Letter From Monticello
By Lise Funderburg
Savoy magazine
February 2001
As I drive East along Georgia's Route16, heading toward my father's hometown
of Monticello, kudzu druids loom at the highway's edge. My rental car windshield
frames tin roofs, baled hay and unpaved red clay roads. At the Piggly Wiggly
in Jackson, I bear left, cross the railroad tracks and start looking for the
Ocmulgee River, my next landmark. An Atlanta radio station plays a slow piano
concerto. Its melancholy fills the car and mixes with the air-conditioning, a
breathy, languorous soundtrack.
I have been coming to Monticello since childhood, but never for long or
on my own. Usually I travel under my father's wing, flanked by my two sisters
and carried along by the reputation of my grandfather, a country doctor
who also became a farmer (perhaps, my father speculates, because so many
patients paid with livestock). And even though my father and his four siblings
were raised in Monticello, and my grandfather (who passed in 1987) is still
considered one of the town's upstanding citizens, I feel like a stranger
here.
On this maiden solo visit, I have to lean in to understand the editor
of the town newspaper, ask my uncle to repeat himself, and count on context
and body language with my father's friend Bubba. They all lean in toward
me, too, my angled Northern speech a series of jerks and abrupt turns.
Beyond what they say, though, I often wonder what they mean. A person's
race, for example, never actually has to be mentioned to be understood.
Is it a tonal shift I can't pick up? The consequence of a shared geography
and history, common to Southern towns with populations numbering fewer
than 3,000? Say a family name (the white Bentons, Kellys, Jordans; the
black Tinsleys, Johnsons, Funderburgs) and it bespeaks generations of widely
known relationships and economies, kindnesses and cruelties, nearness and
distance all coinciding with an ease that I--from a big Northern city,
from a Civil Rights Movement childhood, and with a full set of white relatives
(starting with my mother)--can't easily translate. In Monticello, the Ku
Klux Klan is not some abstract threat. It is an uncle here, a cousin there.
As a child, I loved secret languages: But where is the decoder ring now?
I also don't fully understand--but have come in search of--what pulls
so deeply in my father, what prompted him to buy this farm after he retired
in 1985, to spend autumns on it and to sneak in weekends whenever he can
although, like me, he lives in Philadelphia. Fifty years after moving away
from his hometown, he can't spend enough time here. I'm not absolutely
certain, but my theory is that although he is one of those men who retired
with a vengeance after long years of relentless toil, working the land
is the only job he's ever truly desired--and possibly still does.
#
My father, George Funderburg, spent most of his life as a working man.
At 10, he packed peaches. Now those orchards are gone, replaced with pine
forests, cattle pastures, and, increasingly, defunct farms broken down
into five-acre tracts for new homes (which, in just the last five years,
have exceeded all the new housing construction of the last four decades).
My father's parents sent him to Atlanta at 15 for a better education than
he could get at the colored school--so second-rate that even its walls
were castoffs, built from the detritus of the demolished white high school.
During his subsequent and brief tenure as a Morehouse College student ("I
was asked to leave," he'll say now, "on invitation of the dean"),
he waited tables in a Chinese restaurant and worked a dry cleaning concession.
He went on to mop floors at his uncle's cafe in Alabama and had a short-lived
career as a poultryman during World War II. ("It was a failure," he
remembers. "I knew how to feed and water chickens, but not how to
make them grow. Also," he says, with gasping laughter rising up that
eventually will render him breathless and speechless, "people started
stealing them.") Over the next few years, he waited tables on cruise
ships sailing between Detroit and Cleveland; sold cookbooks and storm windows
door-to-door; shortened his Korean War duty by spending nine months on
the front lines; harvested tobacco in Connecticut; and finally settled
into a prosperous career in real estate, building a company now run by
his stepson. He speaks of these jobs with no ardor or nostalgia, just the
matter-of-fact reporting of a past that is gladly gone.
Not so with farming. My father, now 74, who's never had a hobby that I
know of, can study the county agent's pamphlets endlessly. He built a cattle
chute based on one such publication, and its efficiency in holding cows
for worming or tagging has prompted visits from the curious and admiring.
His childhood friend, Alfred Johnson, remembers my father calling when
he bought the farm. "Bubba," my father said, using Alfred's nickname. "Bubba," he
said, "I bought a pig in a sack." (I have to ask Bubba what that
means when he comes to visit me. "It's when you don't know what you've
just bought," he explains.)
"Your daddy loves dirt," says Larry Lynch, one of the local
people my father has befriended since his return to Monticello. Lynch,
who's white, is a lawyer, but his heart, too, is in the family farm that
he and his brother share and that he claims he'll work the rest of his
life to support. "Your dad loves farming so much, it's pitiful," Lynch
says, with the empathy of a fellow addict.
#
Seven miles after the Ocmulgee, I turn onto Fellowship Road, which borders
my father's farm. The cattle gate is closed, as it should be, and cows
loll about the northern pasture. The cows belong to the twins, Albert and
Elbert Howard, with whom my dad has struck a deal, bartering farm upkeep
for a portion of their rent. Scuppernongs and muscadines are lush and thick
with grapes, defying the summer's drought. Starting tonight, Troy Johnson,
Alfred's younger brother, will preside over three days of pick-your-own,
a strategy for putting to use fruit that would otherwise rot on the vine.
Maybe Troy will earn enough to cover his time, but expectations, as with
every venture here, are humble. After all, my father doesn't farm for profit.
The goal, and this is fairly tenuous, is to lose as little money as possible.
My father has wanted to be a farmer since he was a boy, and this 126-acre
tract of pastures, forest, and pecan grove is part homecoming, part folly
and part social justice laboratory. When he hires people to work on the
farm, every transaction is calculated for its impact on both individual
and community. The wage he pays for cleaning his fence line of trash is
intentionally higher than bag-packers earn at the new vast supermarket
just around the bend. When Dad decided to build a house, he also decided
that any party he ever held in it would be integrated, something that still
causes a stir. I don't want to shake hands with the known racists; my father
invites them to his home. He donated land he inherited in town for the
establishment of a city park but made sure the project's backers would
be white and black (even though the site is in a still-all-black section
of town--a section some white supporters have never driven through).
My father's breaking ground, but it's ground his father worked before
him. Frederick Douglas Funderburg came to Monticello in 1922, straight
out of Meharry, to take over the practice of the aging colored physician,
Dr. Turner. It was meant to be short-term; instead, Grandaddy spent his
career here, ministering to black folk throughout the county and his neighbors
up on Colored Folks' Hill. He also helped other blacks register to vote,
collected funds to build the county's first integrated hospital--its first
hospital of any sort--and treated white patients during the 1938 flu epidemic,
integrating his practice from that point on. When my grandfather took over
the Masons' building for an office, he circumvented Jim Crow by furnishing
his office waiting room with identical sets of furniture on each side,
down to the flowers in the vases. Wherever the first patient chose to sit
each morning determined the pattern for that day. Not every problem allowed
for such a passive solution. My grandmother was forbidden to shop in town,
lest she be insulted, forcing Grandaddy--a loyal and proud man--to retaliate
or to pack up and leave.
#
The more time my father spends in Monticello, the more his language changes
(or finds its way home?). Consequently, my sister Margaret and I have been
perfecting our "Honeybaby" imitation. It must be delivered with
a Southern accent, no trace of our father's 52 years in Philadelphia. The
tone is patient but edged with a slight exasperation that comes out in
a harumph. We've isolated two interactions that prompt its use. The first
is asking farming questions that are to him too obvious to imagine. Will
a cow come if called by name? "Honeybaby, maybe if it's the only cow
in the field." The second prompt is suggesting some project around
the farm that would demand his manual labor. "Honeybaby, I'm too old
to work that hard."
Indeed, my father farms primarily by phone. His hands are big but soft, not like Bubba's. Bubba, now 79, stayed in Monticello and married his high school sweetheart, a beautiful and sharp-minded woman named Bertha Kate. For the first few years of the farm, before Bubba's health declined some, he was the overseer--something that, in their day, black men never were and something Dad had painted on the sign at the farm's entrance. Alfred Johnson, Overseer. Dad would call Bubba from Philadelphia with some idea--building a pond or baling hay--and ask Bubba to implement it, setting up a bank account so he could be the one to write checks when the work was done. "We had a good time," Bubba says to me now from across the farmhouse's kitchen table. "A good time." I understand what he's saying. I understand, and it fills and it breaks my heart.