And All Our Wounds Forgiven

by Julius Lester

  “Bobby had saved a seat for me in the balcony in the middle of the first row,” she resumed aloud, unaware that she had been vocally silent. “I looked down to the high-backed chairs on the pulpit and there, in the middle, directly in front of me sat John Calvin Marshall.

  “He was leaning to his right, listening to the college president speaking quietly in his ear. However, his eyes looked out into the chapel at the students coming in with little of their usual noise and talking.”

  She paused. “This is where it gets hard, Andrea. I want you to understand, but not because I want your forgiveness. I committed no sin and therefore do not need absolution. People want adultery to be a morality play in which virtue always resides with the wife. But an adulterous love is moral. I don’t know that a loveless monogamy is.”

  She stopped, sighed, inhaled deeply, held the breath for a moment, then let it out slowly.

  “I have never spoken of my relationship with Cal. For the seven years we were together and the twenty-five since he was assassinated, I have kept hidden that which gave my life meaning.

  “I never wanted to share it, even if that had been possible. Who would have understood? I continue to love him and care for him. Death is a momentary interruption of a relationship. Nothing more.”

  Her vision was blurred by the shock of unanticipated tears. She heard herself sniff and waited until she was sure she could speak without a tremor in her voice.

  “He looks up at me. A blond white girl in a chapel of a thousand black students stands out. A picture of me being arrested had appeared on the front page of the New York Times and every other paper in America.

  “I did not know he was looking for me as he watched the students come in. But when his eyes found me, I knew. At least my body did.

  “My father used to think I had ESP. I do not. I just pay attention to the flashes of light rather than wait for the beams.

  “I was ten and was in the backseat of the car, looking out the window. The sky was getting dark. Without thinking, I told my parents we should buy some candles because the electricity was going to go out. My father, the most rational and logical of men who used that steel trap of a mind to make more money than I’ll spend in this lifetime, believed me. Mother did not. He stopped and bought candles and kerosene lamps. Mother said he was spoiling me, indulging me. The storm came and the electricity went out; my mother never trusted me again.

  “I was seventeen and was driving along a street. I had not had my license long. Suddenly I had a feeling I should get out of the car. I pulled over and ran. A moment later, the car burst into flames. How many times after a plane crash do you read about someone who was supposed to be on the plane but he or she ‘had a feeling’ and decided to take another flight?

  “I try to grasp the tiny feelings that dart past like insects on the surface of a still pond. So it was when he looked at me that morning.

  “It was not love at first sight. If it had been, less would have been required of me. But love is not as much a feeling as it is a decision about who or what you admit into your soul. When he looked at me, I was not deceived by the composed exterior of John Calvin Marshall. I, that is, my body, experienced his loneliness and terror at being John Calvin Marshall, and it, I admitted him, and the loneliness, and the terror into my soul.

  “That was the defining moment of my life. I knew it then. Our eyes met, and I wanted to look away, but I chose to hold his eyes with mine.

  “Then, the college president stood to introduce him and Cal looked away. A moment later, as the college president called his name and he rose from the high-backed chair, the student body leaped to its feet and applauded. I looked around the chapel into the faces of the black students gleaming with anticipated salvation. These were my classmates, girls on my floor in Jubilee Hall, boys I sat beside in class, and I realized that I did not know them. The hope and longing and pain in their applause frightened me. The blue of my eyes, the yellow of my hair, the roseate paleness of my skin insulated me from danger and placed me outside the suffering and therefore outside the need for deliverance. Yet, being outside did not mean I was alienated. Because I did not share the particularity of that moment did not mean I could not care.

  “Cal stood at the podium, his hands grasping its sides. He was dressed in a dark suit cut narrowly to emphasize his slim frame. He was the medium-brown color of oak leaves in November, and looked just as ordinary, neither especially handsome or repugnant, without mustache or goatee. Nothing about him indicated he was the man inspiring a generation of black, and soon, white youth to live as if ideals were as tangible as money and infinitely more important.

  “Expressionless, his body still, he seemed annoyed by the applause and his eyes flitted around the chapel like a bird in a room unable to distinguish solid wall from open window. But when his eyes darted quickly up to the balcony, mine were waiting and for an instant, long enough for me to notice, he rested.

  “When the applause stopped and we sat down, he began to speak. His voice was soft and deep, the tone almost lazy as if he had learned that a spoken lullaby could be more musical than one sung. In the years to come, I would hear countless speeches begin with the painfully slow cadences that caused some to wonder if he was on medication. ‘Ladies and gentle-men. ———It is ————with ——— great ——— plea———sure ——— that I come to tell you———the Negro———will no longer be ———a slave———to any white man.’ He said it calmly, matter-of-factly, lazily, and the very disinterestedness of the tone made the applause and stomping of feet and cheering even more raucous and prolonged. Others thought the lethargy of his beginning was a way of measuring the temperature of the audience, but I recognized those long silences as spaces in which the man I would come to love as Cal receded and John Calvin Marshall came to the fore. As his cadence became more regular, an ordinary man became the apotheosis of four centuries of history written in red tears and salty blood. Imperceptibly, the cadence quickened and the timbre of his voice echoed back to stubbled fields where Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey sang fired songs of burning freedom, back to the lap-slap of ocean against the hulls of white-masted slave ships cleaving the waves with cargos of soul and flesh, back to muffled sobs and deafening screams, the rhythms of broken hearts beating in whole bodies.

  “’Our struggle,’ he shouted at the end, his voice rising with the majesty and power of a wave, ‘is for the redemption of the unquiet soul of the slave and the unquiet soul of the slaveowner because black man and white man are the front and back of the same soul, two halves, which together make a harmonious whole but apart can only create dissonance, discord and dissension. Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary. There’s a great camp meeting in the promised land.’

  “Applause rained down on him like rice on a bride. As if being awakened, his eyes blinked and the terror and loneliness returned, only this time with a desperation that had not been there before. He looked as if he did not know who was being applauded, or why. Then he raised his head, his eyes deliberately seeking mine this time. Instinctively I knew he would need me, and when our eyes met, I saw his relief and saw his body relax as he returned to himself. He looked away as the college president came up to shake his hand. But I held him in my eyes for a moment longer.

  “Having sat at the front row of the balcony, Bobby and I were practically the last to leave. As we came down the steps into the foyer, Cal was entering it from the chapel. He was surrounded by students but he saw me and stopped.

  “Students turned to see what had drawn his attention. ‘It’s Lisa,’ voices whispered.

  “’Stand back and let Lisa through,’ someone said. I wanted to run back up the stairs because I was afraid that if anyone saw us together they would think we were lovers. Such had been the extent of the intimacy we had exchanged without word or touch.”

  Elizabeth played idly with the diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand. When Gregory had proposed and offered it to her, she had been disappointed.
Not by the ring. It was gorgeous. Her disappointment was that Gregory had needed to buy one so clearly beyond his means as a young dentist. He wanted to impress her, she who could afford whatever she wanted. She let him put the ring on her finger but made a silent decision to keep their finances separate. However, she had been embarrassed that wearing the ring had made her feel special and apart from all the women who did not wear this sign of chosenness.

  Such a silly little emotion, the need to feel special and apart. She wondered that the black girls at Fisk had not hated her.

  “We don’t have a choice about sitting-in,” Bobby explained one evening later that spring as they walked across campus. “You do and you chose to go to jail, risk getting beat up, cursed, spit at. That’s why we love you. That’s why you’re special to us.”

  She had been the white girl who crossed the color line. Her picture on the front page of the New York Times had given the protests legitimacy in the eyes of other whites. “Among those arrested was Lisa Adams, 20-year-old daughter of wealthy businessman and inventor, Phelps Adams.”

  “When the picture appeared in the paper,” she said aloud, “Jessica, my mother, called and wanted to know what did I think I was doing? Back then I got rattled pretty quickly when asked to explain myself and the more I tried the harder it was to think. This made me appear even more stupid, which frustrated and infuriated Jessica, and within two minutes I was crying hysterically. Swimming Niagara Falls and surviving would have been infinitely easier for Jessica than navigating through tears, especially those of her only child. To Jessica my tears were a negative commentary on her parenting. She was right about that. Never have tears been filled with as much anger and hatred as those I shed in her presence. She gave the phone to Daddy. For him, my tears were merely language in search of an alphabet.

  “He got on the phone and didn’t ask me how I was or what I was crying about. Instead, he asked, casually, ‘How was the train ride?’”

  “I wanted to yell at him, ‘What do you mean, how was the train ride? Don’t you see I’m upset? Didn’t you see my picture in the paper? Are you proud of me or are you angry, too? And, anyway, I told you right after I got here that the train ride was fine. What do you want?’

  “But I trusted Daddy not to ask an inconsequential question. So, I started talking about the cactus in Arizona and we reminisced about the Polo Club in Phoenix where I first started to learn golf and soon I wasn’t crying because I was back on the train coming to Nashville.

  “As I relived the ride I remembered looking out the window as the train brought me closer and closer to Nashville. I had no idea why I was on that train. The last place I belonged was on an exchange program to a small Negro college in the South. Only the social-conscious, political, liberal kids chose one of the Negro schools in the South. I had a reputation on campus as a beach bunny and a ski bunny, which was unfair. I was an athlete but, in those days, such status was too high to accord a woman. But my professors knew: when it was snowing in the mountains or the surf was up, expecting me in class was like telling a hawk not to soar. So, people were incredulous when they heard that not only was I going on exchange but I was going to a Negro school in the South.

  “It was Daddy’s suggestion. With a name like Phelps Adams, it’s safe to assume he had roots in New England, Vermont to be exact. Some great grandmother or great aunt had been one of the New England school marms who went South after the Civil War to teach the freed slaves and had ended up at what was then called Fisk Normal School. When Daddy saw Fisk’s name on the list of exchange schools, he wanted me to go. So, I did.

  “I told Daddy about getting off the train in Nashville after the three-day ride and seeing a sign that said WHITE ENTRANCE and another that said COLORED ENTRANCE. I had no idea what was going on. Then I had trouble getting a cab because the white cab drivers wouldn’t take me to Fisk, and there were no Negro cabs around. Finally, someone from Fisk arrived.

  “During my first week I saw signs whenever I went downtown. COLORED RESTROOM. COLORED WATER. NO COLORED ALLOWED. WHITE ONLY. I asked my roommate to go downtown on the bus with me and she refused and I couldn’t understand why until she said we couldn’t sit together because we would be arrested. Why? I asked. That’s just how it is, I was told.

  “As I told all this to Daddy, it became clear why I went on the sit-ins and got arrested. I didn’t like the law telling me where I had to sit on a bus and that I couldn’t eat in a restaurant with whomever I wanted to. There was nothing political about it. Segregation put limits on my life. Gregory says I take things too personally. But how else can I take them? I exist in the world as a person.”

  History is subjective experience, she had told him when they met that summer of 1969, that summer she spent wondering how she could live and why she should, now that Cal was dead.

  She remembered driving alone from Atlanta to Nashville after they took his body from her arms, remembered making a statement to the police, and then, what? She was supposed to just get in the truck and go? But how? It would have helped if there had been someone to say “I’m sorry,” someone to ask, “Is there anything I can do for you?” But those words were reserved for Andrea, the titular wife. So, she eventually turned the key in the truck’s ignition, Cal’s blood still damp on her blouse, and drove out of the hotel parking lot.

  When she reached her house in Nashville, she went to bed and slept for most of three days, getting up only to go to the bathroom and drink water or orange juice and watch the news on TV. She remembered seeing Cal’s funeral and the procession of mourners walking from the church to the cemetery behind Cal’s plain wooden coffin carried on the shoulders of six black men. Andrea was in the center of the picture, her face covered by a veil. Lisa wondered if Cal’s spirit wondered where she was, needed her to be there even now.

  But she was white and there was no place for her anymore in the civil rights movement, what little of it remained in the tide of blackness washing ashore as if the souls of the African dead thrown overboard from slave ships now sought succor. She would not stay and become the object of a scorn she had not earned. But where to go and what to do? After TV coverage of the funeral ended, she went back to bed and was still trapped in sleep the next morning when a loud knocking awakened her.

  She opened the door and there he was, tall and proper, the hair more gray than black now. What did he think of his daughter and her picture on the front of every newspaper and magazine in the world holding the dying body of John Calvin Marshall? Had he been suspicious? He never said. He never asked. He opened his arms and she fell against him and he folded her into himself and she cried for the first time.

  Later, that morning, after he shopped and came back and cooked for her, he asked if she wanted to come home. She cried again because home was Cal and Cal was now memory of heartbeat.

  She had looked around at her little house hidden in a grove of trees on a backroad north of Nashville. It had taken her a while to find a place secluded enough so Cal could come without being seen. A search of the records had uncovered an owner in Florida who was all too happy to sell the abandoned shack and the ten acres surrounding it. She had the house rebuilt, a little bigger but not much. She had not wanted her existence there to become the object of curious attention.

  She came to love its simplicity — the living room one walked into from the outside, the kitchen/dining area directly behind, and to the left off the kitchen, the bedroom and bath. No one had ever come there except Cal.

  That afternoon she looked at her house and noticed for the first time that it was devoid of objects that would have made vivid whom she had been for the past seven years. There were no stuffed animals, no posters evoking memories of vacations taken or fantasized, no paintings crystallizing an essence of soul aching to be lived, no shelves of records and books to mark the solitary pleasures where senses met mind and neither resented the other.

  It was empty because only emptiness offered a respite from the companionship of death more constant t
han any love.

  MAY 7, 1955: BELZONI, MISSISSIPPI — REVEREND GEORGE LEE. 52. MURDERED FOR ORGANIZING NEGROES TO VOTE. SHERIFF CONCLUDES LEE DIED IN A TRAFFIC ACCIDENT. WHEN PRESENTED WITH THE LEAD SHOTGUN PELLETS TAKEN FROM LEE’S FACE, SHERIFF SAYS THEY LOOK LIKE DENTAL FILLINGS.

  AUGUST 13, 1955: BROOKHAVEN, MISSISSIPPI — LAMAR SMITH, 63, MURDERED. “I’M SURE IF THERE WAS ANY REASON FOR THE SHOOTING IT WAS THAT SMITH THOUGHT HE WAS AS GOOD AS ANY WHITE MAN,” SAID A WHITE FRIEND OF SMITH’S.

  AUGUST 28, 1955: MONEY, MISSISSIPPI — EMMETT TILL, 14, MURDERED FOR SPEAKING TO A WHITE WOMAN.

  JANUARY 23,1957: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA — WILLIE EDWARDS, JR., 25, FORCED AT GUNPOINT TO JUMP FROM A BRIDGE INTO THE ALABAMA RIVER. IN 1966, ALABAMA ATTORNEY GENERAL ARRESTS THREE MEN FOR THE MURDER. JUDGE FRANK EMBRY RULES THAT “FORCING A PERSON TO JUMP FROM A BRIDGE DOES NOT NATURALLY AND PROBABLY LEAD TO THE DEATH OF SUCH PERSON.” CASE HAS TO BE DROPPED.

  The dead were referred to so often in conversation there was no clear demarcation between the realm of the living and those who inhabited one beyond. Negroes in the South permitted their dead to walk among them — as long as they behaved themselves — and those dead whose dying had been a crucifixion, those dead whose dying had no other source than the color of their skin, those dead for whom the grieving never stopped, those were the ones whose names it was important to weave into daily speech, because speaking their names and recounting their dying was a way of caring for and loving them, a way of easing the pain of the living and the dead.