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Our Portion of Hell: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement
in Fayette County, Tennessee (Links Books: NY, 1973)
In 1965, I visited Fayette County, Tennessee as a civil rights worker. I was a graduate student at the time, and I'd become increasingly uncomfortable with passively watching the civil rights movement as a mere spectator. Many young people were standing up for their belief in social change and I followed their lead. In April of 1965-- at the very time that thousands of people were marching for voter rights in Selma, Alabama-- I joined a group of students from the University of Chicago to spend two weeks living and working with African-Americans in Fayette County, a farming community just outside of Memphis, Tennessee.
The African-American community of Fayette County was extraordinary. Back in 1959, they started one of the first voter registration drives in the rural South. Within a few months, the white community reponded by threatening blacks with brutal reprisals: they refused to let registered black voters buy food, gas, and produce at any white-owned store in the county; and, in the case of 257 tenant farmers who'd registered to vote, white landowners kicked them off the land they'd lived on for generations. The African-American community refused to be intimidated. The evicted farmers set up a "Tent City" on the land of an independent black farmer-- and for over a year they endured cold, hunger, mud, and occasional gunshots before the federal government intervened to defend their voting rights.
When I arrived in Fayette County, I spent a week living on the farm of Harpman and Minnie Jameson. Their small home was a mile off the main highway, and to get there we had to walk along a muddy road that was inaccessible to cars. As a "city slicker," living on a farm was completely new to me. There was no plumbing, not even an outhouse; I ate things I'd never imagined eating; I slept three in a bed with the Jamesons' son James as well as with another civil rights worker; and I tried, unsuccessfully, to milk a cow. During the two weeks our group spent in Fayette County we helped with the construction of a community center-- but, in truth, I was not much of a carpenter. What mattered most was that I became lifelong friends with the Jamesons and other community leaders-- and this opened up my life in many ways.
A few years later, I took a leave of absence from my first teaching job in order
to help my Fayette County friends tell the story of their grassroots movement. Many of the people most active in the movement had received no more than a mediocre eighth grade education in segregated one-room schoolhouses. Even so, I told them that I didn't want to be a white outsider writing their history-- that they had to tell their own true-life stories. I returned to Tennessee with a tape recorder, and for several months I traveled the back roads of Fayette County interviewing the men and women who had stood up for their rights and put their lives on the line. My long days were exhausting and sometimes frustrating, but I have never lived more fully. I was deeply moved by the hospitality and trust I received. As I said before, the friendships that emerged from this work have remained with me till this day.
After the interviews were completed, I spent many months transcribing my friends' spoken words and editing them into effective narrative form. It was difficult work, but it was also exhilirating-- the real beginning of my writing career. It was not easy to find a publisher for
Our Portion of Hell, but I was determined that the voices of my Fayette County friends become part of the historic record.
After
Our Portion of Hell was published, I realized that my work had just begun. Two more books (
A Stranger in the House
&
All the Lonely People
) followed-- comprising a trilogy of works looking at contemporary America from the bottom up.
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