My father was a Yankee from Philadelphia who came to Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech. After graduation, he joined the fighting in World War II, commanding a destroyer escort in the Pacific Ocean. Upon his return, he decided for some reason still unknown to me, to settle down outside Atlanta. I never found out why he didn’t go back to his home state of Pennsylvania. Perhaps he felt comfortable with the warmth and hospitality the South offered to a white man, or maybe the different pace of living, slower and more in touch with the country than the ferocious push of the industrial North, was appealing to him. Whatever it was, he appeared content in the South, and probably would have lived out his life there had he not applied for and been accepted to a job with the federal government in Washington D.C. Listening to him speak years later, I came to the conclusion it was a move he regretted. The DC political bureaucracy came to annoy him to no end. As a ship’s commander, my father was a man of precise detail, lost in a world interested in who you know or whose feet you are kissing this week rather than whether you are doing the job correctly. There is a real truth about the saying pronounced over a piece of crappy and mediocre effort:

“Ahhhhh….good enough for government work.”

If mediocrity is king, then Washington DC is a city of royalty. It was not a place for an ex-Navy officer with an impeccable sense of right and wrong. When his required twenty years were up and his government pension secured, he said goodbye to government work and went out to play golf until he got bored with that. Then he found a job teaching engineering to young men eager to fill jobs like the one he had left. They, too, would learn the ways of bureaucracy and mendacity. My father was happy to instruct them.

My father never taught me about the ways of the South. Perhaps he thought his sons would catch on to southern social mores by simple observation. I have the feeling that if he had somehow discovered his sons were regularly going up to Ronnie Knight’s house, crossing over LaVista Road, and playing with the black sons of the sharecropper who lived on the vast acres of land on the other side of our white subdivision, he would have had a fit. He was a closet racist, claiming to all who would listen that he had no animus against black people. My brother and I knew better. When he would start up his blather about how unracist he was, ending with his signature statement, “Why, I even once shook a black man’s hand.” we would look at each other and roll our eyes in disbelief at the window dressing he was trying to sell his listeners to make him seem not a racist.

Wow! What a big deal! You actually shook a black man’s hand! I’m sure the black man was honored to have a white man touch him. Why, maybe that black man went home and never washed his hand again. “Lookie heah, honey! A white man done shook mah hand today!” While I cannot imagine my father as a member of the Klan, there do exist degrees of racism, and ignoring racial injustice is participation in it as much as carrying the burning cross. I hate to admit it, but my father was “a gentle racist,” which means that while he would never commit an act of violence against a black person, he just didn’t care one way or the other for them. I have small clues for this accusation, such as him grumbling and using the “N word” under his breath when the issue of civil rights arose. Gentle racism such as this is what allows the violence to take place. Gentle racism never marches in protest, never speaks out against wrong treatment of blacks, never writes letters to congressmen. For a white man in the South, his world was good. Why rock the boat?

Because of this lack of training in southern social mores, I one day thoroughly embarrassed him in public. We were in Decatur to drop off his 1951 Chevy Belair sedan for some minor repairs. After we left the car at the garage, we strolled for several blocks; past rows of neatly kept private stores, through Courthouse Square in Decatur, and down to the barber shop stuck in the corner of the old Candler Hotel on the corner of Church Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue.

On a red tile porch of the hotel sat well-worn green wicker rocking chairs, occupied by men with snowy white hair who looked older than God. A few puffed at large cigars, the fragrant aroma wafting down to the street below. A steady stream of people entered and left through wooden screen doors, which slapped shut with a loud bang against the wooden frames in which they were mounted. The old men rocked and talked and blew enormous clouds of smoke into the air. I thought it was a marvelous scene. They intrigued me. One day when we drove by, I asked my father these men were who were always there, rocking and smoking.

“They’re Civil War veterans,” he replied. I thought I detected a certain bit of reverence in his usually unemotional voice.

My brother and I were towed into the barbershop to get our haircut. The entry to the barber shop was below the porch, tucked into a corner where the wall of an adjacent building created a ninety degree angle with the face of the shop. Opening the door released a marvelous cornucopia of smells; shoe leather and polish from the cobbler who had his shop in the back, talcum powder, and the oil used liberally on the blades of the Wahl hair trimmers which hung behind the barber chairs. My father sat down to wait, but I always wandered to the back, trying not to attract attention, in order to observe the cobbler as he worked with his patients. His dexterous hands rapidly moved shoes first one way, then the other, driving in nails, putting glue to the new soles, and then a quick polish on the buffing wheel spinning behind him. A great line of various wheels, mounted on a single shaft, whirled away behind him, driven by a wide, loose leather belt which slapped and popped as a single powerful motor drove it. Each wheel had its own function; grinding, buffing, or final polishing, after which the cobbler would inspect his work, and if satisfied, tag the shoes and drop them into paper grocery bags with the work ticket stapled to the top. I wanted to ask a hundred questions. I stood rapt and watched.

After we came out with our already short flattop haircuts a bit shorter, my father decided we needed to take the trolley bus back to pick up his car. He walked us down to the corner of East Ponce de Leon and Church Street and we stood at the corner to wait for the next bus to arrive.

In the 1950’s, metro Atlanta and Decatur were served largely by trolley buses. In old pictures of the Atlanta streets, you can see a maze of overhead wires for the trolley poles to contact. From the top of the bus, a pair of metal shoes on long poles ran along overhead wires. Tension on the shoes was maintained by heavy springs attached to the poles. What fascinated me the most about the whole set up were the intricate switches at the intersections. Looking like railroad switches, they would allow the poles to shift from one set of wires to another so that the trolley bus could make turns. To this day, I don’t know how they operate, and I’ve become a pretty decent mechanic over the years.

Sometimes, either one or both of the shoes would lose contact with the wire with the sharp crack of an electrical connection being broken. The heavy spring would thrust the pole in the air like a defiant finger, pointing to the sky. The trolley bus would glide to a halt in the middle of the street. Cars honked in annoyance as they maneuvered around the dead bus blocking the flow of traffic. The bus operator sprinted down the steps and out behind the bus. A pole rope allowed him to pull the dewired pole down until the shoe was back under the wire on which it belonged. Once in place the operator would slowly release the pole and maneuver the shoe back onto the overhead wire. If both shoes had dewired, the operation would be repeated with the other pole. The constant upward tension on each pole made this an annoying and difficult job. The poles wanted to sway left and right, and I remember watching one operator make several tries before he finally got both poles rewired and drove off.

The doors opened and we bounded up the stairs, followed by my father, who stopped to fish nickels out of his pocket for the fare. Jing! Jing! Jing! The coins dropped into the box, the driver said, “Thank you.” and we turned to find seats.

But there were none. The entire front of the bus was packed, all the way back to the rear steps, where existed an invisible dividing line separating black riders from whites. Beyond this unseen line were many available seats.

“Daddy,” I piped up loudly, making myself heard over the noise of the bus engine, “Why don’t we go sit there?” My hand lifted, my finger pointed to the seats beyond the steps.

The bus became very quiet. All eyes, even those in the back, fixed upon my father, their gaze questioning: “Mister, how come your boy don’t know right?” Some appeared sympathetic, as if understanding my father to have nothing in his son’s wayward choice. Others appeared stern, as if to say, “You need to take this boy home – now – and sit down with him and tell him the facts of life.” My father was thoroughly embarrassed. I could tell by his expression – his eyes became hard and cold as he regarded me, and his lips took on that tightness which I knew meant he was damned upset. But it was his own fault. He had never taught me that black folks were not to be mingled with, that talking with them, except in work situations, was not proper, and that sitting with them in any sort of public venue – well, such was simply either an inexcusable faux pas, or, a dozen years later at the lunch counters in Birmingham, a deliberate act against a dehumanizing social structure.

My family left Georgia in 1962 for my father’s government job. Many years later I returned, driving through the area on the way to Miami to enjoy a vacation awarded me for being one of thirteen top salesmen in the company for which I worked. I stopped to look at our old house on Lavista Court, then drove into Decatur. To my surprise, the Candler Hotel was still there. But the rocking chairs and the old men were gone. So was the barber shop. I drove by slowly and stared, letting my thoughts wander back to old Rebel soldiers, the smell of a Saturday barber shop, and trolley buses now replaced by sleek machines with diesel engines where white and black now sit together in co-mingled humanity.