Not long after Old Folks moved to Atlanta,
and Brenda bought the trailer, in Wewa, Old Folks drove down on a long weekend to
visit her.
He went into B & B Feed & Seed, to get a bag of scratch
feed, for Brenda's chickens.
Bubba, the first B of B &B, said, "I
hear you're working in Atlanta."
Old Folks said he was.
"How
do you like it?" Bubba asked.
That was a trick question.
Old
Folks was an outsider, to Wewa. His politics were suspect.
"A lot of
black people up there," Old Folks said.
"When a black person dies
in Georgia," Bubba said, "he doesn't go to heaven, he goes to Atlanta."
Atlanta did have a solid black bourgeoisie. Many black businesses, colleges and universities,
black soul food restaurants, black barbershops.
There was a Martin Luther
King National Historic Site.
They had an NFL, an NBA, and a major league
baseball franchise, the National League Braves, with star black athletes on all of
the teams. I think Atlanta may have been a center for recording black street music.
I know when Robert Shaw did his annual Christmas show, he included choirs from black
universities.
Hank Aaron had a BMW dealership. You saw black people driving
expensive cars, and not just Cadillacs. There were black millionaires, black philanthropists.
The mayor was black, the police chief was black. Many of the elected officials, and
their department heads, were black.
Old Folks started calling Atlanta Black
Experience Citizen Heaven, Georgia, in his books.
* * *
Old Folks first called black people black experience citizens in Playing
Hurt, the book in which he asked what colored town would look like in Utopia.
It would look a lot like Atlanta.
* * *
When Old Folks heard black people talk about the black experience in an exclusive
way, as if black people could know all about white culture, because they lived in
it, but white people could not appreciate black culture, because they were white,
he thought, "Huh?" "How's that?" "Come again?"
It was like the National Black Arts Festival (NBAF) saying they promoted diversity
by showing white people what black art was like.
Enough about me--how did
you like my book?
* * *
Sadly, Old Folks had found out in his diversity training workshop how black
people really felt about white people. They didn't like them. In fact, they hated
them.
Old Folks didn't want to live anywhere he wasn't wanted. He would oblige
the people who didn't like him by leaving. He would let them have it.
It's
your city. Good luck.
He did reserve the right to call Atlanta Monkey Island,
and say, "May the best monkey win," in private, or among friends, and even
in his book, if he had to read the hateful things that were said about white people
in some books he read by blacks, to listen to them on the radio, the teevee, not
enough black people on TV, not enough black people on TV, not enough black people
on TV.
Jesus, have you looked at it?
You can have the teevee,
too.
You can have think tanks and public intellectuals.
Genius Award
winners.
Stanley Crouch.
You can have Stanley Crouch.
Stanley will tell it as he sees it.