You Can Go Home Again

By PRISCILLA PAINTON MARION

Rarely does history draw a complete and ironic circle in a single generation. In Marion, La., the result makes an odd spectacle. In this unpaved country of clay soil and bayous, deep in a wilderness of pines, stands the white brick ranch house of Joseph and Hazel Hampton, complete with gold- flecked ceilings, a built-in barbecue grill and the creamy smell of fresh carpet. The house might belong on the groomed set of Knots Landing, but it stands instead on the spot where Hazel Hampton once picked cotton, within sight of the sharecropper's cabin, now silvery from weather and wind, where she was raised.

The Hamptons have gone home to Marion from Los Angeles, and their journey is part of a discreet reverse migration of Southern blacks with second thoughts. "When we left the South, it was a one-way deal," says Joseph Hampton, 57, . a retired aircraft-parts machinist. So it was for 6.5 million other blacks who fled northward between 1910 and 1970 in one of the greatest transplantations in American history. "The first migration was a huge wave crashing on the beach," says Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land, a forthcoming book about this vast crossing. "This is the small undertow running back to the sea."

The trickle has not escaped the Census Bureau. Last January it reported that for the first time in more than a century the proportion of black Americans living in the South had taken an upward climb: 56% lived in the region in 1988, up from 52% in 1980. More important than the number of blacks, however, is the implicit indictment of the North and the redemption of the South contained in this black to-and-fro. "What's unusual is that they were immigrants to another country in a real sense, and ordinarily, immigrants don't go back to the old country to stay," says Lemann.

The Hamptons said goodbye to the South on their wedding day in 1960. "He was muzzled down, the black man, muzzled down when it came to the white man," says Joseph Hampton. "Like a child abused by his parents, he'd act so scared, you know." But if segregation drove Hampton away from his roots, it also helped drive him back: Florence Heights, the predominantly white west-side neighborhood he chose in Los Angeles, quickly turned all black after his arrival. And while partitions and signs did not hem in the Hamptons' liberty, crime and congestion eventually did. A family of four was killed when a gunman mistook their home for that of an enemy. Another neighbor, about three doors down, lost a son in a shooting, and rival gang members took revenge on the young man even after his death by riddling his coffin with bullets. The Hamptons' daughter had her car stolen, and police helicopters regularly buzzed their neighborhood.

In one sense, the South offers to some of its black refugees nothing different from what it does to other retirees looking for a slow, peaceful life. "On Sundays you can hear a pin drop anywhere in the city," says Eugene Dykes, 65. Six years ago, he returned to Columbia, S.C., after 29 years in Los Angeles, working mostly as shipping supervisor for the Automobile Club of Southern California. But in a deeper sense, part of the South's appeal to its black emigrants is the strange intimacy that has always existed between the races in the region's rural culture. Their homecoming is partly an illumination of the old saying that in the South you can get close as long as you don't get too high, and in the North, you can get high as long as you don't get too close. "Here they recognize that if I cut you, you cut me, we've got the same blood. Flesh and blood, we get along with one another," says Isaac Scott, 77, who went back to the rural town of Barnwell, S.C., after 49 years in New Haven, Conn., mostly as a construction worker. "The Southern accent sounds beautiful to me now," says Dykes. "That's the way it should have been the whole time."

On the road to Marion, there are posters trumpeting the Louisiana Senate candidacy of David Duke, the ex-Klansman who lost last October's nonpartisan primary but won an estimated 60% of the white vote. Joseph Hampton sees nothing alarming in this. From his post-emigre perspective, he feels Louisianians have taken down their COLOREDS ONLY signs and muffled their racial prejudice under thick, soothing layers of courtesy. When he visits Wal- Mart, the discount chain store, there are professional "greeters" at the door. The auto dealer in nearby Monroe made a toll call to find out if he was satisfied with a repair. Strangers always wave at him as they drive by. "One man, a white man, he had a whole arm out of the car. That's normal, natural around here," he says.

California may have given Southern blacks a chance to make a comfortable living -- Hampton pulled in $50,000 a year with overtime making parts for Northrop Aircraft -- but its residents kept a businesslike distance. "Neighbors are very hard to find in California unless there's money behind it," he says. He would trade California's officious tolerance for Louisiana's sweet hypocrisy any day. "As long as you make me feel as though I've got as much right as you've got, fine. If you've got borderlines, let them be in your mind." For some blacks resettled in the South, the Northern cities they left behind have long ago abandoned any pretense of racial detente. In Barnwell, Scott, the retired construction worker, says he follows TV news reports about the way people up North are "fighting and don't want to live here and don't want to live there. To me, there is more prejudice up there now than there is down South."

Some members of the black diaspora have brought back to their hometowns part of the energy they took along when they left 30 years ago. Dykes is leading an 18-piece dance and jazz band in Columbia, much like one he put together during his California stay. Scott's wife Beverly, 46, works as a secretary in the Barnwell police department. As for the Hamptons, their $120,000, five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in the forest has become a local attraction. Some people have taken pictures of it and are calling Joseph "Mr. Hollywood." Others are grateful for the tiny lift the new dwelling represents now that the area's timber economy has turned down. "We need any stimulation we can get," says Betty Long, the white owner of the L&L Grocery in Marion.

California and Louisiana cultures are in a perpetual asymmetry in the Hampton home. Hazel, who made her living in Los Angeles as a housecleaner, complains about how hard it is to "find people to do work when you want to." Joseph brings sodas to the two white men installing tile in the hallway, while Hazel tells a visitor about how she "pulled corn, picked cotton, picked potatoes and pulled peanuts" right below where she sits on her imitation- Victorian sofa. She can look out over her back deck and see the creaky porch where, she says, her stepfather once stood and shot a rabbit in the pitch dark.

Down the road is the plywood-patched cabin of Hazel's sister Patsy Lee Williams, with hogs in the backyard and weeds growing out of the bed of a broken pickup in the front yard. One day, Hazel says, a white man came riding by and "he saw our house, and he stopped, and he stood there. He cried, and he said he would never have dreamed of this for me." "You see," says Joseph, "Hazel was his maid."