APRIL 25, 1959: POPLARVILLE, MISSISSIPPI — MACK CHARLES PARKER, 23, TAKEN FROM JAIL AND LYNCHED. A VETERAN, PARKER WAS ARRESTED FOR RAPE THOUGH THE VICTIM WAS UNSURE HE WAS HER ATTACKER. WHITES WERE ANGERED THAT PARKER’S COFFIN WAS DRAPED WITH AN AMERICAN FLAG. VETERANS ADMINISTRATION ORDERS PARKER’S SISTER TO RETURN IT.
SEPTEMBER 25, 1961: HERBERT LEE, 50, SHOT AND KILLED BY E.H. HURST, A MISSISSIPPI REPRESENTATIVE. LEE HAD BEEN WORKING TO REGISTER BLACKS TO VOTE.
APRIL 9, 1962: TAYLORSVILLE, MISSISSIPPI — COL. ROMAN DUCKSWORTH, JR., 28, A MILITARY POLICEMAN, RECEIVES EMERGENCY LEAVE FROM THE ARMY TO BE HOME WITH HIS WIFE AFTER THE DELIVERY OF THEIR SIXTH CHILD. DUCKSWQRTH IS ASLEEP WHEN BUS PULLS INTO HIS HOMETOWN OF TAYLORSVILLE. POLICE OFFICER WILLIAM KELLY THINKS DUCKSWQRTH MIGHT BE A ‘FREEDOM RIDER’ AND SHOOTS HIM. LATER, OFFICER KELLY SENDS MESSAGE TO CPL. DUCKSWORTH’S FATHER, SAYING, IF HE HAD KNOWN WHOSE SON IT WAS, “i WOULDN’T HAVE SHOT HIM.” DUCKWORTH’S FATHER SENDS MESSAGE BACK: “i DON’T CARE WHOSE SON IT WAS, YOU HAD NO BUSINESS SHOOTING HIM.”
SEPTEMBER 30, 1962: OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI — PAUL GUIHARD, 30, FRENCH REPORTER, SHOT IN THE BACK AND KILLED WHILE COVERING THE RIOTS AT OLE MISS WHEN JAMES MEREDITH ADMITTED AS FIRST BLACK STUDENT.
APRIL 23, 1963: ATTALLA, ALABAMA — WILLIAM MOORE, 36, A WHITE SUBSTITUTE MAIL CARRIER FROM BALTIMORE, IS MURDERED AS HE WALKS FROM CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, TO JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, CARRYING A SANDWICH BOARD READING “EAT AT JOE’S———BLACK AND WHITE”.
JUNE 12, 1963: JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — MEDGAR EVERS, 38, MISSISSIPPI NAACP LEADER, SHOT AND KILLED IN HIS DRIVEWAY.
i was not shocked or outraged by the evil. i was never a sentimentalist about the capacity of the human animal to inflict pain and death and justify it. those who are dismayed by atrocities indulge their emotions and reveal their ignorance of history or refusal to regard it seriously. much of man’s energy is expended on ways to luxuriate in the sensuality of death.
there is a town in mississippi called drew. i believe it is the hometown of some pro quarterback from the seventies or eighties. a negro woman in drew told me that when she was a girl there was a lynching in the town. the negro was castrated. his penis was put in a large jar of alcohol and kept in the window of the general store for many years afterward. such stories were not rare in the south.
i was not surprised, dismayed, outraged, indignant or angered by american atrocities and massacres in vietnam, or anyone else’s atrocities for that matter. neither did i ever sign any of the self-serving full page ads decrying this or that injustice that appeared with the regularity of bowel movements in the pages of the new york times. the intellectuals, artists and academics who were signatories actually thought they were discharging a moral debt by affixing their names to those self-righteous proclamations. assuaging one’s conscience is not a moral act. it is an evasion of responsibility for the wounds each of us inflicts. it is an evasion of responsibility for the wounds we suffer.
i did not want to denounce evil. i wanted to understand. i wanted to understand how a person decides to bomb a church on a Sunday morning. does it come to you while having a donut and coffee? are you sitting on your front porch one saturday afternoon sipping iced tea and think, shit, i believe ill go bomb a nigger church sunday. probably be a lot of little kids in there and maybe three or four of them will get killed. did the person or persons who made that decision sleep as well as harry truman?
i wanted to understand how truman could have slept so soundly. why didn’t he lie awake for a few moments? why wasn’t there at least one stitch of remorse?
harry truman is the quintessential twentieth-century man. the buck stops here, read the little sign on his desk. all words. all words. it is not’enough to accept responsibility for making a decision. we must also accept responsibility for the consequences of that decision, even the consequences we did not anticipate and could not have foreseen. otherwise the buck does not stop. it simply passes to the next generation. all acts have consequences.
example:
during the late fifties and early sixties, fast food restaurants — mcdonald’s, kentucky fried chicken, pizza hut — began opening across the country. at one time eating out had been a special event, a luxury permitted only on mother’s day or easter. with the proliferation of fast food franchises, eating out became a way of life. in its tv ads mcdonald’s portrayed itself as a substitute for home. the smiles of the girls behind the counter were an instant infusion of mother love, love real moms could no longer give after a hard day at the office. the mothers were now in need of mothers and an institution that offered hot food at a reasonable price between five and seven p.m. was a good enough substitute.
so convenience joined saving time as a primary value in american life. the ease of accomplishing an end became an unquestioned good. (i suppose one could say dropping the bomb on hiroshima was convenient. though not for the japanese.) i was not opposed to convenience. but convenience costs.
when i was a child i would go to the chicken yard behind our house, catch a hen and with a hatchet, take off its head. once the chicken was dead, i carried its warm and bloody carcass into the kitchen where my mother dropped it into a large pot of boiling water and took off the feathers. i don’t remember when it became “more convenient” to buy chicken at the store, already defeathered and cut up, wrapped tightly in cellophane. of course, for city people there was no alternative. but being able to buy a chicken in the grocery store removed us one step from relationship with the living creature that provided us food. but because we cooked it we still handled the breasts and thighs and legs. when we ate the chicken we saw the blood next to the bone if the chicken had been undercooked, and both my mother and andrea consistently did that. now it is “more convenient” to go to a fast food franchise where every piece of chicken is fried to the same degree of doneness each and every time. a child grows up without any sense that once, those plump thighs and legs walked and ran.
perhaps this did not matter. i assumed something was gained by active participation in the process of feeding oneself. i assumed something was lost by becoming someone who merely consumed.
even if my assumptions were mistaken, convenience is not a value that should be at the heart of a nation’s culture. a child who grows up being taught that convenience is the greater good will seek convenience in areas where it cannot obtain. love is not a convenience. parenting is constant in- convenience. ethics are inconvenient. and believe me, death is most inconvenient of all.
did i want to turn back the clock and have us hunt and kill our own food? not at all. i merely wanted us to be as aware as humanly possible of what we did. accepting responsibility for the consequences we could not have foreseen was to acknowledge our limitations. it was to suffer our finiteness. it was to know that we and the chicken shared an identical condition — mortality. i wanted us to suffer our mortality.
if i do not suffer the infuriating pain of and rage at my own mortality, then I will seek to make you die in my stead. like the natives of preliterate cultures who believed they acquired something of the spirit of the bear or deer when they killed it, i have wondered if our wars are not a spiritual cannibalism. americans feast on death because they fear life. and they hate their fear.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1963: BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
ADDIE MAE COLLINS, 14
DENISE MCNAIR, 11
CYNTHIA WESLEY, 14
CAROLE ROBERTSON, 14
MURDERED IN BOMBING OF SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH.
SAME DAY, SAME CITY: VIRGIL WARE, 13, IS RIDING ON THE HANDLEBARS OF HIS BROTHER’S BICYCLE WHEN HE IS SHOT AND KILLED BY TWO WHITE TEENAGERS IN A TRUCK. TWO 16-YEAR OLD EAGLE SCOUTS ARE ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH MANSLAUGHTER. THEY ARE CONVICTED. ONE SERVES SEVEN MONTHS. THE OTHER IS RELEASED AFTER A FEW DAYS AND WARNED BY THE JUDGE NOT TO HAVE ANOTHER “LAPSE.”
JANUARY 31, 1964: LIBERTY, MISSISSIPPI — LOUIS ALLEN, 45, BLACK WITNESS TO MURDER OF HERBERT LEE, SHOT AND KILLED.
People talked of death more of
ten than of love, talked of it matter-of-factly. Finding bodies of black men in rivers was a part of the natural order of things in the South, but she never learned to laugh and joke about it, never learned, like Cal, to walk easy with Death by her side, or like others, to drive at maniacal speeds over midnight highways mocking Death as if it were a bull with razor sharp horns and she the toreador and cape and the object was not to kill the bull — that was not possible — but to see how long she could remain alive.
The bareness of her house had provided a hiding place from Death as omnipresent in her landscape as a fat and silly full moon on the face of a perpetual night. When she was there, she was able to forget and felt guilty because Cal could never forget and neither could any of the other blacks in the civil rights movement and she had asked Cal if it was all right if she forgot sometimes. It was unavoidable. When she walked along a street in downtown Nashville, her height or her looks may have called attention to her but not her color.
“I need you to be white and blond and blue-eyed,” he had said.
She left the house. A few years later someone found her name in the records and she sold the house and land for a large profit to a development corporation that was going to put up — what else? — a mall.
She returned with her father to the house in California where she had grown up and where her parents now lived in dignified estrangement. When she went into what had been her room, she was surprised to find it almost as bare as the house in Nashville. She had not put pictures of movie stars on her walls or collected stuffed animals, or read books besides the ones needed for school. The only furniture was a king-sized bed and a dresser. The room, and it was a large one, was dominated by the sliding glass doors leading to a deck from which stairs led down to the beach. The wall at a right angle to the doors was a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The floors were polished, gleaming with the hard, flinty brightness of the sun off the ocean. Had she never had enough life to depict with objects, or had she always needed respite from the omnipresence of death?
“So. You’re back.”
She turned at the flat sound of Jessica’s voice. The two women looked at each other with the kind of matter-of-fact hatred only possible between mother and daughter, a hatred that came not from things done by each to the other but that flowed from who they were, a hatred so natural that neither had to expend emotion on it, a hatred so intimate that it was a kind of love.
“Jessica,” Elizabeth said. She could not remember the last time she had seen or talked on the phone with her mother but it had been too long. The woman standing in the doorway looked twenty years older than her fifty-two years. The body was still tall and erect (and she had never noticed how much alike her father and Jessica looked) and the skin of the lean face was still taut, but there was a weariness of spirit in the eyes, a nimbus of bankruptcy in the straight set of the lips that would have given her the appearance of evil had there been any vitality left. Elizabeth wondered if she was going to die soon. (She did.)
“How long are you staying?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Just making conversation, I guess. What would you like me to ask you? What it was like being the mistress of one of the most famous men of the twentieth century? Is it true what they say about black men’s penises? What would you like me to say?”
Elizabeth was too spent and, surprisingly, too mature to grab the bait as she would have in years past. “Would you care to join me for a walk on the beach, Jessica?” she asked instead.
The older woman hesitated, then nodded.
That summer of 1969 was lived more outdoors than in. She walked the beach for hours, sometimes with Jessica, sometimes with her father, most of the time alone, especially at dusk when she would cry and scream into the roar of the surf. She was surprised at how insignificant the world became in the midst of grief. She was aware of the riots across the country after Cal’s death, and there was an evening when she sat with her father and Jessica and watched Neil Armstrong take a small step for man and a giant one for mankind and she thought how presumptuous of him to think he knew the significance of being the first person on the moon. There was something that summer about a young woman drowning in a car driven by Ted Kennedy but she didn’t think about the political implications for the presidential ambitions of the last Kennedy brother. Her grief merged with that of the young woman’s parents and she wept for both. She cried, too, when she saw a magazine photo from a large rock festival at some place back east called Woodstock and in one a beautiful young woman with long blond hair sat on the shoulders of a guy and both were bare chested and it was raining and they were so happy and Elizabeth was sorry that she had never been so young and so free, that she had never been in love and felt the rain on her breasts as she rode astride her lover’s shoulders.
All summer she weaved back and forth across the yellow line separating grief and self-pity, sometimes aware vaguely that grief did not make her unique in human history, or worthy of notice or comment. But the pain of grief also encompasses all of history, and, in her self-pity, she belonged to humanity more completely than she ever had.
She permitted her father to coax her out for drives down the coast to La Jolla or up to Santa Barbara and through reading bumper stickers she became aware of a nation pirouetting into self-pity, an emotion tolerable in a person — for a while — but for a nation, the aggrieved self-righteousness at the core of self-pity was potentially volatile and dangerous.
OUR GOD ISN’T DEAD, SORRY ABOUT YOURS
TRUST GOD! SHE PROVIDES
WE ARE THE SILENT MAJORITY
HELP YOUR POLICE FIGHT CRIME
WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US ABOUT
TARZAN AND JANE ARE LIVING IN SIN
CUSTER WORE AN ARROW SHIRT
The evening she met Gregory she supposed she had been well across the yellow line and breaking the speed limit in the self-pity lane.
She had been sitting just above the tide line, staring across the dark evening blue of the ocean when suddenly, a voice, “Pardon me. Are you Lisa Adams?”
She looked up into a face as young as love.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice sounding sharp and unfriendly in her ears.
“I’m sorry. Greg. Gregory Townley. I’m spending the summer at the Carver’s,” he pointed down the beach and up the cliff.
She shook her head. “I don’t know the neighbors.”
“I’ll be entering my first year of dentistry school at UCLA. Reg Carver and I were roommates at USC and will be also at dental school, and he invited me to stay the summer with him and his folks rather than going halfway across the country to Chicago, my home, where I wouldn’t know anybody anymore. Do you mind if I sit down?”
She wanted to say no, but he seemed harmless enough.
“I saw your picture in the paper when —” he hesitated, not knowing how to finish the sentence.
“John Calvin Marshall was killed,” she finished it for him. She looked at him, his developed chest, the legs that seemed muscled and resilient, and wondered if he were strong enough to ride her on his shoulders, her thighs clasping his cheeks, her breasts open to the sun, the wind and the rain.
And that was how it began, like most relationships, in a fantasy of being through an other someone she had never been. Gregory looked — and how voluptuous the word sounded — normal. It appeared to her that Death did not even know his name yet, that Death was not aware that this Gregory existed and maybe, just maybe, he might live forever, gazing at her shyly, starstruck because she, she — and what was his fantasy of whom he would become through her?
“What was John Calvin Marshall like?” he asked without prelude. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer if that’s too personal.”
“And what made you think I did have to answer?”
“I didn’t mean it quite the way it sounded,” he apologized. “And it is certainly none of my business. But I’ll probably never again in my life be this close to someone who knew him
.”
“Why do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “I guess you wonder what’s real about these people on TV and what isn’t. And the only one who knows is someone who sees them off-camera, as it were.”
“Maybe the one you see on television is the real one, and the person off-camera is unreal,” she responded, not caring to answer his question.
“What is your definition of real?”
“Whatever people agree to.”
He thought for a moment. “Are you saying reality is subjective?”
She thought for a moment. “Yes, I think I am.”
“An aching tooth is not subjective.”
“An abscessed tooth is not subjective. The aching is.”
He smiled. “Touché!”
“I won’t answer your question except to say that John Calvin Marshall was someone I cared about — deeply, but I felt no anger when he was killed. It was an inevitability he lived with. For most blacks, however, John Calvin Marshall was the best in them. Killing him killed something in all black America. Why else were there riots all across the country? Blacks were expressing the grief of their own deaths.”
“I disagree,” Gregory interrupted. “There are a lot of whites like me who are in shock and think Marshall’s death is the worst thing that could have happened.”
She nodded. “Sure, a lot of white people are deeply grieved, but they don’t feel as if that which gave their lives definition and meaning and direction has been taken away. And that’s the problem. The civil rights movement was successful because at the same moment in time and in the same places, the subjective experiences of blacks and whites concurred with the notion that an integrated society was in everyone’s best interest. Now, the subjective experiences of blacks and whites have diverged. For blacks the best among them has been killed by the worst among whites. Without John Calvin Marshall I wonder if all of us, black and white, will lose faith that we can ever be better than we are.”
And All Our Wounds Forgiven Page 4