And All Our Wounds Forgiven (2 page)

saving time
became a national priority. the fifties saw the introduction of ballpoint pens, minute rice, tv dinners and fast food restaurants — mcdonald’s, kentucky fried chicken and pizza hut. why did we become obsessed with
saving
what cannot be saved?

world war ii. it taught us that we could die — not individually, each in his and her own time, but all at once, together, with no one left to remember who we had been, or even that we had been.

truman said he slept peacefully after he made the decision to drop the atomic bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki, that he never had a second thought because the decision shortened the war and saved american lives. that is good. but it is a good encompassing so little. we see only the magic circle we draw around us and ours, and by definition, whatever protects us and ours is the intrinsic good. we remain oblivious to the intrinsic evil snoring quietly on the other side of the circle.

truman’s limited good changed the fundamental definition of how we lived on the planet. i was 15 when the bombs were dropped. a profound difference between me and those young people who gathered around me in the civil rights movement was they grew up knowing sentient existence on the planet could be destroyed by human volition. they grew up numbed by the second world war, which deliberately, willfully, knowingly made civilians the objects of mass destruction. dresden, auschwitz, hiroshima, nagasaki. 54,800,000 people, mostly civilians, died in world war ii. the object of war was no longer territory; the object of war became death. how could anyone born after 1946 trust life?

being born in 1930 i grew up in a world in which the continuity of life was unquestioned. after hiroshima and auschwitz i could not trust life naively anymore, but neither did I distrust it. instead, my generation was infected by a virus called existential anxiety. we were not comfortable with life or death and lived in fear of both.

those born after hiroshima were beyond anxiety. anxiety implies that life can be trusted if you learn how to relate to it. the post-hiroshima citizen trusts only death, because it is the singular and ultimate security, the one experience that can be depended on to be what it claims to be. those of us whose consciousness predates hiroshima retain an ancestral memory of the nobility of the human experiment. our angst is leavened by faith in the dignity of the human being. when faulkner stood at Stockholm in 1949 and declared “man will prevail,” he affirmed the secular catechism that had held the west together since the renaissance. then he went and had a bourbon-and-branch.

that first generation of post-hiroshima youth loved me, for a while, because they longed for this secular faith. however, during the last days of my life, i saw them swallowed alive by the idolization of race. blacks placed racial exaltation above a love of humanity and did not understand: their love of race was passion for death, a passion ignited in the extermination camps, and at hiroshima and nagasaki.

when civilians became the targets of government weaponry, whatever semblance of safety government represented was destroyed. it did not matter that it was our government against someone else’s. truman miscalculated the extent to-which people were willing to go to save american lives. we saw photographs of the mushroom clouds in life magazine and read the stories of women and children vaporized from the face of the earth, leaving behind only their shadows burned into the ground. no shots were fired on american soil in ww ii. no bombs fell on american cities. yet, americans seemed to understand inchoately that murder carried to its logical extreme is self-murder. when the soviet union acquired a nuclear capability, it became clear: governments were now willing to destroy the world to save the nation.

after auschwitz, after hiroshima, saving time became an obsession because we could no longer assume that the human experiment on planet earth would continue until its natural end was reached hundreds of millions of years later when the sun’s heat consumes the planet. our descendants were no longer guaranteed to us. we were compelled to
save time
because at auschwitz and at hiroshima, time was destroyed.

we mistake for the Good the limited good we see — or think we see — or rationalize that we see — or lie about. we do not want to see that what is good today may spawn evil tomorrow. evil is not an absolute. evil is ambiguous, and sometimes, it does not seek to negate the good but merely hold its hand. for many of us, this is worse. good that is ashamed of itself loses its vitality. it should not. good and evil are not distinct. they interpenetrate each other continually until it is unclear which is which. if one is patient, you eventually understand that it does not matter. good or evil are merely opinions we offer based on notions of what is convenient and inconvenient to us, our group, our nation.

and if i had known . . .

A tall woman, straight blond hair brushing her shoulders, sat by the bed of a comatose black woman in a Nashville, Tennessee, hospital.

The white woman had appeared early that afternoon. Shyly, almost fearfully, she asked if she could see Andrea Marshall. If not for the offering of respect in her voice, the head nurse, an almost equally tall black woman, would have assumed she was a reporter. She was about to tell her someone was in the room already, the man who had come in the ambulance with Mrs. Marshall last night, when, from the far end of the corridor, she saw him coming toward them. As he got closer he looked up, saw the white woman at the nurse’s station, stopped, and said, “Lisa?”

“Bobby?”

They embraced with the overeagerness of two who had been absent from each other more years than had been shared. Yet, the looks they exchanged (once past the comparing of hairlines (his) and gray strands (hers)) were a tentative affirmation of the memories joining them, memories as defining of their lives as if they had been married and buried their only child. They embraced again with a tremor of anxiety at this unexpected resurrection of a past that, apparently, had not been buried and now appeared not even to have died, and, unlike them, had not aged.

They released each other and stepped back. “You look as trim and fit as ever,” he commented, admiringly.

She nodded, “I stay in shape.” She couldn’t help but note that he had not. It had been — what? — almost thirty years since she had sneaked him out of Shiloh in the middle of the night and taken him to New York (for reasons she was never told). That man had been thin, almost emaciated. This one was rounded, like a balloon blown up slowly, care being taken to cut off the air before the wisp that would pop the skin. He had become a sphere of a man, the dome of his bald head atop an even rounder body supported by legs that appeared too thin for the weight imposed upon them.

“It’s good to see you.” The earnestness in his voice would have made her blush if it had come from an adolescent boy. But he was not a teenager and there was a bewilderment in his eyes, not at the present moment that had brought them together but about life itself. There was something he had failed to grasp, and sooner than he would have thought, a half-century of living was past tense and more sentences began with “I remember when ...” than with “I am going to . . .” and he was alone, a pain in his heart like the aching of milk in a woman’s breasts as the tiny coffin of her child was placed tenderly in the grave. Such loneliness lacked even the illusory edge of a horizon. Elizabeth preferred gazing into the night sky when she wanted to contemplate infinity.

“How long are you staying?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I hope long enough for us to have a chance to talk.”

“That would be good,” came the unanticipated response, and hearing it, she felt poised on a crest of unshed and unwanted tears. “How’s Andrea?” she asked quickly.

“She hasn’t regained consciousness, and the doctors don’t know if or when.”

“Had she been ill?”

He shook his head. “No. I took her to church yesterday and she was fine. We spent the afternoon editing her diaries for publication, and, around eight, just as I was getting ready to go, she collapsed. I called the ambulance and I’ve been here every since.”

Diaries! Andrea had kept a diary? Elizabeth looked at Bobby with renewed interest. How much did he know? How much truth was Andrea telling? Had a truth she feared speaking struck with force enough to paralyze her?

“Would it be OK if I sat with her?” she asked, not wanting to cry, not now, not yet, not until she knew for whom or to what she would be yielding.

“That would be great. It would give me the chance to go home, make some calls and get some sleep.”

She hadn’t moved from her bedside, not even to go to the cafeteria or the bathroom. When passing in the hallway, nurses, especially the black ones, glanced through the open door of the room (it wasn’t everyday somebody famous was in the hospital. The White House had called last night!) and would see Elizabeth’s lips moving. If her eyes hadn’t been open, they might have thought she was praying (though she didn’t look like the kind who knew very much about the Lord, not that you could judge a body’s soul from a diamond ring on their finger big enough to bowl with, or from the leather coat laid carelessly over the other chair in the room. That coat was a month of paychecks for an R.N., which didn’t mean she wasn’t as God-fearing as the Pope even if her nails were manicured as precisely as cut diamonds.)

But prayer was not to be confused with church books or the words that came from preachers’ mouths with the ease of profanity. Prayer was the painful submission to the colors in a tear and the mystery of a stone, and when she had heard on the eleven o’clock news the night before that “Andrea Williams Marshall, widow of slain civil rights leader, John Calvin Marshall, suffered a stroke this evening and is listed in grave condition in a Nashville, Tennessee, hospital,” she had gotten up immediately, gone to her computer, and through her modem, accessed airline schedules, made a reservation and, before dawn, driven down from the mountain and through the snow in her Blazer. It had taken five hours rather than the usual three to get to Logan Airport in Boston.

Gregory said she didn’t think. That was not true. She didn’t think as he did. He examined every decision through a round and angled mirror as if it were the tooth of one of his patients. He poked and scraped with the curved hooks of needle-thin instruments, afraid there might be an emotional plaque eating away unseen at the soul.

She acted and explained later, if at all. Nothing made a man feel more unloved than not knowing why. But for her, and she suspected, most women, having to answer a “Why?” was like hitting the brakes on an icy road while doing 60. So she had flown to Nashville, not even telling Gregory where she was going. He would’ve asked questions for which she didn’t have answers. If she had paused and reflected, doubt would have eroded her confidence and left her in stasis — and at home.

For her, knowledge resided in the loins, a certainty like the shifting of the body’s center of gravity when her hips and thighs balanced the alternate edges of skis as she essed down a mountain slope on virgin snow. If there were thought at such times, she was
its
object. From the moment she heard the news she had known only that she needed to be with Andrea.

Maybe it was not important if Andrea heard (and would she have come if Andrea could have listened and said in return?). But after thirty years, it was time.

She stared at the woman in the bed, struck yet again at how much younger than her age she had always looked. She was not so much beautiful as handsome. Like many black women she seemed to have gone from youth to agelessness and become an icon of Woman, primordial, eternal, her face a mask holding in perfect equilibrium the cycles of every woman’s life.

“You always looked ten years younger than your age, even the first time I saw you. It was here in Nashville, in the chapel at Fisk. April, 1960. The sit-ins had begun and John Calvin Marshall,
the
John Calvin Marshall, had come to speak. I was an exchange student from Pomona College in California, here not even two months and found myself thrust into history like a slice of apple into cheese fondue. Everybody thought I was special because I had sat in and gotten arrested. There weren’t many blond, blue-eyed twenty-year-old white girls willing to risk getting beat up by the police or a mob, being called ‘nigger lover’ and spat on. I was the all-American girl. Ever since I was small, people have looked at me and seen corn fields, amber waves of grain and spacious skies. When I walked into rooms you could almost smell apple pie baking and hear The Star-Spangled Banner’ in the background. And there I was on a lunch counter stool surrounded by blacks, protesting racial segregation. Blacks loved me and whites wanted to kill me.”

She stopped and stared into the distance, a sadness covering her eyes as if she were recalling a love that could have been fulfilled if only———

may 17 1954. i was working on my dissertation at harvard. i left my carrel at the widener library to go for a walk, i happened to wander to harvard square where i passed a newsstand. there, on the front page the headline — the supreme court had declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. i bought a copy and ran to andrea’s dorm at radcliffe to share the good news, news as revolutionary as the emancipation proclamation.