America's storyteller

What was it like to be a mama's boy on a landing craft about to hit Normandy in '44? That was in "'The Good War'." Or to be a woman who has a job for the first time in her life, ironically enough because of the war. Or "Working." What was it like to be a teacher or a checkout clerk? Want to hear a funny story about that one, while we're at it?

This guy was a meter reader, a gas-meter reader. The one who comes in with a flashlight and goes in your basement. I said, "Tell me about your day." And he gets going: "Well, it's mostly dogs and women."

Then I realized, the first is the reality and the second is a fantasy. So I said, "Let's talk about the dogs first." He said, "The worst, you know, are the Pekinese and the poodles, the spoiled brats of dogdom. They're the ones who gnaw at your foot, and I want to smack 'em with my flashlight."

"OK," I said, "what about the women?" He said, "Well, nothing has happened, you understand? But it's one of those things in my mind. For example, you go to a house" -- and he named a suburb in Chicago, a nice suburb -- "and the lady of the house is very pretty. She's lying outside on the patio; it's a summer day. On a blanket, on her stomach. She's in a bikini and the bra is unbuttoned because she wants the sun to hit the whole of her back. So what I do is I creep up slowly, very slowly, and when I'm right next to her I holler, 'Gas man!' And she turns around!" And then he says, "I get bawled out an awful lot. But" -- here's the part -- "but it makes the day go faster."

I wanted to capture that aspect in "Working." All the other books, whether they're about race or coming of age or reflections on death, which is really about life, are all visceral, specific things. This book is about hope. The most abstract, it seems, and yet it turns out to be the most personal. It's my tribute to what I call the "prophetic minority," those who've been activists since the Year One.

You notice I dedicate the book to a couple whom you may not know, Clifford and Virginia Durr. They were a white couple living in Montgomery, Ala. She was the sister-in-law of [Supreme Court Justice] Hugo Black. And he was a member of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], who wrote the "Blue Book" on the rights of listeners -- air belongs to the public! -- for as much variety of programming as possible.

Contrast him today to the FCC kid who's the son of Colin Powell, right? And Colin Powell, we know, is the African-American butler to the new Bertie Wooster. Bertie was a little milder than W., not quite so mean-spirited. He had a British butler, and Bush has one too. His name is Tony Blair. But his American butler is very elegant, and Powell's son is the footman at the head of the FCC. He lays out the red carpet for them. So now we have an FCC that says, "The hell with regulation! Clear Channel, you can own 10,000 stations if you want!"

We live in a crazy moment when the most powerful media mogul in our country, aside from Time Warner, is an Australian Neanderthal, Rupert Murdoch. So people are confused and bewildered; they seem lost and hopeless. So I thought, why not a book about all those who have had hope, and have taken their beatings and paid their dues -- but as a result of what they've done, something has happened.

That was the case with the Durrs, for example. They could have led easy lives. His was a prominent family in Montgomery, and she was the daughter of a clergyman. She had three roads to travel: She could have been the Southern belle, in "Gone With the Wind" fashion, been nice to her "colored" help and joined the garden club. Or she could have gone crazy, that is, being intelligent and thoughtful but doing nothing, as her friend did -- her friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who was a schoolmate of Virginia's. You know Zelda went nuts, right? The third route was to say something was cockeyed here. The Depression taught her that. The other side of the tracks taught her that. She said, "I've gotta fight this," and she took the third path, the rebel girl.

Virginia -- I gotta tell you this story -- was a lanky, elegant woman. She was in Chicago -- this was in the '40s -- with a group against the poll tax [a tax imposed in Southern states to prevent blacks from voting]. She and Dr. Marion McLeod Bethune -- you've heard of her? African-American woman educator, friend of Eleanor Roosevelt -- were speaking at the Symphony Hall and it's jammed. Mrs. Bethune was fine, but Virginia was incredible!

So I go backstage and I go to shake her hand. I say, "Mrs. Durr, you were fantastic." She said, "Thank you, dear." And as she says that she puts forth her hand, and she's got a hundred leaflets! "Now, dear" -- without missing a beat -- "it was nice of you to come back. Hurry outside and pass out those leaflets. Dr. Bethune and I are at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in two hours. Hurry, dear!" So that's how I met her.

The next time, I saw a picture of her in the papers. Sen. Jim Eastland [a segregationist Mississippi Democrat] was jealous of Joe McCarthy, and he wanted his own committee to investigate subversives and commies. So he gets after the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which was a group of Southern whites, mostly, who tripled the registration of blacks in the South. It was a remarkable group that also included Miles Horton, the founder of the Highlander Folk School. That's where Rosa Parks went. Rosa Parks was a seamstress for Virginia Durr. Virginia encouraged her to go to this school, which Martin Luther King attended, which was about helping labor organizers, black and white.

So Virginia was an unfriendly witness called by Jim Eastland to investigate this group. And there's a picture of her in the newspaper, with her legs crossed, and she's powdering her nose. There he is, all 300 pounds of him, furious and fulminating. She ignores his presence; he's not even there. The guy goes crazy and orders her off the stand. Naturally, all the reporters gather around her: "What did you do, Mrs. Durr?" She said, in that voice of hers, "That man is as common as pig tracks. I guess I'm just an old-fashioned Southern snob." But the fact is, she defied them, and Cliff did too. And they paid their dues: They went broke and they were ostracized.

Now we come to 1965, the Selma-Montgomery march, two years after Martin Luther King in Washington. You know of that? They had 200,000 people converge on that march from Selma to Montgomery! There was a celebration at Virginia's house in Montgomery -- 2 Felder Street, how could I forget it? -- that home was a home for waifs, everybody came in, even though they had no dough.

We were celebrating this tremendous event, which wound up at the mansion of Gov. George Wallace. We're watching Wallace on TV, excoriating the marchers and the leaders, and he names the people in the room, including Miles Horton. And then Miles says, "Isn't it funny? Remember 20 years ago, there were 15 or 20 of us and we'd be egged, tomatoed and threatened? We all knew each other. Today, I didn't know a single person there, and not one knew me. But isn't it wonderful? Two hundred thousand!"

That's what I mean by the prophetic minority. That's why I dedicated the book to them, and the book deals with those kinds of people, who we call activists. Who are imbued with a sort of hope and craziness, you know -- who some way or another hope our society, or the world, will be a more decent place to live in.

I think perhaps at this moment it's more important than ever. They encourage the rest of us; this is the big thing. They imbue all the rest of us with hope. Feb. 15, 2003 -- I celebrate that day because 10 million people all over the world came out against the preemptive strike [against Iraq]. And then there was silence, because for three days it looked like W. was the liberator of Iraq. Then, well, we know what happened.

Next Page: "If Bush wins, then that's it, that's enough"

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