Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Diane McWhorter: Taking Pictures from the Inside

Diane McWhorter TAKING PICTURES FROM THE INSIDE From Birmingham to Monroeville, I visited with Diane McWhorter over the course of a remarkable year in her life: the publication and acclaim of Carry Me Home, recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. The first part begins a few days before her book was praised on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and the second, more than a year later, becomes an Alabama afternoon in Harper Lee’s hometown. Birmingham O n a chill dusk in her hometown, Diane McWhorter is driving through quiet downtown streets, taking a visitor on what she calls, “my civil rights tour.” By the site of the former Trailways Bus Station where freedom riders long ago rolled into an angry community, by the Gaston Motel , where protesters stayed in the spring of 1963, she drives toward a corner where a stately, brown-brick building, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, looms in the dwindling light. “Right over there,” she says, pointing to the right side of the church and speaking of September 15, 1963, “is where the bomb blew up.” That bomb took the lives of four children and has long been at the heart of a mystery for McWhorter. “It blew the clothes off the Sunday school girls and stacked them up like cordwood under a blizzard of debris,” she writes. While the identities of the bombers became known, their motivation—and 54 THE TELLERS the web of events that led to Birmingham’s violent summer of 1963—has been shadowy. “I wanted to figure out not just who they were, but why they were,” she says. The answers to those questions can be found in McWhorter’s richly personal and incisively historical book. The 700-page work—Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Movement— took her on an emotional roller coaster during the nineteen years it took to complete and to grow to 3,400 pages in manuscript form. “I left 2,400 pages on the cutting-room floor,” she says. The remainder presents a portrait of her hometown that wins praise and empathy from some and draws anger from others. “What she has done is a remarkable synthesis of personal history with the city’s history,” says journalist and Birmingham native Allen Barra. Diane McWhorter sits in the upstairs gallery of the old County Courthouse in Monroeville , Alabama. McWhorter’s book Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2002. Photo by G. M. Andrews, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. DIANE MCWHORTER 55 “You carry a scar if you’re from Birmingham,” says native son Paul Hemphill , author of the memoir, Leaving Birmingham. Hemphill says that when people hear he’s from Birmingham “they go to the ‘Birmingham file’ of attack dogs and fire hoses. It’s like looking at a bad wreck.” In Carry Me Home, McWhorter, once again, returns to the scene of that “wreck.” Finishing her drive through downtown as night falls, she heads to the rolling lawns and sumptuous homes of a very different part of town—the place where she began her own journey forty-eight years ago. Until she was well into her 20s, McWhorter, who now has two young daughters and lives in New York City, had never been in some of the black neighborhoods of downtown Birmingham. Only 10 years old at the time of the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, she was a child “of privilege,” she says, growing up in the luxurious world of Birmingham’s Mountain Brook community. Her youth was spent at the country club, the Mountain Brook, and she writes of its members: “Theirs was a snobbery so exquisite that an evening over at the Birmingham Country Club—‘that roadhouse,’ my uncle sneered charmingly—was considered slumming. For us children, the privilege of belonging meant that you knew which of your friends didn’t.” In high school, she was active in sports and social clubs. She was president of her high school sorority. After going north to Wellesley College, she devoted herself to magazine journalism, becoming managing editor in her 20s of Boston Magazine. At 29, McWhorter, by then a rising star in the literary field, secured a book contract to write about her hometown during the civil rights era and was on her way. Little did she know, though...