My Vanishing Country Read online

  Dedication

  For Ellen, Kai, Stokely, and Sadie

  Epigraph

  God of our weary years

  God of our silent tears

  Thou who has brought us thus far on the way

  Thou who has by thy might

  Led us into the light

  Keep us forever in the path, we pray

  —“Lift Every Voice and Sing,”

  J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Black, Country, and Proud

  I: The Wounds Have Not Healed: “Don’t Be a Dead Hero”

  II: Black and Forgotten

  III: School Daze: The Making of a Morehouse Man

  IV: The Making of a Politician, Part 1

  V: The Making of a Politician, Part 2

  VI: Dreaming with My Eyes Open: Becoming a Leader

  VII: Risk Taking

  VIII: Anxiety: A Black Man’s Superpower

  IX: A Voice for the Voiceless

  X: Why Are the Strongest Women in the World Dying?

  XI: Why 2016 Happened and the Power of Rhetoric

  Afterword: Their Eyes Are Watching

  Dear Donor Family

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Black, Country, and Proud

  I’m from what’s called the Low Country in South Carolina, where beauty and blight and history are intertwined. You can drive for fifty miles in any direction and still be on the same grounds where slaves, some of them my not-so-distant ancestors, toiled over cotton, indigo, sugarcane, rice, wheatgrass, and soybeans. Particularly, my hometown is Denmark, South Carolina—a place where everybody knew my last name, a name, I would learn as a child, that was colored with honor and infamy.

  To get to Denmark, which is in Bamberg County, just drive down Highway 321 if you’re coming from Columbia, the state capital. You’ll pass fields of corn and cotton and flash by acres of swampland creeping over neon-green beds of marsh.

  You’ll eventually seem to arrive halfway around the globe in a little slice of “Scandinavia,” where towns dubbed Norway, Sweden, and finally Denmark appear one after another. The first two are so teeny, you’ll miss them if you blink. Before them, you’ll tick past a chicken farm that always smells of pure shit before you eventually get to Denmark, a community of thirty-four hundred souls, nearly all African American.

  Visitors often think that the “Scandinavian” towns, which are nine miles apart from each other, are so called because of Nordic settlers, but that’s not so. The monikers actually followed that theme only when my hometown was named after B. A. Denmark, a nineteenth-century railroad businessman.

  I always liked to imagine my own alternative theory: that my town was tagged after a badass freed and literate African-American carpenter named Denmark Vesey, who was convicted and executed for leading “the rising,” a deftly plotted slave revolt in 1822. Vesey’s sense of justice and his rebellious nature have always appealed to me.

  Continuing through those isolated hamlets, you’ll pass graceful Victorians and dilapidated shotgun houses. They say a bullet can fly from the front door straight through the back door of these narrow dwellings, which is how we once believed the shotguns got their names. But a growing theory is that the name of these skinny homes, which are no more than twelve feet wide, comes from a style of house in West Africa called shogun, which means God’s house. The shotguns play a huge role in southern history and African-American folklore in the deep parts of the South, as do the abandoned buildings that make up the dying downtowns.

  To me, there’s a rustic beauty to ghost towns, with their ramshackle clues of a fruitful past. The empty downtowns conjure feelings of nostalgia and sorrow simultaneously: in Denmark, I can drive up to a gas station and see a man from childhood standing outside, and I realize that same man has been standing around there for twenty-some years.

  Denmark is an intriguing country town, especially when you consider what it has to offer, or all it used to be. It’s about an hour from Augusta, Charleston, and Columbia, and thanks to old B. A., it was once a transportation hub, with trains from three large train companies coming and going. Once bustling, Denmark’s downtown today is the perfect example of what’s happening in the forgotten rural Black Belt, a term once used to label a section of the country known for its dark, rich soil. Now, however, it describes a chain of connecting states known as the nation’s largest contiguous thread of poverty.

  Most of the businesses that were open in Denmark in my father’s day are now shuttered. A Laundromat is still open, as well as Poole’s Five and Dime, a few restaurants, and a hardware store—but that’s nearly it. The entire area no longer has a hospital. Whether it’s Denmark or somewhere else in Alabama or Mississippi, if you had driven through forty years ago, it would have been pulsing with energy and black life. The train tracks traveled north, south, east, and west, heading to Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, and Los Angeles. At one time, Denmark had a pickle factory, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and a furniture manufacturing company. The town was packed with people of all trades—bricklayers, technicians, construction workers, bakers, painters, and cooks—as well as black businesses of every kind, which is why you had some wealth in a place that’s 85 percent black.

  Despite today’s extreme poverty in my hometown, significant numbers of educated black people have always lived in Denmark, especially since two historically black colleges are located there: Denmark Technical College and Voorhees College, where my father was president. All these things were going for it, but when the tracks got pulled up, politics blew in. People talk about corporations coming in and destroying towns, but I believe that South Carolina was devastated by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The textile mills started closing their doors and moving overseas, people started leaving, and with them, all the jobs vanished.

  * * *

  In 1990, when I was six years old, my father moved our family from Greensboro, North Carolina, back to his hometown of Denmark, from which he had fled more than twenty years earlier. He was the city’s prodigal son coming home. If I had been older, our move to this black, rural outpost would have given me pause, but the very thing I should have been wary about is the thing my six-year-old self loved most: everybody knew our name.

  In South Carolina, black folk don’t ask each other’s last name; we ask about kin. And, of course, there are many versions of this custom, depending on where you’re from. For instance, African Americans in the state’s Upcountry might say, “What’s your people’s name?” In Denmark, it’s “Who’s your people?” It’s a very direct question to determine who’s someone’s mother and father and any other relative one might need to know. It helps us to determine whether we’re blood and possibly even more. It reveals our lineage and background.

  The custom can easily be traced back to slavery. Slaves were separated from their loved ones and stripped of everything they held dear. So now, we’re left always searching for a kindred spirit, grasping for home, which is why we call each other “cousin” or “uncle” or “aunt” or “sis,” even when we’re not blood-related.

  As a reluctant little boy moving to a new town, I quickly realized Denmark wasn’t unfamiliar territory. Everywhere I turned, someone, child or adult, was telling me, “We’re your kin,” or “You Bakari . . . Cleveland Sellers’ boy!,” or “You Little CL,” or “I knew your granddaddy!”

  Denmark was where my roots were planted.

  It’s home.

  * * *

 
Driving through Denmark’s desolate downtown is like looking into a loved one’s eyes and no longer seeing a twinkle. The light has dimmed. What once was a sparkle, is no longer.

  Denmark is a microcosm of the forgotten black South, where isolation, lack of economic development, and substandard housing and school systems have devastated it to its core. What I’ve seen all my life in Denmark helped me to cultivate my political belief that small businesses are the lifeblood of all communities. Whether you look back at Tulsa’s wealthy “Black Wall Street” of the early twentieth century or the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Sellers family in Denmark circa 1950s and 1960s, black people and black power always meant being able to have economic self-sustainability and access to the ballot box.

  However, you can see in poor black towns today that international industry and a globalized economy have left most of us behind. Denmark is now a place where no one can take for granted things such as clean water, a simple Wi-Fi connection, and a local hospital.

  A Country Boy’s Wonderful Life

  By the time my family arrived in Denmark, my father had already received a graduate degree from Harvard University. Unfortunately, a prison record kept him from getting jobs he deserved.

  Back in Greensboro, we had lived a strange existence, sometimes eating government food but also sometimes employing a maid. My parents struggled financially but wanted their children to live their best lives. For instance, my father has always been a staunch supporter of historically black colleges. Although he couldn’t afford it, he’d take us to the colorful and famous North Carolina A&T football games, known for their marching bands and drumline. My sister tells the story of Daddy allowing us to walk onto the field with the marching band. Who’d suspect such adorable little kids were up to no good? Then we’d scamper into the stands where he had told us to meet him. It was a brilliant scheme and saved my father lots of money he didn’t have; it also allowed us to have the time of our lives. We sat in the best seats, moving only when someone told us to get up from their spots, and then we’d just scoot over to some nearby empty ones. Our family made do, and me and my brother and sister rolled with it. When the electrical company shut our lights off, we just thought it was game night because we always played Monopoly in candlelight.

  In 1990, my grandmother had just died of breast cancer in Denmark, and my grandfather had died a year earlier from pancreatic cancer. So we moved back to South Carolina into their home, a small ranch-sized house where my father had been raised. The bedrooms were lined up behind each other. First was my parents’ room, which was connected to a door that led to my bedroom, and in my room was a door that opened into my older brother’s room. My grandparents, who both had been quite ill before their deaths, didn’t sleep together, which meant me and my brother were not only in their beds, but we were basically sleeping on their mattresses—their death beds. My brother thought it was especially “creepy” to sleep in granddaddy’s bed because it’s actually where he died.

  My parents tried to make a living running the family motel next door. We also had property throughout the neighborhood and the area, property we still own. It was hard to get rent from people who couldn’t always pay. We’d never kick them out but would take forty dollars here and fifty there. It was far more important to my father to help people keep their dignity than to take their money. However, we made more rent money when my father was in Africa for a few weeks and my mother was collecting rent. Everyone knew that Gwen Sellers did not play.

  My mother, who’s from Memphis, had a love-hate relationship with Denmark. She’d eventually love it after so many years, but she never liked it. Early on, she warned us that Denmark was backwards and that people wouldn’t like us because of my father’s past. She often discussed the difference between “country” and “southern,” and she believed my father was “country,” like Denmark.

  My older sister, who was headed to college and wanted nothing to do with rural Denmark, was not country. I, on the other hand, embraced being “country,” like Daddy. Right away, I loved Denmark. They say you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, but I did. What we didn’t have, didn’t matter. I squeezed everything I could get out of that old town. I took to the country vernacular, the pockmarked back roads, the ponds and the cotton fields where we played.

  My brother, on the other hand, Cleveland Lumumba Sellers, who is eight years older than me, cried for two weeks after we left Greensboro. He wanted me to have a better experience adjusting, so he spent loads of time outside with me playing football or toss-up tackle (you throw the ball up in the air and whoever catches it runs until he gets tackled). We also went pole fishing in Mill Pond. Country folk have no need for reels or fancy gadgets we could never afford. We simply used an old cane pole, a line, and wigglers or worms from the corner store.

  A good day of fishing is measured by the pain in your legs because that meant you were too busy to get up from the bucket you’d been sitting on. You’d also know you had a very good day if you left with that bucket filled with crappie, a bony fish that travels in pools. Crappies are easy to cook: you clean them, cover them with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt, drop them in grease, and eat them with mustard and white bread. White bread was a staple in every house in Denmark because it was cheap. It also can stick to the roof of your mouth, but if a fish bone gets stuck in your throat, country folk know all you do is swallow a wad of white bread whole, which pushes the offending bone downward.

  In Denmark, we rode bikes or walked everywhere. There was no “your friend’s mom is about to pick you up” in the car. Our feet carried us where we needed to go.

  Now in a rural town like Denmark, basketball was everything. On the weekends we’d literally break into the college gym, the same gym my daddy played in when he was a boy, until the coach found out and just unlocked the door for us. There were only two other basketball hoops in our area. One belonged to my friends Boo and Chicko, who lived in a house at the end of a street, and the other belonged to my family. It was located behind the family motel. We’d play so long and I’d get so dirty that my mother would make me undress outside the screen door.

  But although I’d reach six-foot-five by age fifteen, I was no LeBron James. One of my best friends constantly told me how mediocre I was at basketball. His name was Jamil Williams, but we called him Pop. My family loved Pop. My father was like a surrogate parent to Pop, and he was like my brother. He was sweet-hearted but always in trouble. Pop was also a superb athlete. He ran track and was excellent at soccer and basketball. I, on the other hand, could tell you every statistic about my favorite players and teams, but I wasn’t the most graceful athlete. Pop and I would sit in my room and talk about our favorite players. I would try to shoot hoops like my hero Larry Davis, a player from Denmark, but Pop always checked me. He’d shake his head, and in the most black country voice you could ever imagine, proclaim, “Bo”—which country folk say instead of “boy”—“Bo, gimme the ball. You can’t play no ball, big head.”

  I’d say, “What you mean?”

  “Just stick with the books,” he’d say.

  “You can’t tell me I can’t play,” I’d say.

  “Nah, you can shoot, but you have no hops.”

  Pop saw himself as my protector. He often said people thought the Sellers family had more than they did because most in town had nothing. “So, they took it as an opportunity to try to hurt Bakari,” he’d tell people. “I’d step in and say ‘You bednot! You ain’t gonna lay a hand on Bakari!’ And they didn’t.”

  Pop was good for me. He introduced me to Denmark, to my new neighborhood, and showed me his life, which was very different from my own. He lived on “the other side of the tracks,” the very rough side of town. First, you have to understand that the neighborhood I lived in was no prize; in fact, to outsiders it would look extremely desolate, a picture of poverty packed with abandoned shacks. But it was quiet, and every person knew every other person. There was an art studio across the street. We’d get penny candy from
Mr. Meyers, a retired black businessman who’d park a chair in front of the store and fall asleep. Sometimes his sons would cook up hotdogs and sell them to us for pennies. The “Icy Lady” sold ice-cold slushies (frozen Kool-Aid in a Dixie cup) from her house. Even today, if my daddy leaves his keys in the truck, and someone takes the truck, someone else will knock on his door and return the keys.

  But Pop’s part of town was hard and sometimes violent. And though I wasn’t particularly popular, I immediately became a cool kid because I knew people from both sides of the tracks.

  The Boy with an Old Soul

  My big brother Lumumba didn’t have as easy a time adjusting to Denmark as I did. In fact, he was miserable, but he was also very practical, so he kept himself extremely involved in sports at the high school. I’d visit him in the locker room, which had no lights, so my brother’s basketball team had to get dressed in the classroom before games. They had no warm-up suits, only shorts, but not enough for everyone, so every week one boy didn’t get to play.

  Pop and I traveled with him to other schools that had shiny gymnasiums and big, well-lit locker rooms. Although I was only six or seven, I’d wonder out loud why my brother’s team could be treated this way when they were ranked as one of the best basketball teams in the nation.

  Some may think that’s a precocious thing for a child to say, but let me provide some context. Before we moved to Denmark, my father was taking prekindergarten me along to various community meetings and academic conferences. So, thanks to him, my brother, and Pop, I was developing a certain cultural awareness, an ability to understand my surroundings before I knew everything that was going on. The fact that Pop lived on one side of the tracks and we lived on the other was suddenly irrelevant: we were all struggling. And the disparities between my brother’s dilapidated school and the rich white high schools he played against were clear as day.

  Not everyone realized or appreciated this about me. Nosizwe, my sister, who is twelve years older than me, thought I was the strangest child in the world. “Bakari’s not a normal child,” she’d say. “He’s a little old man in a child’s body.”