Candlemoth (5 page)

    And
that's where it went.

    And
once that special delivery had been made I went too.

    Like
a comet with turbo-charged afterburners, we hightailed it down the street until
we arrived, gasping and sweating and laughing fit to bust wide open, at the
edge of the Lake.

    Nathan
could barely breathe. He had to sit with his head between his knees, his hands
gripping his ankles for a good five minutes before he could even speak. His
face was streaked with tears, his eyes red and buggy, and when he tried to
stand up he fell sideways like a plank and just lay there.

    Never
been so frightened.

    Never
laughed so much.

    Never
seen my father so angry as when he came home that night clutching a
fish-smelling piece of linen that Mrs. Chantry had so kindly given to him with
the message:
Pass that on to your son, Mister Ford, and tell him and his
little negro friend that I did enjoy the fish.

    My pa
switched me that time. Switched me good in the woodhouse.

    Next
day I stayed inside.

    Nathan
didn't come over. Nathan's daddy didn't switch him, didn't believe a child
should be beaten. Believed the best discipline for a child was to have him stay
indoors and copy out scriptures until his hand didn't work no more.
Write
until you're wrong,
Nathan would tell me.

    Later
we spoke of Mrs. Chantry and the fish. Believed she ate it whole and raw and
talked about how her neck swelled up as she almost inhaled the thing complete.

    That
was the way we saw it, and so that was the way it was.

    Those
years, as we approached our teens, were years that warned of things to come,
like premonitions, portents, readings in sand.

    Eisenhower
became President in 1953, though Rocky Marciano's retained heavyweight title
after he K.O.'d Jersey Joe Walcott seemed far more real and relevant and
necessary to know. Jackie married JFK in the same year, and near Christmas
something happened that only later, much later, would we even begin to
comprehend. December of that year the U.S. Supreme Court took the banning of
school segregation under advisement, and though another three years would pass
before Nat King Cole was dragged off stage by a white mob in Birmingham, those
mutterings of discontent and disaffection were so much the sign of Old
America's death throes. Though folks seemed more occupied with Marilyn Monroe
and Joe DiMaggio, Elvis Presley singing 'That's Alright Mama', James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
and someplace called Disneyland in Anaheim, Cal.,
there were things running their own agenda behind the scenes that carried so
much more significance.

    In
March of '54 Eisenhower committed the U.S. to united action to prevent any
communist takeover of South-East Asia. Seven months later Viet Minh troops
began to occupy Hanoi. Tension was building. Out there in some unheard-of
jungle a war was being born, a war that would take the minds and hearts of this
nation and grind them together into one unholy regret for a million mothers and
fathers.

    Nathan
Verney and I were children. We did not understand. We didn't want to
understand.

    In
Montgomery, Alabama, the City Bus Lines ordered an end to segregated seating.
Eisenhower told the schools down there to end their discrimination, and the
Supreme Court ruled the segregation law invalid.

    I was
a white kid from North Carolina. Nathan was black. It was not until '57 and
'58, when the Federal District Court ordered Little Rock, Arkansas to treat us
all the same, when

    Martin
Luther King was arrested for loitering and cited police brutality and was fined
$14 for refusing to obey a police officer, that the pains this country was
experiencing started to creep into our lives in a way that actually touched us.
February of 1960, Nathan and I were nearly fourteen years old, and someone put
a bomb in someone's house. That house belonged to one of the first black
students to enroll at Little Rock Central High. We heard about that, heard
about it from Nathan's daddy, and he went down to Montgomery and marched with
those thousand black students in March of the same year.

    Martin
Luther King spoke with Eisenhower, urged him to intervene to defuse the
tension, but Eisenhower was a politician not a negotiator. Ten blacks were shot
in Mississippi in April. They called it the worst ever race riot. They called
it many things. Me and Nathan called it madness.

    I
recall Nathan's daddy back then, and twenty years later I would still remember
the passion, the fury, the anger he lived inside for all those years.
Religion,
he said,
was unimportant.
Didn't matter what we called
ourselves. Didn't matter what church we attended. Didn't matter what hymns we
sang. And sure as hell, our color didn't matter. A man was a man, all men made
in God's image, and all men equal at birth and equal in death. All men called
to account for the same sins, no matter their race or belief.

    Nathan's
daddy came home one day with a bleeding head. Didn't want no bandage or dressing,
and though Mrs. Verney fussed and clucked and hovered he sent her away while he
talked to us. Said he would scar, and scar gladly. This was something he would
wear for the rest of his life. He was a man of God. He was a minister of the
faith. Yet to the police officer that hit him in Montgomery, Alabama he was
another poor dumb nigger who'd forgotten his manners, his mouth and his place.

    Nathan
and I had never really seen a difference between us; not until then.

    In
January 1961 John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United
States. He walked into a minefield. Three months in office and armed Cuban
exiles made a bid to overthrow Castro's Marxist government in Cuba. Khrushchev
vowed to give Castro all the aid he needed. The following month the U.S. agreed
to give more money and military aid to South Vietnam.

    A
week later white mobs attacked the freedom riders at the bus station in
Birmingham, Alabama.

    I was
fifteen years old, and foremost in my mind were girls - girls like Sheryl Rose
Bogazzi, Linny Goldbourne and Caroline Lanafeuille - but something out there
told me that the trials and tribulations of a 9th-grader were the least of the
world's concerns.

    As I
turned sixteen, Nathan there beside me, America seemed to hang on the edge of
the abyss both at home and abroad.

    We
heard about someplace called the Bay of Pigs, and for thirteen days people
honestly believed, I mean
really
believed, that the world would end.
Like Dean Rusk said, 'We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just
blinked.'

    More
than eleven hundred Bay of Pigs invaders were jailed for thirty years and
Castro tried to ransom them for $62,000,000. A month later, May '62, and JFK
sent his Marines into Laos. In July, Martin Luther King was arrested for
marching illegally in Georgia, a stone's throw across the state line from where
I sat in Greenleaf Senior High.

    In
September the shit really hit the fan.

    Whites
stormed the University of Mississippi when James Meredith was scheduled to
enter and enroll. Governor Ross Barnett ordered the State Troopers to stop the
kid from getting in. JFK sent the Deputy Attorney General and seven hundred and
fifty Federal Marshals down there to ensure that Meredith was given safe
passage.

    Later,
Ross Barnett was urged to rebel against JFK by a vast crowd of whites in
Jackson Stadium. The Ole Miss College Band, all decked out in Confederate
uniform, brought that crowd to their feet for a rendition of 'Dixie'.

    James
Meredith would not attend his first classes until October, and even then two
hundred arrests would be made.

    In
the same month JFK - a man who would be alive for only thirteen months more -
imposed an arms blockade after telling the world that Russia possessed missile
sites in Cuba. He lifted that blockade in November, and in December eleven
hundred and thirteen of the original Bay of Pigs invaders were ransomed for
$53,000,000.

    Seemed
the world had twisted on its axis. Seemed people had gotten their ideas all
choked up with McCarthy and discrimination and Castro and how Marilyn might
have been murdered because of who she loved.

    These
things were real, but not so real as to actually reach us where we lived.

    Not
until December, Christmas coming, and it was carried home so swiftly, so
mercilessly, that there was nothing we could do but face the truth.

    The
world had gone mad, and finally, at last, that madness came to Greenleaf.

    Ironically,
it would have been Nathan's birthday today.

    More
ironically, Mr. West chose to speak to me. I could not remember the last time
he had spoken directly to me. Perhaps two weeks, maybe a month. Down here in
D-Block you lost track of time. Left without your exercise for forty- eight
hours you didn't know if it was day or night. I'm sure they changed the times
the lights were put off and on. Disorientating. You got confused.

    Anyhows,
Mr. West came down, he looked through the grille, and he said:
You're a
fucking animal, Ford. What are you?

    
And
I said:
An animal, boss.

    
And
he said:
Sure as shit is shit you're an animal.

    And
then he laughed.

    I
could see his legs through the spaces between the bars. Could have almost reached
them from where I sat. Would never have made it. The man moved like a leopard.
My hand would have been out through the bars and he would've broken my wrist
with a billy club in a heartbeat. Less than a heartbeat.

    
Seems
to me the only good thing you ever did was kill some nigra, he went on. And now
they gonna fry your ass for it. Fucking ironic or what, eh?

    And
then he reached into his shirt pocket, took out a cigarette, lit it. He inhaled
once and then, smiling through the grille, he dropped the cigarette to the
floor and ground it to dust beneath the sole of his shoe. Did it on purpose.

    Ground
it so fine it could never have been retrieved and re- rolled.

    And
then he crouched on his haunches and peered through the bars at me. For a moment
there was an expression of sympathy.

    
Some
folks are here 'cause they deserve it, he started. And then there's some folks
that are here to pay for all of our sins. You're here 'cause you're just too
fucking stupid to know better, Ford. That's the simplicity of it. Seems to me
there was a time some way back when you did something you decided was worth
buryin' yourself for, eh? Always the way. If you're not here for what they said
you done, then sure as shit is brown and smells bad you're here for what you
think you done. An' don't tell me I ain't right, 'cause I know I am.

    The
sympathetic expression folded seamlessly into one of disgust and disdain.

    Whatever
the hell it was, boy, you felt bad enough to get yourself killed for it.

    Mr.
West, despite everything, knew when he'd caught a nerve, and once caught he'd
twist it like some vicious and sadistic orthodontist. Some said he could read
minds. Some said he could sense the tiniest tics and flinches in your
expression and catch those like a frog catching flies. Never missed, always
satisfied, always ready for more.

    He
stood up, the caustic sneer ever-present, and walked slowly away.

    Mr.
West's words had been timed perfectly, for he knew where I hurt, he knew where
my wounds were, and he played at them ceaselessly.

    Seemed
to me Mr. West had chosen me as his
raison d'etre,
at least for now, at
least until I walked the walk and sat in the
Big Chair.
That's what he
wanted; that's what would make him happy.

    That was
Nathan's birthday, and it was remembering this that made me think of Greenleaf
once more. Made me think of a particular day; the day the world made it clear
that Nathan Verney and I were not, and never would be, the same.

    Seems
to me now that all everyone wanted to do was fuck everyone else.