Adam David Miller

At our recent conference I got talking to an older African American man with a kind face and philosophical look. He told me about a memoir he has written, Ticket to Exile. I was highly intrigued by his story and asked him to write something for me to put up here.

By Adam David Miller

I hurt. I had said it. I had sliced open an internal storm.

With these two words at the age of 76 I finally probed an event in my life that had lain closed for fifty-seven years. I had nibbled around the edges before, tried through dramatic sketches to speculate what might be the result of my returning to the scene of the event, on how the principals would receive me, what sort of treatment I might expect. These dramatic sketches, while providing temporary relief, were ultimately unsatisfying. Some ingredient in them was lacking, an ingredient that only a direct facing of the event would fulfill.

As a nineteen year old shoe repair apprentice in Orangeburg, South Carolina, 1942, I had written a seven word note to one of our customers, a dime store clerk my age that read: “I would like to know you better.” We had talked briefly several times about our dissatisfaction with our lives when we were alone in the shop while she had some minor repair, a pair of lifts or a shine. She summed up her feelings: “I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life fondling lingerie and folding baby didies, that’s for darn sure.” And I was restless, wanting something different from what I was being offered. In another time and place we could have advanced our acquaintance. In the pre-Civil Rights era U.S. South, such was not allowed: I was black she was white.

Within hours after I handed her the note at her job I was arrested and jailed. My charge was attempted rape. Given the racial climate of that time and place no other charge was thinkable by white men, since any attempted personal contact between a black male and a white woman had to result in rape. No white woman in her right mind would permit anything less. Though shocked and outraged by having his shop invaded by police and one of his most trusted and loyal employees taken to jail, my boss could do nothing to prevent it. He was black, the police were white.

I was bemused. My mind could not accept the charge. Expecting some measure of censure were my act discovered, I thought I would be let off with a warning. After all, by all visible measures, I had been an ideal Negro: hard working, polite to whites, crime free, one who appeared to ‘know his place’. That I had committed such an act must have given the police and sheriff, who ‘knew’ me, pause. Only after the harsh echo of the jail door subsided and I was alone in my cell did the awful magnitude of what I had done began to force itself into my consciousness.

In breaking the taboo against black men dating white women (There was no such taboo on white men dating black women) I had been short-sighted, selfish, thinking only of my wants, not working through the possible consequences of my act. I expected people to behave rationally when I certainly knew better. I had lived in an irrational society, had escaped confronting it on several recent occasions by the skin of my teeth. What motivated my act, given what I should have known, eluded me then; though I’ve tried to uncover it in Ticket to Exile by reviewing my life up to that point, some of it eludes me even now.

II

My stay in jail was short, parts of four days. I was not abused or threatened. I was only questioned briefly at the time of my booking, with questions asked alternately by the Chief of Police who had arrested me and the Sheriff of the county jailed where I was to be housed: “Boy, who was in with you on this thing? Who helped you write this note?” “Nobody, sir, I did it on my typewriter….” “You sure there wasn’t nobody else, now? Nobody in the shop or nothing.?” “Did she give you any indication?”…. “Indica…. she, oh, no sir!”

As it turned out, they didn’t believe me when I told them that I had no co-conspirator, that I had typed the note on my typewriter in the shop. On fact checking after I had completed a draft of Ticket to Exile, in 2005, an informant told me the white lawmen went to the shop and badgered my boss until he showed them the typewriter. “He did finish high school,” my boss said. (There was no typing class at my high school though there were several at the white high school). Not satisfied, they called my English teacher, who told them: “Of course he could do whatever he wanted to do. He was Salutatorian.”

My boss secured my release with the help of a black lawyer who looked white, with money I had saved to buy my mother a lot to build her a house in a better neighborhood. They used some of my money to buy me a one-way ticket to New York where my sister lived. My release was conditioned on my leaving town secretly, immediately, and not returning. Joining the Navy was one solution they suggested as a means of both protecting me from harm and keeping me away. I was not permitted to say goodbye to anyone, could take only a suitcase of clothing my mother sent.

All these arrangements had been made without consulting me. It seemed that by committing this horrendous (to them) act I had forfeited my agency, my ability to think and act on my behalf, even in consultation with others. This for a young man who had begun making money at age nine, who began contributing to the household after he finished high school, who had earned a scholarship to college, who had never bought the myth of white superiority, having seen too many whites who were inferior to many blacks he knew, who thought of himself as good as anyone. For such a one, loss of his agency was devastating, a blow from which he never quite recovered.

III

Loss of agency and the tribal curse. The question was “Why?” I would be dogged by this question, from Chief and Sheriff, from my mother and aunt who were allowed to visit me once before my release, Whites would say, “He had it good there, why didn’t he leave well enough alone?” Black women were especially pained. My mother and aunt asked, “Weren’t any of our nice sexy colored girls good enough for you, you had to go looking for a white girl?” I like nice sexy colored girls, I wanted to tell them, I only wished they liked me better. Because I had not gone to college, a way into their presence, many girls I would have liked would not give me the time of day. But no matter. I had earned the curse for placing them in an impossible competition: they felt they could compete with a black woman but not with a white one. I could never be fully trusted.

Ticket to Exile is the book I wrote to try to make sense of that pain I felt so long ago, and have carried with me ever since. On completing it I felt immensely lighter. I am happy to find that it is now being used in schools and that young people today seem able to connect with the young man I was then.

In a review worth reading, here, Sandip Roy finishes:

Miller writes that for 57 years he never told anyone what had happened to him. Then one day he sat down at a laptop and typed out the words “I hurt.” If there is any complaint about the book that followed, it’s that at the end the reader is left wondering, “But what happened next?”

Adam tells me he is at work on the sequel, “beginning as I step off the train in New York.”