Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking by Jessica Mitford Page A

from a belt....” “Of course nothing was ever proved about it, but they do say her death was not accidental.” Few seem to have died in their beds. All this, in surprising contrast to the peachy-creamy surface of life in Montgomery.
    The Montgomery country club is much like the one in Louisville—spacious, old-fashioned, French windows giving on to a long outdoor terrace, presumably for Gone With the Windish occasions. As in Louisville, good whiskey and terrible food are served by old-family-retainer types of blacks in white coats. There were a lot of young people in the crowd, girls in diaphanous evening dresses, boys in white dinner jackets. Their talk was all but incomprehensible, their “y’alls” rang out like Rebel Yells. I found myself talking to a middle-aged man, introduced to me as a member of the school board; so we discussed education—in its noncontroversial aspects, for I was a guest and on my best behavior. The topic was the difficult situation of the unusually bright child, whether he should be “skipped” or handled otherwise. It is a safe and well-plotted subject, with enough “on the one hands” and “on the other hands” to keep one going for a while. My interlocutor explained that in his district, the problem is being tackled by grouping the children within each grade according to ability. I rejoined that the same system obtains in Oakland—and could not help adding that in our grammar school, there is a fifth-grade group of six children with I.Q.s of over 150—two whites, two Orientals, and two blacks. With genuine forehead-wrinkling puzzlement (and no apparent rancor) the school board member drawled, “Is that so? It don’t seem possible no Nigra could have an I.Q. of 150, do it, now?” I started to say, “To me it do ...” when our hostess hurriedly bore me off to talk to someone else. (A friend of mine in California, herself a transplanted Southerner, insists I have exaggerated this story, that educated Southerners do not talk like this. But I heard what I heard, and what’s more I’ve caught her talking in the same vernacular when she gets around her own folks from down home. To forestall a probable further criticism—that I have represented the whites but not the blacks as speaking in dialect—I can only say that educated Southern blacks are indeed far more particular about their diction than are their white counterparts.)
    For a breath of fresh air, I went to the mass meeting in the black community where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was to speak with the Freedom Riders. Actually the air was disturbingly filled with tear gas at one point, and no one quite knew if we’d get out of there alive. The hostile white crowd outside, which had been gathering for some time before the meeting, was suitably attired, I noted with approval, in the latest thing in mob wear. In faded cotton frocks revealing insect-bitten bare legs, or dirty shirts and jeans, they might have been movie extras assembled by a rather unimaginative director to do a corny mob scene. A well-read lot, they appeared to be, too—versed in the literature of their region. Surely that half-beaten-down half-savage look, that casual yet brutal slouch, that mean glitter in the eye could only be achieved by one with at least a passing acquaintance with the works of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Eudora Welty. There was no police protection, of course; just one or two very nervous-looking U.S. marshals. To achieve the church, I parked my borrowed car nearby and walked past the extras with all deliberate speed, as the Supreme Court would say—for, being hatted, gloved, and stockinged, I felt more than a little conspicuous.
    Inside, the church was a loud, sweet-singing haven, warmly enveloping. It was filled far beyond its normal seating capacity with people of all ages: dark-suited men, women in best dresses and flowered hats, little girls in party shoes, little boys wriggling in their stiff collars.
    As the