Juneteenth (38 page)

Well, maybe so; but what if I had, nobody would believe it. And maybe that’s because everybody dreams in the night that in this land treachery is the truth of life—so they can’t stand to think about it in the light of day. That reporter—McIntyre?—yes, waiting out there in the hall. He would’ve just thought that I was crazy the same as he does anyway. He wouldn’t know how to add up the figures; couldn’t get with the beat, even if I gave them to him. It would be like him walking down into a deep valley in the dark and looking up all at once to see two moons arising up over opposite hills at one and the same time. Ha! He’d either go cross-eyed and fall on his face in trying to deal with the sight. Or maybe like the fellow in the depot who was too tight to invest a nickel, he’d simply stand there twisting and turning and trying to make up his mind until he’d invented a new kind of dance and stank. No, Hickman, not his kind; he’d simply shut one eye and swear that one of those hills and one of those moons wasn’t there—even if the one he was trying to ignore was coming streaking toward him like a white-hot cannonball.…

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed. Maybe it’s just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality. Maybe wise men are just those who have had the power to stay awake and struggle. And who can blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated truths we have to struggle with? In this country men can be born and live well and die without
ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation
.

But look, Hickman—Alonzo … this is
here
and
now
and the stuff has begun to bubble. The man who fell and the man lying there on the bed is the child, Bliss. That’s the mystery. How did he become the child of that babyhood … father to the man, as it goes? And how could he have been my child, nephew and grandchild and brother-in-Christ as he grew? The confounding mystery of it has to be struggled with and I wish it was all a lie and and we could go back home and forget it. Still there was Robert, my brother-son. He was the second, dropping out of all that confusion. Yes, and there were all those long years before I had learned not to puzzle out questions about the babe anymore and could come to accept the sheer quickening wonder of him growing up, a young life being lived without regard to the consequences of its being put there among us, and without regard to the violent circumstances of its bawling birth. There was blood on the land and blood on my hands. I made my peace with that beginning too long ago for vengeance and finally I found my way to my ministry. Yes, the Lord-and-Master calls a man in strange tongues and voices, yes, and among strange scenes in stranger weather. I was never one to argue Genesis, not even in my heathen days—a start is a start, and “is” is
“is”
not “was.” Still, there had to be a beginning. Used to hear that crab lice came from a man and woman’s unwashed secreting and that was ignorant superstition—even though there’s no denying the biting and the scratching, or the fact that the big crabs made the little ones.… I’m so tired and sleepy that my mind’s falling into the cracks and crevices. Wonder if that young nurse would bring me a cup of coffee? No, just hold on. Wait. You’ll be asleep a long time and soon. Meanwhile stay awake and watch the story unfold. By right, he should be dead and cold, but he’s
holding on so you couldn’t let go even if you wanted to. Stay. Yea! I wait and hope for me, because ain’t this the time for me as well as for him? Here in his condition, so late in the day, asking me to tell him and
me
holding back the little I do know to keep him holding on and still not knowing fully how I became the man I am but merely the start. It sure changed my life around. I was never the same afterwards and it left an ache and emptiness that I’ve had to live with ever since. Oh, yes, you tried to cover it over with rectitude, tried to move on up above it and grow on top of it and you didn’t try to sermonize from it either. Not directly. You just allowed it to teach you to feel for others.… Hickman, you ache like he aches, and he aches, they ache, everybody aches and aches. Hickman, the guards outside the door think you want to get out, to leave. And that’s the truth.… Most will to forget, they drink denial like they drink whiskey. Yes, but where’s the true contrast coming from? Sugar without salt. Life without death, what kind of a world? What kind of reality? Yes, but I must live by what I’ve seen and remember. And I have seen my people face Death and even go a piece with him and then wrestle with him and get away, thank the Lord, and return. Yes, but how many have I seen pass on and die? How many, where there are no hospitals to take them in, passing on in little ole stuffy rooms lit by a dim flame guttering low in sooty chimneys? And me sitting in some rickety rocking chair on a bumpy boarded floor looking across the pain-racked face to ole Death crouching like a big bird on the head of the bed; just sitting and a-waiting like the great-granddaddy of all poker players. Just crouching there while I tried to give myself over to some poor soul’s trial, trying to absorb his agony into my own inadequate flesh. Humming a little comfort from the scriptures, sometimes from one of his favorite hymns, and sometimes praying until I grew mute and numb with weariness, and then leaving it up to the Lord … Bliss, sometimes I’ve seen Death arise and leave like smoke from the chimney when dawn grayed the room. I’ve seen him wait with patience and then take off in silence, like a cat hunting in the grass that’s waited until it sees the bird break his spell and fly away. And sometimes I’ve seen
him come down to claim the prostrate soul and heard the rattle in the dying throat as life left the body and the soul took flight. And sometimes in the quiet of the early morning, around the still point of three, the simmering time, when back there in the old days the dancers would have been bear-panting and rocking to the shouting of those horns, getting with it, while I played the blues. Then here comes the to-be-or-not-to-be time, the crisis time, and found me sitting and a-rocking along beside some sickbed with sleep weighing heavy on my lids and almost exhausted with the watching and the struggle and there heard some wife or mother give voice in the dark to woman’s old cry of heart-loss. I have heard it rip and tear up suddenly out of sleep as though the whole night had drawn itself together and screamed, and me looking up then and amazed as always to see their nightgowned forms flashing past to get to the bed to confirm what their souls had already acknowledged and accepted across sleep and distance, known it the way a fisherman knows when his line goes slack in the water that the fish is gone. Then I’ve heard them screaming again with the full realization of eternity come down. That’s something to remember and think about, here and now. Something to remember even beyond the question of being ready for the time when it comes. But who can stand to stare steady into Death’s blank face and all-consuming eye all the time, every day—even as the tens of thousands fall around us? Better to lift up our eyes to the hills and prepare for what’s on the other shore. A man has to live in order to have a reason for dying as well as for having a reason for being reborn—because if you don’t, you’re already dead anyway. Now hush, because you’re simply thinking words, old saws. So hush … all is noise
.

Yes, but what a time this has been. What an awful time this has turned out to be. And I thought we’d make it with something to spare. I still did, even after that young gal kept turning us away. I thought we’d contact him somewhere along the line and we’d talk awhile somewhere in private and tell him what we felt and hoped and prayed, both for him and for us and for the country, and then go on back home and wait. Just that. Just that; that was
all, even though there wasn’t a thing to justify the feeling that it might come to pass except our old habit of hoping. Maybe it just sneaked up on me, stole me while we were out there where I took them so they could see it for the first time and probably for most of us the last, and that got my hopes up and made me reckless. Maybe I let them down right there. Maybe the place and the image and the associations got to me. But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand. That’s the dangerous shape, the graven image we were warned about, the one that makes it possible for him to hear his inner hopes sound and sing and see them soar up and take wing before his half-believing eyes. Faith in the Lord and Master is easy compared to having faith in the goodness of man. There are simply too many snares and delusions, too many masks, too many forked tongues. Too much grit in the spiritual greens. But then, there that something is. There sits his hopes made manifest and a man knows that it’s not simply the mixed-up hopes and yearnings within his own mind and most secret heart that grab him and make him stand tiptoe inside his skin and reach up through the dark for something better and finer and more durable than he knows himself to be capable of, but something felt by a lot of other folks and even achieved and died for by a precious few.…

So I walked them out there just so that we could ease off from the frustration and runaround that we were getting, and so that I could have time to figure out our next move. Then they—we—had arrived and there it was … there
.

He slowly shook his head, staring across to the sleeping face and feeling it become almost anonymous beneath his inward-turning vision, the once-familiar cast of features fading like the light. He closed his eyes, his fingers clasped across his middle as the mood of
the afternoon moment returned in all its awe and mystery, and he found himself once more approaching the serene, high-columned space. Once more they were starting up the broad steps and moving in a loose mass still caught up in the holiday mood evoked by seeing the sights and scenes which most had only read about or seen in photographs or in an occasional newsreel. Then he was mounting the steps and feeling a sudden release from the frame of time, feeling the old familiar restricting part of himself falling away as when, long ago, he’d found himself improvising upon some old traditional riffs of the blues, or when, as in more recent times, he’d felt the Sacred Word surging rapturously within him, taking possession of his voice and tongue.

And now his heartbeat pounded and his footsteps slowed and he was looking upward, hesitating with one foot fumbling for the step which would bring him flush into the full field of the emanating power, and he felt himself shaken by the sudden force of his emotion. Then once again he was moving, moving into the cool, shaded and sonorous calm of the edifice, moving slowly and dreamlike over the fluted shadows cast along the stony floor before him by the upward-reaching columns, and he advanced toward the great image slumped there above in the huge stone chair.

From far away he could hear some sister’s softly tentative “Reveren’? Reveren’?” and now their voices fading in a hush of awed recognition; creating but for her echoing
Reveren’? Reveren’?
a stillness as resonant as the profoundest note of some great distant bell; still staring, still hearing the sister’s soft voice, which sounded now through a deep and doom-toned silence, her
Reveren’? Reveren’?
reverberating through his mind with the slow, time-and-space-devouring motion of great wings silently flying.…

Then he, Hickman, was looking up through the calm and peaceful light toward the great brooding face; he, Hickman, standing
motionless before the quiet, less-and-more-than-human eyes which seemed to gaze from beneath their shadowed lids as toward some vista of perpetual dawn which lay beyond infinity. And he thought,
Now I understand: That look, that’s us! It’s not in the features but in what that look, those eyes, have to say about what it means to be a man who tries to live and struggle against all the troubles of the world with but the naked heart and mind, and who finds them more necessary than all the power of wealth and great armies. Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us. It wasn’t in the dirty dozens about his family and his skin-tone that they tried to ease him into, but in that look in his eyes and in his struggle against the things which put it there and saddened his features. It’s in that, in being the kind of man he made himself to be that he’s one of us. Oh, he failed and he knew that he could only take one step along the road that would make us free, but in growing into that look he joined us in what we have been forced to learn about life and about being truly human in the face of life. Because one thing we have been forced to learn is that man at his best, when he’s set in all the muck and confusion of life and continues to struggle for his ideals, is near sublime. So yes, he’s one of us, not only because he freed us to the extent that he could, but because he freed himself of that awful inherited pride they deny to us, and in doing so he became a man and he pointed the way for all of us who would be free—yes!

Staring upward into the great brooding eyes he felt a strong impulse to turn and seek to share their distant vision but was held, the eyes holding him quiet and still, and he stared upward, seeking their secret, their mysterious life, in the stone; aware of the stone and yet feeling their more-than-stoniness as he probed the secret of the emotion which held him with a gentle but all-compelling power. And the stone seemed to live and breathe then, its great chest appearing to heave as though, stirred by their approach, it had decided to sigh in silent recognition of who and what they were and had chosen to reveal its secret life for all who cared to see and share and
remember its vision. And he was searching the stony visage, its brooding eyes, as though waiting to hear it resound with the old familiar eloquence which he knew only from the sound of the printed page—when a sister’s voice came to him as from a distance, crying, “Oh, my Lord! Look, y’all, it’s him! It’s HIM!,” her voice breaking in a quavering rush of tears.