Teachers

   "Jim," a woman asked at one of my book talks, "do you remember me?" 

   Her face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place the name.

   “It’s Miss Neil,” she said, “from Knollwood.”

   Of course! Miss Neil, my second-grade homeroom teacher at Knollwood Elementary School in Decatur, Ga. She had come to hear me speak about “The Class of ’65” at the Atlanta Athletic Club. I’ve done many book talks this fall – and I’ll be blogging about some of them – but this was one of the best ones, in large part because someone who helped teach me to read and write came to show her support for one of her students. 

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   She’s Mary Virginia Shores now and retired from teaching. The color photo shows us together at the book club; the black-and-white one above is our class picture from 1962-’63. Miss Neil is at the back, while I’m on the front row, fourth kid from the right, trying hard to stand out with some silly pose.

   Seeing Miss Neil made me think about all the things that were going on in the South during my second-grade year – things that I had no clue about. While we were sitting in her classroom, Ole Miss erupted in violence over integration, Martin Luther King Jr. was locked up in Alabama and wrote his eloquent “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and Bull Connor’s police dogs were unleashed on demonstrators in that city in brutal scenes that shocked America.

   Closer to home, the standoff over segregation in Albany was entering its second year and the protests were about to move up the road to Americus, where Koinonia was still being boycotted and its teenagers were still being harassed at Americus High School. Greg Wittkamper, the hero of my book, was about to begin his junior year – and things were going to get very hot for him.

   We talked about all this at the Atlanta Athletic Club, where I spoke in a room facing the impossibly green golf course, just down the hall from the trophies and mementoes of the Bobby Jones Room. Most of the 30 or so people in my audience had read the book, and they posed thoughtful questions.

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   One woman raised her hand and simply wanted everyone to know how much she admired one character from the book: Gladys Crabb (at left), Greg’s senior English teacher, who was sympathetic to him and listened to him talk about his troubles during the worst of his persecution. When Greg’s classmates wanted to reconcile with him decades later, they knew just whom to contact: Mrs. Crabb, who put them in touch with him. She was still teaching her students 40 years after they had graduated. And because of teachers like Miss Neil, I was able to tell that story.

   Thanks to the AAC Book Club and to Betty Marie Stewart, who invited me for what turned out to be a meaningful reunion of its own.

21st-century book club

I had never done a book talk by Skype until the Literary Ladies book club of Columbia, S.C., asked me to join them and discuss “The Class of ’65” by remote hookup this week. I positioned my Macbook where the camera would show me against my bookshelves and waited for their call, which came right on time at 8:15. I clicked on the video button, and there they were: a living room full of book clubbers all facing me like I was there reaching for the cheese and crackers. In the corner of the screen I could see what they were seeing on their laptop, and it wasn't good. In an effort to illuminate my countenance with my desk lamp, I had made myself look like a scary flashlight face from a cheap horror movie. I apologized for the amateurish cinematography and started talking about the story behind the book.

It felt odd at first; I kept thinking of Edward R. Murrow interviewing celebrities like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall who were sitting in their Hollywood living rooms while he directed the banter from his New York studio. (CBS had better lighting, even in the 1950s.) But once I got over the novelty, it felt natural. I got to know a couple of the ladies, including Leila Dudley, a cousin of Deanie Dudley, one of the classmates in the Class of ’65 who reached out to Greg Wittkamper decades later and reconciled with him. Leila’s grandmother co-owned the building in Americus that housed the feed store that was bombed in 1957 for defying the boycott against Koinonia and doing business with the communal farm.

All in all, I highly recommend Skype book club meetings with authors and would be interested in doing others. There are only two problems: On Skype, the author can’t sign books or enjoy a glass of wine with the club. Our host for the evening, Becky Airheart, tells me that there was a bit of wine-drinking going on before they dialed me. I thought everyone looked happy! Thanks, Literary Ladies; hope you enjoyed the evening as much I did.

Homecoming

Speaking at the Decatur Book Festival was like a spin through the old neighborhood for me. I grew up in Decatur and as a boy used to visit the library next door to the venue where I talked about “The Class of ’65” over the Labor Day weekend: Decatur Presbyterian Church. What’s more, I was raised in a Presbyterian church and first heard about Koinonia and the religious and racial conflicts at the heart of my book during my first job, as an editor at the Presbyterian church’s denominational magazine. 

All of which made it deeply gratifying when I looked out from the pulpit Saturday afternoon and saw that the stately old sanctuary was packed. “It looks like Easter out there,” one of the church staffers joked. I shared the pulpit with Jim Grimsley of Emory University, a decorated novelist who recently published his first nonfiction book, “How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood.” It’s a touching memoir about how he overcame the prejudices of his upbringing in rural North Carolina. Ernie Suggs, my former colleague at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ably moderated. 

The scene amused me at first; they had the Jims sitting in two of those throne chairs that I thought you had be an ordained minister to occupy. We shared a mic, like a couple of Beatles, and spoke for half an hour, and then took some good questions from the people in the pews. With that, we were whisked across the street to sign books in a tent run by FoxTale Book Shoppe, an indie in Woodstock, Ga., one of whose partners, Ellen Ward, happened to go to high school with me. Several of the people lined up to get their copies signed had known my parents or were friends of my sisters or brother. !t was like a class reunion.

A quick word about the Decatur Book Festival: It’s one of the best events of its type anywhere. For two days, they shut down several streets in central Decatur and turn the city over to thousands of strolling book lovers and vendors catering to them. Every sanctuary, hotel ballroom and government chamber for blocks around becomes a speaking platform for one of the hundred or so authors who come to promote their books and meet their readers. The crowds are big and engaged. This was the 10th annual edition, and I was honored to be involved -- especially because it’s my hometown.

Capturing a special moment

As I get ready to appear at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend (3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 5, at Decatur Presbyterian Church), I was thinking back to perhaps the best moment in the roll-out of "The Class of '65." Here's the video of me introducing my main character, Greg Wittkamper, at last month's Lewisburg Literary Festival in West Virginia, near where he lives. See him dabbing his eyes near the end? Those are tears. There were many reasons I wrote this book; telling this man's story of moral and physical courage was right at the top. If we don't sell another book, this made it all worthwhile. Thanks to Greg's brother-in-law, Gary Godwin, for capturing this moment. (P.S. -- We do want to sell more books! That's why I have a dozen more talks lined up in the coming weeks.)

What about Jimmy?

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When I speak about “The Class of ’65,” people often ask about Jimmy Carter and whether he supported Koinonia when it was being terrorized and boycotted. The answer is complicated. Jimmy left the Navy and moved back to Sumter County with Rosalynn after his father died in 1953, a few months after my main character, Greg Wittkamper, settled at Koinonia with his family. The bombings and drive-by shootings targeting the communal farm started not long after that. The Carters were among the most progressive families in the county and resisted pressure to join segregationist groups like the White Citizens Council, which cost them some business at their peanut warehouse. Jimmy did not fall in with the local boycott against Koinonia -- in fact, he shelled some of their peanuts -- but did he do everything he could have to publicly support the embattled community? Well, he didn’t exactly mount a soap box and speak out for a group of people who were widely seen as communists and race-mixers. If he had, he probably never would have been elected dog catcher, much less state senator, governor and president of the United States. Launching a political career from the dying embers of the segregationist South was a delicate matter for a man who believed in the new order and came to embody it. Carter eventually embraced Koinonia and helped turn its most famous offspring, Habitat for Humanity, into one of the most beloved nonprofit organizations in the world. His White House chief of staff was Hamilton Jordan, nephew of Koinonia’s co-founder Clarence Jordan. So when I’m asked about the Carters and Koinonia, I say that they did what they could at the time ... and later did a great deal more. As the former president begins treatment for his melanoma, we can all endorse the sentiment of the latest campaign sign that's popping up in Plains, Americus and beyond: “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor.” God bless and keep you, Mr. President.

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