Juneteenth (39 page)

And he was addressing himself now, crying in upon his own spellbound ears, as the sister’s anguished “Ain’t that him, Revern’? Ain’t that Father Abraham?” came to him like the cry of an old slave holler called across a moonlit field.

And too full to speak, he smiled; and in silent confirmation he was nodding his head, thinking,
Yes, with all I know about him and his contradictions, yes. And with all I know about men and the world, yes. And with all I know about white men and politicians of all colors and guises and intentions, yes. And with all I know about the things you had to do to be you and stay yourself—yes! She’s right, she’s cut through the knot and said it plain; you are and you’re one of the few who ever earned the right to be called “Father.” George didn’t do it, though he had the chance, but you did. So yes, it’s all right with me; yes. Yes, and though I’m a man who despises all foolish pomp and circumstance and all the bending of the knee that some still try to force upon us before false values, yes, and yes again. And though I’m against all the unearned tribute which the weak and lowly are forced to pay to a power based on force and false differences and false values, yes, for you “Father” is all right with me. Yes …

And he could feel the cloth of the sister’s dress as he gently touched her arm and gazed into the great face; thinking,
There you sit after all this unhappy time, just looking down out of those sad old eyes, just looking way deep out of that beautiful old ugly wind-swept and storm-struck face. Yes, she’s right, it’s you all right; stretching out those long old weary legs like you’ve just been resting awhile before pulling yourself together again to go and try to bind up all these wounds that have festered and run
and stunk in this land ever since they turned you back into stone. Yes, that’s right, it’s you just sitting and waiting and taking your well-earned ease, getting your second wind before getting up to do all over again what has been undone throughout all the betrayed years. Yes, it’s you all right, just sitting and resting while you think out the mystery of how all this could be. Just puzzling out how all this could happen to a man after he had done all one man could possibly do and then take the consequences for having done his all. Yes, it’s you—Sometimes, I guess … Sometimes …

And then he was saying it aloud, his eyes held by the air of peace and perception born of suffering which emanated from the great face, replying to the sister now in a voice so low and husky that it sounded hardly like his own:

“Sometimes, yes … sometimes the good Lord … I say sometimes the good Lord accepts His own perfection and closes His eyes and goes ahead and takes His own good time and He makes Himself a
man
. Yes, and sometimes that man gets hold of the idea of what he’s supposed to do in this world and he gets an idea of what it is possible for him to do, and that man lets that idea guide him as he grows and struggles and stumbles and sorrows until finally he comes into his own God-given shape and achieves his own individual and lonely place in this world. It don’t happen often, oh no; but when it does, then even the stones will cry out in witness to his vision and the hills and towers shall echo his words and deeds and his example will live in the hearts of men forever—

“So there sits one right there. The Master doesn’t make many like that because that kind of man is dangerous to the sloppy way the world moves. That kind of man loves the truth even more than he loves his life, or his wife, or his children, because he’s been designated and set aside to do the hard tasks that have to be done. That kind of man will do what he sees as justice even if the earth yawns and swallows him down, and even then his deeds will survive and persist in the land forever. So you look at him awhile and be thankful
that the Lord allowed such a man to touch our lives, even if it was only for a little while, then let us bow our heads and pray. Oh, no, not for him, because he did his part a long time ago. By word and by deed and by pen on paper he did the Lord’s work and transformed the ground on which we stand. And in the words my slavery-born granddaddy taught me when I was a child:

Ole Abe Lincoln digging in the sand
,
Swore he was nothing but a natural man
.
Ole Abe Lincoln chopping on a tree
Swore a mighty oath he’d let the slaves go free
.
And he did!

So let us pray, not for him but for ourselves and for all those whose job it is to wear those great big shoes he left this nation to fill …”

And there in the sonorous shadows beneath his outspread arms they bowed their heads and prayed.

And to think
, Hickman thought, stirring suddenly in his chair,
we had hoped to raise ourselves that kind of man …

Opening his eyes in the semidarkness now, Hickman looked about him. While he had dozed, the nurse and security man had gone, leaving him alone with the man sleeping before him and now, still possessed by the experience at the Memorial, he looked upon the sleeping face before him and felt an anguished loss of empathy. He looked at the Senator’s face half in shadow, half illuminated by a dim bed lamp as from a great distance, mist-hung and beclouded, thinking,
This is crazy; weird. All of it is. A crazy happening in a crazy place and I am the craziest of all. His being here is crazy, my being here is crazy, the reasons that brought us here are crazy as any coke-fiend’s dream—and yet part of that craziness contains the hope that has sustained us for all these
many years.… We just couldn’t get around the hard fact that for a hope or an idea to become real it has to be embodied in a man, and men change and have wills and wear masks. So there he lies, wounded and brought low but still he’s hiding from me, even in this condition he’s still running, still hiding just as he did long ago—Only now I’ll have to stay close and seek him out. For me it’s Ho-ho, this a-way, woe-woe, that-a-way and the game is lost in the winning. Besides, they wouldn’t let me leave here even if I told them that I only wanted to go back down home and forget all the things I’ve been forced by hope and faith to remember for all these years. What’s worse, they won’t want to hear the truth even if somebody could tell it. They’re keeping me here for the wrong reasons and probably trying to keep him alive just because it seems the thing to do after they learned that someone faceless and out of nowhere could have the nerve and determination to do what that boy did in the place that he did it. So now they’re shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth. They really don’t want to know the reason why or even the part of it I think I know because knowing will mean recognizing that they slipped up in places where they’d rather die than be caught slipping. A tint of skin—ha! They’d have to recognize that in this land there’s a wild truth that they didn’t blunt and couldn’t bring to heel.… It’s like a tamed river that rises suddenly in the night and washes away factories, houses, cities and all. Why can’t they face the simple fact that you simply can’t give one bunch of men the license to kill another bunch without punishment, without opening themselves up to being victims? The high as well as the low? Why can’t they realize that when they dull their senses to the killing of one group of men they dull themselves to the preciousness of all human life? Yes, and why can’t they realize that when they allow one group of men the freedom to kill us as evidence of their own superiority they’re only setting the stage so that these killers will have to widen the game, since if anyone can kill niggers the only way left to prove themselves superior is by killing some white man high in the public eye? Attack
the head since the feet are too easy a target? We have suffered, trained ourselves against their provocations, have taken low and rejected their easy invitations to die, have kept to our own vision and for the most part put down the need for bloody retaliation as foolishness. But instead of being satisfied, they’ve sensed the life-preserving power of our humility and gone stark crazy to destroy even that! Hickman, how can you help despising these people? How can you resist praying for the day when they shall turn upon one another as they did once before and purge this land with blood? How can you resist praying for the day when the sacrificer will be sacrificed, when the many-headed beast will rend itself, tooth, nail and fiery tail, and die?… How resist, Hickman? Why not pray for that?

Why not? Don’t play me for a fool—Why not? Because this American cloth, the human cloth, is woven too fine for that, that’s why. Because you are one of the few who knows where the cry of pain and anguish is still echoing and sounding over all that bloodletting and killing that set you free to set yourself free, that’s why again. Because you know that we were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real. So you’re in it, Hickman, and have been in it and there’s no turning back. Besides, there’s no single living man calling the tune to this crazy dance. Talking about playing it by ear, this is one time when everybody is playing it by ear because everybody in the band and out on the dance floor is as blind as a mole in a hole
.

But why couldn’t he have seen us, if only for a minute? Why? If he had, then all of this might not have happened. Oh, but it’s the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us. Well, there’s nothing to do but wait and see. He’s holding on even though Death is around somewhere close by—as he always is. I’ll just have to try once more to outwait him, to outface him, even though I’ve seen enough even for an old preacher like me.…

CHAPTER 15

And I named him Bliss, Hickman thought, shaking his head. Resting back in his chair now, his hands shading his eyes from the light, he stared sadly at the man on the bed. Lord, he thought, here he is at last, stretched out on his bed of pain. Maybe his dying bed. After flying so far and climbing so high and now here. Just look at him, Lord. Why does this have to be? I know it’s supposed to be this way because in spite of all our prayers it is; still, why does it have to be? I’m tired; for the first time I feel old-tired, and that’s the truth. And this is what’s become of our Bliss. He wasn’t always ours and yet he first was mine. It wasn’t easy either; far from easy. My hardest trial …

Hickman, maybe she was as Christian as she thought she was, maybe she was doing just what she had to do.… Then it seemed like Wickham said the Jews used to put it out there in K.C.: like killing your mother and father and then asking the court for mercy because you’re an orphan.… Maybe she was driven, like those
gamblers who couldn’t stand to win. But just think about it—coming there wrapped in a black shawl through the rutted alley over all that broken glass shining in the starlight … past all those outhouses, yard-dogs, and chicken coops, long after dark had come down. Coming into
that
house at a time like that. Having the nerve, the ignorant, arrogant nerve to come in there after all that had happened. Hickman, do you know that that was
something?
Talking about Eliza crossing the ice!—Ha! But her—having the arrogance to come there after all that had happened.

Maybe she was innocent, Hickman.

Innocent?

I can’t understand what people mean when they call somebody like her innocent. A man murders sixteen people on a city street at high noon he’d never seen before in his life, and they call him innocent? Maybe she had innocence
in
her but she was not
of
it. You couldn’t believe it, could you?

The first, yes; all that about Mamma and Bob, I could. Because that terrible story has happened to so many that it’s new only when it happens to you and to yours. You get to live with it like the springtime storms. So that it gets to be part of your sense of what life is. You learn to live with it like a man learns to live with only one arm and still get his work done—but not the Bliss part,
that
was the snapper, the stinger on the whip!

There you were, sitting again in the lamp-lit room feeling the weight of the rifle across your knees and a shotgun and two pistols on the table beside you; sitting dressed in your working tuxedo and your last white, iron-starched shirt, there staring into the blank wall at the end of time. Yes, and with death weighing down your mind. They’d already told you to get out of town, because you reminded them of what they’d done and you’d refused to go; yes, and maybe they recognized what it would cost some one or two of them at the
least to force you, so after all those months you were still there. And instead of the end it was the beginning. Maybe it would help him to know. Yes, but in his condition it might
kill
him to know; the truth can humiliate those who refuse to meet it halfway. And I couldn’t believe it myself when it was happening. You’d heard the expected knock on the door and said
Come in
with the rifle ready, taking a glance at the shotgun and the pistols on Mamma’s table and at her Bible open to where you’d written the record, hers and Bob’s; and with your own all written down to the month, feeling that this was to be the month, and just waiting for some unknown hand to write in the date. It’s still waiting, after all these years, thank you, Master—my best-loved Bible to this day … I never thought of it before, but maybe it all began with my writing my death in the Book of Life, who knows? Yes, and with me sitting just like I’m sitting now … It’s like I’ve never gotten up or recognized her presence in all these elapsed years. Ha! Sitting there in death’s dry kingdom preparing myself for seven months to take a few of them along with me. Yes, ready to write your name in blood and to go to hell to pay for it. Hickman, you were too big and black for anybody to ever have called callow, but, man, you were
young!
Waiting for more liquored-up, ganged-up violence to come get you—and then seeing her standing there. There, Lord, after the double funeral and all, you thought you were seeing an evil vision, didn’t you, Hickman? Yes, indeed, or at least that I had dozed. I shot bolt upright in the chair. Yes, you sure did. Standing there, looking at me out of those hollow eyes; not saying a word. I thought,
If I take a deep breath it’ll go away
, then she stretched out her hand and kind of fluttered her fingers and tried to speak and I knew she was real. Shot up with a pistol in my hand, no longer surprised as Bob must have been, just dead sure her being there meant more deathblood to flow, and dead set to drown her in it along with me. A church organist, come to
think of it. I never thought about that before, but, Hickman, look at the pattern it makes.… Tall and wrapped in a black shawl like those Mexican women in mourning, shaking her head at my pistol like I was some child she’d come upon in the woods about to go after a bear with an air rifle, saying,