels as I suspect he had seen Nazi troops do in too many WWII movies. 

We were ushered into a long foyer, again unremarkable, until you looked up at the far wall. There, looking like it had been removed from the Reichstag before VE Day was a huge banner of Adolph Hitler. Standing beneath it to either side were two more black-uniformed, pink-faced, inbred ersatz Nazi commandos, rifles at the ready. 

The rest of the furnishings could best be described as early depression. Old sofas with tattered upholstery vomiting their necrotic stuffing were the principal accouterments, all guarded by a bored bloodhound, which sniffed at me, before placing his large droopy head back down between his paws, where he sprawled across the stained cushions. 

Crooked pine wood shelving held aloft by battered cinder blocks, and tattered, threadbare carpets combined to give the place a rather sordid veneer. A William Faulkner timepiece of decrepit past glories set among the red clay dirt of west Georgia. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof mixed with a touch of Blazing Saddles.

At the rear of the room a doorway opened and a kindly looking old man in spectacles and gray blazer emerged, smiling into the musty air. He motioned us into his office, not seeming to notice Wilt Binghamton at all. Sitting behind a large weather-beaten desk, Stoner certainly belied his reputation as a fire-breathing, unrepentant segregationist, Klan member, and neo-Nazi thug. Offering us Ball jars filled with sweet tea garnished with mint sprigs, he motioned for us to be seated.

I looked around the room and out the window. The young black children were still visible, now shooting hoops at a netless rim high on a tar-covered utility pole. The July air was sticky in that uniquely southern way. Mosquitoes buzzed loudly. Overhead fans beat the air and flying cockroaches the size of Humvees crawled languorously on the windowsills. A late afternoon thunderstorm could be heard rumbling in from the Piedmont as the sky darkened, and an occasional flash of lightning lit up the low hills to the north setting the whole scene as if frozen in a fading hazy daguerreotype. 

If not for the white sheet with the blood red thunderbolt on a banner that hung directly behind the old man, we could just as easily have been interviewing Debra’s grandfather. But no - jerking back to reality, the Editors of the Emory New Wheel and Times, had a job to do. They had to interview this slightly deranged race-baiting old codger, who had actually garnered ten percent of the vote in a recent statewide election. Ask him serious questions. Listen to his answers. This was fucking crazy.

Binghamton, ever the aspiring newspaperman and occasional college diplomat, fired first. “Why do you hate black people?” Ah, approach the target slowly, lull him to sleep. Nice subtle interview technique Wilt, I thought. Bound to catch him off guard. 

Stoner actually looked kind of hurt. “Ah don’ hate Nigras,” he said, “Ah jest don thaank they should be livin an workin aroun whaat folks. That comunist Martin Lucifer Coon feller was all wrong. Yer basic nigra no more wants to liiive round us than we wont to liiive round him.” 

He said all this in a rather mild tone, as if he were discussing the weather. Coop almost laughed. This was something out of a bad movie. Did people like this still exist? Coop gave it a shot. “I see you have a picture of Adolph Hitler outside. Do you favor killing all those who are not racially pure white Christians?” 

“Ah don't believe Mr. Hitler is guilty of what he’s charged with. War is hell. The folks who wi-in git to raht the histry. Sho-owr a few djews da-hd, but they had sold out th’ Aryan ra-ace and th’ Fuhrer was tra-inn to save good German Christians from becumin mongrels.”

Now he was on a roll. “The Jews control the media, Hollywood, and the Universities. They’ve ma-ade all this stuff up, jes cause he wanted a country for the whaat ma-an. If he d-id ha-ave to ‘relocate’ a few from their homes, they had it cumin fer killin r lord Jesus Chras-te, runnin’ all the banks, and stabbin Germany in the baack at Versailles.”

It went on like this for an hour. Venomous hateful monologues delivered in a soft, matter-of-fact voice. Photos of the Fuhrer and small black children frolicking out the window. Beautiful magnolias and jackbooted stormtroopers. The whole scene was too weird for words. 

To Coop’s twenty-one-year-old Yankee mind, raised on faded newsreels of Rosa Parks, Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney, and a bloody Memphis balcony, this was the past he had fervidly hoped and wished, no longer existed. But it was a past that was never really vanquished. The Stoners of the world had always been there, and likely always would be. Just one economic crisis, one lost war, one pandemic, or one refugee migration wave away. Could civilization be just a thin veneer? Peering into the heart of darkness was not easy. Could Faulkner be right? Is the past often prologue? Is it sometimes not even the past?

As years would tumble forward and I spent time exploring the old Confederacy and the modern US of A with Coop, I began to understand how simplistic our view of America really was. JB Stoner was real. What he stood for was appalling, but Stoner was not only southern,  he was also American - and in many ways universal.

Coop had twenty-one years. I had millennia. I had seen Stoner before. Humans could produce great beauty; they could build the Pantheon in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens. They could construct Machu Picchu in the clouds without modern tools, the Taj Mahal to honor a lover, Angkor Wat, and the Great Wall of China. 

But the progeny of Octavian gave the world Mussolini; Picasso inhabited the same space as Franco; the Great Wall and Mao’s cultural revolution are both Chinese; the Khmer built the great temple and murdered millions; - and the exact same culture that produced Beethoven and Mozart, Von Humboldt and Einstein, could within several generations spit out Hitler, Himmler, and the Einsatzgruppen. 

In the third decade of the 21st century we have elected our first black president as well as a failed businessman, and racial grifter. One of our political parties welcomes people of all colors, races, and religions. The other chooses to mythologize a pale past, where only a chosen few could attain their dreams. The future is cloudy. Only by coming to grips with the past, by shining a clear light on the hope that is America, and the reality of our bloody history, can we pull and bend that arc towards a more equal and just future that lives up to the ideals Jefferson, the slaveholding author of our aspirational founding creed, enshrined.

In the end, the future remains in my mind as muddy as the Mississippi through the Delta, and as ethereal as Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, wailing the blues, for a long lost love. Lucifer made him a guitar and the blues were born. The old folks say he lost a woman and sold his soul to win her back. That's the simple story. 

Those crossroads are America - we have a choice which path we follow.  The devil is out there, playing to hate and fear. I met him in Marietta, Georgia.  Ol' Robert understood this. He sold his soul to save ours. He gave us the blues as a reminder.  Jefferson and the blues - the story of America.