On Memorial Day, orange-hot sunbeams filtered down through the magnolia blossoms and darted off the gold-leaf dome of the state capitol building in Atlanta. The air smelled like ripe bananas, ladybugs crawled lazily across the early morning grass and yellow jackets sipped the dew dripping like blackstrap molasses in the Southern heat. Traffic was slow and it was easy to find a parking place. Everybody in town was at the swimming pool, or going on a holiday picnic, or in their air-conditioned houses watching ballgames on TV. Everybody, that is, except Lester Maddox, the seventy-fifth governor of Georgia.
Down at the state capitol, a limestone monolith which cost $118.43 less than $1,000,000 of carpetbagger money to build, Maddox was hard at work behind his desk. He does not celebrate Memorial Day. He only recognizes Confederate Memorial Day. And for the next four years, so will the people who work for him.
It was early, not yet noon, but the TV reporters from the local stations were already setting up cables in the marble halls, hoping to catch ol’Lester’s thoughts for the day. Not that they expected to get much. One thing Lester Maddox has learned since he’s been in public office is that the press is his natural enemy. They print cartoons of him, analyze his vocabulary on their editorial pages, criticize his every legislative move, and make him the butt of more jokes than Tallulah Bankhead.
Wandering past polished glass cases filled with rotting Confederate flags, I wondered what Lester Maddox was really like. I had seen him only once, on television, waving a pistol at a group of Negro youths who had tried to enter his fried-chicken cafeteria called The Pickrick, eyes bulging, face crazed. Now he is governor, a fact which has provided more conversational needlepoint for sophisticated Atlanta than Gone With the Wind. “I’ve never interviewed a governor before. I don’t know much about politics,” I confessed nervously to one of the reporters, a Dartmouth graduate from Ohio. “Don’t worry,” he said, “neither does ol’Lester.”
Inside the glass doors marked “Office of the Governor” sat a buxom brunette in slight makeup and a bright orange dress with two yellow porcelain pears on her left bosom. She is Mrs. Mary Beazley and she knows everything that goes on in Maddox’s office. When I had telephoned the governor’s public-relations counsel Bob Short from New York, he put me right through to Mrs. Beazley, who assured me, “Don’t worry ’bout a thing, I’ll see that you get a good story.” Now she waved me to a seat and continued with a telephone conversation. A lot of other people were waiting, too. There was a man in a white ice-cream suit with a plantation bow tie smoking a Havana cigar who looked like Raymond Massey as Abe Lincoln, forty-two Negro schoolchildren from Albany, Georgia, and a twenty-four-year-old war veteran from Jackson, Mississippi, wearing a Purple Heart over a short-sleeve sport shirt, who had come to ask Maddox to march in a “Win in Vietnam” parade.
Suddenly, unspectacularly, Maddox himself was on the scene, dodging the reporters, shaking hands like Will Rogers, chucking the Negro kids under the chin, and telling everybody “Howdy.” Dressed in an inexpensive, olive-drab suit with a Masonic pin in his lapel, he looks, at fifty-two, like a fighting cock. Hairy hands hang from their coat sleeves in animated chunks. His round, balding head, too big for his stubby little body, rises above the rest of him with a few tiny strands of hair clinging for dear life to the crown, Dagwood Bumstead style. Horn-rimmed glasses sag heavily against a network of tiny varicose veins which threaten to fester and erupt on the tip of a nose supported by a red sunset of a face which continuously changes shades as his temper comes and goes. When he speaks, he whimpers in a high-pitched, nasal voice like Henry Aldrich. “This the gentleman from N’Yok? C’mon and let’s have us a li’l talk, son,” he motioned, leading the way past the outstretched hands and ignoring Mrs. Beazley, who waved three telephones frantically at him.
In his chambers, blood-red carpets line the floors, black leather chairs rest comfortably against dark wood-paneled walls, air-conditioning adjusted to 65 degrees sends wet chills through the bones and, in stark contrast, possibly as a reminder of its phantom past, an antebellum plantation sofa with cream- and rose-colored flowers stands near the entrance. On his desk, a spray of disorganized bills to sign, state documents, assembly-meeting speeches and a copy of William Manchester’s The Death of a President sprawl nonchalantly, almost covering the governor’s prize possession—a gigantic white-leather Holy Bible with his name engraved in gold. Also in the clutter I noticed a statue of praying hands pointing up toward an enormous Confederate flag waving just behind his chair, another paperweight of praying hands holding down a copy of Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative and, just beyond, a smaller, unobtrusive American flag dangling precariously on a stick.
“I don’t turn away anybody, no suh. You know they tell me Ronald Reagan don’t let nobody in to see him. Well, I don’t run my bizness thataway. I promised to be guv’nor of all the people, black and white, and I’m keepin’ my word. Tell me, what do they say about me up yonder in N’Yok? They think I’m some kinda nut? Well, I’m not. You ask me anything you wont, heah?”
I asked him about his campaign. “Well suh, I knew I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t put ads in the paper ’cause nobody liked me and I already closed down my restaurant ’cause the Communists in Washington had turned the state of Georgia into a police state. So in October of ’65 I went to work preparin’ a platform which I published 50,000 copies of and delivered by hand in my ’64 white Ponyac station wagon. I had no public-relations firm and nobody to write a speech even. I answered all the mail myself—traveled a hunnert thousand miles and fifty thousand of that was in one car. Nobody ran my campaign but me. I always been my own boss and that’s the way it’s gonna stay. Cost me $40,000 just to get in the primary and the runoff against two million that had been spent against me by my opponents. I never did even have a billboard. I been studyin’ on politics fer thirty years and ran fer lots of things, but I never did win. This time I didn’t see no way in the God’s world I could lose. People were fed up with the Communist dictators and rabble-rousin’ bolsheviki ’roun’ heah and I knew they’d support an ol’ country boy like me. I tied me a four-foot ladder on my Ponyac and drove down the highway and evertime I saw one of them big $2,000 billboards put up by one of my opponents I’d pull off the road, git my ladder out and nail up ten little signs all over the big’uns and ruin ’em all and it wouldn’t cost me but a quarter.”
He roared a high tenor laugh, rubbing his nose with his two forefingers. I asked him how much he got paid. He didn’t flinch. “The salary was $12,000 a year when I was elected—about $18,000 includin’ commissions. They increased it to $42,500 a year fer me. Hell, a mule couldn’ live on what they used to pay. There was more money in sellin’ fried chicken. I got a furniture bizness on the side now which the wife runs and I plan to go back into that when this is all over. You know I wuz a happy sonbitch in that restaurant. I still don’t like to drive by there. It hurts my heart. I got into it with fo’ dollars in my pocket and through the great American free-enterprise system enlarged it nine times in ten years till I was makin’ half a million dollars a year before the Communist takeover under Lyndon Johnson. You know, the moral decadence in this country is frightnin’. Chillrun see their parents and executives in political life drinkin’ and carryin’ on, abusin’ theirselves on the taxpayer’s money, and they think they can do it too. I know I cain’t wipe this condition out but I know if I c’n git others to follow my example we’ll raise a state full of Christians down heah in Georgia. I wouldn’ have opened my restaurant if I had to sell cocktails. It was a place you could bring the wife and chillrun on a Sunday night without fightin’ off the drunks. Many of my friends do take a social drink, mind ya, but not me. I don’t smoke neither. You won’t find an ashtray in heah. Drinkin’ and smokin’ leads to moral degeneracy. Just like some people want to integrate. That’s their bizness. When the gov’ment tried to force my customers to sit next to Nigras I got mad. We don’ cotton to that down heah. I’m a peaceful man and I always treated my colored hep fair with due respect and a decent wage. But I’m not gonna live next door, no suh. I’ve never been one to get mad and fuss. Those kind lose. But don’ step on me.”
I asked him if he ever had any regrets about the pistol-waving incident which sent his image flying through the TV cables of the world as a radical monster of the militant Southern-bigot variety. “Naw suh!” Did he think he had done the wrong thing, displaying his passionate hatred of Negroes in public? “Naw suh!” Would he do it again? “Yes suh!” Would he uphold the federal law regarding desegregation now that he was governor? “If a man wonts to let them Nigras in his place of bizness that’s up to him. I cain’t stop him. If he don’t then I cain’t stop that neither. The system of free enterprise is one of the principles the American people cherish most. They are declaring war on the chillrun of the South. Integration represents an erosion of the rights of the people. We are placin’ the Constitution ahead of the welfare of our citizens and the people of Georgia are not gonna continue to tolerate this.”
What were his views on some other, non-racial topics, I wondered? How would he handle, for instance, capital punishment? (Four hundred fifteen people have died in Georgia’s electric chair.) “I’ve never signed an order sendin’ nobody to the ’lectric chair. Rather than do that I’d rather walk that last step myself. Some of the people go to the ’lectric chair ’cause juries are afraid the criminals will be back on the streets in seven years if they don’t kill ’em. I plan to solve that problem by makin’ their sentences longer and keep ’em in jail. Then they cain’t git out.” Right.
The phone rang. It was a long-distance call from the new member of the Pardon and Parole Board, Judge J.O. Partain, whose first act after Maddox’s appointment was to sign a medical reprieve for a dangerous prisoner to travel to Louisiana for an operation. The prisoner had a long record of convictions and past escapes, and all week the Atlanta papers had been giving Maddox hell about it on the basis that the prisoner could have received the same medical attention in the prison hospital. “Yes suh,” said the governor to the party on the other end. “Yes suh. What do you mean we don’t have the prisoner’s records anywhere in the files?” [Judge Partain had claimed he was told the prisoner had no previous record.] “How could you lose a man’s prison record?” A frantic glance in my direction. “Well, don’t tell that fellow you just named anythin’ you don’t want to be told all over the place, you heah? Yes suh.”
He returned from his conversation, ready to quote more political press-agentry to his Yankee visitor. “I believe people in high places as well as low places oughta practice what they preach. They talk big but then they git into office and turn to graft and immorality. This state gonna get the best gov’ment under me it’s ever had. I just wanted to see what an honest man could accomplish. I have no close ties with any Establishment controlled by any group any place anywhere. I’m jes’ one of the people. I git out in the streets in them country towns and people yell, ‘Lester,’ not ‘Guv’nor!’ I’m a big follower of Dale Carnegie, who taught me to follow the Golden Rule of Jesus instead of jes’ admirin’ it. My image was like a animal or a red-neck or a beast. That’s ’cause of the Communist press. We still have some articles in Atlanta that are brutal. Look here.” He thrust some clippings from The Atlanta Constitution at me. One was an editorial-page cartoon showing Stokely Carmichael holding a sign, “Don’t Obey Laws You Don’t Like,” and being chased with a club held by Maddox, then Maddox picking up the same sign and marching off with it. Another was an editorial by Ralph McGill, the distinguished journalist-columnist-publisher of The Constitution, titled “Defending the Second Rate.” A third, titled “A Little Maddoxemantics,” was an analysis of the grammatical errors in Maddox’s public speeches. “They try to make me look like a durn fool ever chance they git,” he said. “It’s yeller journalism. They won’t ferget my past. When I gave up my restaurant, I opened up a souvenir stand in front, sellin’ ax handles. You could buy a whole family backlash kit with mama-size drumsticks and junior-size drumsticks—those clubs railroad switchmen used to carry. I was outta bizness and had to do somethin’. They blew that up in the papers like it was awful, even though the demand fer my ax handles only lasted two days. I bought more’n I could sell and there weren’t no Nigras aroun’ to use ’em on anyway ’cause the restaurant was already closed down.” He raised his arms behind his bald head and stretched his stumpy legs in front of him, closing his eyes, remembering. “I’d much rather be ol’Lester at The Pickrick, sellin’ short ribs and beans, than Guv’nor. Everybody lost when I lost that place.
“I still believe integration is unChristian. The Bible says so.” “Where in the Bible?” “Wait a minute, and I’ll show you.” He searched in his desk and handed me a mimeographed sheet. “This is proof of the breakdown of the purity of the races as unGodly—In choosin’ a wife for Isaac, he was instructed ‘that thou should not take a wife unto my son of the daughter of the Canaanites’—that’s from Genesis xxiv, verses 3 and 4. Also from Leviticus—‘Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind.’ And in Deuteronomy, ‘Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together.’ It’s against the will of our God to integrate. The Bible says it right here.”
He told me it was high time he got some work done but I could “hang around” if I wanted to and he promised me another meeting.
In the outer office the man in the white ice-cream suit with the plantation bow tie was still standing nearby, smoking his Havana cigar. “My name’s Shine. Please to meetcha. You from a magazine? Esquire! You mean ol’Lester gonna be in Esquire? Well, kiss my foot. Now if he c’n jes’ get in Playboy he got it made. You tell them folks up yonder in New Yok he ain’t crazy. He got Klan members on his staff, but I never seen ol’Lester at any Klan meetin’ I wuz ever at. He’s been good to the coloreds. Why, there’s been more goddamn niggers in this room since he’s been here than any guv’nor in the history of Georgia.”
People in Atlanta still can’t believe the election. It was a queer one, even for a state which once had two governors at the same time. This was a city which had watched Maddox’s rise to power with the horrified fascination of a crowd at Cape Kennedy witnessing a rocket launching explode in midair. He ran for mayor in 1957 and 1961 and people laughed. He ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1962 and the Negro vote killed him. The liberals denounced him because his background is a study in unenlightenment (he attended school only to the tenth grade), but the common workers love him. He appeared to shake hands at every shift break in every cotton field in Georgia, walked up and down the main streets of the country towns telling druggists, “Doctor, I wanna show you my prescription for Georgia,” and refused to ride in planes as his opponents did, saying, “You cain’t shake hands from a helicopter.” He put every penny he owned into his campaign, even mortgaged his house. People who ridiculed him were often subjected to threatening phone calls from his admirers and one political opponent was even forced to engage full-time police protection at his home.
In the Democratic primary the Republicans cut their own throats by voting for the Democratic candidate they thought had the least chance of beating their own Bo Callaway, a distinguished corporation executive and the first Republican representative from Georgia to sit in Congress in years. With the Republican vote added to the red-neck vote, Maddox got enough to land in the runoff with Callaway. But the liberal Democrats and the Negroes, who didn’t approve either candidate, headed a write-in for Ellis Arnall, a former Georgia governor, who stole so many votes that neither Maddox nor Callaway received a majority. Callaway got approximately 47.4 percent of the votes, Maddox came in second with approximately 47.1 percent, and Arnall got the rest. Lawsuits were filed. A recount was demanded. According to the state constitution, if no candidate receives a majority vote, the election must be decided by the General Assembly, which is composed of two hundred thirty-one Democrats to twenty-eight Republicans. A hundred thirty votes were needed to elect. Since sixty-five percent of Georgia’s Democratic Party is conservative, it was an easy one to predict. The General Assembly met the second week of January, 1967, and the night of the decision, while people were still laughing at him, ol’Lester drove his family out to the new executive mansion, parked and pointed a stubby finger: “I jes’ wanted y’awl t’see where you gonna be livin’.”
Few Atlantans slept that night. TV sets blared, waiting for the votes. The people had already handed Callaway a plurality. Now it was up to the politicians. So few of the outnumbered Republicans showed up for the count that Callaway got on TV, tears in his eyes, and said he understood. It was the poor plowboy (Maddox) vs the millionaire (Callaway) who never worked for his bread and butter, went to West Point, skied on the slopes at Aspen, and owned five textile mills. The morning Maddox was announced as the new governor, liberal, sophisticated Atlanta awoke to storm clouds.
Atlanta bears little relation to the rest of the South and none whatsoever to the rest of Georgia. Of its 1,250,000 population, forty-three percent is composed of Negroes and only slightly less than the remainder is made up of upper-bracket white liberals brought in by big businesses from other states. With its sloping hills, its richness of foliage (they say three blossoming dogwoods abound to every man here ) and its swanky sections of luxury homes, Atlanta looks more like Beverly Hills than the South. Very few reminders of the Old South, in fact, still exist. The Ku Klux Klan used to burn crosses on top of Stone Mountain, but today burning crosses are as hard to find as Confederate nickels. People drive as fast on the Atlanta expressways as they do on the Hollywood Freeway. The old plantations have been razed to make room for new $110,000,000 luxury apartment complexes and the city boasts the best Urban Renewal program in the United States.
Not that Negroes are treated like kings. Restaurants still refuse to allow them to be photographed inside, Negro babies are kept behind the whites in hospital maternity wards so they are not visible from the plate-glass viewing windows, and Negro homes in Buttermilk Bottom are being bought by the city and resold to developers. But the situation is much better than it is in most sections of the South and it was improving vastly when Lester came into office.
Suddenly Atlanta found itself trusted to the care of a man who had no experience in governing even a crossroads junction, let alone a cosmopolitan city, who had never held public office, who knew none of the right people, and who drank only milk.Since then, Lester-watching has been a sport second only in popularity to the Atlanta Braves. Chicken wasn’t all Lester sold at the old Pickrick. Visitors could also read letters, pamphlets and a publicly posted letter calling for the sterilization of all Negroes. Tourists could purchase a copy of the U.S. Constitution or a K.K.K. announcement, side by side. Maddox also displayed prominently Goldwater bumper stickers, American flags, a barrel of ax handles to use on any Negro who entered the door and a booklet called Kiss of Death, published by the Christian Constitutional Education League in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, billed as “a graphic illustration of beautiful white maidenhood clasped in the arms of an African savage.”
The Pickrick had been started with $25,000 saved from Maddox’s original four-dollar hot-dog-stand investment. It was a brick-and-board building at 891 Hemphill Avenue, in a seedy section of Atlanta a few blocks from the Georgia Tech campus.
The Pickrick became an institution, not only for its snappy fried chicken sold cafeteria style at a reasonable price, but because of its ads, placed every week in the Atlanta papers. Everybody else ran their ads in the big Sunday editions, but Maddox foxily unveiled his on Saturday, causing more attention and getting cheaper rates and wider space. They began as harmless ads for fried chicken, but as his following grew Maddox saw an opportunity to use them as sounding boards for racial prejudice. Under big headlines worded “PICKRICK SAYS,” he editorialized at length to the delight of everyone in town, capitalizing key words to get his message across: “If you want to integrate, then integrate. Just leave me alone. I don’t bother you and all I ask is that you be Christian enough not to bother me. Stop making yourself look inferior by taking away something that belongs to others. AND THAT ALL may know, we do not serve INTEGRATIONISTS regardless of race, creed or color. This means red, yellow, black and white. We discriminate against INTEGRATIONISTS and respect their right to discriminate against us.” Followed by the prices of his Sunday-night drumstick special.
But trouble really started for Maddox on July 3, 1964—the day after the federal civil-rights bill was passed. Three Negro students tried to enter The Pickrick and were chased away by customers brandishing ax handles and by Maddox waving a pistol and yelling, “Get away you no-good dirty Communists!” On August 11, three more youths appeared and were immediately surrounded by a crowd of Maddox’s friends in torn sweat shirts and Bermuda shorts, gas-station attendants in sockless tennis shoes, frowzy Southern white girls licking Eskimo Pies and Maddox’s own Negro kitchen help. Lester’s people, among them two of his sisters. That afternoon Maddox staged a march, followed by five hundred local toughs, in front of The Pickrick. He shoved policemen, shouted at the TV cameras and threatened to shoot any Negro who came near him. Police wreckers were called to haul away the Maddox family cars blocking the entrance to Hemphill Avenue and Maddox ended up on all the front pages, even rating a report on Huntley-Brinkley.
The next day federal marshals invaded The Pickrick and handed Maddox a government order to show cause as to why he was not desegregating. He went to the Democratic convention in Atlantic City and picketed in front of Convention Hall, to no avail. In the last week of September, a Negro theological student, the Reverend Charles Wells, tried to enter the cafeteria and Maddox pushed him bodily out the front door. With the lawsuit, a federal order to desegregate and the federal taxmen denying him the right to deduct his Pickrick editorials as business expense, Maddox was really in trouble. He wrote in his customary ad in The Atlanta Journal: “Because of this unGodly, unAmerican, unconstitutional and inhuman legislation, we lost more money in two months than I earned in the first ten years after leaving school. We will never get over this horrible thing that has come into our lives and never recover the financial losses.”
On top of his financial problems, the Justice Department stepped into the picture and began an investigation of the Lester Maddox Cafeteria because he was defying the Civil Rights Act. (He had reopened The Pickrick under this name in September, calling it a local “non-interstate” eating place, believing thereby he could evade the Public Accommodations Section in the Civil Rights Act referring to businesses related to interstate commerce.) Maddox’s greatest ad appeared in October, 1964, the week Lady Bird Johnson visited Georgia:
“PARENTS
in distant states who have been questioned because your son at Georgia Tech came to our cafeteria for meals, students who have been visited by F.B.I. agents, men and women who work in Atlanta (with out-of-state license plates) . . . and others who have been subjected to this police-state harassment . . . please do not blame us.
BLAME THE PRESIDENT
he United States Congress and the Communists for this dreadful and unbelievable thing that has happened to Freedom and Liberty in America.
SPECIAL TONIGHT (No Integrationists)
Order of Lester’s skillet-fried chicken—25c for drumstick and thigh, 50c for breast.
AND I APPRECIATE
the Negro man who called to tell me it makes him sick to look at that picture that shows Atlanta’s top Negro politician leader being hugged by the President of the U.S.
BY THE WAY,
We could use a few more customers but we don’t want any integrationists, regardless of race, creed or color . . . and WE DO NOT OFFER to serve INTERSTATE travelers because the government denies your right to eat here by refusing to let us operate our business segregated if we offer to serve you. It is a police state we have; just like Lyndon Johnson said we would have if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be passed. OUR SUNDAY MENU—skillet-fried chicken, 50c.”
On February 1, 1965, Maddox appeared in Federal Court charged with contempt of a court order compelling him to serve Negroes. On March 17 he was tried for pointing a pistol at a Negro who tried to enter The Pickrick. An all-white jury deliberated forty-seven minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty. Several hundred people gathered at the old Pickrick to watch him erect and dedicate a monument to the “death of private property rights in America”: a small white building with a twenty-foot tower, in the base of which copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were placed side by side in a coffin symbolizing, to Maddox, “the end of freedom.”
Since his election, he has seldom exploded in public. He has stopped criticizing the Johnson Administration. And he has not turned Negroes away from the state capitol. “Patton never became the general Ike did, because he slapped a private in public,” he is fond of saying. Although he hasn’t done much of anything in the way of legislation (“I reckon I’ll get around to that soon,” he keeps repeating) he has shown some action. He issued an order banning miniskirts in the capitol and has insisted that all male staff members have their hair cut above the ears. He also went after the gamblers, knocking on the doors of the craps joints before going in, announcing each time, “I always knock the first time. After that anything goes.”
He kept his promise to close down the gambling houses on some U.S. highways. (“The honeymoon is over,” cried one local casino owner.) He speaks to Sunday-school classes warning against the pitfalls of alcohol, and even backed up his own sermons in a scandale which has become known in Atlanta as the “Bucky Redwine Case.” Bucky was a young all-American Gary Cooper-type businessman (Mr. Deeds before he went to town) who was like a son to ol’Lester. As a reward for his aid in Maddox’s campaign, he was appointed executive secretary, arriving almost simultaneously with a Maddox warning to the new staff that nobody was ever to be caught with liquor either on his breath or in his desk as long as Lester was in office. Two months later two young students from Yale and Ohio Wesleyan were picked up in Bucky’s car, charged with being in possession of six cans of beer. The students and their dates were under twenty-one, and one of the girls worked as a secretary in Maddox’s office. Although Bucky’s only guilt had been to buy the beer, Maddox called a TV press conference at which he condemned anyone on his staff who drank. The Atlanta press had a field day angling in on close-ups of the Holy Bible while Maddox fumed and Bucky Redwine sat by with a wad of gum in his jaw telling the reporters: “He reminds me of the father who told his l’il boy, ‘Climb up on this ladder and jump in Daddy’s arms.’ Four times the kid jumped and four times his Daddy caught him. ‘Now go all the way to the top and jump all the way down to Daddy.’ The child hit the ground with a splat, and the Daddy said, ‘Now. Don’t trust nobody. Not even yore Daddy. That’s the first lesson in the big world.’”
It was also a lesson to the Lester watchers. He is a man of his word. Two Wednesdays a month he opens the doors to the capitol on “Little People’s Day,” sings God Bless America, his favorite song, and makes the press join in. Shortly after his appearance on Meet the Press he even backed down and appointed four Negroes to state jobs, a revolutionary act which caused one state senator to remark, “Lester don’t care how high a nigger gets as long as he don’t get close.”
Who’s afraid of Virginia Maddox? Well, just about everybody. One Atlanta hostess told me, “She never gets invited anywhere. Well, she won’t go to cocktail parties and you don’t think I’d give a sit-down dinner and serve Dr Pepper, do you?” Everyone in Atlanta still talks about her appearance in the local news on Maddox’s first official Little People’s Day. While everyone in town sat in their living rooms watching, Mrs. Maddox suddenly appeared before the cameras in the foyer of the capitol. Cotton wash dress. Hair a mess. “Are you here to participate in the governor’s Little People’s Day?” asked the newsmen, shoving mikes into her horrified face. “Naw, cain’t rightly say I am,” came the reply. “I jes’ come down here to get Lester to sign this check so I c’n go buy some groceries.”
Even with the right men hired to moderate his speeches, Lester has a hard enough time with his own public image without worrying about other members of his family. When I asked him for an interview with the First Lady, he peered over the top of his glasses, turned red as a beet, and said, “She don’t talk much.” Nevertheless, after several messages relayed to state troopers at the mansion, an appointment was made. It was Mrs. Maddox’s first interview for a major magazine. She was preparing to move into the new executive mansion, but could I drop around to the old one about noon?
I decided to drive by the new one first. Well, you should see it. Elevated on a sixteen-acre clearing on West Pace’s Ferry Road in the fashionable Buckhead residential section of Atlanta, it gleams like an alabaster castle in the white heat of a Southern summer, surrounded by magnolia and cottonwood trees, like the set of an old Jeanette MacDonald movie. Nobody tried to keep me out, so I walked right in through the swimming pool and up the stairs past shiny metallic kitchens, a bathroom of white Georgian marble with a sunken tub, lemon-yellow suites overlooking Grecian gardens, parquet and marble floors, a sauna bath, a glittering chandelier hanging fifteen feet from a cream-colored ceiling—all held together by more than thirty fluted white columns on four sides of the house. Two Atlanta housewives were busily inspecting the bookcases in the library with a measuring tape. I followed them into the grand ballroom, seventy-three feet long and thirty-nine feet wide, where five hundred can be accommodated at state dinners. “Couldn’t you just die, Loralee,” said one of them to the other, “all those beautiful dinner parties and the crystal full of buttermilk?”
The sun shifted high in a hammock of cotton-candy clouds as I pulled up the driveway of the old mansion. A couple of state troopers were leaning on straw-back chairs in the back of the house. Guns glinted bright metallic glows from their holsters. One of them drawled cautiously, squinting his eyes from the sun, “You hafta wait in yore car ’til Miz Maddox comes home. Wait a minute. That’s her drivin’ up now.” A dark blue sedan roared into view, angling in under the shade of magnolia trees tall as the Statue of Liberty. A state trooper got out of one door and a soft, primly dressed woman in a raspberry-colored dress with matching budget-shop shoes and purse stepped out of the other. She walked into the old house from the driveway without looking back, and the state trooper, measuring the distance between us with the end of his thumb, motioned me to follow.
Old floors creaked and moaned under the weight of our feet. Voices echoed through the near-empty halls. Dark, cool stillness settled around the rooms. Brief glimpses of plum-colored light seeped in from the shutters, which ran from the high ceilings to the floor. Mrs. Maddox kept walking, not turning around. The walls were pink. The rugs were pink. The ceilings were pink. Everything was dim, as though the sun had never been there. She led the way, like a sergeant on field maneuvers, to the vastness of the living room, paused near an old brocade sofa that had been upholstered to take to the new mansion, touched it gently and turned to the state trooper: “I declare I don’t think they did a durn thang to this ol’ thang.”
“No, ma’m, it don’t look like it to me neither.”
She noticed me for the first time and smiled weakly. A soft sun ray peeked through the shutters and played with her hair. I took an informal hand, soft as freshly-baked bread. Standing close to her, I smelled Johnson’s Baby Powder. “You wont Co-Cola?” she asked, and the state trooper went off to the kitchen to get it.
I asked her if she was excited about the move to the elegant new house. “Yeah, but you know that’s a awful big place for Lester’n me. We got two kids still livin’ at home, but it’s not the same. We just sold our own house. It was much nicer’n all this. We moved in here January fifteenth and you know sumpin’? I jes’ wouldn’ unpack fer two days. This durn place was so big I couldn’ even find a percolator. By the time you walk from the kitchen to the breakfast room all your food’s cold. They got me some prisoners from the state work farms, but Lester still wonts me to cook, and I jes’ cain’t cook fer all those politicians he brings aroun’ here. He don’t like anything but fried chicken.”
“Doesn’t he eat anything but chicken and collard greens?” I asked.
“Well, you know sumpin’? He used to be right finicky, but we went up yonder to Washin’ton Dee Cee, y’know, and that Lady Bird had a dinner party for all the guv’nors and Lester eat everthang they shoved in front of ’im.”
The state trooper brought our Cokes, wrapped in napkins which bore the state seal, and let himself out the side screen door. “They’re real good to me, them boys. All them doors stay locked and they don’t dare come in without callin’ up from out back first.”
She was warming up. “Where you from?” I told her I was born in the South. She got friendlier. “What magazine you say you were writin’ fer?”
“Esquire. Do you ever read it?”
“I b’lieve it’s one of them men’s magazines,” she said negatively, adding quickly, “But I believe it’s a good ’un. I mean, they don’t print any pitchers of nekkid wimmin, do they?”
She continued, “Don’cha jus’ love it down here? Lester was born and raised right here in Atlanta. His daddy was Dean G. Maddox, and he worked as a roll turner at a galvanizin’ mill right up to the time he died five or six years ago, bless his heart. I was born in Birmin’ham. My daddy was Mr. S.O. Cox. We left Alabama when I was six months old, so I don’t know a thang about it. My daddy worked for the railroad, but he quit durin’ a strike one time and opened a grocery store and never went back. I don’t have much of a head for dates, but I’ll try to help you some for your story. I married Lester when I was seventeen and he was twenty. We been married thirty-one years. My girl friend and me used to ride our bikes in front of his house. He had a li’l pigeon coop rigged up in front where he sold candy and Nu-Grape soda and evertime he saw me he’d say, ‘Virginia Cox from Birmin’ham, I’m gonna marry you.’ He only made $18 a week at a steel mill and I tol’ him, ‘Lester Maddox, you ol’ fool, you gonna hafta make at least twenty-sumpin’ ’fore I’d even consider it.’ I finally gave in. He moved his pigeon house up the street on the corner of State and Fourteenth and we expanded it to sell hot dawgs. I didn’t know a thang about makin’ hot dawgs, but I was right there beside him. We had four stools and mostly a carry-out trade—we added hamburgers and ice cream. Then in 1947, I think it was, we saw this property grown over with weeds on Hemphill Avenue. They couldn’t sell it so we got it cheap. We started a drive-in. That’s where the whole family got started. Soon as the kids could reach the counter they’d wait on curb service. We bought the best-grade meat and people took a likin’ to it. Most places buy pore meat and stuff it with bread. I was the cashier. We first started out with hot dawgs. Then we started servin’ breakfast. Then we opened at eleven and cut out the breakfast. It got to be too much trouble. We never had a vacation, but we didn’t care. Some days I made three hundred pies at a time if I was pressed for hep. We made a big bizness outta The Pickrick. Everybody in town came. We had our own special recipe—had special pans made up to fry it in. We never dropped it in deep fat. You know sumpin’?, I cain’t teach the cook how to make it right in the mansion. I’m not tellin’ you a story. He’ll put it in beaten egg and milk before he dips it in flour. My chillrun sit down and say, ‘Mama, this is not your fried chicken.’ You know sumpin’? You can make a lot more money in fried chicken than you can in this guv’nor bizness.”
I asked her if her life had changed noticeably since she had become the First Lady of Georgia. “Yessuh. It flat has. I gotta go to the beauty parlor all the time. I always did m’own hair but when I got into this politics bizness some folks sat down’n tol’ me, ‘Now you gotta dress just right or people’ll criticize you. Yessuh, they do. They crit-icize. I get letters from ’em. I said, ‘Lester, I don’t think I c’n look good all the time like they wont,’ and he says to me, ‘You jus’ gotta make a effort.’ So I try. I had me a seketerry for awhile but she had a baby and quit on me. Now I have to read all the letters myself. Now you know what he’s gonna do? He’s gonna open the new mansion up five days a week to the public. He says, ‘We only gonna be in there four years, but the public’s gonna be a-comin’ the rest of their lives,’ and I says, ‘Lester, I jus’ don’t believe I c’n handle all that. All them school kids traipsin’ in an’ out all day long. I wouldn’ mind three days so bad but five is more’n I c’n handle.’ So we got us a man we’ll pay out of our own salary to supervise things. He’s even gonna make out the menus, ’cause I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that stuff, and we cain’t feed people fried chicken all the time. You know that kitchen’s only got two stoves in it? I’d go crazy cookin’ for all them folks in there on those two stoves. ’Sides that, I still got the payroll to make out down at the furniture store.”
The Maddoxes have four children: a married daughter named Linda Densmore (twenty-nine) who helped her father as his private secretary during his campaign; a single daughter named Virginia (twenty-seven) who works as a “seketerry fer Du Pont, but you don’ wanna advertise them, they git enough publicity without us hornin’ in”; and two sons— Larry (twenty), an employee at Lockheed Aircraft in Marietta, and Lester Jr. (twenty-three ), who was arrested for burglary in December, 1965, during his father’s campaign, when police found him taking $3,000 worth of merchandise from a TV appliance store. (“I offer no apologies and seek no sympathy,” said Maddox on TV, his face turning pomegranate red. “However, if the Communists and the government of Lyndon Johnson had not destroyed my bizness, my family would have stayed together and escaped this tragedy.”) A bond was posted for Lester Jr., who was released pending a hearing, later put on probation. He now works in his father’s furniture store.
“We don’t none of us see Lester much. Only time I see him regular is at breakfast, but he’s gone pretty near ever’ night. I didn’t ever like politics, ’cause I always got left at home, but now I get to go some of the places. I been to Washin’ton Dee Cee twice. I also went to Delaware for their centennial and Lester got out of the car in the parade and started shakin’ everbody’s hand and left me alone and the people in the street jes’ laughed at me when they looked in and saw a woman inside where it said ‘Governor of Georgia,’ so I tol’ the lady drivin’ the car, ‘I believe I’ll get out and walk too, ’cause they lookin’ for him, not me.’”
She was laughing and talking now, sipping her Coke, over the soft hum of a mower out on the lawn. I asked her if she had ever tried to interfere during ol’Lester’s ax-waving incident at The Pickrick. “Nawsuh, I never interfere with anythin’ he does. A person oughta run his bizness the way he sees fit. I didn’ mess in his bizness then and I don’ now. I don’ think I been down yonder to the capitol over three times since he’s been there. He’s the guv’nor and they sure don’ wont the wife down there.”
I asked her about his ban on miniskirts. “He calls ’em long blouses. Well, I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout that till it was on the TV station. That night he came home and I had let out the hem on a long dress of mine and he didn’t even notice. ‘How do you like Mama’s new dress?’ one of my daughters asked him. ‘Well, I think it looks jes’ fine.’ I said, ‘Lester, I don’t know if you noticed or not but my ankles are showin’.’ I don’ think he even knows I got ankles. But you know sumpin’? I don’ think the capitol is the place for them thangs. They don’ even let ’em wear those in my beauty parlor. I do some of my tradin’ at Rich’s and I never saw any of the clerks dressed anythin’ but conservative. Most of the people like what Lester’s doin’ in office, includin’ the Nigras. I went down to Crawford Long Hospital to get a checkup the other day and saw this old colored man name of Ozell who used to work at The Pickrick and he says, ‘Miz Maddox, we’re real proud of the Guv’nor but he made one mistake, he hired somebody else instead of me as cook in that new mansion.’ I thought that was nice.
We had talked the day into afternoon shadows. I got up to leave and she walked me to the screen door. “I really enjoyed it,” she said. “I don’t see many folks ’cause I never know what they wont me to say. Not too many of ’em come here to the house. We had the Hubert Humphreys one morning for coffee. She’s a real nice lady. ’Course one woman always understands another. I didn’t have much to say to him though. Then my nephew from up North come down here on his way home from the Army with his room-mate. I believe he was one of them I-talians. Seemed right nice, though. I’ll be glad when this four years is up and we can get back down to normal. I tol’ Lester, ‘This is the hardest four years I’ll ever spend. This is harder work than The Pickrick.’” Hand on the screen door, gesturing out over the gardens. “You know sumpin’? We lived in one little house with one bathroom and six people for twenty years but we never did have a bit o’ trouble with that bathroom. Never did one of us wanna git in there when the other’n was usin’ it. Now we got nine bathrooms and nobody to use ’em.”
Back on the Maddox trail, ol’Lester was stealing the show from the Holstein cows at the Putnam County Dairy Festival. Riding down the main street of a little hick town called Eatonton, the home of Uncle Remus’ creator Joel Chandler Harris, he jumped over the side of his car in the parade and went into action, shaking hands, kissing babies and exchanging folksy talk. He darted into stores asking the proprietors, “How’s bizness?” “Fine, and yours?” “Never had it so good.” He leaned over white-trellised front porches to shake hands with old ladies rocking in the sunshine and grabbed an uncountable number of babies from their mothers’ arms, thrusting them into the air with glee. “This is where it all began years ago,” he told the crowd of rednecks, “this is Maddox country.”
His bald head glistening with sweat, he handed the white carnation in his lapel to a four-year-old who took it, looked at the beaming governor, threw it on the ground and yelled for his mother. Then ol’Lester told a group of young Negro schoolchildren standing in a frightened cluster on the curb, “You got to make A’s in school. That’s what we wont.” He was home.
But the air in Atlanta was filled with anything but gaiety. Maddox was being roasted in the press for the war he had recently begun on church bingo, which had been unwisely announced at the same time as a raffle at his own furniture store for a “free $299 Serta perfect sleeper set with king-size mattress.” (“Meanwhile back at the store,” cried The Atlanta Journal editorial page, “we notice that a furniture store closely identified with Mr. Maddox [so closely that it runs his picture in each ad] is, itself, having a kind of raffle like).”
On another page, a Catholic Archbishop and Maddox’s own Baptist preacher were having it out over the mini-skirts: “I do think that the rags worn in our slums are far worse than the mini-skirts allegedly worn in the statehouse,” said the Catholic. “We do not take our faith from a foreign power,” snapped the Baptist. “I don’t think he’d know a mini-skirt if he saw one,” sniffed one of the governor’s own secretaries, summing it up.
And the governor himself, promising me one last meeting, arrived at Atlanta’s WAII-TV to face a stern-looking group of political interviewers. What are you doing about the filthy conditions in our prisons? they demanded on the air.
“I invited all the wardens to lunch and conditions are being improved,” said ol’Lester, wiping his brow nervously, the sweet memory of the morning’s peaceful cheers in Maddox country fading away in the harsh reality of the afternoon’s inquisition. Only minutes after his statement, the TV newsroom received an Associated Press flash announcing a surprise raid on a state prison work camp, revealing that Negro prisoners were still being charged six cents for five-cent stamps, locked in the cafeterias and not allowed to lie on their bunks on rainy days, fed bologna, beans and water (no milk) at every meal, and allowed only one two-hour visiting privilege every two weeks. Maddox looked like he might faint.
What is your stand on gambling? asked the commentators.
“Gambling is bad. . . . It can lead young people to drinkin’ and assault and dope addiction.”
What are your plans regarding George Wallace and his third political party? They leaned forward. This is the question plaguing everyone, not only in Atlanta but in Washington. Maddox denies being close to the Wallace administration in Alabama, but it is a known fact that when The Pickrick had problems with the federal government, Wallace aided him financially, calling it “the only American thing to do.” Now, when Wallace visits Atlanta, state troopers line the capitol and liberal state politicos walk out of the General Assembly, but Lester meets George and Lurleen at the airport, even gets down on his hands and knees and straightens out the red carpet.
“I hadn’t made up my mind yet on this subject. I’m flexible. Lotta folks up yonder in Washin’ton who wanna see Georgia on their side. We are the heartbeat and the hub of the South. . . .”
The Maddox brand of press-agentry continued for half an hour, until they asked the final question: Governor, you are always doing a lot of talking about free enterprise. Just what is your definition of free enterprise?
Ol’Lester fumbled nervously, wiping the sweat off his bald head.
“Well . . . when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock they tried socialism a coupla years, then they put all their corn in one pot and nearly starved to death. They learned socialism wasn’t the best thing after all, and neither was communism. We gotta learn the same thing. It’s every man fer himself.”He left the broadcast blushing, not sure whether he had made a fool of himself or not. “Everthang pick rick?” he said to two blonde secretaries in the reception hall. “Everthang’s pick rick,” they giggled.
He motioned for me to follow him into the men’s room, where he talked to me over the top of one of the partitions. “How y’awl like Atlanta, son? Y’awl been gettin’ everthang ya need?” He washed his hands with disinfectant soap and asked if there was anything else I wanted to know.
“One thing I don’t understand,” I said. “What does the word Pickrick mean?”
“To pick means to he’p yerself, son, to choose. And rick means to heap it on. You pick it and we rick it.” I told him I had heard some good things about the restaurant while it was open. “Yes suh. You could get all the fried chicken you could eat fer a dolla. I jes’ loved that place, son. It grieves my heart not to be there.”
In Georgia, a governor cannot succeed himself. It’s four years and out. Did he have an eye on Washington when his term expired? “Naw suh. I jus’ wanted to see how fer a li’l feller could go. I wanted to see if this wuz still America.”
He walked cockily toward the glass doors of the TV station. “How you, Charlie? Haven’ seen you in a coon’s age, Luke. How’s the wife, son?” His bodyguard, hand on his holster, swung between Maddox and the rest of the room.
“Boy, I’d like to hear how he’s cussin’ us now,” said a commentator as Maddox headed down the walk.
“Son, you jus’ come on back down here fo’ years from now and you gon’ fin’ me givin’ up this here guv’nor stuff, right back in my furniture store, jus’ a pickin’ and a rickin’,” said Maddox, waving at me.
He stepped into his blue Oldsmobile parked at the curb and his driver stepped on the gas. “Ride ’em, cowboy,” howled the newsmen from behind the glass doors. But all they got in return was a “Y’awl be good now, ya heah?” and a crooked-tooth grin as the car drove away in the dusty afternoon.
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