The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 185

Like most of Leary's blacks, Murrie Williams, retired field hand, lives in a neat but weathered house. A grove of pecans stands nearby. A of life in Leary, the shacks of niggertown were thrown up and called Jordan's Quarters. Save for the few Negroes who lived on tenant farms in the country, Leary's blacks always lived in the quarters, hidden away from the rest of the town like a colony of indentured laborers. Leary is consequently as profoundly segregated town.

Nine hundred and sixty-one people live in the hamlet. About seven hundred are black, and the rest are white. The whites live in several dozen neat brick and frame houses in the southwestern end of town. They live on paved streets with sidewalks, and their children attend pri- vate schools in Damascus, or Sbellman. In 1970 when the Calhoun County schools consolidated, several of Leary's more prosperous whites pooled their money, bought a yellow Bluebird school bus, lettered it "Southwest Georgia Academy," and now, at great expense, trundle their boys and girls off in it every morning for the long ride necessary to assure that they will not attend classes with blacks.

In Leary, as throughout' much of rural south Georgia, Court-ordered desegregation was a woeful failure. Enrollment at the brand-new Calhoun County schools is nearly all black. The Leary swimming pool, the one city recreational facility and the logical place for blacks and whites to meet, has been closed for ten years, ever the threat of "darkies" swimming in the same water with whites arose. Most of the white children now swim in private pools behind their homes or in a deep, aquamarine-colored natural spring on the southern edge of town near the Two-Dollar Road, a dirt lane where years ago one could leave $2 in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree and return to find a gallon of moonshine in its place. Occasionally, blacks have swum in the hole, too, but never when whites were present Before plunging into the cold, blue water, the black children bundled their clothes in neat packages and placed someone on look-out "Gottago" was their signal to flee if whites were espied.

Many escape trails snake through the woods surrounding the spring. That racial relations in Leary have not progressed much since the 1950s is hot surprising, for it is a town that in most ways adheres to the past rather than anticipating the future. The biggest thing that has happened in Leary in a long time was when a movie company filming Tie era, an 1890s western, bivouacked in town for several days in the fall of 1979 to shoot a bank robbery scene. Leary's streets were covered with dirt for the movie, and the film company's crewmen painted numerous marred and faded wooden plaques and awn ings to hang over the town's stores, authenticating the hamlet's already' near-perfect resemblance to what it was and is: a place almost completely bypassed by time. After the filming ended, the movie company's workmen offered to take down all of the artificially decrepit shingles, but only Dick Perryman accepted.

Most of the merchants' reveled in the nostalgic handiwork. Still hanging before Little Marshall Jordan's store are deceptively aged signs reading: "J.M. Jordan Co. Carriage Trimming and Harness Making; E. S.

Shepard Boots and Leather Goods, Haberdashery Clothing." Sandblasted on the brick wall of another building is a barely legible but new street direction: "Livery Stable, one-half mile." A lot of people believe that through Hollywood's legerdemain Leary regained its identity, and throughout the town people are still saying, "Why, I don't believe I've ever seen Leary so prosperous-looking. It's like the good old days." Of course, people just wanted to hang onto the remnants of something that bad happened in Leary. Save for the daily ebb and flow of their lives, almost nothing ever does happen. No one has ever written down any history of Leary except for a couple of incomplete, diarylike remembrances and random newspaper articles. There are only certain.

7 Since integration, Leary's swimming poo, has been closed..