Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

It had not been as easy to get back to the Alabama State Normal School as they had thought. Why the Shay brothers could never go back, they didn’t want anyone to find out, Cello’s grandfather liked to say. But that was a bit of make-believe, tough-dude publicity. My dad said that the Shay brothers worked one summer at a resort hotel in Wisconsin in order to earn their school fees, but they lost all their money to hustlers in Chicago. Their father told them not to come back to Alabama and they didn’t.

The Eagle appealed to obsessives among Chicago’s black residents, and given how crowded and rough that big place was, there were thousands of people who found something in the paper they could lose themselves in. Uncle Ralston analyzed first basemen and heavyweights, black and white, with such contrariness that he incited readers in Chicago and in other cities where the Eagle was distributed to send denunciations, which he printed unedited — except for obscenities — under the title “Letters to the Dunderhead.” He made a bad call early on as to Jackie Robinson’s potential.

The Eagle reprinted odd facts from old almanacs: “Did you know that in 1910…” Its news stories were mere notices compared with its features. But then the Eagle treated Bible sales meetings and barbers’ conventions as news stories. Because it was not a daily, it did not waste more time than necessary on the weighty questions of the moment. People searched its columns for mention of themselves. The paper was full of names, lists, memberships, reunions, prayers for the sick and the shut-in, who had gone to which bridge tournament, who had been licensed by which state authority, and what benevolent lodge had met where.

Uncle Ralston liked to say that they starved for the first ten years at ten cents a copy and then the war saved them. But they had made it to safety before then, when they got their own Goss press and the newspaper could come flying off the rack folded and cut. The investment was his wife’s. Her family’s insurance company had begun in the murky areas I read about in Urban Studies classes, among slick blacks who, for worthless stock in burial societies, took nickels from Southern blacks come North for jobs. The Eagle had white visitors during World War II because the army noticed that the paper printed letters about the treatment of black soldiers in Southern states where their training camps were located, most of the letters from members of the soldiers’ families.

The bullying by the army did little to enhance Uncle Ralston’s reputation after the war. He had some profile in the National Negro Chamber of Commerce. He was a Republican, officially, convinced that his support was important to Congressman De Priest, and the Eagle had ignored the New Deal in its pages while loving the post office as management training ground for Negroes. Uncle Ralston sometimes blamed his refusal to sell war bonds as the reason he could never get on the boards of the Wabash Avenue YMCA or Provident Hospital. He’d rejected membership in the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association at first, but he joined up after the war, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was interested in everybody and he needed cover.

He had a business on the South Side, but he was not popular, his position among blacks not secure. He said the snobs in the Forty Club looked down on him because he came from Alabama. He was jealous of the black leaders on Truman’s commission to desegregate the military, Mom said, as if anyone would have called on him for such a thing. Uncle Ralston did not become a Democrat until Rockefeller lost his party to Goldwater’s crazies. There were stories about his wife’s family that Mom liked to tell, about their having been in the policy or numbers game as much as the insurance business. She said that Uncle Ralston met Cello’s grandmother when the Shay brothers worked as bookies for Cello’s grandmother’s father.

“Keep the Panthers out of our schools,” Uncle Ralston said, looking at Mom. He told her she was a hypocrite for joining the National Housing Conference. “What’s wrong with your house?”

My mother was Betty Shay, Reginald’s daughter, and she married my father, Alfred Goodfinch, the newspaper’s young treasurer. Ralston Jr., vice president, was his best friend, mostly because everyone said so. They spent a lot of time together in the office, each in his world, not talking much. Ralston Jr. was the black nationalist casualty in the family, showing up everywhere with secondhand bean pies and pamphlets. Dad kept his distance from the struggle, though he was no self-hating black guy or fastidious conservative who somehow wanted to limit his exposure to other black people. He was on the side of historical justice, he just had no appetite for confrontation, whether it be on the streets or in the committee room.

It was 1966 when the Pennsylvania Railroad failed and Uncle Ralston went to Ghana to fetch Ralston Jr., Cello’s father. He must have realized on the plane back just how whacked his son was. It was his third big mental episode in two years. Ralston Jr. was going to miss out. He’d gone off the deep end and was going to miss out on the enormous changes heralded by the Great Society. Uncle Ralston believed in Lyndon Baines Johnson as a white man who had seen the light. But his son had fallen out with his own reason just when it was his turn to be lifted up by federal programs and low-interest business loans and the Negro vote.

The Eagle froze, culturally, that summer Uncle Ralston went to Africa for the first and last time. He resisted change in any part of the newspaper thereafter. By 1968 the news stories and columns said first, “Afro-American,” then superhistorical “Aframerican,” and finally “black,” in spite of Uncle Ralston’s objections. For a year, he’d refused to give his permission to switch to something more in accord with the times. Then they just went ahead without his permission.

Bit by bit, the managing editor dared to go over the publisher’s weary head. Dad, acting vice president, went upstairs to the office in the two-story tower on the right to inform Uncle Ralston of what had already been done. If a thing had been decided for business purposes, then Uncle Ralston could accept it. After all, he’d lived through some dicey times that required him to eat compromise every day, he pointed out. Dad therefore presented change as business, as something about which the paper had no choice. But what was wrong with the Eagle had been a problem for some time. The old crew was either dead or retired and they couldn’t be replaced for what the Eagle could pay.

There were mutterings outside, in the community, wherever that was, that Uncle Ralston was an Uncle Tom, a relic of bygone ward politics. He wasn’t. He was as much of a race man as my withdrawn, private dad. But he sat out the militant years not because he didn’t understand the anger, but because the revolution had taken his son, so he believed. One day his suave heir had tailor’s bills and met white politicians at the Palmer House, and the next he was in denim overalls, flying to Ghana in search of his pre-industrial-age, natural soul.

The women were the grunts of the revolution, the ones who didn’t miss the meetings, who put away the chairs and made the calls and bought the coffee and kept the minutes. Mom was a self-declared enemy of the Blues. “Everything is allowed, because I’m feeling bad.” She wasn’t a big fan of Gospel either. We seldom went to church anyway. Mom would show up at different churches and colleges for Handel at Christmas and Bach at Easter. She said she worked with so many pastors during the week that she needed rest from them on the weekend. But she liked priests, the guitar-playing sort. No tunes of the counterrevolution there.