Jack & Jill Politics

(I was reading, on this blog, Rashad Robinson’s moving Black History piece about Troy Davis, and I reflected on something I wrote not long after Georgia executed him and that ran last September as a guest column in a Georgia daily. Like many, I felt close to this story. In fact, I felt a personal connection. Like Davis, I’m also from Savannah.)

1989 Savannah.
I was in my early forties then. I’d just begun a job in a
professional position at a local company.
“Are you firing Jim?”
The company, you see, after years of not hiring any blacks
at all, would hire only one black at a time in this position. Jim held
that position then. Hiring me meant there would be two blacks for the
first time.
My boss ratted on her boss. She couldn’t believe he’d posed
such a question at the precipice of a new supposedly enlightened
decade.
She wasn’t from Savannah.
Were she, she would have known black professionals usually
meant preaching or a government job like teaching or postal worker. If
not professionals, black guys pretty much walked the streets, had
poor-paying jobs, if they had those. They were just, well, hanging,
getting arrested a lot. The women had their babies. A visit to Savannah
courtrooms revealed only blacks committed crimes in Savannah.
The divisions were palpable, the majority society’s
demands for acquiescence that more amazing when all moved through the
same air.
Some group back then did a study on black employment in
Savannah. I think it found one black manager–that in a lower
management position–in one major company in all of Savannah. There
were certain places you wouldn’t see blacks live, like in the historic
buildings in downtown and midtown. (I think both, for the most part,
remain off-limits.) Just about any place in walking distance of
downtown is part of the sprawling black ghetto.
Out-of-town associates wondered why they didn’t find many
blacks in new cars in Savannah.
My wife, who loves shopping, hated shopping in Savannah.
They’d follow you as soon as you’d walk into the store, she said.
Steal? My wife is the type of person who would run you down to give you
the twenty you dropped.
My wife’s not from Savannah either. Her distaste for it
provided the impetus for us moving out my hometown.
Has anyone done a study on the psyche of people openly left
out a place they call home? Is there a similar pathology for the
despised in a distant European country, the divisions not necessarily
based on race?
Even today, with black mayors, city managers, police
chiefs, and city attorneys, Savannah remains two separate worlds, the
divisions freshly palpable—the top black officials mere escapees, and
often not good ones. It is not insignificant, trust me, that Clarence
Thomas is from Savannah.
Savannah’s not alone. Leave Atlanta. Drive to any of these
smaller, particularly Southern cities and get that Old South feeling
again with the seemingly simple act of visiting a fast-food restaurant.
Ask yourself if more than a few blacks have actual good jobs in that
“strict atmosphere,” to borrow from the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks,
especially in the private sector.
Troy Davis was from Savannah. I don’t think he lived
anyplace else.
As you know, the state of Georgia executed him last night
for killing a white police officer. The year was 1989. Troy was 19
then.
His last words were that he didn’t do it.
There were enough prosecution witnesses who recanted their
testimonies that helped indict him to give that point of view a lot of
credibility.
That certainly would explain the worldwide outpouring of
support he’s gotten.
But I could see him, well, hanging in that parking lot
that fateful night.
And, during his last days, did he not also have that look
of someone smugly satisfied about…something, like a guy getting that
lick in, even if it’s tacit and literally his last, a kind of sly
blowback to a city’s crimes against him and to its inevitable
obliviousness in finding a gurney big enough to lay its shamed corpus?