And All Our Wounds Forgiven (5 page)

But she was white and there was no place for her anymore in the civil rights movement, what little of it remained in the tide of blackness washing ashore as if the souls of the African dead thrown overboard from slave ships now sought succor. She would not stay and become the object of a scorn she had not earned. But where to go and what to do? After TV coverage of the funeral ended, she went back to bed and was still trapped in sleep the next morning when a loud knocking awakened her.

She opened the door and there he was, tall and proper, the hair more gray than black now. What did he think of his daughter and her picture on the front of every newspaper and magazine in the world holding the dying body of John Calvin Marshall? Had he been suspicious? He never said. He never asked. He opened his arms and she fell against him and he folded her into himself and she cried for the first time.

Later, that morning, after he shopped and came back and cooked for her, he asked if she wanted to come home. She cried again because home was Cal and Cal was now memory of heartbeat.

She had looked around at her little house hidden in a grove of trees on a backroad north of Nashville. It had taken her a while to find a place secluded enough so Cal could come without being seen. A search of the records had uncovered an owner in Florida who was all too happy to sell the abandoned shack and the ten acres surrounding it. She had the house rebuilt, a little bigger but not much. She had not wanted her existence there to become the object of curious attention.

She came to love its simplicity — the living room one walked into from the outside, the kitchen/dining area directly behind, and to the left off the kitchen, the bedroom and bath. No one had ever come there except Cal.

That afternoon she looked at her house and noticed for the first time that it was devoid of objects that would have made vivid whom she had been for the past seven years. There were no stuffed animals, no posters evoking memories of vacations taken or fantasized, no paintings crystallizing an essence of soul aching to be lived, no shelves of records and books to mark the solitary pleasures where senses met mind and neither resented the other.

It was empty because only emptiness offered a respite from the companionship of death more constant than any love.

MAY 7, 1955: BELZONI, MISSISSIPPI — REVEREND GEORGE LEE. 52. MURDERED FOR ORGANIZING NEGROES TO VOTE. SHERIFF CONCLUDES LEE DIED IN A TRAFFIC ACCIDENT. WHEN PRESENTED WITH THE LEAD SHOTGUN PELLETS TAKEN FROM LEE’S FACE, SHERIFF SAYS THEY LOOK LIKE DENTAL FILLINGS.

AUGUST 13, 1955: BROOKHAVEN, MISSISSIPPI — LAMAR SMITH, 63, MURDERED. “I’M SURE IF THERE WAS ANY REASON FOR THE SHOOTING IT WAS THAT SMITH THOUGHT HE WAS AS GOOD AS ANY WHITE MAN,” SAID A WHITE FRIEND OF SMITH’S.

AUGUST 28, 1955: MONEY, MISSISSIPPI — EMMETT TILL, 14, MURDERED FOR SPEAKING TO A WHITE WOMAN.

JANUARY 23,1957: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA — WILLIE EDWARDS, JR., 25, FORCED AT GUNPOINT TO JUMP FROM A BRIDGE INTO THE ALABAMA RIVER. IN 1966, ALABAMA ATTORNEY GENERAL ARRESTS THREE MEN FOR THE MURDER. JUDGE FRANK EMBRY RULES THAT “FORCING A PERSON TO JUMP FROM A BRIDGE DOES NOT NATURALLY AND PROBABLY LEAD TO THE DEATH OF SUCH PERSON.” CASE HAS TO BE DROPPED.

The dead were referred to so often in conversation there was no clear demarcation between the realm of the living and those who inhabited one beyond. Negroes in the South permitted their dead to walk among them — as long as they behaved themselves — and those dead whose dying had been a crucifixion, those dead whose dying had no other source than the color of their skin, those dead for whom the grieving never stopped, those were the ones whose names it was important to weave into daily speech, because speaking their names and recounting their dying was a way of caring for and loving them, a way of easing the pain of the living and the dead.

APRIL 25, 1959: POPLARVILLE, MISSISSIPPI — MACK CHARLES PARKER, 23, TAKEN FROM JAIL AND LYNCHED. A VETERAN, PARKER WAS ARRESTED FOR RAPE THOUGH THE VICTIM WAS UNSURE HE WAS HER ATTACKER. WHITES WERE ANGERED THAT PARKER’S COFFIN WAS DRAPED WITH AN AMERICAN FLAG. VETERANS ADMINISTRATION ORDERS PARKER’S SISTER TO RETURN IT.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1961: HERBERT LEE, 50, SHOT AND KILLED BY E.H. HURST, A MISSISSIPPI REPRESENTATIVE. LEE HAD BEEN WORKING TO REGISTER BLACKS TO VOTE.

APRIL 9, 1962: TAYLORSVILLE, MISSISSIPPI — COL. ROMAN DUCKSWORTH, JR., 28, A MILITARY POLICEMAN, RECEIVES EMERGENCY LEAVE FROM THE ARMY TO BE HOME WITH HIS WIFE AFTER THE DELIVERY OF THEIR SIXTH CHILD. DUCKSWQRTH IS ASLEEP WHEN BUS PULLS INTO HIS HOMETOWN OF TAYLORSVILLE. POLICE OFFICER WILLIAM KELLY THINKS DUCKSWQRTH MIGHT BE A ‘FREEDOM RIDER’ AND SHOOTS HIM. LATER, OFFICER KELLY SENDS MESSAGE TO CPL. DUCKSWORTH’S FATHER, SAYING, IF HE HAD KNOWN WHOSE SON IT WAS, “i WOULDN’T HAVE SHOT HIM.” DUCKWORTH’S FATHER SENDS MESSAGE BACK: “i DON’T CARE WHOSE SON IT WAS, YOU HAD NO BUSINESS SHOOTING HIM.”

SEPTEMBER 30, 1962: OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI — PAUL GUIHARD, 30, FRENCH REPORTER, SHOT IN THE BACK AND KILLED WHILE COVERING THE RIOTS AT OLE MISS WHEN JAMES MEREDITH ADMITTED AS FIRST BLACK STUDENT.

APRIL 23, 1963: ATTALLA, ALABAMA — WILLIAM MOORE, 36, A WHITE SUBSTITUTE MAIL CARRIER FROM BALTIMORE, IS MURDERED AS HE WALKS FROM CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, TO JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, CARRYING A SANDWICH BOARD READING “EAT AT JOE’S———BLACK AND WHITE”.

JUNE 12, 1963: JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — MEDGAR EVERS, 38, MISSISSIPPI NAACP LEADER, SHOT AND KILLED IN HIS DRIVEWAY.

i was not shocked or outraged by the evil. i was never a sentimentalist about the capacity of the human animal to inflict pain and death and justify it. those who are dismayed by atrocities indulge their emotions and reveal their ignorance of history or refusal to regard it seriously. much of man’s energy is expended on ways to luxuriate in the sensuality of death.

there is a town in mississippi called drew. i believe it is the hometown of some pro quarterback from the seventies or eighties. a negro woman in drew told me that when she was a girl there was a lynching in the town. the negro was castrated. his penis was put in a large jar of alcohol and kept in the window of the general store for many years afterward. such stories were not rare in the south.

i was not surprised, dismayed, outraged, indignant or angered by american atrocities and massacres in vietnam, or anyone else’s atrocities for that matter. neither did i ever sign any of the self-serving full page ads decrying this or that injustice that appeared with the regularity of bowel movements in the pages of the new york times. the intellectuals, artists and academics who were signatories actually thought they were discharging a moral debt by affixing their names to those self-righteous proclamations. assuaging one’s conscience is not a moral act. it is an evasion of responsibility for the wounds each of us inflicts. it is an evasion of responsibility for the wounds we suffer.

i did not want to denounce evil. i wanted to understand. i wanted to understand how a person decides to bomb a church on a Sunday morning. does it come to you while having a donut and coffee? are you sitting on your front porch one saturday afternoon sipping iced tea and think, shit, i believe ill go bomb a nigger church sunday. probably be a lot of little kids in there and maybe three or four of them will get killed. did the person or persons who made that decision sleep as well as harry truman?

i wanted to understand how truman could have slept so soundly. why didn’t he lie awake for a few moments? why wasn’t there at least one stitch of remorse?

harry truman is the quintessential twentieth-century man. the buck stops here, read the little sign on his desk. all words. all words. it is not’enough to accept responsibility for making a decision. we must also accept responsibility for the consequences of that decision, even the consequences we did not anticipate and could not have foreseen. otherwise the buck does not stop. it simply passes to the next generation. all acts have consequences.

example:

during the late fifties and early sixties, fast food restaurants — mcdonald’s, kentucky fried chicken, pizza hut — began opening across the country. at one time eating out had been a special event, a luxury permitted only on mother’s day or easter. with the proliferation of fast food franchises, eating out became a way of life. in its tv ads mcdonald’s portrayed itself as a substitute for home. the smiles of the girls behind the counter were an instant infusion of mother love, love real moms could no longer give after a hard day at the office. the mothers were now in need of mothers and an institution that offered hot food at a reasonable price between five and seven p.m. was a good enough substitute.

so convenience joined saving time as a primary value in american life. the ease of accomplishing an end became an unquestioned good. (i suppose one could say dropping the bomb on hiroshima was convenient. though not for the japanese.) i was not opposed to convenience. but convenience costs.

when i was a child i would go to the chicken yard behind our house, catch a hen and with a hatchet, take off its head. once the chicken was dead, i carried its warm and bloody carcass into the kitchen where my mother dropped it into a large pot of boiling water and took off the feathers. i don’t remember when it became “more convenient” to buy chicken at the store, already defeathered and cut up, wrapped tightly in cellophane. of course, for city people there was no alternative. but being able to buy a chicken in the grocery store removed us one step from relationship with the living creature that provided us food. but because we cooked it we still handled the breasts and thighs and legs. when we ate the chicken we saw the blood next to the bone if the chicken had been undercooked, and both my mother and andrea consistently did that. now it is “more convenient” to go to a fast food franchise where every piece of chicken is fried to the same degree of doneness each and every time. a child grows up without any sense that once, those plump thighs and legs walked and ran.

perhaps this did not matter. i assumed something was gained by active participation in the process of feeding oneself. i assumed something was lost by becoming someone who merely consumed.

even if my assumptions were mistaken, convenience is not a value that should be at the heart of a nation’s culture. a child who grows up being taught that convenience is the greater good will seek convenience in areas where it cannot obtain. love is not a convenience. parenting is constant in- convenience. ethics are inconvenient. and believe me,
death is most inconvenient of all.

did i want to turn back the clock and have us hunt and kill our own food? not at all. i merely wanted us to be as aware as humanly possible of what we did. accepting responsibility for the consequences we could not have foreseen was to acknowledge our limitations. it was to suffer our finiteness. it was to know that we and the chicken shared an identical condition — mortality. i wanted us to suffer our mortality.

if i do not suffer the infuriating pain of and rage at my own mortality, then I will seek to make you die in my stead. like the natives of preliterate cultures who believed they acquired something of the spirit of the bear or deer when they killed it, i have wondered if our wars are not a spiritual cannibalism. americans feast on death because they fear life. and they hate their fear.

SEPTEMBER 15, 1963: BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
ADDIE MAE COLLINS, 14
DENISE MCNAIR, 11
CYNTHIA WESLEY, 14
CAROLE ROBERTSON, 14
MURDERED IN BOMBING OF SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH.

SAME DAY, SAME CITY: VIRGIL WARE, 13, IS RIDING ON THE HANDLEBARS OF HIS BROTHER’S BICYCLE WHEN HE IS SHOT AND KILLED BY TWO WHITE TEENAGERS IN A TRUCK. TWO 16-YEAR OLD EAGLE SCOUTS ARE ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH MANSLAUGHTER. THEY ARE CONVICTED. ONE SERVES SEVEN MONTHS. THE OTHER IS RELEASED AFTER A FEW DAYS AND WARNED BY THE JUDGE NOT TO HAVE ANOTHER “LAPSE.”

JANUARY 31, 1964: LIBERTY, MISSISSIPPI — LOUIS ALLEN, 45, BLACK WITNESS TO MURDER OF HERBERT LEE, SHOT AND KILLED.

People talked of death more often than of love, talked of it matter-of-factly. Finding bodies of black men in rivers was a part of the natural order of things in the South, but she never learned to laugh and joke about it, never learned, like Cal, to walk easy with Death by her side, or like others, to drive at maniacal speeds over midnight highways mocking Death as if it were a bull with razor sharp horns and she the toreador and cape and the object was not to kill the bull — that was not possible — but to see how long she could remain alive.