For essayist, Huntsville is the new town that became a hometown

When a new town becomes a hometown by Beth Thames

A lovely and thoughtful essay on the slow, steady process of adapting to the place you’ve moved to. It’s what I’m in the midst of trying to do in Chapel Hill, and all the more poignant since the place the essayist now calls home is the place I’ll never quite get over leaving. 

50 years later: I wonder what the civil rights movement looked like to our expanding families in 1963 Alabama

Sonnie Hereford and his father walk into Fifth Ave. Elementary in Huntsville, making it the first integrated school in Alabama. I’d walk through those doors six years later, completely unaware of what had happened in 1963.

Southerners are marking events that happened 50 years ago when civil rights events exploded across my home state and others. I’m fascinated with the events themselves, but also curious about impacted families like mine.

Early June marked 50 years since George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in response, President Kennedy’s speech sketching out a civil rights bill that very night, and in the early hours the next morning, Medgar Evers’ murder.

In the coming months, we’ll mark 50 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the horrific bombing of Birmingham’s 16th St. Baptist Church that killed four girls in the church basement.

My great friend Bill Kimber was born June 11 in Birmingham’s South Highlands Infirmary, just a few miles from 16th St. Baptist Church. That was the same day that Wallace created his lasting image as an ardent segregationist on the University of Alabama campus.

I was born in Huntsville on July 7, just a few months ahead of the integration of Fifth Ave. Elementary School by Dr. Sonnie Hereford and his namesake son who I now count as a friend. It was the first school in Alabama to be integrated, and I would walk through those same doors as a first grader six years later.

There’s not much I can add to civil rights history that can’t be found in lots of other places, but I would like to know what was it like for my mother and Bill’s mother, and other young parents, bringing children into the world when that world as they knew it was being turned upside down.

Was it scary and daunting? Did they have sympathy for what the marchers and rights advocates were trying to accomplish? Or were they so busy with pregnancy they were insulated from it? After all, they were working-class white families, not completely immune from civil strife and turmoil, but obviously not impacted by Jim Crow like those marching and protesting and hoping for changes in laws that would change their lives.

When I was old enough to have conversations with her about it, my mother told me it scared her at first. I understand. The world that she’d known was changing dramatically. It would be one of the biggest and most important social upheavals in American history, and it was happening down the street.

I can just imagine Bill’s mother in her hospital bed, Wallace’s defiant words blaring through the television via the black and white evening newscast. What a world to bring a son into. In the long run, it was a better world. A world where Bill and I went to school with black kids and had black friends and those kids went to better schools.

My mother also told me she, at some point, began to understand the importance of the civil rights movement, and supported it. I’m not talking last year, but sometime in the 60s. As a single mother from a working-class family, I think she was in a position to understand what it meant to be oppressed, at least to some extent. She and other members of my extended family (Hi Cousin Pat!) were all-in supporters of civil rights and equal rights for women by the time I was old enough to have those conversations.

My mother, Muriel Isom, in the early 1940s.

While I sort of understand how she got there, I have no idea what that journey was like for our moms. Mine was a woman who grew up the child of a mill worker father and homemaker mother in segregated Alabama of the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to see change come roaring at her in the ‘50s and ‘60s faster than she probably imagined possible.

I’m proud, though, to come from a family that embraces it rather than resists it.

Waving goodbye to a Southern tradition: Waving at passing cars

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m trying to revive a Southern tradition one finger at a time.

When I was a boy and two oncoming cars met each other on most roads, the drivers waved. Not usually a big wave. Maybe a hand off the steering wheel, or one or two fingers up while the palm stayed put, but you almost never passed a car without a wave of some kind.

Where I lived, this applied to city and country driving, and if you were in the country, you also turned your head and gave a heartier wave to people sitting on their front porches.

It happens fast, especially when you and the car you’re meeting are going 55 mph or faster. You have to look into the windshield of every oncoming car, have your hand on top of the steering wheel ready to go up, and respond before the car has passed you. If someone waves and you don’t get at least a finger up until you’ve already passed, it’s like a snub. Very bad form.

By the time I learned to drive, the waving ritual was on the wane. Yet it still was a somewhat regular occurrence even in my fairly progressive hometown of Huntsville, Ala. (common retort: As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist).

My first post-college job was in Scottsboro, Ala. (common retort: Please don’t bring up the Scottsboro Boys) and not only did you wave at every passing vehicle, four-way stops were negotiated by waves of mutual agreement. (This actually drove me nuts. Just follow the rules, people. We’ll get through a lot faster.) After leaving Scottsboro, waving happened less and less.

These days waving at passing cars rarely happens — probably less here in Chapel Hill, N.C., (common retort: Go Heels) where I meet more people from California and New York than from the South. I’m sure there are lots of other reasons for the decline: Ever-widening roads, the interstate system and higher speed limits come to mind. Native Southern drivers who might be inclined to wave here probably don’t, assuming every oncoming car is driven by a transplanted Yankee who wouldn’t know what to make of being waved at anyway.

A few years ago I decided to put my graduate education to use and do a quantitative study of road waving. At the time, I drove a Ford Explorer which was helpful because drivers of trucks and truck-like vehicles seem to be the last keepers of the waving ritual. Here’s how the study went:

Method: I drove in three Southern states: Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. On uninterrupted stretches of two-lane highway, I checked my odometer and waved at every oncoming car I passed for 10 miles in each state, documenting how many waves were returned.

Limitations: It’s possible I might have missed some waves that happened after our cars had passed. (Folks open to but not expecting a wave sometimes don’t have their hands in position and can’t get a wave off fast enough, try as they might. )

Results: A 12-15 percent response rate in each state. (The differences between states weren’t statistically significant.)

Breakdown:

• Of that 12-15 percent, about 80 percent of returned waves were from drivers of trucks of all kinds (pickups and semis).

• Seventy-five percent of waving drivers of trucks were white males and almost 25 percent were black males.

• Of the drivers of cars, the percentage of returned waves was about 20 percent.

• About 90 percent of car drivers who waved were men.

• The most common vehicles passed were cars driven by women, and very few women car drivers waved.

Anecdotal anomaly: I did get one wave from a black woman driving a pickup truck.

Clearly it’s going to be an uphill drive to bring this tradition back, but I’m going to give it a try. Just don’t wave at me at a four-way stop. You may get another finger for that.