George Wallace Overcomes

By Lance Morrow/ Montgomery

Running for Governor with new black friends

Given the history, what astonishes one is this tenderness. An odd, sweet quiet comes upon the field and grove in the September afternoon. The people, after their rally, rest almost dreamily on the threadbare grass. George Wallace has spoken. He sits in his wheelchair on the small flatbed metal stage in the park at Noccalula Falls near Gadsden. The people come to him. They fall into a long, orderly line to file past and take his hand and have him sign their Wallace posters.

Their gazes mix awe and deep familiarity and shyness. They are blue-collar people, or else small farmers who work these hills. Mostly they have rough, country faces and washed, flat, distantly Celtic eyes. People in wheelchairs are pushed up to his wheelchair, and George Wallace reaches out the gentlest communing hands to them, and spends long moments with each, consoling and almost, one thinks, healing. He has the nimbus of saint and martyr--or at any rate, of a celebrity who has passed through the fire and the greater world; he has come back to them from history, come back with powder burns.

Northerners should watch Wallace with his people. The process is tribal, a rite of communion. Only by watching it can one begin to analyze the disconcerting news that a fairly large number of Alabama blacks have, in 1982, joined the Wallace tribe.

One of George Wallace's heroes, Stonewall Jackson, had a military premise: "Mystery. Mystery is the secret of success." Jackson meant a mystery of action, a talent for moving armies unpredictably. George Wallace's gubernatorial campaign this year is exploring a few deeper mysteries of the human character or, at any rate, of the human memory: questions that involve the capacity of the politician's heart to change, the mind to forget and the Alabama black to forgive. The South has profound shallows.

Last week Wallace won the Democratic nomination to become Governor for what would be an unprecedented fourth term (or fifth, if one counts the partial term served by Wallace's wife, the late Governor Lurleen). Wallace, at 63, beat a well-heeled moderate Birmingham suburbanite, George McMillan. Alabama liberals wince at the choice available in November: either George Wallace or the Republicans' pistol-packing law-and-order Reaganite mayor of Montgomery, Emory Folmar. In the weird way that these things happen, Folmar, 52, is playing the part of the old George Wallace in this race, running against the new George Wallace, the aging and re-upholstered seg.

The chief mystery of the campaign, at least to those with memories that run back 20 years, is that many black Alabamians are voting for Wallace, and even working in his cause. The Deep South is supposed to be the one American region where the past means something.

The Alabama Democratic Conference, the state's black political machine, strongly supported McMillan in the primary. They brought in Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King to speak against Wallace, to remind blacks of what Wallace had been. The majority of blacks (an estimated 65%) went against Wallace. Still, it was the combination of rural blacks and rural whites and blue-collar workers that won for Wallace. That any blacks at all enlisted with Wallace is reason to reflect.

The poison and paranoia have mostly gone out of the issue of race in Alabama. (Look for them more in South Boston, say, there in a cradle of abolitionism.) The countryside is peaceful now along the route from Selma to Montgomery, through Dallas County and "bloody Lowndes," the old Black Belt over which so many gusts of racial violence have passed. But still one looks across the cotton fields at the tall, deep Alabama forests that are primordially rich and inviting and sinister.

Something of the quality of those woods occasionally comes out in George Wallace's voice: a slurred dankness and a warning. But mostly his message is one of populist conciliation. Wallace is a born-again Christian. He appeared before the assembled blacks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham last summer and apologized for his old segregationist politics. Have you changed in your attitude toward blacks? Wallace is asked today. "No," he replies. "I have respected and loved them always."

It is spiritually disorienting to see a black driving a car with Alabama plates and a Wallace bumper sticker. It is surreal to walk into Wallace's state campaign headquarters, a neobellum low-rise former furniture store on the edge of Montgomery. There, amid the deep shag carpeting and the clickity-click of computer printers churning out voter lists, sits Mrs. Ollie Carter, a black Wallace worker. All day she phones around the state with a gentle, churchgoing courtesy, asking blacks for their support, reminding them to vote.

Mrs. Carter claims that 98% of the blacks she calls say they are supporting Wallace. She taught elementary school for 19 years in rural Shelby County, and remembers that none of her pupils had their own textbooks until George Wallace became Governor. Wallace people almost always mention his record in improving Alabama education (though the state still ranks among the lowest in literacy), especially those free textbooks for the children, and the system of 26 junior colleges he started around the state. And the fact is that, leaving aside the low growls of race, Wallace was generally quite a good Governor. As for all of that racial viciousness, Mrs. Carter squares her frank and open countenance, earnest and astonishing: "He has made some mistakes. But haven't we all? You have to understand. The races are more bold and honest with each other in the South." That is true. So is the opposite; the exchange between the races in the South has also been a drama of long silences, of the unstated.

One theory has it that Alabama blacks have always been cynically knowing about George Wallace, that they have figured all along that his segregationist behavior and rhetoric were matters of political expediency. There is some truth in the theory. Alabama today has the second highest (after Michigan) unemployment in the nation: 14.5%. Everywhere in Alabama the message is the same: "Folks are hurtin'." Wallace has argued, so far successfully, that as an internationally known figure and the most experienced Governor in Alabama history, he can bring new industries and new jobs to the state. So many Alabamians, black and white, have accepted the logic that the chances are good Wallace will move back into the Governor's office.

What holds the mind in the Wallace race, however, is the symbolism rattling around in the play. Wallace in the past has been accused of a mean and opportunistic depthlessness. Yet his career now opens upon unexpected dimensions of passion and forgiveness and redemptive possibilities. If Wallace is an opportunist, as every politician is, he has also displayed resources of courage and endurance and temperament and even of grace.

One recent night, George Wallace Jr. was riding up to Scottsboro--that resonant Alabama place name, home of the Scottsboro Boys--to give a talk to some Wallace workers at the courthouse. As the Cadillac sedan fired up the interstate from Montgomery in the dusk and into a soft Alabama night, George Jr. talked about his father. They are close. A few nights before his father was shot in Maryland, George Jr. had a dream in which just such a shooting occurred, except that in the dream, George Sr. died. George Jr., a poised, intelligent, decent young man with his mother's eyes and his father's eyebrows, who works as director of student finance at Troy State University, is 30 now. He has been giving political speeches since he was seven and his daddy stood him up on chairs so he could reach the microphone at political rallies.

Once in Michigan, George Jr. remembered, "I watched while my father just set a crowd on fire. Set them on fire!" Was that frightening? he was asked. A pause. "Yes." But then: "I thought to myself: I wonder why it takes a man from south Alabama to set these people on fire. Why isn't there a man from Michigan who can set these people on fire?"

George Wallace, the senior George, promises his people that he will never go out trying to set the rest of the country on fire again. "I already been shot outta the presidential race once," he jokes sardonically. Besides, he says, "everything I was saying in the '60s and '70s is now the conventional wisdom." It was never race at all, it was Big Government interference that was the issue, it was states' rights. That always sounded like a self-serving and morally evasive line. But maybe in the deeper levels of Confederate psychology, down in the almost pagan sources of Southern Scotch-Irish defiance, there is some truth in it. It is the truth of a profound sense of community, touchy and estranged and quick to take offense and to punish. It is essentially a tribal ethic. The tragedy of the South was that the honor of the white tribe came to depend upon the subservience of blacks.

But in a sense, the tragedy of race was secondary in the drama of George Wallace. He used it, when convenient. But when he ventured into the presidential primaries, it was the honor of the tribe of outraged Middle Americans that he was riding forth to rescue and avenge. It was Pickett's Charge across a vast suburban parking lot, and it ended in a bloody mess. But in a way it succeeded. The Reagan victory of 1980 was a vindication of Wallace's social conservatism, if not of his populist economics.

Driving back down from Scottsboro well past midnight, George Jr. turned in his seat with a small, inspired smile and said: "You remember The Last Hurrah? Well, in that one, at the end, Skeffington lost the election. Down here, we're going to have The Last Hurrah, with a twist. We're gonna win!"

Then he rode in silence all the way to Montgomery. -- By Lance Morrow/ Montgomery

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