Burke Hero Herman Lodge Debated the White Kid
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Augusta, GA
By Al Gray
The winter
of 1977 was brutal on East Ninth Street in Waynesboro, Georgia. The Georgia Department of Labor had become
beneficiary to $millions in Federal funds under the Comprehensive Employment
and Training Act (CETA), with a portion of them being released under CETA Title
III. This program was administered locally by a consortium of 13 area counties.
Nobody seemed to know what on earth to do with the Title III Migrant and
Seasonal Farmworker program. They did
what came natural – they threw me into doing it – all the time muttering
something about a need to “chill out.” Those words were prophetic.
All of us
have heard about bureaucrats being shuffled off to a desk in a closet with
nothing to do, except being paid. Sadly
that wasn’t the case with this assignment. A nice closet would have been just
fine. Instead the office to which your then-naïve apprentice bureaucrat was
directed was “somewhere on East 9th
Street, down yonder in Waynesboro. You will be fine. Just think, with this job
out in the farms, you can probably line up new places to hunt and, if you start
early in the morning, you can even catch some afternoon hunts!” You did catch the descriptor “naïve,” didn’t you?
Imagine my
chagrin when the office building was in a rusting galvanized tin-roofed, wood
frame, old school on a weathered paved street where it intersected with a dirt
road. This picture tells it all.
When one
rolled his office chair across the floor, the roof would rattle. Heat? That was
swiftly gone with the wind roaring through the cracks.
One
particularly cold day found James Williams, Alton Spells, and your humble
scribe huddled around the gas heater in the office. Get the picture. One
mustachioed black dude in a suit, another in jeans with an enormous Afro, and
one very white, then-skinny white boy from Evans in Columbia, County, all
hunkered down – arguing politics, as usual.
That old
building was also the informal headquarters of the Burke County NAACP.
President Herman Lodge, destined to be Burke County’s first black commissioner,
was a frequent visitor. Between doing
program enrollments in the field, this, the only white fellow in 5 Waynesboro
blocks would, at age 25, would do battle with his elders, generally combatting
the notion that everything was a total conspiracy. Sometimes they would shoo me
off. A disbeliever in Whitey-Is-Evil and a social program skeptic made them
uncomfortable.
Then there
were the program enrollees. There were more than a bushel basket of problems
with folks down on the farm. Then there
were the self-inflicted problems. Take the Reverend Benny Lapp’s interview.
Me: Rev.
Lapp, employers are fickle about job applicant’s employment histories. I notice
a gap between 1969 and 1972. Can we explain that?
Rev. Lapp – I were in-car-cer-ated…….
Then there
was Shirley McCorn, a poor white gal living in a single wide with 5 kids down
in Midville.
Me: Shirley, that looks like a DOG Collar around
your calf….isn’t that a rabies tag dangling from it?
Shirley: It
certainly is.
Me: You
wouldn’t wear that to an interview would you?
Shirley: I
would.
Me: Why?
What does it mean?
Shirley: Everyone
kept calling me a bitch, so I decided to be true-to-life.
James Williams and I rode all over those counties, trying to
find jobs for migrants and seasonal workers. There were sad sacks and there
were happy faces. There were farmers who told us to get off their property, but
more who were happy to take federal funds bounty for doing what they were going
to do anyway in terms of employment. James always dressed to the hilt and drove
a new Audi, of which he was most proud.
We were the enforcers.
In that day, in Burke County, Georgia folks still practiced
witchcraft. We enrolled a person like that, named Neva Doodis. Neva was short
for Geneva and she came from Gough….or maybe Vidette……those two towns always
get mixed up in the cobwebs of time and a 3-score-aged brain. At anyway Neva’s
enrollment was, well different.
Me: You enroll this one, she is a rootworker.
James Williams:
Say wha…..at?
Me: She is a witch, a root doctor.
James: Nobody believes in that these days. What can
a root doctor do?
Me: I don’t believe in that stuff, either. Just
don’t leave Neva around your open beverages.
James: Why not?
Me: If you let somebody who says she is a root
doctor feed or serve in a drink a root potion conjured up by a root talker,
then what the root doctor can do to you is supposedly unlimited. She can have you
by controlling your thoughts, even to the extent that you might bark like a dog
or even jump in old Walter Wimberly’s hog parlor to slop with his hogs on your
next visit to Shell Bluff. Besides that, she can put a hex on you so that
physical things so bad on you at inopportune times, even if you don’t drink or
eat anything she got hold to.
James: I can handle her.
Me: Ok
Neva got into our training program. She was civil enough,
despite being a lover of the moonshine that flowed freely into Waynesboro.
However, Neva was getting paid to attend class. She was
missing too many from being hung over or maybe it was from howling at the moon.
I finally had enough and drove over to her house during class times. There Neva
sat in a rocker, bleary eyed, with a milk jug on the screened porch.
Me: Neva, this is a class day and you have
missed it. Didn’t James warn you twice already?
Neva: Dat Williams? Naw, he hain’t been heah
tellin me nuttin.
Me: He gave you the notice required to terminate
you the last time and you signed for it.
Neva: Missah Ah-el, you ain’t gonna cut mah check
off, you can’t do that!
Me: Why not?
Neva: I gots de powah on you.
Me: I made sure not to drink anything. Sorry,
Neva but we gave you 3 chances. Like baseball, you got called out on strikes –your
sit-at-home strikes against training sessions.
Neva: You gonna be sorry.
Me: James Williams will drop by your last check.
The next week James went out and dropped off Neva’s last
check. He came in laughing.
Me: How did it go?
James: Rough, Neva threw pine cones at me – after I
handed her check – but she was so drunk she missed. Let’s me and you hope she
misses with her hex.
Me: Checks? She won’t be getting any more of
them.
James: Clean out your ears, I said “HEX”….H……E……X.
Me: Hex? What hex?
James: On mine, she mumbled something about “your
ideas gone bad”…and one yours she got to cussin’ about “whitey wot goes huntin’
meetin’? up wid Mr. Rattlesnake up ‘round de ‘Geechee Rivah.”
That year passed pretty quickly. I hadn’t met “wid Mr.
Rattlesnake” just yet and James was packing up his office stuff to leave. He
rolled his chair across the floor, causing one last celebratory rattle of the
tin roof, got up and shook my hand. “ It
was a lot of fun working with you Al, but you didn’t do any hunting much after
work!” The gang here – Miss Dorothy, Alton, and Miss Alicia – you all have been
wonderful. Even the clients were OK.
Hey, what happened to Neva Doodis, I wonder? Remember that silly hex
about my “idea?”
“James,” slapping him
on the shoulder, I exclaimed “You accused
me of bad hearing. I figured out what Neva said was ‘your Audi going bad’!!!” Remember? It wasn’t 3 days after you took her that last check
and got bombarded with pine burs when your Audi’s engine blew on the side of
Highway 56 and I had to take you home.
James grew pale “Holy
Moly, you are right!”
What happened to Neva, we will never know. What we do know is
this piece of good advice. Don’t snicker at the root doctor. There are forces
in the world that are dark. If you imbibe or eat of their concoctions, you
might end up howling at the moon, crawling on your belly like a snake, or have
your blinders ripped off and see the very real conspiracies that my old
debating adversary, the late Herman Lodge, warned about..
I like to think that I influenced old Herman a little. After all, we are the sum total of the experiences and people that we meet.
Seeing is believing. James Williams knows.
The Audi blew up on the way to fabulous wealth and power. You
cannot convince him otherwise.
I know.
You will read about them as they are revealed.
No imbibing or feasting on offerings of the rootsayer needed
or allowed. The guardian angels don’t approve and I will need them again.***
A.G.
A.G.
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