Taylor Branch Searches for Just the Right Words

On the summer day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Taylor Branch, author of “Parting the Waters” and now “Pillar of Fire,” was 22 years old and trying to convince black people in rural Georgia to vote. An effort to target the community’s matriarchs had landed him on a front porch in the middle of nowhere with a venerable midwife.

“She just rocked and said nothing while I gave her my speech about voter registration. I was in graduate school studying politics at Princeton. I tried using bigger and bigger words from political philosophy classes. Finally, out of the blue, she said, ‘Do you believe we landed on the moon this morning?’ I said, ‘Yes, I believe it because I saw it on Walter Cronkite back at the motel.’

“She said, ‘Have you seen that commercial where the kid floats through the kitchen on an invisible shield of Simonized wax without scuffing the floor? Do you believe that?’ I said, ‘No, because that’s a commercial.’ She rocked some more and said, ‘Have you ever been in a fistfight?’ ”

The old woman kept after Branch until she was certain he could understand the difference between fact and fiction.

“What she was saying,” he explains now, “was that she had lived there since Reconstruction, and voting was a matter of life and death to her, and there I was on her doorstep trying to preach to her using graduate school words. Besides, she could prove they hadn’t landed on the moon because if they had, why wouldn’t they have simply refueled and made the next leg of the journey to heaven?”

It was the last time Branch ever used graduate school words.

“This was the beginning of my charmed conviction that analytical language is self-contained and does not work when you are writing about race.”

Branch, now 51, is plain-spoken and direct. It’s the air around him that seems to become dense with characters and stories and vernacular as he speaks.

In his short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, he looks as if he has been let out of the FBI library for a brief period. He blinks and rubs his forehead with his palm when he talks. One of President Clinton’s close friends (they met while working on George McGovern’s presidential campaign), Branch is someone you know would manage to fit in just about anywhere, with his old civil rights buddies in Berkeley or Venice, at a White House dinner, or on a porch in rural Georgia.

“Parting the Waters,” the 1,000-page epic about the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1963 and the rise of Martin Luther King Jr., took Branch nine years to write. His editor forced him to cut 700 pages from the original manuscript. (In his first pass at it, Branch cut eight to 10 pages, “mostly widows,” after which he developed a “sort of Gen. Patton blood lust” for his own work.) It was published in 1988 and won Branch a Pulitzer Prize and a country of dedicated readers.

To have not read “Parting the Waters” is to have missed a critical conversation in American life, as one repentant friend put it. It is famous for its storytelling, Branch’s narrative historical method and for its emphasis on minor characters who, together--from Baptist preacher Vernon Johns to schoolteacher Septima Clark to King himself--created the emotional and political momentum of the civil rights movement.

“Pillar of Fire,” which begins with Malcolm X and the 1962 riots in Los Angeles and ends in Mississippi in 1965, was even more difficult for Branch to write because every time he switched subjects, he had to switch entire scenes and worlds, from the Nation of Islam to the Johnson administration. “I refuse to write essays,” says Branch as we talk at a Los Angeles hotel. “We don’t learn about race by abstraction. I want to take people into the interior worlds of the characters. I’m not interested in Malcolm X, for example, as an actor in history as much as I am in what he became culturally. A lot of what he said in those last years was nonsense, but his mind was always working. If someone were trying to shoot me, I’d have a hard time giving a speech on race relations at Radcliffe.”

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Branch grew up in Atlanta, with six siblings. His father had a dry cleaning business. In 1964, he went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with every intention of becoming a surgeon. He was a regular guy, interested in football. He played in a rock ‘n’ roll band. It was the Birmingham riots--in which police commissioner Bull Connor turned the fire hoses and the dogs on elementary schoolgirls--that awoke Branch to the civil rights movement.

“Bull Connor saw himself as a victim. Nobody says, ‘OK, I’m going to be really evil now,’ ” says Branch with his slight Southern drawl. “The movement at its best didn’t allow people to be cartoon characters.

“I do believe a project is more worthwhile when you begin with a question rather than a theory or an answer,” he says. “My question was: What was this movement made of and how did it happen?” Once his eyes were opened, there was no going back. “I dropped my premed classes very dramatically,” says Branch, as though he has outgrown this kind of gesture.

“I was dissecting a baby tiger shark, and I was supposed to memorize all 400 nerve pairs, and it seemed to me that the teacher was doing her best to smother whatever wonder there might be in these nerve pairs. So I took that shark up on the roof of the biology building and rigged up an elaborate pyre with cherry bombs and blew it to smithereens.”

He thinks he was born too late for the civil rights movement but made it in time for the antiwar movement.

“I remember thinking these students were condescending to the civil rights movement, which I thought had more power and complexity. In 1968, I went to Chicago as a delegate, and we challenged [Georgia Gov.] Lester Maddox.” Despite this condescension, “the antiwar delegation was modeled on the freedom summer delegation of 1964.”

In 1969, Branch was teaching high school and was getting ready to go to graduate school.

“The movement was disintegrating; it was gone and I’d missed it,” he says wistfully. The summer that Branch went out to promote voter registration, he was stunned to find segregation alive and well in rural Georgia. “The colored and white signs were still up in these towns!” Instead of writing the policy paper on the possibilities for economic development in the region that Princeton expected of him, he wrote a 400-page protest diary, which a professor sent, unbeknownst to Branch, to the newly formed Washington Monthly magazine.

After his master’s work was finished, Branch went to work at the Washington Monthly, then on to Harper’s and Esquire--what he refers to as “the safe perch of journalism.” In 1976, Branch left the magazine world and began ghostwriting. He thought strategically that writing in someone else’s voice would better prepare him for fiction. His first project was “Blind Ambition” with Watergate figure John Dean, followed by “Second Wind” with basketball star Bill Russell.

He started to write a book called “The Frontiers of American Decadence,” on drugs and the Mafia, but stopped because it struck him that the cynicism of conspiracy theorizing had nothing to do with the old lady on the porch.

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Branch doesn’t do readings; instead, he speaks at bookstores and gives sermons at local churches, such as the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. He has “been around the block of heartache” trying to see a film made of “Parting the Waters,” which was optioned originally at Paramount. Alex Haley, among others, took a crack at the script, and Branch finally collaborated on one that he is happy with, in which King is a presence, but not a major actor.

“Sure, it would be a great charity event,” says Branch, “but it is difficult to find people on the budget level with the guts to expose the rough edges and uncertainty of race relations in this country. People want to be gentle and correct, on the side of the angels. They want to keep their composure, but everyone in that movement took a step into the unknown, and any film about it has to show them doing it.”

Branch is teaching for the first time at the college level at Goucher College near Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Christy, a speech writer, and his two high school aged children.

In a recent quiz, only six out of 19 Goucher students could identify Eisenhower. Two knew who Ho Chi Minh was.

“It’s a lot of work generating interest in history in this new generation,” says Branch, who was asked in a recent interview--because of his friendship with Clinton and because of King’s sexual activity--about Monica Lewinsky. “You take nine years to write a book, and they ask you about Monica Lewinsky,” he seethes. Branch has also refused an offer from the administration to write President Clinton’s biography because he feels he’s too close to the president and because he can’t see anything dignified about being an “appointed biographer.”

The next and potentially final book in the series is called “At Canaan’s Edge,” which will continue until King’s death in April 1968. “The movement fell apart when people started worrying about who would get credit for what,” Branch says. “The civil rights movement is a metaphor that connects all of American history. Martin Luther King becomes a metaphor at the heart of that movement. We can say that the whole dialogue is changing because race relations is no longer simply black and white, although if you look at the battle line, at Rodney King and O.J. Simpson, black and white still defines the debate.” He faults the president’s race commission for continuing to have this narrow view.

The only thing Branch feels hasn’t changed for the better since the civil rights movement is the way we talk about race, “very pinched and inward-turning.”

“We should look to King’s oratory,” he says, “to that wonderful combination of patriotism and spirituality that hearkens to both the Gettysburg Address, for example, and the doctrine of equal souls. I see democracy as very fragile,” says Branch. “Our leaders cannot speak only to special-interest groups. You’ve got to stretch democracy to keep it alive.”