And All Our Wounds Forgiven (13 page)

the book frightened me as nothing else had because it provided a moral foundation for murder. it gave blacks an ethical framework from which revenge became not only justifiable but necessary. the means of one’s freedom became murder of the other.

even as ibj signed the bills into law, i knew we had lost.

He went. The first week no one spoke to him, not even Charlie Montgomery. Why should they have? He wasn’t one of them. The car in which he had driven into town could also take him away at the first sign of trouble.

Anybody could come to town and talk about freedom and registering to vote. Hell, every colored person in Mississippi knew they should be free and able to vote. That wasn’t news. What they needed was to be convinced there was a way, and even if it meant wading up a bloody stream without hip boots, they needed someone to show them how to keep their balance while treading on slippery rocks. They needed someone to show them who they
could
be. They knew who they were.

Bobby’s words would make little difference. Their literacy was in the ways of people. So, he sat on their front porches and chatted about the weather and the cotton, and with the older ones he commiserated about the errancies of the younger generation, and with the impatient youth he commiserated about the blindness of the old.

Finally, one day a big man blacker than suffering, wearing coveralls and a straw cowboy hat, came up to him as he sat in The Pink Teacup, the colored cafe, and said, “I’m Charlie Montgomery.” He stuck out a hand big enough to have grasped Robert’s entire head, and Robert Card had found a home in Shiloh, Mississippi.

World War II had changed Charlie. “I felt like some kind of fool over there in Europe getting shot at defending a country that was killing niggers everyday. I’d lie there in them foxholes, man, the Germans zinging bullets through the air, and think to myself that if I got out of there alive, I was coming back to Shiloh and do some fighting for me and mines. You understand what I’m telling you? Me and mines!” Charlie Montgomery invited him to stay in the four-room house where he lived with his wife, Ruth.

Every morning Bobby got in his car and drove over rutted, dusty plantation roads, stopping to talk to anyone he saw about starting a sharecropper’s union, or registering to vote, and almost daily there was a confrontation with some white man, a plantation overseer, the sheriff, or just a good ol’ boy with a wad in his cheek and a rifle in his hand, and Bobby learned how differently the twin barrels of a shotgun felt against the stomach from the single hole of a rifle, and how different they were from the miniscule opening in a pistol, but whichever, he had to stand with the iron hole pressed into his navel and stare the white man in the eye, and the look had to be just right because if his fear showed itself as defiance, the cracker would pull the trigger, he would, and if his fear expressed itself as servility the cracker would also shoot, so the look had to be calm, relaxed, even bemused, permitting the white man the space to back down without losing face. Before the white man returned to his pickup truck, the news would be spreading throughout the Negro community. “That boy stood there and went eyeball to eyeball with that cracker as cool as morning during hog-killing time. You shoukfve seen it!”

The colored of Shiloh had their first images of freedom.

But freedom cost, and the bill could be paid only with blood. Death had a smell to it. Bobby never knew if white people in Mississippi smelled Death, but the colored sure did.

“You be careful, son,” the old folks started telling him. Maybe Negroes in Shiloh knew Death so well because it lived on the outskirts of town, sitting in a shack like an old man whose intimacy with loneliness made his only comprehensible conversations the ones he had with himself. O1’ Boy, as they called him, was moving through the world that year in a new way, not only taking people with the usual cancers, heart attacks, old age, murders, car, train, plane accidents and the freakish ones you read about in the tiny fillers in the newspaper like the girl in Germany who was playing in a cemetery and a tombstone fell on her and crushed her or the Japanese fisherman killed when a swordfish leaped from the water and with its broad bill stabbed the man in the heart and returned to the water with the grace of an Olympic diver. Death seemed to take on new life because it was the consort of the change Bobby and others his age knew had to come if they were to stand erect beneath the sky and he didn’t know who Patrice Lumumba was, was not even sure how to say his name and did not know what countries bordered Zaire or where it was on the map of Africa, but he did not have to know the details to understand that Huntley and Brinkley were telling him that a Negro had been assassinated because he wanted to be free. Change was in the air like the smell of winter on Thanksgiving Day.

“Man done broke the bonds of earth,” Mrs. Montgomery said with Biblical accuracy one evening sitting on the front porch looking at the paper. “Charlie, you see here that them Russians done sent a man into space and he circled the world from out where the stars twinkle?”

“Everybody wants to be free of what holds ‘em down, even when it’s gravity doing the holding.”

It was Andrea Marshall who had shown him the paragraph in the
New York Times
about President Kennedy sending troops to Vietnam, another place Robert had never heard of and wasn’t sure where it was but he understood instinctively that JFK didn’t care a damn about freedom if he could send troops to Vietnam and not Mississippi. Every month he drove to Nashville for a day or two to see Cal and Andrea, Cal was still not so famous yet that he did not have time to sit around the kitchen table late at night, and the three of them would talk without purpose or direction, just talk and in the talking, learn.

“The United States broke relations with Cuba and banned travel there,” Andrea said one night. “Why would this mighty nation be afraid of a small island? Why would it want to prevent us from traveling there? They must be afraid we’ll learn something if we go there.”

“Castro might know a thing or two about freedom that we don’t,” Cal commented.

Their distrust of Kennedy intensified when he founded the Peace Corps. “Why th’ hell would he want to send young, idealistic Americans all over the world to help the poor when he’s got Negroes in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and Louisiana who can use all the help anybody can give ‘em?”

When Cal was angry his speech returned to the well of his southern ancestry and that was where it stayed for much of the year because 1961 was when History attached its strings to his arms and legs.

Robert knew nothing of that until he sat with the Montgomerys one evening that spring watching Huntley-Brinkley on the one channel they could get on the twelve-inch screen TV their daughter had brought them from Memphis, the only TV anybody colored had in the county, which was why the living room was always filled with people, especially at 6:30 when Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were on and it got quieter for that half-hour than it did at a funeral with no one saying a word even during the commercials as if silence were needed to absorb the pictures, not the content of the images but their mere existence as representations of the world beyond the Mississippi Delta and it did not matter if the images were of the president and his beautiful wife, Jackie, on a sailboat or of Red Square in Moscow or Alan Shephard being the first American blasted into space. What was important was
seeing
there was other than cotton and the flat delta earth and so it was that evening in May when on the TV screen appeared the image of John Calvin Marshall being dragged from a Greyhound bus by a mob of whites in Birmingham, Alabama, and beaten within a heart-skip of death, he and eleven others — colored and white — who had dared challenge the laws of segregation and sit together on a bus. They called their action “Freedom Rides,” and across the South, they and anyone who worked in civil rights were thereafter known as “Freedom Riders.”

Bobby had been hurt and angry Cal had not told him of the plans for the Freedom Rides, had not even hinted that such a major action was in the offing.

“Trust you?” Cal chuckled when Bobby was able to confront him after he was released from the hospital. “If I had told you about it, there is nothing I could have said or done that would’ve kept you away. Am I right?”

Bobby nodded.

“What good would that have done the people in Shiloh who have come to depend on you emotionally? What would they think if you decide to jump up and go off everytime there’s a bit of hot action somewhere? I sent you to Mississippi to lay the foundation for change that will continue long after you and I are gone.”

The president himself pleaded with Cal not to continue the Freedom Rides into Mississippi where Cal was determined to go. Cal ignored the pleas and boarded another Greyhound bus with an integrated group and rode into Jackson, Mississippi. White Mississippi would not tolerate mob violence. The police backed a paddy wagon up to the door of the Greyhound bus. When Cal and those with him stepped off, one foot hit the pavement and the other went up and onto the steel step of the paddy wagon. Within twenty four hours they had been tried, convicted and were on their way to serving sixty days at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, known simply as Parchman Farm.

What no one, not even Cal, could have anticipated was that the idea of the Freedom Rides caught the imagination of white college students all over the country. They began taking Greyhound buses from Chicago, Berkeley, New York, Washington, D.C., and came to Jackson, Mississippi to be arrested for trespassing, disturbing the peace and violating the laws of Mississippi, which required separation of the races except when black women held and played with and kissed and loved white babies, except when white men held and played with and kissed and fucked black women (which left black men and white women to masturbate and fantasize about each other).

By the end of the summer of 1961, several hundred young people, white and black, had been sent to Parchman, and there the civil rights movement was truly born. Sixty days in Parchman broke the spirit of petty thieves and callous murderers, but neither the warden nor the guards nor even the other prisoners understood the spirit of freedom.

“There is nothing that can be done to the man who is not afraid to go to jail or die. Nothing! The only power any government has over its citizens is the threat of imprisonment, that is, taking away one’s physical freedom, and the threat of death, that is, depriving one of life. But if when you are physically free you are imprisoned in a system that tells you where you can and can’t go, who you can and can’t associate with, you are not free. If you are breathing but do not have the power to define your own existence, then, you are not alive. You are free when you run into the jail cell and close the door behind you. You are free when you look the marksman in the eye and say, ‘Fire!’ “

It was a sentiment Bobby heard Cal express first when he spoke at Fisk. It made sense until the afternoon almost a year and a half later when he was sitting in The Pink Teacup and someone rushed in and said there had been a shooting at the cotton gin and Bobby got in his car and drove with maniacal speed along the highway until he came to the unmarked turnoff by the railroad and as he slowed to a stop by the covered sheds where the wagon loads of cotton were brought to be ginned, he saw a large man in coveralls lying in the dust. Later, after Cal had served his sixty at Parchman, Bobby went to Nashville to see him and Andrea, to talk as they used to, just the three of them, but a group of brighter and more well-educated students were there now, black ones and white ones talking about this famous person who had sent a check and this writer who wanted to do an article and this TV show that wanted an interview and they looked at Bobby as those kind had always looked at him as someone to be tolerated but only because he did the work necessary so that more important work could take place like getting Cal’s picture on the cover of
Time
and having him interviewed by Mike Wallace. But Bobby insisted and pulled Cal into the kitchen and tried to tell him what it was like to see the brains of someone you loved spilling from the skull and into the dust and how you looked at the brains and wondered if that wrinkle was where sight had resided and had that crevice controlled the movement of the legs and arms and that patch of rosiness, was that where the dreams of freedom and dignity and respect came from? And he tried to describe what it was like to hold the brains of someone you loved in your hands, what it was like to try and put those brains back where they belonged except there was no skull anymore, only a fragment of bone out of which spilled brain and eyes and flies droned in anticipation of this unexpected gift of blood and how the drone and the silence were the only sounds besides the low hum of death itself and he squatted there in the dust, alone, the white men and the black who had been working at the gin standing a respectful distance away, the murderer among them, and each of them knew who he was but no one spoke and no one moved and Bobby wondered if the murderer would raise the shotgun again and shoot him but that did not happen until finally — did an hour pass? two hours? — the sheriff came and took a blanket out of the trunk of his car and covered Charlie Montgomery, and Robert, his hands heavy with the dried and caked blood, felt released and got in his car and went to tell Ruth she was a widow lady now but she knew already.