(2 of 4)
The poison and paranoia have mostly gone out of the issue of race in Alabama. (Look for them more in South Boston, say, there in a cradle of abolitionism.) The countryside is peaceful now along the route from Selma to Montgomery, through Dallas County and "bloody Lowndes," the old Black Belt over which so many gusts of racial violence have passed. But still one looks across the cotton fields at the tall, deep Alabama forests that are primordially rich and inviting and sinister.
Something of the quality of those woods occasionally comes out in George Wallace's voice: a slurred dankness and a warning. But mostly his message is one of populist conciliation. Wallace is a born-again Christian. He appeared before the assembled blacks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham last summer and apologized for his old segregationist politics. Have you changed in your attitude toward blacks? Wallace is asked today. "No," he replies. "I have respected and loved them always."
It is spiritually disorienting to see a black driving a car with Alabama plates and a Wallace bumper sticker. It is surreal to walk into Wallace's state campaign headquarters, a neobellum low-rise former furniture store on the edge of Montgomery. There, amid the deep shag carpeting and the clickity-click of computer printers churning out voter lists, sits Mrs. Ollie Carter, a black Wallace worker. All day she phones around the state with a gentle, churchgoing courtesy, asking blacks for their support, reminding them to vote.
Mrs. Carter claims that 98% of the blacks she calls say they are supporting Wallace. She taught elementary school for 19 years in rural Shelby County, and remembers that none of her pupils had their own textbooks until George Wallace became Governor. Wallace people almost always mention his record in improving Alabama education (though the state still ranks among the lowest in literacy), especially those free textbooks for the children, and the system of 26 junior colleges he started around the state. And the fact is that, leaving aside the low growls of race, Wallace was generally quite a good Governor. As for all of that racial viciousness, Mrs. Carter squares her frank and open countenance, earnest and astonishing: "He has made some mistakes. But haven't we all? You have to understand. The races are more bold and honest with each other in the South." That is true. So is the opposite; the exchange between the races in the South has also been a drama of long silences, of the unstated.
One theory has it that Alabama blacks have always been cynically knowing about George Wallace, that they have figured all along that his segregationist behavior and rhetoric were matters of political expediency. There is some truth in the theory. Alabama today has the second highest (after Michigan) unemployment in the nation: 14.5%. Everywhere in Alabama the message is the same: "Folks are hurtin'." Wallace has argued, so far successfully, that as an internationally known figure and the most experienced Governor in Alabama history, he can bring new industries and new jobs to the state. So many Alabamians, black and white, have accepted the logic that the chances are good Wallace will move back into the Governor's office.