classes?” Dr. Strong answered with a question, put something like this: “Do you think a person without a high school degree should be able to make a political statement about his life?” I could not think of a good reason why he shouldn’t have that right. Which, of course, meant that my west-side classmates in junior high—even the black sailors I avoided in boot-camp—had the same political rights I had. It was so basic that it should not have been such a memorable insight. Donald Strong’s graduate seminar in a tower of the library was a high place where I could look down on my life and inbred assumptions, putting them in perspective.
Key’s text and the supplemental readings began to reinforce in my consciousness something else—the knowledge that to be Southern was to be somehow different. Of course, that distinction had been noticeable when I was the only Southerner in my prep school class, where I had organized a Confederate underground and actually raised the Stars and Bars on Wooster’s flagpole. Clues to a more complete architecture of Southern uniqueness came my way one evening in the spring of 1959. The celebrated journalist Eugene Patterson, then editor of the Atlanta Constitution, spoke to our journalism fraternity and flattered me by accepting an invitation for a nightcap in the bar of the Stafford Hotel. He advised me to read everything C. Vann Woodward had written. Eventually, I made my way through most of Woodward’s seminal series of books and got to know slightly the man we called “Marse Vann.” In particular, his slim volume, The Burden of Southern History, shaped my generation’s sense of the singularity of being Southern.
Gene Patterson’s reading list would be completed in time, but immediately on graduation from the University, I first had to announce the happy news of my availability to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald. A humbling wave of apathy greeted my applications to those great journals. Forced to live at home, under the roof of the publisher of the Anniston Star as the greenest of cub reporters at the paper inspired in me a powerful desire to . . . get the hell out of there.
Before I could escape, two reportorial diversions developed into lifelong anecdotes: the story of the ax murderess and the African prince. Every reporter remembers his first murder story, and mine was a doozie. The mystery began in the summer of 1959 with the grisly discovery in nearby Gadsden of a legless, armless, faceless torso. A day later, a couple picking berries pulled back a branch and uncovered a horrifying sight—a second legless, armless, faceless torso. Associated Press labeled the mysterious slayings the “X” and “Y” murders. We speculated that they were “gangland” murders, possibly the result of an underworld civil war between the Alabama hill-based white-whiskey ring and the Tennessee red-whiskey ring. The speculation ended when employees at the Anniston Army Depot noticed that the Harper brothers, Emmet and Lee, had not been at work for several days.
They had been living in a trailer on a farm in Rabbittown where Viola Virginia Hyatt lived with her father. All Viola said about motive was: “They done me wrong.” In fact, she was alleged to have been in the midst of a dual sexual encounter with the brothers. Her business with one concluded, something was said, and the other brother covered himself with a handkerchief in a manner she found insulting. The punishment she exacted was hardly commensurate with the offense. She stole into their trailer at night with her daddy’s shotgun, emptied a chamber into each brother’s face, and dragged the bodies outside. There, in order to fit the disposal task to the dimensions of a wooden wheelbarrow, she cut off their arms and legs with her daddy’s double-bit ax. Making several trips, she deposited the parts on a tarpaulin in the back seat of the family car. She drove through the night on a journey that touched several northeast Alabama counties, throwing an arm out here, a leg out there, rolling out the two torsos. After her arrest she took sheriff’s deputies on a ghastly treasure hunt to relocate the pieces, and deputies stated as fact that she kept more private “treasure” in the freezer. Lorena Bobbitt never attained such rank as a folk villain.
I met Viola in the basement of the old county jail when she returned from her sanity hearing at Bryce Hospital, the state mental health facility in Tuscaloosa, where she was declared sane and competent. A big woman wearing a simple, camellia-red dress and red shoes appeared in the door, dwarfing little Sheriff Roy Snead Sr. She walked past me with a dignified strut toward a tiny elevator, guided by the sheriff who turned aside my interview request with, “She’s going to jail.” Intrepid reporter that I was, I entered the elevator with them, and found myself belly-to-belly with an ax murderess. My congealed brain could produce only the question, “Are you afraid?” Matter of factly, she replied, “No. Why should I be?” She had me there. We chatted through the bars for a few minutes, but I didn’t have the experience and composure to get her to talk much about her life. Viola—ever mysterious and taciturn—pleaded guilty, was a model prisoner in Julia Tutwiler Prison, and returned home after 10 years to lead a quiet life until she died in 2000.
The saga of the prince began with a cryptic note in my typewriter from the city editor, Cody Hall: “Talk to African prince in hospital with kidney stones.” “A prince,” I thought, “How do you talk to an actual prince, especially African royalty in the segregated South?” Dr. Phil Noble, minister of the First Presbyterian Church, was already there in the administrator’s office when I arrived. Soon a dignified young West African, Majuba Lapola Setewayo, eldest son of the Emir of Upper Volta, joined us. Regal in bearing, he tapped a cigarette on a gold lighter and lit it, sending thick tusk-like streams of white smoke curling from his nostrils. He explained that he was an exchange student at Stanford and had been taking the train to Atlanta for research at Morehouse University when he had a kidney-stone attack as the train approached Anniston. He was feeling better when we met, and told intimate tales of other African rulers such as the anti-imperialist first president of an independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Writing the story, I was acutely conscious that Prince Setewayo would one day rule another nation and I wanted to make a good impression—for Alabama and for the United States. Then, a few days later, Phil Noble called with shocking news. The prince was an impostor. Majuba Lapola Setewayo was in fact Eddie Lee Woods of Waycross, Georgia. He was a drug addict who to get a fix faked kidney stones by pricking a finger to show traces of blood in his urine samples. He was a talented actor. One of his many successful performances earned him a police escort from O’Hare Airport to a Chicago hospital. Under my shamefaced byline, the Star’s second story about him began: “The African prince, who was paid court briefly in Anniston last week, actually is only the Prince of Phonies.”
4
As far as I could see, the Old South was under no immediate threat in 1959, when my search for a “real” job—away from the sheltering family—led me to Raleigh, North Carolina. But it was not without a sense of adventure and its sibling, anxiety, that I headed down Quintard Avenue pulling a U-Haul-It filled with furniture from Mother’s attic. I had landed a job as a political reporter for the now-defunct Raleigh Times, an afternoon paper owned by the Daniels family that was a training ground for at least one other publisher of a family paper, Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times. A gubernatorial election was going on up there, and the issue was the same as it had been—which one of the segregationist candidates was the better man? Present, however, was a North Carolina difference that wasn’t immediately apparent to me at the time: a patina of moderation covered the race issue there that would have melted in the blazing racial rhetoric of Alabama and Mississippi.
Once in Raleigh and situated in a one-bedroom apartment in Cameron Village, a real estate development surrounding one of the South’s earliest suburban shopping centers, I began to sniff around, looking for girls and absorbing the different character of the place. There were three things afoot about which I knew little or nothing. A now-celebrated research park was forming in a wasteland bordered by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, a crucible where government, business and education came together in a chemistry that produced a fabulous sprouting of wealth and social enrichment. A non-hysterical, undefiant roadbed of laws, lubricated by moderate rhetoric, was allowing social revolution to overturn the established order without Alabama’s
