Mr. McKenzie,
I started reading this piece, and then literally jolted to a stop when I saw the words “Jenkins County”. Though this incident was unknown to me, perhaps it should not have been. I lived in Millen, Georgia for three years.
1980 was a bad time in America, and a bad time to graduate from college. Mr. Reagan was just starting to ask that a price be paid to be poor, and I accepted the first job offered after searching for about six months. I should have kept looking.
To clarify, Millen, even to a young white male, was pulled out of the age of segregation (which I can just remember as a rural South Carolinian.) The local doctor had two waiting rooms, and I always took the one on the left out of habit, which caused me to believe most patients were Black, and the doctor was unable to afford nice accommodations for his patients. Until about my third visit, when I was brought out through the other waiting room. Bright, clean, nicely furnished….and entirely white. Yes, in 1982, this town was still fully segregated. Though I read the small weekly paper regularly, the only mention I ever noticed of a person of color in any context was the buried article containing the text, “A black man was killed with a shotgun in a fight over a bag of potato chips.”
Soon after moving to town my next door neighbor came to my door to threaten me because I’d gotten the accounting job his uneducated wife felt she deserved. (This was not so much a racist town as simply a town of hate in general. But admittedly, most hate was seemingly racial.) Though this tiny town had a murder rate more than four time that of NYC at the same period, justice was not a component. A white man who was thrown out of a bar one night went home, got a gun, drove back, shot the bar-owner through the heart (in the back) in front of the man’s wife, and never spent a single night in jail. Not even that one. I got the feeling that those living there knew the score, and never raised their glance.
Not everyone was filled with hate, and a co-worker, books (and various recreational aids) kept me sane. She related a day when she and her family drove into town, noticing an older Black woman lying on the sidewalk amidst her dropped grocery bags. Despite being with the limits of Millen, she had lain there long enough for ants to have gotten into her groceries, but no one could be bothered. Perhaps race was the issue, but perhaps only one.
And now I have some better idea of Millen, thanks to you and the historical context you provide. I could go one for hours, and pages, including an incident that scars me to this day. Despite being a southerner, I’d love to have been able to live my life without knowing such places, and attitudes, ever existed, much less that to some degree they still do.
Thank you, sir. I wish I didn’t have this account to share.
