Running for Governor with new black friends
Given the history, what astonishes one is this tenderness. An odd, sweet quiet comes upon the field and grove in the September afternoon. The people, after their rally, rest almost dreamily on the threadbare grass. George Wallace has spoken. He sits in his wheelchair on the small flatbed metal stage in the park at Noccalula Falls near Gadsden. The people come to him. They fall into a long, orderly line to file past and take his hand and have him sign their Wallace posters.
Their gazes mix awe and deep familiarity and shyness. They are blue-collar people, or else small farmers who work these hills. Mostly they have rough, country faces and washed, flat, distantly Celtic eyes. People in wheelchairs are pushed up to his wheelchair, and George Wallace reaches out the gentlest communing hands to them, and spends long moments with each, consoling and almost, one thinks, healing. He has the nimbus of saint and martyr—or at any rate, of a celebrity who has passed through the fire and the greater world; he has come back to them from history, come back with powder burns.
Northerners should watch Wallace with his people. The process is tribal, a rite of communion. Only by watching it can one begin to analyze the disconcerting news that a fairly large number of Alabama blacks have, in 1982, joined the Wallace tribe.
One of George Wallace's heroes, Stonewall Jackson, had a military premise: "Mystery. Mystery is the secret of success." Jackson meant a mystery of action, a talent for moving armies unpredictably. George Wallace's gubernatorial campaign this year is exploring a few deeper mysteries of the human character or, at any rate, of the human memory: questions that involve the capacity of the politician's heart to change, the mind to forget and the Alabama black to forgive. The South has profound shallows.
Last week Wallace won the Democratic nomination to become Governor for what would be an unprecedented fourth term (or fifth, if one counts the partial term served by Wallace's wife, the late Governor Lurleen). Wallace, at 63, beat a well-heeled moderate Birmingham suburbanite, George McMillan. Alabama liberals wince at the choice available in November: either George Wallace or the Republicans' pistol-packing law-and-order Reaganite mayor of Montgomery, Emory Folmar. In the weird way that these things happen, Folmar, 52, is playing the part of the old George Wallace in this race, running against the new George Wallace, the aging and re-upholstered seg.
The chief mystery of the campaign, at least to those with memories that run back 20 years, is that many black Alabamians are voting for Wallace, and even working in his cause. The Deep South is supposed to be the one American region where the past means something.
The Alabama Democratic Conference, the state's black political machine, strongly supported McMillan in the primary. They brought in Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King to speak against Wallace, to remind blacks of what Wallace had been. The majority of blacks (an estimated 65%) went against Wallace. Still, it was the combination of rural blacks and rural whites and blue-collar workers that won for Wallace. That any blacks at all enlisted with Wallace is reason to reflect.