TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122490/1224140.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.6 KB | 154 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 72

You Can Go Home Again


Across the U.S., black Americans are returning to the South

By PRISCILLA PAINTON/MARION


    Rarely does history draw a complete and ironic circle in a
single generation. In Marion, La., the result makes an odd
spectacle. In this unpaved country of clay soil and bayous,
deep in a wilderness of pines, stands the white brick ranch
house of Joseph and Hazel Hampton, complete with gold-flecked
ceilings, a built-in barbecue grill and the creamy smell of
fresh carpet. The house might belong on the groomed set of
Knots Landing, but it stands instead on the spot where Hazel
Hampton once picked cotton, within sight of the sharecropper's
cabin, now silvery from weather and wind, where she was raised.

    The Hamptons have gone home to Marion from Los Angeles, and
their journey is part of a discreet reverse migration of
Southern blacks with second thoughts. "When we left the South,
it was a one-way deal," says Joseph Hampton, 57, a retired
aircraft-parts machinist. So it was for 6.5 million other
blacks who fled northward between 1910 and 1970 in one of the
greatest transplantations in American history. "The first
migration was a huge wave crashing on the beach," says Nicholas
Lemann, author of The Promised Land, a forthcoming book about
this vast crossing. "This is the small undertow running back to
the sea."

    The trickle has not escaped the Census Bureau. Last January
it reported that for the first time in more than a century the
proportion of black Americans living in the South had taken an
upward climb: 56% lived in the region in 1988, up from 52% in
1980. More important than the number of blacks, however, is the
implicit indictment of the North and the redemption of the
South contained in this black to-and-fro. "What's unusual is
that they were immigrants to another country in a real sense,
and ordinarily, immigrants don't go back to the old country to
stay," says Lemann.

    The Hamptons said goodbye to the South on their wedding day
in 1960. "He was muzzled down, the black man, muzzled down when
it came to the white man," says Joseph Hampton. "Like a child
abused by his parents, he'd act so scared, you know." But if
segregation drove Hampton away from his roots, it also helped
drive him back: Florence Heights, the predominantly white
west-side neighborhood he chose in Los Angeles, quickly turned
all black after his arrival. And while partitions and signs did
not hem in the Hamptons' liberty, crime and congestion
eventually did. A family of four was killed when a gunman
mistook their home for that of an enemy. Another neighbor,
about three doors down, lost a son in a shooting, and rival gang
members took revenge on the young man even after his death by
riddling his coffin with bullets. The Hamptons' daughter had
her car stolen, and police helicopters regularly buzzed their
neighborhood.

    In one sense, the South offers to some of its black refugees
nothing different from what it does to other retirees looking
for a slow, peaceful life. "On Sundays you can hear a pin drop
anywhere in the city," says Eugene Dykes, 65. Six years ago,
he returned to Columbia, S.C., after 29 years in Los Angeles,
working mostly as shipping supervisor for the Automobile Club
of Southern California. But in a deeper sense, part of the
South's appeal to its black emigrants is the strange intimacy
that has always existed between the races in the region's rural
culture. Their homecoming is partly an illumination of the old
saying that in the South you can get close as long as you don't
get too high, and in the North, you can get high as long as
you don't get too close. "Here they recognize that if I cut
you, you cut me, we've got the same blood. Flesh and blood, we
get along with one another," says Isaac Scott, 77, who went
back to the rural town of Barnwell, S.C., after 49 years in New
Haven, Conn., mostly as a construction worker. "The Southern
accent sounds beautiful to me now," says Dykes. "That's the way
it should have been the whole time."

    On the road to Marion, there are posters trumpeting the
Louisiana Senate candidacy of David Duke, the ex-Klansman who
lost last October's nonpartisan primary but won an estimated
60% of the white vote. Joseph Hampton sees nothing alarming in
this. From his post-emigre perspective, he feels Louisianians
have taken down their COLOREDS ONLY signs and muffled their
racial prejudice under thick, soothing layers of courtesy. When
he visits Wal-Mart, the discount chain store, there are
professional "greeters" at the door. The auto dealer in nearby
Monroe made a toll call to find out if he was satisfied with
a repair. Strangers always wave at him as they drive by. "One
man, a white man, he had a whole arm out of the car. That's
normal, natural around here," he says.

    California may have given Southern blacks a chance to make
a comfortable living -- Hampton pulled in $50,000 a year with
overtime making parts for Northrop Aircraft -- but its
residents kept a businesslike distance. "Neighbors are very
hard to find in California unless there's money behind it," he
says. He would trade California's officious tolerance for
Louisiana's sweet hypocrisy any day. "As long as you make me
feel as though I've got as much right as you've got, fine. If
you've got borderlines, let them be in your mind." For some
blacks resettled in the South, the Northern cities they left
behind have long ago abandoned any pretense of racial detente.
In Barnwell, Scott, the retired construction worker, says he
follows TV news reports about the way people up North are
"fighting and don't want to live here and don't want to live
there. To me, there is more prejudice up there now than there
is down South."

    Some members of the black diaspora have brought back to
their hometowns part of the energy they took along when they
left 30 years ago. Dykes is leading an 18-piece dance and jazz
band in Columbia, much like one he put together during his
California stay. Scott's wife Beverly, 46, works as a secretary
in the Barnwell police department. As for the Hamptons, their
$120,000, five-bedroom, three-bathroom house  in the forest has
become a local attraction. Some people have taken pictures of
it and are calling Joseph "Mr. Hollywood." Others are grateful
for the tiny lift the new dwelling represents now that the
area's timber economy has turned down. "We need any stimulation
we can get," says Betty Long, the white owner of the L&L
Grocery in Marion.

    California and Louisiana cultures are in a perpetual
asymmetry in the Hampton home. Hazel, who made her living in
Los Angeles as a housecleaner, complains about how hard it is
to "find people to do work when you want to." Joseph brings
sodas to the two white men installing tile in the hallway,
while Hazel tells a visitor about how she "pulled corn, picked
cotton, picked potatoes and pulled peanuts" right below where
she sits on her imitation-Victorian sofa. She can look out over
her back deck and see the creaky porch where, she says, her
stepfather once stood and shot a rabbit in the pitch dark.

    Down the road is the plywood-patched cabin of Hazel's sister
Patsy Lee Williams, with hogs in the backyard and weeds growing
out of the bed of a broken pickup in the front yard. One day,
Hazel says, a white man came riding by and "he saw our house,
and he stopped, and he stood there. He cried, and he said he
would never have dreamed of this for me." "You see," says
Joseph, "Hazel was his maid."