In the late spring or early summer of 1967, I had dropped out of art school at Auburn University, gone to New York City, and ended up at an inter-media school in Woodstock, New York called Group Two One Two. This was a somewhat free-form school based roughly on the principles of Black Mountain College. I was attending a poetry workshop there conducted by Joel Oppenheimer and one day he asked me where I was from. I told him Scottsboro, Alabama. He repeated the name, Scottsboro. Do you know a fellow named Thomas Weatherly? Hes about your age. Hes in my poetry workshop at St. Marks in the Bowery. I think he told me he is from Scottsboro.... No, I replied, I dont think I ever met him. The summer passed, and then the fall, and the school was over until the next spring. As everyone was saying their good-byes and preparing to go their separate ways, Joel issued an invitation to everyone to come look him up at The Lions Head Tavern back in New York City. In the city one night after I had finished eating dinner with my friend, the painter Donald Cole, at a restaurant somewhere in Little Italy, we walked out to the street, discussing how to spend the rest of the evening. Suddenly, Don said, I know what we can do! Why dont we try to find Joel Oppenheimer? Where was it he said to look him up? The Lions Head on Christopher Street, I recalled. We agreed it would be a dandy thing to do, and we wandered around seemingly every crooked street in Greenwich Village until we spotted the sign over the door — and the steps going down — to the half-subterranean tavern with dimly glowing windows. Inside, the barroom was comfortably full of people, but not too crowded, and we quickly spotted Joel holding court at the bar. He welcomed us, and after a few minutes of reunion celebration and his congratulating us for finding the place, he turned to me and asked again, Say, didnt you tell me you are from Scottsboro, Alabama, and that you dont know Tom Weatherly? Yeah, thats right. I dont think I do, I answered. Oppenheimer turned his head, flagged a waitress and asked her, Is Tom here tonight? She said, Yes, I think hes in the kitchen. To which Joel replied, Tell him to come out here for a minute. She hurried through the doorway and disappeared. A few moments later, the kitchen door swung open, and a tall young black man walked over to where we were standing. Joel Oppenheimer looked at us and said, “You two fellows have a lot in common.” And he proceeded to introduce two Scottsboro Boys to each other, a thousand miles away from their own hometown! It was a moment that was forever crystalized in our consciousness, and one we would revisit often in conversations for years to come. We both knew instantly why we had never met. It was no mystery. During our youth, we had attended school in the segregated South. The schools started integrating the year after I graduated from the whites-only Scottsboro High, and long after Thomas had attended the the blacks-only George Washington Carver School, where his father was the principal. Because of that imposed separation of the races, it was unlikely that Tom and I would ever cross paths in Scottsboro. We lived on opposite — “color coded” — sides of town. In fact, I didnt live in town at all, but three miles out in what was then the country. My father owned a construction company with which he did anything that was humanly possible with his small collection of heavy equipment, and he did it better than anybody else alive. That night at the Lions Head, Tom invited Don Cole and me to come up to his apartment to show us some of his poetry. I dont remember how we got there, but for the rest of the night, Tom read his poetry and talked about his life and his family back in Scottsboro. After that night, I didnt stay much longer in New York. By December, I had run out of reasons for being there, and I decided to finish my BFA at Auburn. After completing my degree, I began teaching art at the junior college near Scottsboro in 1972, the year after my father died. I went to Atlanta to attend graduate school at Georgia State for an MFA that was mandatory to keep the job. After I got the MFA, however, I decided to stay in Atlanta. That night at the Lion’s Head was the last time I heard from Thomas Weatherly until sometime after I returned from Atlanta to our old hometown in 1996 to be the caregiver for my 90-year-old mother, who had had fallen and broken her hip. The hip-replacement surgery was successful, and she lived eight more years. One evening, not long after Id returned home,the telephone rang. It was Tom Weatherly. Tom had obtained my phone number from Steve Seaberg, a mutual friend in Atlanta. We talked for quite a while that night, catching up with each other’s lives, but I needed to end the conversation to help my mother. It was only the first of many more such phone calls, sometimes two or three a month during the next 17 years. Several years after that first phone call, Tom returned to Alabama to be the caregiver for his own mother, as I had for mine. So our experiences paralleled again, and the calls and conversations became more frequent. The last one was a week before he died. We talked about nearly everything. Politics and racial issues were usually at the top of Toms favorite list of subjects. Religion was up there too. I said something about this the last time we talked, and he told me he did this because he was trying to understand these things better, and our conversations helped him do it. He said, “I can talk with you about these things, because youre honest with me about them.” Another recurring theme was his family. He honored and greatly respected his parents, his fathers wisdom, intelligence, and importance in the city. He was proud of his antecedents, especially his grandmother, Mary Hunter, also a school principal, for whom a street and public housing project in Scottsboro are named. And he often spoke lovingly of his children and grandchildren and sent me pictures of them. Conversations with Thomas were hard to end, because he was interested in so many things. One topic would often segué into another, and another, and another until, after talking for more than a couple of hours, I just couldnt deal with any more, and Id have to admit that to him. His interests were not just eclectic---I think they were comprehensive. He once told me that he read the entire Comptons Encyclopedia when he was eight years old! Tom Weatherly was his own Google. We often argued, but usually I was more interested in Toms special insight than I was in defending my own point of view. I knew I wasnt going to learn anything by doing the talking. One other thing we frequently talked about was our first meeting that night at the Lions Head, when Joel Oppenheimer introduced us. I had often thought about our first meeting in the years following, but Tom shed new light on it for me by sharing his own reactions as well as related details. He especially resented the delight Oppenheimer had seemed to take later on in rubbing-in the circumstances that had kept us from meeting before we got to New York. While he resented those circumstances himself, he was frustrated by the lack of understanding of the whole of Southern culture by outsiders who imposed their generalizations on it. But now there wont be any more conversations. I immediately started missing him when I first heard the news of his death. I had a crazy urge to call him and ask him all about it. And ever since I started writing this, I wished I could call him to confirm details, read what I had written, and ask for his feedback. His time might have run out, but Thomas never did. We still had a lot more to talk about. I still had a lot more I wanted to ask him, and he still had a lot more to say to me and to us all. Clyde Broadway, July 20, 2014.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 14:43:28 +0000
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