Light On Dark Water

The Green Greene Book

It isn't often that I run across something that makes me think "Everybody should read this." But this is one of them.

The book referred to is The Negro Motorist Green Book, compiled and marketed annually from 1936 to 1964  by Victor H. Greene. It was a guide for black people traveling in the U.S. It "listed all the restaurants, filling stations, museums, hotels, guest homes, grocery stores and establishments that readers would feel safe being Black in." 

This piece, by a writer whose name I don't recall having seen before, Carvell Wallace, discusses the book and its significance to black Americans, which would be interesting enough, but then he goes on to reflect on the way in which the people and places mentioned in the guide have vanished, and on the place of place in American life in general. His search for one address in particular, which now denotes only an undefined space below a freeway overpass in Oakland, California, leads to penetrating observations about the country and its culture. It is a really, really fine piece of writing. Click here to read it. It's rather long for online reading, but very much worth it.

Thanks to Janet for pointing this out to me.

 

Maclin Horton
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56 responses to “The Green Greene Book”

  1. Janet

    Just ran across it, eh?
    AMDG

    Reply
  2. Janet

    I would really love to see a copy of this, and I bet that there are probably quite a few around in used bookstores and people’s attics. It just wasn’t that long ago.
    It looks like so many books that were in our house when I was growing up. Aside from the many things in the article that are great, just looking at that page brought back so many memories, or at least that feeling of being immersed in memories.
    AMDG

    Reply
  3. Mac

    Heh. Had a feeling you might complain about that, Janet. Sorry, I meant to give you credit, just forgot. I’ve updated the post now.
    Yeah, I could spend a lot of time immersed in periodicals etc. from roughly 1930-70.

    Reply
  4. Janet

    I’m trying to figure out why that even mattered. These days I’m blaming everything on having to think in Spanish.
    AMDG

    Reply
  5. Grumpy

    Plan to read this surreptitiously on my phone while my sister is driving on Tuesday.

    Reply
  6. Grumpy

    Moving out on Monday, drivin to the Mid West Tuesday

    Reply
  7. Janet

    Congratulations.
    AMDG

    Reply
  8. Mac

    Yep, congratulations. Hope the move goes reasonably smoothly. Seems presumptious to ask for more where moving is concerned.

    Reply
  9. Rob G

    Thanks, Mac. That is indeed an excellent piece.

    Reply
  10. Art Deco

    Some aspects of this article are engaging, but the man does irritate. Consider his assessment:
    Victor H. Greene made a book designed to help Black people know where they could stay. Because he knew Black people could not stay.
    This makes no sense whatsoever.
    That and the small stupidities. Trayvon Martin’s wasn’t a ‘death by racism’. It was a death by misadventure – that which arrives when you elect to practice your MMA moves on the neighborhood watch captain and discover (too late for you) that he had a gun. The author’s averse to the Plains states because he’s addled by the idea that some Stormfront type will kill him (NB, about 16 people have been murdered by klavern members since 1953, and all but a couple in one of 3 Southern states; not exactly a quotidien occurrence in Kansas). He thinks the purpose of drug laws is to incarcerate blacks because racism (NB, about 80% of those in prison are there for violent crimes or property crimes; half the remainder are not black).
    Interestingly, a White Pages search for this man turns up only a couple of matches, the salient one a fellow in Alameda, California (a quite ordinary burgh with a modest black population) who was born around 1975. The woman he identifies as his mother would have been 48 years old in 1975. He identifies the two of them as having been ‘homeless’ during his early childhood. Red flag.

    Reply
  11. Mac

    You’re welcome. Thinking about it more, I’m struck by the opening anecdote where he’s fearful of stopping the car in mostly-white Nebraska, or wherever it was. Understandable, though the fear is much greater than the actual risk. But it ought to help him understand the fear on the other side. A white person in many all-black areas would be objectively at greater risk. I don’t mean this as an exercise in “yeah your side is just as bad,” but as something required for understanding.

    Reply
  12. Mac

    Cross-posted with Art. “You’re welcome” was to Rob’s “thank you.”
    Yes, some of those specifics like the mention of Trayvon Martin don’t really signify what he thinks they do. But the overall gist is reasonable enough, if limited.

    Reply
  13. Janet

    Maclin wrote Carvell Williams. Try Carvell Wallace. He’s not that hard to find.
    I didn’t notice the mistake before.
    Yes, I think the perception is greater than the fact, but there’s not doubt people really feel that way.
    AMDG

    Reply
  14. Mac

    Thanks, Janet. Corrected. Also noticed that the second link was not a link–fixed that too.
    “I think the perception is greater than the fact, but there’s not doubt people really feel that way.”
    Yes, and on both sides.

    Reply
  15. Art Deco

    Try Carvell Wallace
    That’s who I searched for. There’s another fellow in Connecticut who is 47. A woman of 80 in 2007 would have been 42 in 1969, which is elderly for young mother, but not a demographic / obstetric phenomenon.
    White Pages is certainly not comprehensive or completely accurate. It did, however, turn up a fellow near Oakland as one of its top returns. Ancestry.com has a database called ‘U.S. Public Record Index’. It lists a Carvell O. Wallace who has lived in Brooklyn, Washington, and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Sounds like this fellow. U.S. Public Records Index offers a date of birth of 21 October 1974.

    Reply
  16. Mac

    When I search for Carvell Wallace I get pages of hits which mostly refer to this writer. Where do you get 80 for his mother’s age? I didn’t remember him mentioning her exact age, but searching that piece for both “80” and “eighty” I don’t see any reference to either as his mother’s age. I think you’re barking up the wrong tree in insinuating some kind of fraud.

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  17. Art Deco

    Understandable, though the fear is much greater than the actual risk.
    That’s one way of putting it. The annual homicide rate in small towns and rural areas in New York averages to about 1.14 per 100,000. That in central Rochester averages to 35 per 100,000. The man is addled by the thought of whites killing blacks, something which is not common (an ordinary-sized metropolitan region might have one such homicide in an average year) and has not been at any time in his lifetime.

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  18. Marianne

    He has a website: http://www.carvellwallace.com/

    Reply
  19. Paul

    Not quite the same, but a series of copies can be consulted online. (This struck me rather.)

    Reply
  20. Paul

    Sorry, this is the link for the series.

    Reply
  21. Janet

    I don’t see where you see that his mother was 80.
    AMDG

    Reply
  22. Janet

    Oh, I see Maclin already said that.
    AMDG

    Reply
  23. Paul

    Turns out the publisher is Victor H. Green (not Greene).

    Reply
  24. Paul

    Which isn’t to say he wasn’t called Greene but traded as Green (for example), but using “Greene” as a search term just slowed things down.

    Reply
  25. Mac

    I wonder if “Greene” is a mistake on Wallace’s part. What is it about that one section that strikes you particularly?

    Reply
  26. Art Deco

    I don’t see where you see that his mother was 80.
    You’re right. They’re on Highway 80.

    Reply
  27. Art Deco

    If I’m to take his biographical sketch at face value, he was a social worker of sorts for 15 years but now works for a small commercial company (whose line of business he does not specify). As for his writing, he appears to have one subject – American blackness – on which he meditates. There’s a picture of his mother on his site that must have been taken ca. 1980. My guess would be she was born around 1950, but it’s hard to tell black women’s ages; could be earlier, could be later.

    Reply
  28. Peter

    I’ve heard that when Jewish people from New York drove down to Florida in the pre-Interstate days they weren’t always welcome at some motels in the Carolinas and Georgia.

    Reply
  29. Mac

    I can believe that happened a few times, but I’m very doubtful that it was typical. KKK rhetoric notwithstanding, I think southern anti-semitism was overestimated. Wildly over-estimated in some instances of which I have knowledge, like the Jewish women in New York who were entirely convinced that their lives would be in danger if they set foot in Alabama. Anti-semitism was sort of theoretical–demagogues could use it, along with assorted other hostilities (regional etc.), to whip up the yahoos but there wasn’t much of the sense of threat or actual grievance that drives serious bigotry. Lots of little southern towns, like the one where I went to high school, had a few Jewish families who were well-respected.

    Reply
  30. Paul

    Mostly the correspondent from Dickinson, North Dakota, writing: several places of business, while they are glad to provide for Negro customers, do not care to advertise for Negro trade. The attitude of a majority of those I contacted was that, while they themselves had no color prejudice, some of their regular customers did have. … There are so few Negroes living in North Dakota that a colored person is still a curiosity. Some of the prejudice here is merely unfamiliarity with any of the race. It is a general thing, and not specific. When talking about Negroes abstractly, they feel differently than if a colored person, in person, asks them for services.

    Reply
  31. Mac

    Thought that might be it. Yeah, that’s pretty sad.

    Reply
  32. Art Deco

    I’ve heard that when Jewish people from New York drove down to Florida in the pre-Interstate days they weren’t always welcome at some motels in the Carolinas and Georgia.
    I believe ‘restricted’ commerical accommodations were characteristic of venues where there were large populations passing through of both of affluent Jews and affluent old stock Americans. It’s hard to say though, because it’s something you know only from folklore or mass entertainment. The ‘restricted’ hotel in Gentlemen’s Agreement was a fancy place. Private clubs tended to have one sort of clientele or the other (not an issue for any but those affluent enough to pay the initiation fees and the dues); that’s still true to a great degree.
    The Southern anti-semitism in my family (2d degree relations) was manifest in what used to be called the ‘5 O’Clock Shadow’. Jews were people you had to do business with, not people you had into your home. The thing is, the relation in question was a lawyer who’d spent his adult life in New York (a very jarring experience) and Washington (a more congenial one). Had he been in some other line of work or practiced with his father back in Tennessee, he might have had a different take on things.
    Also, I think people forget that Jews used to have more distinct tastes and sensibilities and Jews and bluebloods similarly situated could and did have quite different manners. It was said of Lionel Trilling and J. Robert Oppenheimer that they spent their life playing against type. I could tell you small stories from Rochester in the 1970s which would demonstrate some of the properties of that difference in manners.

    Reply
  33. Art Deco

    Lots of little southern towns, like the one where I went to high school, had a few Jewish families who were well-respected.
    Dinah Shore and her family in Tennessee. Tony Randall (ne Arnold Rosenberg) spent most of his formative years in Tulsa, Okla.

    Reply
  34. Art Deco

    I think southern anti-semitism was overestimated.
    My mother would second your opinion. She said there were too few Jews to matter to people in the South of that era.

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  35. Art Deco

    like the Jewish women in New York who were entirely convinced that their lives would be in danger if they set foot in Alabama.
    Matthew Yglesias admitted some years ago that he was taught as a child (by his grandmother) that WASPs did not love their children, manifest in their use of boarding schools. Matthew Yglesias was born in 1980, so you figure his grandmother was born ca. 1920. He did not say if he pointed out to her that < 1% of the population of youth are enrolled in boarding schools.

    Reply
  36. Mac

    I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the same observation made by the French, or some continentals anyway, about the English.
    What’s maddening about the anti-Southern prejudice I mentioned–it’s a whole little anecdote–is that they absolutely did not see that it was a prejudice, and absolutely could not consider the possibility that they could be wrong.

    Reply
  37. Mac

    “Jews used to have more distinct tastes and sensibilities and Jews and bluebloods similarly situated could and did have quite different manners.”
    I wasn’t aware till many years later that the mother of one of my high school friends was Jewish. She was just like all the other middle-class southern ladies as far as voice, manners, etc. were concerned.

    Reply
  38. Art Deco

    Yes, but I’m from New York, so you did notice that conversations had a different rhythm. I’m speaking of the cohorts born from approx 1925 to 1942. With the older generation, it was more pronounced. My mother was a classical music aficionado and had season tickets to the Philharmonic. She told us, ca. 1975, that Jewish women were easy to spot in the Eastman theatre because their sense of style was quite distinct (and, it had been explained to her by an older Jewish friend, incorporated certain practical considerations).

    Reply
  39. Mac

    I wasn’t disagreeing, just observing that the small-southern-town Jews we’re discussing did not have such noticeable differences. Or at least not such that were noticeable to a teenager. Roughly same generation, born in the ’20s.
    Of course if you had dropped a Woody Allen type into Athens, Alabama then (or for that matter now), he would have stuck out like…well, Woody Allen. I’m thinking of that bit in Annie Hall where he visits her parents.

    Reply
  40. Art Deco

    No Woody Allen types in Ra cha cha.
    You can see here that in 1948
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfW9-0EzYxA
    Dinah Shore had a residual Southern quality in her singing voice that she later lost (while retaining it in her speaking voice).
    Interesting contrast to Rosemary Clooney
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIOLUXgiTTc
    Who from age 20 until her death never had a trace of a Southern accent in her singing voice. You can see by age 27, she had none in her speaking voice either
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEXL3d1RKBk

    Reply
  41. Janet

    When I was growing up in Memphis, my grandfather owned a business with a man who was Jewish, and I spent some time occasionally with a Jewish man who worked for my dad and his wife. I never noticed anything particularly different about them, but looking back I can see that they were obviously Jewish. They were definitely Southern, though.
    Then when I was in my mid-20s, I worked for a company where most of the people were Jews from NYC. There was a very definite difference there, but I can’t imagine any of them being afraid of, or backing down for anybody.
    Actually, the women reminded me a bit of my husband’s NY Italian aunts.
    AMDG

    Reply
  42. Janet

    But like Maclin said, I don’t remember anybody ever making any kind of a big deal about Jews when I was growing up, and we lived fairly close to a synagogue. Of course, we weren’t in a rural area.
    AMDG

    Reply
  43. Mac

    Where there were would have been zero Jews.:-) As we were saying early, anti-Semitism in that milieu was sort of theoretical, as most people had never met one. Kind of a box to check on the KKK enemies list.
    Have to watch those videos later, Art.

    Reply
  44. Stu

    I grew up in an area of Miami that was half Jewish and half Gentile, so it’s fun to read all this. Blacks and Latinos were the definite minorities with of course the former looked down on moreso than the latter. The Haitians were of course the bottom tier as the newest immigrants speaking a language no one else understood.

    Reply
  45. Stu

    Now that I’ve spent an equal amount of time away from Miami the most striking thing to me about the place at that time in the 70s and 80s is how for the most part all of these groups tried to live apart from each other. In different neighborhoods, that is.

    Reply
  46. Stu

    Everywhere else I have lived economics seems to be the sole indicator of neighborhood. Language, of course, is the primary directing force here. But the Jews, Blacks, and Gentiles most likely all spoke only English. Only elderly European Jews were likely to speak Yiddish, or other.

    Reply
  47. Mac

    That pattern of separate neighborhoods was pretty the way it was in a lot of places in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, etc. That also made the Catholic parishes Irish, Italian, etc.

    Reply
  48. Mac

    This reminded me that I hadn’t looked at the videos Art posted. Interesting clips but . Clooney’s voice sounds a bit forced, like maybe she was still working at getting rid of the southern.

    Reply
  49. Art Deco

    Now that I’ve spent an equal amount of time away from Miami the most striking thing to me about the place at that time in the 70s and 80s is how for the most part all of these groups tried to live apart from each other. In different neighborhoods, that is.
    Urban geographers and applied mathematicians have addressed this issue. It requires little effort. Mild preferences over whom you would prefer to have as a neighbor generate this social geography after a few iterations.

    Reply
  50. Art Deco

    Clooney’s voice sounds a bit forced, like maybe she was still working at getting rid of the southern.
    I was surprised to find this recording on Youtube. She wasn’t well known prior to 1951. Her signature song – which she was so reluctant to record that her manager at Columbia Records had to tell her she could record the song or she didn’t work there anymore – was sung with a put-on accent which sounds Italian.
    She was a Kentucky partisan to the end and was buried in her hometown. I didn’t realize she grew up in towns smack on the Ohio River 40-60 miles outside of Cincinnati (and lived in Cincy as well). This map of American dialects
    http://aschmann.net/AmEng/
    Says that’s where the Southern accent gives way to the generic midwestern accent. I’m wondering if she and her sister never sounded all that Southern to begin with.

    Reply
  51. Mac

    I wondered that, too. I remember on a trip to Cincinnati stopping in a McDonald’s in Kentucky not far from the Ohio line and noticing that I was hearing more midwestern accents than I had expected.

    Reply
  52. Janet

    My daughter is married to a man from Louisville and she lives there. My impression is that there is no Southern accent there at all. It’s all midwestern.
    I would think that it’s just natural to want to live around people who are like you. It’s not a repudiation of other cultures, but an extension of the relaxation in your own home where you know, usually, how people are going to behave, and what they expect from you.
    AMDG

    Reply
  53. Art Deco

    My daughter is married to a man from Louisville and she lives there. My impression is that there is no Southern accent there at all. It’s all midwestern.
    I have some shirt-tail relations (all born between 1976 and 1989) who’ve never lived outside the South or never lived outside the South until they were 23 years old or thereabouts. Not one has a proper accent. One of them grew up in Mobile, by the way. Among the previous generation, it’s a 50-50 split. Those who stayed down South kept their accent and those who moved up north lost it. Several of the grandparents had intense twangs. Rosemary Clooney was a contemporary of the grandparents.

    Reply
  54. Art Deco

    Louisville not my town. I seem to recall seeing a brief documentary on the Bingham family who owned the Courier-Journal. The parents had noticeable Southern accents; their children were a split. The children were born ca. 1940.

    Reply
  55. Mac

    My children all grew up in the south, and two still live there. None have southern accents, which I find rather sad. At most they have a trace of it.

    Reply
  56. Art Deco

    I’ve visited East Tennessee recently (not to visit family. My cousins there are indubitably numerous but quite distant). The accent is much more common there than up the road in the Shenandoah Valley.
    Now that you mention it, I do have one shirt-tail of a shirt-tail born in 1979 who has a drawl.
    I’m told by one of my shirt-tails that her maternal side relations have proper accents. Her thesis is that the loss of the accent is a bourgeois thing and that working people keep it. It did occur to me that when and where I grew up, to sound local was somewhat downmarket. My siblings and I were a 50-50 split: two have generic accents and two sounded local.

    Reply

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