Unblinking

by Lenzo, Lisa;

  Our dad wasn’t involved in the first attempt to march from Selma. That attempt was broken up by Alabama state troopers, who attacked the long column of men, women, and children with tear gas, whips, and clubs. Fifty people were hospitalized, and that day came to be known as Bloody Sunday. I remember Martin Luther King appearing on national TV afterward to announce that they would try the march again, and calling on Americans of all colors and all religions and from across the whole country to join him. My dad and one of his doctor friends, moved by TV footage of the brutally beaten marchers and by Dr. King’s call to action, decided to fly down to Selma to march, and also to help treat the wounded if the marchers were attacked again.

  Now Arthur and I are two decades older than our dad was when he walked those fifty-plus miles to Montgomery, and while we have learned more about that march and the civil rights movement in the years since, we have never asked our dad about his experience in the Selma march.

  I’d remembered our dad being gone just a few days, but now he tells us that the march lasted for five. “Five days?” I exclaim. “You marched for five days?”

  He nods.

  “And it rained, Dad, didn’t it?” Arthur asks. “I was reading about it on the Internet, and it said that it rained several times along the route.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” our dad says.

  “Did you have raincoats?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Umbrellas?”

  “No.”

  “So what did you do?” Arthur asks.

  “We got wet,” our dad says. “It was refreshing, actually. We didn’t have any place to shower along the way, and we hadn’t brought any extra clothing.”

  Arthur and I exchange looks, and Arthur massages Dad’s shoulders and says, “Five days! I can’t imagine you skipping a shower for even one day, Old Man, fastidious as you are.”

  “Didn’t you stay at people’s houses?” I ask. “Couldn’t you use their showers?”

  “We slept in houses that first night, but then we slept in fields, in tents. There were too many of us. We were passing through small towns, some of them nothing more than hamlets.”

  “Did you get lessons in nonviolence before you set out?” I ask.

  “No. But we were all aware.”

  “What was it like? Was there a lot of chanting and singing?”

  “Not at first. At first it was rather solemn. There weren’t many people at the start. Only about two hundred.”

  “I thought there were thousands,” I say.

  “Only three hundred were permitted to participate at first,” Arthur informs me. “According to what I read, the highway was too narrow. When the highway widened to four lanes, they allowed more people to join in.”

  “That’s right,” our dad says. “At the start, over a thousand people showed up, but only a couple hundred of us were allowed to march. My colleague and I were chosen in case doctors were needed. And maybe also because I was a Unitarian. A week before the main march began, a Unitarian minister from Boston was killed. That cast a pall over everything.”

  “Did you know him?” I ask.

  “No. He was killed before I got there.”

  “Did they find out who killed him?” Arthur asks.

  “We didn’t know at the time. Later they did—three local white bigots. I don’t think they ever got prosecuted.” Our dad lifts his hand with a concentrated effort and rubs his temple. “The minister who was murdered,” he says, “was eating at a black restaurant and hanging around in the black parts of town, and that was against the rules. He was this white northerner, this Yankee, flaunting southern white rules, and he ended up dead.”

  “And before that there was also a black man who was killed,” my mom says from across the room. “And a lot of black people were angry afterward, when the death of the white minister got so much national attention—not only in the media but also in the movement. There were marches and protests across the country after the minister died, but a black man being killed in the South didn’t get anywhere near the same notice.” My mom hardly ever just sits—she works on a quilt or knits, or she looks through bills or reads the paper or a book. But passing through the living room and hearing us, she stopped to listen, and now she is sitting in the recliner with nothing in her hands. “Do you remember that, Ralphy?”

  “Yes,” my dad says. “This young black man was killed by an Alabama state trooper during a previous march. He was trying to protect his mother, and she was trying to protect her elderly father, whom a trooper had begun beating for no reason. The young man was unarmed, but a cop shot him.” When I look it up later, I find that the grandfather who was being clubbed was eighty-two, the current age of my father. And that the grandson, Jimmie Lee Jackson, aged twenty-six and a deacon of his church, was shot twice in the stomach, after which troopers chased him out of the restaurant where he and his family had taken refuge. The troopers then continued to beat him in the street until an ambulance called by other marchers arrived. He died in the hospital eight days later.

  We are all quiet for a minute. My mom is sitting in the big recliner, her head bowed to her empty hands; Arthur and I have pulled up chairs next to our dad’s wheelchair. “The police in Selma were extremely vicious,” my dad says, “as they were in a lot of places. And ordinarily a police presence of any kind would make me nervous. But right before the march started, Lyndon Johnson ordered federal troops to protect us. And every time I heard a helicopter or saw one pass overhead I was relieved.”

  “There were helicopters flying overhead?”

  “Oh, yes. Constantly.”

  Our dad tells us that the helicopters, as well as guards on the ground, some on foot and some driving jeeps, followed the whole march, yet in every town they marched through, there were counter-demonstrators shouting, “Niggers!” and “Nigger lovers!” from the sidelines. “I couldn’t believe how contorted their faces were,” Dad says. “Completely distorted by hatred.” In many towns, Dad tells us, there were black people who joined the march for a few miles, then returned to their towns. In the first hamlets the marchers passed through, the people only stared, looking wary. In towns further along the route, they waved, and later on, they joined in, walking along with the marchers.

  I’m sitting very still next to my father, awed by his place in the history of our country, surprised that I’ve never questioned him about it before now.

  “How did Mom feel about you going?” Arthur asks.

  “We talked about it,” Dad says.

  “And she agreed?”

  “Oh, sure,” Dad says. “I wouldn’t have gone without her permission.”

  We turn toward the recliner where Mom is sitting with her legs drawn up beside her. “Mom, did you want him to go?” Arthur asks. “Or did you just go along with it?”

  “Oh, I was for it,” Mom says. “I thought it was important. But all week long, I was worried and tense. I remember the first day, Sunday, on the way home from church, the car got a flat tire. All five of you were in the car with me, and I didn’t know what to do. Zachary was only a baby; he’d just had his first birthday. Mike was the oldest, but he was only eleven. So I drove to a gas station on the flat—I completely ruined the tire and the rim. And then I had a doctor appointment later that week, and the doctor said I had some little thing wrong with me, and I started crying. The doctor was surprised. He said, ‘This is nothing to cry about, it’s not at all serious.’ But I was crying at the thought that I might have to deal with everything from then on alone, without your dad to help me.”

  Dad looks across the room at Mom and says, “Your mother was braver than I was.”

  I think this is true. My dad might have gone out in one terrible moment, like Viola Liuzzo, who was shot in the head; or he might have suffered a fatal beating, like James Reeb, the minister from Boston; or he might have died from being shot and then savagely beaten, like Jimmie Lee Jackson, the young deacon. But my mom would have had to raise five children on her own and live
the rest of her life without her husband. She would have had to be strong and resilient month after month, year after year, until all her children were grown, and beyond.

  We talk some more about the march, and I tell my dad that when I was little, I had a picture in my mind of him walking shoulder to shoulder with King. “So a couple of years later, when I saw photos of the march in a book, I was surprised that you weren’t right there beside him.”

  “No, he was at the front, with the other notables. But I did walk right beside Pete Seeger for a while.”

  “You did! Did he sing?”

  “Yes. And we sang with him.”

  “What did you sing?”

  My dad is quiet, remembering. “One of the songs was ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Someone would call out the next line, sometimes making it up on the spot. And I made up a line, and Pete Seeger picked it up.”

  “Do you remember what it was?”

  My dad is quiet again. Then he clears his throat. “We shall all have jobs,” he sings, his voice hoarse and soft. “We shall all have jobs. We shall all have jobs, someday. Deep in my heart . . . I do believe . . . we shall all have jobs, someday.”

  Our dad reverts to his speaking voice. “We weren’t marching just for voting rights but also for jobs, better housing, decent schools. Blacks wanted the right to vote so they could help to change things.”

  As I sit beside my dad, I think of how things have changed, for better and for worse. Dr. King would be proud and glad that blacks and whites, together, elected Obama twice, but he would cry, and cry out, at all that remains wrong, in Alabama and in Detroit and across the rest of our country.

  Our dad already told us years ago that no one was hurt on this march, and that the only doctoring he had to do was to wrap a sprained ankle. Now we ask him about the speeches at the end of the march. So many luminaries, political activists, and celebrities were there, including some of the best folk singers of the time—and of course, Martin Luther King, who gave a magnificent and moving speech.

  “I didn’t stay for the speeches,” my dad says.

  “Why not?” we ask. This was the best part, the crowd grown from three hundred to twenty-five thousand, celebrating their victory.

  His voice soft with emotion, our dad says, “I wanted to get home to my sweeties.”

  ⊙

  “I won’t say he’s about to die,” Zachary, my ER nurse brother, says six months later, on the phone from California. “Because I’ve said that before and been wrong. He’s a tough old guy, with a strong heart and good lungs. But if he goes pretty soon, I wouldn’t be surprised.” According to Mom, Zachary says, Dad is sleeping most of the time, difficult to wake, and when he is awake, he’s very weak and confused.

  I had decided to skip going in to Detroit this month, but I’m concerned by this news, so I get into my little red Honda and set off.

  When I arrive, around noon, my dad is asleep in the recliner. My mom looks frazzled and worried—she looks like she did four decades ago, the other time it seemed she was losing her husband, when my dad was involved in his long affair. Years after that affair was over, when I asked my mom why she didn’t leave my dad then, she said she was waiting for him to come back to her. Not that he’d ever moved out of our house—she meant come back into the intimacy they had shared. She believed that if she waited long enough, he’d return. She was willing to wait, she told me, because she’d never loved any man except him.

  As we stand above him while he sleeps, Mom says that Dad has gone suddenly downhill. Only a few days ago he was fine, but now he sleeps most of the time, and when he is awake, he’s always confused. “Last night he woke up,” my mom says, “and he said that he had to go to the wedding of his niece’s son. He has just one niece—you know, Bernadine. And her sons are only, what, ten and twelve? I tried to convince him that there was no wedding to go to, but he insisted there was, and that he needed to find clothes to wear. He also said he’d been asked to say something at the wedding, to give a little speech, and he hadn’t written it yet. He was really agitated about it. I told him it was past midnight, and there was no wedding, and he got mad at me. He tried to get out of bed. I finally sat on him to hold him down.” My mom laughs.

  “You sat on him?” I ask.

  “Yes. I pinned him. I sat on his chest, with my knees on either side, holding him like this.” She holds her arms out in front of her, palms flat, and laughs again. “He probably could have pushed me off. He was really angry. But I wouldn’t get off him, and he finally gave up arguing with me and went back to sleep.”

  I look at my dad, sleeping now, imagining him pushing my mother and hurting her, then getting up and hurting himself. “Where was the aide?”

  “Oh, she was in the bedroom with us, trying to convince him that no one would be holding a wedding in the middle of the night.”

  As if on cue, an aide, a different one than last night, walks in from the back of the house. “This is Jackie,” my mom says. Jackie and I say hi and exchange a few words. She’s from Detroit, not Jamaica, but like Isadora, Jackie lives in the suburbs, with her husband and young son. In Southfield, she later tells me. Not only whites have left the city.

  As I’m settling my things in the guest room, an aide from hospice arrives. Lasheena is here to give my dad a bath, but she can’t wake him. “Mr. Zito?” she says loudly. “Mr. Zito, it’s time for your bath.”

  I join her, putting my mouth next to my dad’s ear and saying softly, “Dad? It’s time to wake up for your bath.” He so loves being clean, he probably wouldn’t want to miss this chance. I rub my dad’s shoulders; I kiss his forehead, then his cheek. But he doesn’t stir, he’s sleeping so deeply.

  “We don’t have to wake him,” Lasheena says. “I can bathe him while he sleeps.”

  “You can?” I ask, imagining my dad slipping off his shower chair onto the floor of the tub, wondering how we will fish him out.

  “Not in the shower,” my mom explains. “Sheena’s just giving him a bed bath.”

  “Or I can bathe him right here in this chair,” Lasheena says. “If that’s all right.”

  My mom says it’s fine. She gets a sheet, and as Lasheena lifts my dad’s right side and then his left, Jackie and I wrestle the sheet under him. Jackie is short and compact like me, while Lasheena is large and strong. I talk to my dad as we move him, telling him what we are doing. He cries out and flinches a little, moaning. He could be dreaming, totally out of it, but I have a feeling that he is semiconscious. “Sheena’s going to give you a bath in this chair, Dad,” I say. “We need to get this sheet under you.” Finally, awkwardly, with a lot of pushing and pulling and rolling, the three of us have positioned the sheet so that it will protect the leather chair from drops of water as my dad is bathed. During all of our moving him around, despite his flinching and cries, he hasn’t opened his eyes.

  Lasheena bathes only his lower body. Afterward, we decide to move him to his bed. We pull him up to sitting. He still doesn’t wake. Lasheena reaches her big, strong arms around his waist, and with one great burst of strength, she hoists him up, pivots, and sets him down on his wheelchair. His eyes are still closed, his face impassive. This time he doesn’t moan or cry out or flinch. I wheel him into the back bedroom, and again, with one great effort, Sheena lifts him from his wheelchair to the bed. Then I help her position him on the bed pad and sheet. His head is like a stone, his body is like a sandbag, and his legs are like rubber. But as I adjust the covers around his shoulders, he whimpers, eyes still shut tight, and his body tenses. He bats me away with hands that are strangely curled. I don’t recognize his high, pained cries. I have never seen my father less like himself.

  ⊙

  Later that afternoon, the power goes out. My dad is still asleep. It’s four-thirty, a humid summer day, but not seriously hot, only in the low eighties. The air-conditioned apartment is around seventy-five degrees. We stick our heads out into the hall. A couple of my mom’s neighbors are also looking out into the hall, and they
say that, yes, their power is out, too. We turn back into the apartment. “Well,” my mom says, “it’ll come back on, eventually.”

  I run water into three of my mom’s largest cooking pots, to use for everything from drinking to flushing toilets, since the building’s water pump needs electricity to run, and my mom hunts around until she finds a tiny flashlight. Lew, a friend of my parents, phones from his apartment on the twenty-seventh floor and advises us to open the door to the hallway, which is generally cooler than the apartments, but to keep our windows closed because it’s hotter outside. Jackie is scheduled to leave in an hour, and she says she’ll wait to eat till after she gets home. My mom and I decide to have a “dessert dinner”—cold rice pudding and a Swiss apple-bread dish called apfel chue. My dad fell asleep after eating only a few bites of his breakfast and didn’t have any lunch, so, at around six, as he continues to sleep, my mom gives him a can of Jevity through his G-tube.

  A half hour later, Jackie has left and her replacement, Jolene, is here when my dad, still asleep, moves his bowels. I have gone into the bedroom to check on him, and when I walk up close, I detect a slight foul smell, and then I hear the wet gurgle of more diarrhea exiting his body. I go out to tell Jolene and my mom, and Jolene comes back with me and stands over my dad. We pause. Then Jolene prepares herself for the harder job. As she pulls on latex gloves, I remove my watch. We have to do this carefully, since we have no running water.

  I help Jolene roll my dad onto his side, and then I hold him steady, circling his shoulders and cradling his head as Jolene cleans him, wiping my dad with wet wipes, removing the soiled bed pad and sheet, then wiping him again. My mom brings a clean sheet and pad and says that this is the last pad left—the other two are downstairs, still wet in the washing machine because of the power outage. Jolene and my mom bundle up the dirty laundry and stuff it, dirty side inward, into a plastic mesh laundry bag. My dad continues to sleep. We’re not sure what to do with the laundry bag stuffed with the soiled bedding. “We could put it out in the hall,” Jolene suggests. “No one will steal it,” she jokes.