It was the summer of 1969 and my Uncle Donnie, age 17, was visiting from Georgia. He had sat with me throughout my six-hour show at the Slidell, Louisiana, radio station that day. Being 19 and already a four year veteran of radio, I showed off, saying clever things to introduce and back-announce each record, talking my head off, as all small-town announcers did in those days. When the mic was off, we talked about the music and our favorite artists and Donnie helped me decide which record to play next. When he got bored with that, we played two-hand Rook in the space between the turntables.
When my shift ended at 4 PM, we jumped into my ’64 baby blue Fairlane for the 26 mile drive to my duplex in Covington, but it became immediately clear that we weren’t going to make it. Not in that car anyway. We drove it, sputtering and jerking, to the nearest mechanic—Ronnie Toney (my wife's cousin) working at a Firestone store in a shopping center. He said he couldn’t get to it today, but he’d fix it tomorrow.
That left us afoot, 26 miles from home. Our only choice seemed to be whether to spend the night at the radio station or hitchhike home to my wife and baby in Covington.
“Two handsome guys like us won’t have any problem thumbing a ride,” said Donnie.
That sounded like a challenge and I couldn’t turn down a challenge from my younger uncle, so we set off down the street, which eventually turned onto the highway. We walked a couple of miles, turning at the sound of each oncoming car, sticking out our thumbs and smiling for all we were worth. But nobody even gave us a second glance till a car full of black guys (well, three of them anyway) pulled to a stop.
We were frozen in place for a moment and Donnie said, “What’re we going to do?”
I said, “We can’t refuse ‘em. They might get mad. Just pretend we’re not afraid.”
And so we got into the car and told them we were headed for Covington.
The driver said, “Us, too. But we got one little stop to make.”
“They gotta take me home,” said the tall black guy in the back seat with us.
I looked at Donnie. His eyes were big as saucers. Mine probably were, too. I think “scared shitless” is the appropriate term.
Growing up in Georgia and Louisiana, we had never associated with blacks. Even though we both had started first grade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, we had never attended school with a black kid. Ever. Not even one. We had never been to church with one. Never eaten in a restaurant with one. Never played with any, except Jo-Jo and Charlie, the sons of the maid who worked for my family in the summer of 1958. (We hired the maid when my pregnant mother got a job in a sewing factory for a dollar an hour. She then hired a black lady who would clean house, cook, and watch us five kids for fifty cents an hour. Mother’s calculation was that working eight hours a day in the sweltering heat of the sewing factory was easier on a woman than cleaning the parsonage and taking care of the five kids she had produced in 8 years. I forget the maid’s name, but she brought her sons Jo-Jo and Charlie with her most days and we played in and around the church and in the vacant buildings on the poor side of Bainbridge, Georgia, where my dad was pastoring a church, two years before we moved to Covington, Louisiana.)
Donnie and I and everyone we knew came from a culture that taught us that the Civil War was about “states’ rights,” that the Confederacy was a glorious “lost cause,” that the Civil Rights movement was stirred up by “outside agitators” –“Godless outside agitators,” at that. And that blacks were asking for too much too soon. We were taught that “our” blacks, here in the south, were happy and didn’t want things to change. Most everyone in our Reynolds and Appling families proudly voted for the most racist candidate in any given election—Lester Maddox and J.B. Stoner in Georgia; John Rarick in Louisiana; and always George Wallace for President when he was on the ballot.
Now here we were—Donnie and I, white teenagers—in a car with three black guys. We didn’t know if they were the infamous outside agitators, the hated demonstrators, godless Communists, escaped convicts, killers, perverts, kidnappers, rapists, forced-bussers, robbers or what. All we knew was they were black and that scared us nearly to death.
As the old car sped north, I positioned my right hand inches from the door handle, poised to jerk it open and dive out of the car when they tried to kill us, which I had no doubt they were going to do. A wave of sadness swept over me as I looked at my Uncle Donnie who was sitting between me and the tall guy. There was no way I could save him and myself both. He was trapped. A goner. I stared, wanting to remember him at his youthful best, but he was already past his youthful best, with ghostly white cheeks, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, breathing raggedly through his mouth. I could smell the fear, both his and mine.
Near Lacombe, Louisiana, the driver suddenly pulled off the highway onto a small dirt road that led into the woods, past trash piles, and into a junkyard surrounding a mobile home with a basketball goal beside it. I wasn’t sure whether to jump out while the car was still rolling or wait till it stopped.
When the tall guy opened his door, got out and pounded twice on the roof of the car I nearly had a heart attack. Rather than jerk on the door handle and roll out, leaving Donnie to his fate, I was too terrified to budge. This was it. Goodbye world. But all the guy said was, “See y’all tomorrow.” Our would-be murderers in the front seat grunted something in reply, the driver turned the car around and we headed back to the highway.
The fact that there was a perfectly innocent reason for the detour into the woods didn’t register with me. I was suffering from cognitive dissonance—so sure that my fearful image of black people was right that not even reality could convince me otherwise. I was still certain they were going to kill us somewhere else, but at least the odds were better now—two against two instead of three against two.
As we barreled up the highway again, my courage began to return. I mentally ran through all the scenarios including whether I should just jump out of the car at 60 miles per hour and leave Donnie to fend for himself, or just wait till the car stopped and attack the two remaining black boys with my bare hands.
A half hour later as we entered Covington the driver said, "Where you live?"
"Anywhere along here is good," I said.
He dropped us off near Marsolan's Feed and Seed, which was two blocks from where I lived.
I said, “Thanks for the ride” and Donnie said, "Yeah, thanks."
The driver said, “No problem.”
Donnie and I told the story of that ride, with varying degrees of drama, for many years afterward to demonstrate our bravery in the face of the enemy. We were far into adulthood before we finally realized the problem was not "them" but as Walt Kelly's Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
