Writing to Save a Life

by John Edgar Wideman

  But during the side trip to South Carolina, I didn’t, couldn’t say, I’m Promiseland people. Too late. My people gone. Drastically severed from me and me from them by time and circumstance. I could not speak to the living about my ties to Promiseland. I confessed only in the burial ground of old Mount Zion, the church my great-grandfather had pastored, his name on a plaque on new Mount Zion’s door. Reverend Tatum drove a horse-drawn buggy to take the pulpit each Sunday, his impeccably dressed wife next to him on the buggy’s wooden seat. Her Sunday bonnet famous because one time they hit a bump and the hat landed in a juniper bush, according to one of my grandfather Harry’s stories.

  * * *

  At the edge of the woods behind old Mount Zion AME I found several gravestones that bore the family name. Three in particular. Sturdy, rough-hewn, broad-shouldered stones belonging to Jordan, Baker, Foster, my great-grandfather Tatum’s brothers, my grandfather’s uncles side by side among scattered graves of parents, wives, uncles, aunts, sisters, in-laws, cousins, neighbors. My people I had never met and never would because once upon a time I was too ashamed or too scared to come south with my grandpa and it’s too late now. Harry’s youngest sister’s son, Littleman, was the last known survivor of the clan my grandfather had left behind in 1898, and Littleman (a.k.a. James), whom I’d met when he visited my grandfather up north, must be buried by now behind one little country church or another. My people in the ground behind Mount Zion only ones heard me say, I’m back. I’m here. Overwhelmed by their silence greeting me, that’s about everything my heart, my head let me confess.

  * * *

  In Brittany I converse with stones. Small stones, scarcely larger than gravel on the Gulf of Morbihan’s beaches, prattle under my sneakers. Stones hundreds of times my weight, darkly furred by algae, stand offshore. A herd of massive animals black against the horizon’s shimmer, their bellowing and moaning blended into the sea’s dull roar.

  * * *

  Stonescapes are various as seascapes. So many stones and every one is different each time I pass. Never the same stone twice. An unending flow of information and my eyes, ears can’t keep up.

  * * *

  I try to convince myself to be satisfied with my limited point of view, my small grip. My irrelevancy a mercy finally that allows me to slip in and out of stony exchanges and silences, languages of no words I know, streaming like half-remembered incidents stream inside my head. I pass by transparent, weightless through a particular stones’s glance and never have before, never will again.

  * * *

  When my mother accompanies me, I tease her. Ask if her mother’s mother mothered by a stone. Does her secret ancestry account for my grim, stony expression people often complain about. The slow hardening of my flesh inside and out, my impenetrability, stubbornness, stiff joints. Is it why a state of rest with no desire to move has become my body’s deepest, purest pleasure. I walk my older man’s walk beside the sea, fascinated as a kid, or to put it more accurately, fascinated as an old man who samples a boy’s ancient astonishment, a boy stymied, intimidated by every form’s restless hunger for change. Each form’s failure to be what it’s not. A boy observing a world more fragile and ephemeral than he is. But it’s also a world hard as stone. Shy as a stone. Stones are shy. Remove a wet stone from its setting and it loses color as it dries. A reverse blush. Stones grow pale like my mother, like Helen of Troy after she’s kidnapped and carried far from home.

  * * *

  Competing with stones for my attention, corpses of jellyfish wash up in great numbers on the gulf’s rocky beaches. Jellyfish in many ways are the exact opposite of stones, until I recall the French word méduse for jellyfish and Medusa’s glare that turned humans to stone. Then I smile. We’re all family here. All orphans. Stones. Me. You. All of us, I tell jellyfish rotting where the tide strands them.

  A plague of dead jellyfish. The large ones are called lion’s mane by the British to honor a cluster of eight long tentacles trailing the fish like dreadlocks as they swim through the sea. The jelly-fish look like humongous puddles of spit or mucus coughed up onshore. If the sun’s bright, you can peer through their skin at an odd conglomeration of pastel-hued pipes, valves, pumps, viscera, organized for locomotion, reproduction, breathing, feeding, stinging, digestion, roaming the oceans’ depths. An ocean that for reasons unknown—Chantal would blame unseasonably warm water temperatures, Antoine argued unseasonable cold when I related what I’d observed—was vomiting jellyfish in great numbers, stranding them dying and dead, draped over stones, wedged between stones, mired in dark clumps of algae.

  I measure one dead méduse with my just slightly longer than twelve inch sneaker. A yard and a half circumference I calculated, then said hello and goodbye to the swelling carcass of a creature whose anatomy, like a giraffe’s, seems strayed from another dimension. A bowl of jelly that looks as if it should quiver when I nudge it with my toe, but it’s surprisingly dense, firm.

  * * *

  One morning I witnessed very young children in school uniforms attack an immense dead or near dead jellyfish. Visible fear and loathing were expressed in the face of a boy who first notices the body. His classmates gather around him and as soon as it becomes clear the ugly thing can’t defend itself, a predictable escalation of bravery, excitement that rises to a frenzy of singsong chanting, hip-hopping dance steps. They prod with shoes, poke with sticks, pelt with stones, smash with rocks as large as they’re able to lift. Why didn’t I shout, Hey, kids. Stoppit. Jellyfish relatives. Yours. Mine. Ours.

  * * *

  Another day, close to sunset, an hour’s steady hump still to go before I reach the cottage, sea a quicksilver radiance over my left shoulder, and in front of me the sky climbs and climbs. I lower my eyes and they are attracted by a something that turns out not to be a bright stone nor jellyfish gleam, but an orange rubber glove washed up by the tide. A single glove lying on the sand, palm up, rubbery fingers curled as if they held something invisible or had let go of something and retained its shape. I found myself daydreaming a hand inside the glove. Not a gory, severed hand like in horror movies at the Belmar show, a live hand like mine, a hand my color, not the glove’s orange of an orange. Perhaps a hand with fingers wrapped around something it had never held but wishes for or something precious it held once and yearns to have within its grasp again. But this glove washed up on the beach can’t hold or let go of anything except sand and grit that collects inside it. No soap opera, just a glove, an orange rubber or latex glove with no flesh and bone fingers inside, no wishes, no memories of being alive once or alive now, just a thing, an orange-colored thing the tide delivered and soon enough will take back.

  * * *

  In Brittany, I chop up the Till file like William Burroughs chopped up his fiction to make new stories, a method not unlike my mother’s way of composing stories. I place fragments of Benni Lucretzia’s testimony at the Till, McMurray court-martial into a box, shake them up, shake them out . . .

  * * *

  —these colored soldiers came in, all three of them were masked. One tall one and two small ones . . . Three niggers entered my house during the raid . . . One of them grabbed me by the mouth. Another grabbed my daughter by the head, they did not find my daughter . . .

  * * *

  They came to me and started to hit me. I was asking for my daughter. One had a pistol in his pocket while he was raping me. One of them lighted a match and my daughter got under the bed. They did not find my daughter so she was untouched . . . I did not know she was under the bed and was looking for my daughter . . .

  * * *

  How many matches did they light. When they were on top of me, two. I don’t know. I was crying. I was looking for my daughter. You were watching what was going on beside you. Yes, because I thought it was my daughter, and I was yelling, “Frieda, do you know where my daughter is” . . . While one was on top of me, he lit a match and I lifted up the mask and he hit me . . . Did the mask cover their eyes? I didn’t take note of it be
cause as soon as they entered I started looking for my daughter . . .

  * * *

  Were you watching those two people? I was watching there . . . and I was asking, “Have you seen my daughter?” I thought my daughter was in the same . . . Now how could you tell that these were colored people. They lit a match. From the face and from the hands. When they were lighting the matches I could tell and when they had their hand across my mouth . . . And you weren’t much interested in what was going on around you. No, because I was struggling myself, and I was thinking about my daughter.

  * * *

  Were they all colored people. Two of them were dark and one seemed to be a little lighter-sort-of-a-mulatto, but it was dark. Do you know what color clothing he had on. No, because I was searching for my daughter and couldn’t see . . .

  * * *

  They hit me in the forehead and on the mouth and on the shoulder, and I was black and blue, they tore off all my clothing, I was all undressed, and one was on top of me and striking me because I wouldn’t open my legs. I was forced. I had to. I was weak. I couldn’t do anymore the big one was on top of me and the other held my legs . . . Did you see his penis. Yes, I saw it. They put that thing in. How far. All of it. All the way because the other was holding my legs. How long. In Italian it spurted . . . All of it in. They had their way. I had a miscarriage, the same morning . . . I had a miscarriage.

  * * *

  Hunches are another way of cutting up and splicing the Till file. For instance my hunch is that Benni Lucretzia’s young daughter Elena was raped or sold the night of June 27. If this fact was discovered by CID investigators, they didn’t report it. Why not. Maybe because it’s not fact. It’s my hunch. A hunch the file doesn’t confirm. Or negate. If Elena Lucretzia, a juvenile, had been raped or bought or both wouldn’t army agents welcome that information as one more evil deed to pin on Till and McMurray. Yes and no. More is not always better. More mess is not a better mess and the army’s case is messy, all soft, gooey circumstantial evidence. Problematic at best. A case difficult to make without witnesses willing to nail down neatly, precisely specific facts the judges require for a death conviction.

  * * *

  Benni Lucretzia and Frieda Mari, according to CID agents, did not report immediately that they had been raped because they were frightened American soldiers might retaliate. The women also said they wished to avoid the public shame and humiliation of being rape victims. Similar fears of disgrace would have motivated the women to do everything in their power to conceal what happened to Lucretzia’s daughter, Elena, on the night of June 27. Investigators were presented with a bargaining chip to offer a mother desperate to preserve her daughter’s safety, honor, and marriage prospects.

  Though agents may have harbored suspicions or even had in hand information confirming that Elena had been raped or sold, they had no compelling interest in publicly disclosing the girl’s violation. A conspiracy of silence shielding Elena Lucretzia just fine from the investigator’s point of view. Till and McMurray could be hanged only once, and conviction on charges of murdering one woman plus raping two others would do the trick. Why drag in poor Elena. Why put a child through the ordeal of testifying to her shame. We certainly won’t, not if you say exactly what we tell you to say, Signora Lucretzia. Repeat what we tell you to say and we’ll hang those black bastards. She’s nodding, yes. Yes, yes . . . Sì, sì. Cooperate with us, signora, the agent continues, and we won’t mention Elena’s name during court-martial. Help us and we promise to guard your daughter’s reputation.

  * * *

  Seventy years after the facts of murder and mayhem, what kinds of rules should govern my reconstruction of events that transpired the night of June 27–28 in Civitavecchia. Unless I offer an open-and-shut case to contradict the official record, won’t I be imitating Louis Till. Wind up like Till. Swinging in the breeze. An irrelevancy. Bearing witness to alternative scenarios I’m able to render only as unspeakable absences. The inside of Till’s mind an echo chamber of questions no one asks. Over and over Till hears questions not asked. How can he respond to questions nobody’s asking. Except with silence to match silenced questions.

  * * *

  I can’t rescue dead Louis Till from prison and the hangman. The Till file’s my hobbyhorse. Me astride it like some kind of chocolate Don Quixote. I can’t save Till. Not father, not son. Too late for the Tills. Louis Till’s case is colder than Rakhim’s. Why not work for live prisoners, my wife has asked me. Millions of people are locked up this very minute. I do. I am, I want to say. Want to explain to her, to myself. I work for an incarcerated son and brother. They are locked inside me, I am imprisoned with them during every moment that I struggle with the Till file. No choice. Trying to find words to help them. To help myself. Help carry the weight of hard years spent behind bars. If I return to Till’s grave, I will confess to him first thing that the Louis Till project is about saving a son and brother, about saving myself.

  * * *

  Lying awake in the cottage near the gulf, I stared into darkness and wondered where the very deepest part of the deep blue sea would be. Mer, the French word for sea, sounds like the French word for mother. If the words for sea and mother sounded alike in English, would I be closer to having a mother now, I asked myself, then tried to think about nothing in particular, waited for the sweet oblivion of sleep, and that’s when I heard the sea, its sound part of the room’s silence all along, nonstop inside me, forgotten or not, it doesn’t forget, it’s there like my mother’s there, speaking to me always. She’s where I come from, where I belong, we belong to each other, and I will return. I can’t help it. There’s no other way. I go there in memories and will go there in whatever form memories assume once consciousness ends. I listen and remember her like the sea is remembered by shapes, substances strewn on the sand. By wind that sows and chases smells of the sea. By uncountable things and fragments of things brittle, soft, almost water, almost stone that feed, swim, watch noisy or silent as I watch and listen. I see myself in shells, rocks, strands of seaweed, myself broken, whole, see her, see us letting go and not letting go, and I understand no more than that. Many, many separations and returns shrouded in darkness, deep blue-black darkness of night that contains the sea, frees the sea, hides the sea. The sea far away though it’s close. Inside me like my mother now, invisible, seachanged. As close as I’m ever going to get to having her.

  * * *

  War stories. Sea stories. Love stories. Till file full of stories. Of lies and truth. Shake them up. Dump them on the table. Then what. Why. Louis Till not stuck like a bone in the country’s throat. America’s forgotten Louis Till, no sweat. It’s me. I’m the one who can’t forget. My wars. My loves. My fear of violent death. I’m afraid Louis Till might be inside me. Afraid that someone looking for Louis Till is coming to pry me apart.

  * * *

  Selfish. Just like him. Just like your father. Mean and selfish like him and not a soul in the world you care about besides yourself, my mother shouted, her face close enough to mine to touch.

  I can’t recall exactly how old I was—suddenly conscious of being taller than her so I must have been in my early teens—but I will never forget my mother’s words: selfish. Just like him. Words I heard more than once afterwards, and whether she truly believed them or wanted to shame me and save me from becoming the person the words described, whether she believed I was that selfish person then and still him the very last day I touched her flesh on this earth, I can’t say. She’s wherever she is and I am here, who I am. Still stung, still recoiling from her words. Wedded to the words for better or worse as she was wedded to my father, the man she loved who deserted her and their five children, the oldest of whom I am. First born, bearer of my father’s name and, according to my mother, bearer of his intense, boundless self-love that admits no space to love another. Bearer of his willed blindness and hard, ice-cold capacity to separate himself from the lives of others as if other lives don’t exist or don’t matter. Or matter only
because of what he could take from them, what they might willingly surrender.

  Since I envisioned my father as almost a god in my mother’s eyes, it’s strange I heard only repudiation and scorn in her words. Just like him. No hint of redeeming resemblances, no backhanded compliment or unintended praise. My father exacted unconditional love and acceptance from my mother. Love that survived his fairly regular disappearances, disloyalties, his contemptuous manner of ignoring her, turning his back and walking away from her good sense, patience, her pleas, tears, the aching need for him in her voice. I believed her bottomless love granted him immunity from the consequences of his selfishness. No sweet immunity for me. The day she accused me of being like him, her words didn’t condemn my father, they condemned me. My fatal flaw. Flawed like him but without the saving grace of being him. Her words orphaned me, separated me from her, my father, my siblings. All decent people.

  I was too young then to comprehend very much about what held my parents together or what caused trouble between them. Too much love, no love, stupid love. My father seemed unhurtable and always in control so I blamed him for my parents’ troubles. Stayed angry at him. Especially when he made my mother cry. Ashamed I couldn’t defend her. All the while, in my most secret places, I envied, coveted my father’s power.

  Mostly, of course, I was jealous. Inconsolably so. As only a colored first son can be. Beyond reason. Acutely, unflaggingly aware when my father was at the center of my mother’s attention. There was a different quality in how she tended to the rest of us if my father was around. She’d wear herself out as usual doing anything and everything for her kids, far beyond the call of duty, providing the necessities plus extras we whined for and expected, selfish extras spoiling us my father would grumble. But managing five demanding kids was never enough to complete my mother’s day. She would plop down finally in her favorite kitchen chair and shoo us to bed or homework, impatient for us to be out of the way so a portion of her day we could not beg, steal, or borrow, could begin. If my father didn’t come home, that portion empty. Her eyes expectant and worried. Fragile. But no matter how exhausted, how wilted she appeared or how weak her voice, I knew she’d revive if my father made it back.