And All Our Wounds Forgiven

by Julius Lester

  It was Andrea Marshall who had shown him the paragraph in the New York Times about President Kennedy sending troops to Vietnam, another place Robert had never heard of and wasn’t sure where it was but he understood instinctively that JFK didn’t care a damn about freedom if he could send troops to Vietnam and not Mississippi. Every month he drove to Nashville for a day or two to see Cal and Andrea, Cal was still not so famous yet that he did not have time to sit around the kitchen table late at night, and the three of them would talk without purpose or direction, just talk and in the talking, learn.

  “The United States broke relations with Cuba and banned travel there,” Andrea said one night. “Why would this mighty nation be afraid of a small island? Why would it want to prevent us from traveling there? They must be afraid we’ll learn something if we go there.”

  “Castro might know a thing or two about freedom that we don’t,” Cal commented.

  Their distrust of Kennedy intensified when he founded the Peace Corps. “Why th’ hell would he want to send young, idealistic Americans all over the world to help the poor when he’s got Negroes in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and Louisiana who can use all the help anybody can give ‘em?”

  When Cal was angry his speech returned to the well of his southern ancestry and that was where it stayed for much of the year because 1961 was when History attached its strings to his arms and legs.

  Robert knew nothing of that until he sat with the Montgomerys one evening that spring watching Huntley-Brinkley on the one channel they could get on the twelve-inch screen TV their daughter had brought them from Memphis, the only TV anybody colored had in the county, which was why the living room was always filled with people, especially at 6:30 when Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were on and it got quieter for that half-hour than it did at a funeral with no one saying a word even during the commercials as if silence were needed to absorb the pictures, not the content of the images but their mere existence as representations of the world beyond the Mississippi Delta and it did not matter if the images were of the president and his beautiful wife, Jackie, on a sailboat or of Red Square in Moscow or Alan Shephard being the first American blasted into space. What was important was seeing there was other than cotton and the flat delta earth and so it was that evening in May when on the TV screen appeared the image of John Calvin Marshall being dragged from a Greyhound bus by a mob of whites in Birmingham, Alabama, and beaten within a heart-skip of death, he and eleven others — colored and white — who had dared challenge the laws of segregation and sit together on a bus. They called their action “Freedom Rides,” and across the South, they and anyone who worked in civil rights were thereafter known as “Freedom Riders.”

  Bobby had been hurt and angry Cal had not told him of the plans for the Freedom Rides, had not even hinted that such a major action was in the offing.

  “Trust you?” Cal chuckled when Bobby was able to confront him after he was released from the hospital. “If I had told you about it, there is nothing I could have said or done that would’ve kept you away. Am I right?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “What good would that have done the people in Shiloh who have come to depend on you emotionally? What would they think if you decide to jump up and go off everytime there’s a bit of hot action somewhere? I sent you to Mississippi to lay the foundation for change that will continue long after you and I are gone.”

  The president himself pleaded with Cal not to continue the Freedom Rides into Mississippi where Cal was determined to go. Cal ignored the pleas and boarded another Greyhound bus with an integrated group and rode into Jackson, Mississippi. White Mississippi would not tolerate mob violence. The police backed a paddy wagon up to the door of the Greyhound bus. When Cal and those with him stepped off, one foot hit the pavement and the other went up and onto the steel step of the paddy wagon. Within twenty four hours they had been tried, convicted and were on their way to serving sixty days at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, known simply as Parchman Farm.

  What no one, not even Cal, could have anticipated was that the idea of the Freedom Rides caught the imagination of white college students all over the country. They began taking Greyhound buses from Chicago, Berkeley, New York, Washington, D.C., and came to Jackson, Mississippi to be arrested for trespassing, disturbing the peace and violating the laws of Mississippi, which required separation of the races except when black women held and played with and kissed and loved white babies, except when white men held and played with and kissed and fucked black women (which left black men and white women to masturbate and fantasize about each other).

  By the end of the summer of 1961, several hundred young people, white and black, had been sent to Parchman, and there the civil rights movement was truly born. Sixty days in Parchman broke the spirit of petty thieves and callous murderers, but neither the warden nor the guards nor even the other prisoners understood the spirit of freedom.

  “There is nothing that can be done to the man who is not afraid to go to jail or die. Nothing! The only power any government has over its citizens is the threat of imprisonment, that is, taking away one’s physical freedom, and the threat of death, that is, depriving one of life. But if when you are physically free you are imprisoned in a system that tells you where you can and can’t go, who you can and can’t associate with, you are not free. If you are breathing but do not have the power to define your own existence, then, you are not alive. You are free when you run into the jail cell and close the door behind you. You are free when you look the marksman in the eye and say, ‘Fire!’ “

  It was a sentiment Bobby heard Cal express first when he spoke at Fisk. It made sense until the afternoon almost a year and a half later when he was sitting in The Pink Teacup and someone rushed in and said there had been a shooting at the cotton gin and Bobby got in his car and drove with maniacal speed along the highway until he came to the unmarked turnoff by the railroad and as he slowed to a stop by the covered sheds where the wagon loads of cotton were brought to be ginned, he saw a large man in coveralls lying in the dust. Later, after Cal had served his sixty at Parchman, Bobby went to Nashville to see him and Andrea, to talk as they used to, just the three of them, but a group of brighter and more well-educated students were there now, black ones and white ones talking about this famous person who had sent a check and this writer who wanted to do an article and this TV show that wanted an interview and they looked at Bobby as those kind had always looked at him as someone to be tolerated but only because he did the work necessary so that more important work could take place like getting Cal’s picture on the cover of Time and having him interviewed by Mike Wallace. But Bobby insisted and pulled Cal into the kitchen and tried to tell him what it was like to see the brains of someone you loved spilling from the skull and into the dust and how you looked at the brains and wondered if that wrinkle was where sight had resided and had that crevice controlled the movement of the legs and arms and that patch of rosiness, was that where the dreams of freedom and dignity and respect came from? And he tried to describe what it was like to hold the brains of someone you loved in your hands, what it was like to try and put those brains back where they belonged except there was no skull anymore, only a fragment of bone out of which spilled brain and eyes and flies droned in anticipation of this unexpected gift of blood and how the drone and the silence were the only sounds besides the low hum of death itself and he squatted there in the dust, alone, the white men and the black who had been working at the gin standing a respectful distance away, the murderer among them, and each of them knew who he was but no one spoke and no one moved and Bobby wondered if the murderer would raise the shotgun again and shoot him but that did not happen until finally — did an hour pass? two hours? — the sheriff came and took a blanket out of the trunk of his car and covered Charlie Montgomery, and Robert, his hands heavy with the dried and caked blood, felt released and got in his car and went to tell Ruth she was a widow lady now but she knew already.

  �
��That man would still be alive if he hadn’t let me stay in his house. That man would still be alive if not for me!” Bobby finally blurted.

  “He’s not going to be the last one to die,” Cal told him. “You have to get used to it. The price of freedom is death.”

  That was not what he wanted to hear, not now, but he did not know what else to say, did not know even what he wanted to hear, and finally, he shook his head and wandered from the kitchen toward the front of the house and, surprised, found Andrea sitting quietly on the sofa, the house now empty of those intelligences feeding on themselves, and she looked up at him and after a moment, she opened her arms and he went and as she held him, he sobbed and knew that Cal was deaf to his own pain, because the cry of a people was easier to respond to than the tears from one pair of eyes, and for the first time, Bobby wondered what he was doing and why.

  He stayed drunk for three days after Mr. Montgomery was killed and wanted to leave Shiloh before he got somebody else killed. The evening of the funeral Mrs. Montgomery, still dressed in black, said, “Son, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. We got to let the white folks know they better buy all the bullets they can find, ‘cause they gon’ have to use ‘em on all us to stop us from getting our freedom.”

  He stayed and did everything he knew to force somebody to use one of those bullets — talked back to highway patrolmen, cursed the sheriff, dared plantation owners to shoot him, and he almost succeeded the night a shotgun blast covered him with glass as he lay sleeping, or the first time he took someone to the courthouse to register to vote and a mob beat him into unconsciousness.

  People thought he was courageous, but courage was quiet and cautious, rooted in respect for one’s mortality and the grief of those who would mourn you.

  One morning at breakfast Mrs. Montgomery said, “Robert, don’t you know that Charlie Montgomery will be mighty disappointed in you if you get yourself killed for nothing. Son, don’t nobody blame you for what happened to Charlie. Nobody ’cepting you. Charlie knowed what he was doing, knowed the chance he was taking. When the Lawd thinks your dying will help folks more than your living, He’ll let you know.”

  Bobby did not feel absolved of responsibility for finding who had killed Mr. Montgomery, however. He had a feeling everybody in Shiloh knew except him, even Mrs. Montgomery, but no one would say and he could not be seen asking. So he waited until after midnight before getting in his car and driving the intricate network of the county’s back roads that linked plantation to plantation. He drove slowly to minimize the noise of the car’s engine and without headlights because any movement after midnight was suspicious. He stopped at shack after shack, knocked on doors until someone awoke and called out, “Who?” through the door, and hearing his name they knew his business. “Ain’t nobody here seen nothing. Don’t nobody here know nothing.”

  That’s how it was for five nights but on the sixth, a door opened and there stood a small, bald-headed man as black as wet tree bark in a floor-length nightshirt . “I was dar,” he said simply. “I seen. I know.”

  That was Ezekiel Whitson. He spoke an almost primitive English, as if he did not trust language or because he respected it so much he wanted to be careful not to abuse or misuse it. He invited Robert into the one-room cabin where he lived alone and did not light the kerosene lamp. Instead he guided Robert to a table in the middle of the room and helped him into a chair while he took the other across from him.

  “Cholly would come by cotton gin a couple times a week. No reason ‘cept sit and talk to us’n. Talk freedom talk. Don’t care what buckra hear, don’t hear. Talk freedom must act free. Cholly want us’n vote. Mistah Jeb. Cholly go to his truck to go from there. Mistah Jeb go to his truck and get he shotgun. He walk toward Cholly. When he get close all he say was ‘Cholly.’ Cholly turn. Mistah Jeb let go with both barrels. Cholly dead ‘fo he hit the dust. Mistah Jeb put he shotgun back in he truck. Don’t nobody say nothing. Buckra they stand quiet on they side of the gin shed. Niggers stand quiet on they side of the gin shed. Don’t nobody know what to do ‘cepting Junior who run to find you. You come. Sheriff come. We go.”

  Bobby left Shiloh that same night and drove to Nashville. He didn’t trust calling the Justice Department from Mrs. Montgomery’s phone, so he used Cal’s. But the JD said they couldn’t protect Ezekiel Whitson and they weren’t even sure there was enough evidence to file charges against Jeb Lincoln, who would have every white man testifying that they had seen him at the opposite end of the county and what was one old colored man’s word against so many whites but Bobby didn’t care. “None of that matters,” he said heatedly to the dispassionate voice of the Justice Department lawyer. “If you don’t give Ezekiel Whitson FBI protection, he is going to be killed because he spoke with me about what he saw.”

  The voice at the other end of the line sighed. “I understand the pressure you people who work in those places must feel, but really, this is the United States. People don’t get lynched anymore.”

  “You dumb muthafucka! Charlie Montgomery got lynched two months ago.”

  There was silence from the other end of the phone. Finally, “I’m sorry,” the voice said with genuine feeling. “I’m sorry.”

  On Christmas Eve a loud explosion rocked the countryside around Shiloh. Robert was awake instantly, and because he slept in his clothes, he had his socks and shoes on and was out the door before the reverberations ceased echoing across the sky.

  Few flames were needed to consume a tiny man in a tiny house, and when Robert arrived the fire had almost burned itself out. He could see the body as black as charred wood, This was the first bombing and Robert would learn that, depending on how close to the explosion the victim had been, generally the body remained intact, which was surprising considering the noise a bomb made.

  The bomb that killed Ezekiel had been placed outside. Given the paucity of fire it had not been that well-made. Well, it had killed its target. How much better made was it supposed to have been?

  In Shiloh silence was a form of communication, the heaviness of it bespeaking shame, the tension in it melting bowels into water, its heat scorching brows and burning armpits. Colored and white were imprisoned in the silence of knowledge unspoken, conspiring to keep alive a reality that would never be the same, not now, not since Death had come to live among them. No one spoke of what everyone knew. They simply waited to see who Death would take next.

  Robert wanted out. Fuck civil rights! Fuck freedom! Fuck John Calvin Marshall! He was 20 years old. He was too young to be holding people’s brains in his hand. He should be seeing how many pussies he could stick his dick into.

  But he was supposed to have enough courage for all of them, to pry the fingers of fear from around their throats and teach them how to breathe. He could not do that if he was choking.

  After a while, he could only get up in the mornings if he had spent the night at Ella’s, a little juke joint on the edge of the cotton field off Highway 51. It was nothing more than a large room with a few tables, a counter, a jukebox and two pinball machines. You could get beer and if you went out back, moonshine. He always went out back. He was there every night, a bottle of moonshine in his back pocket, two dollars in nickels in his shirt pocket, and he drank and played the pinball machine. He narrowed all his attention to the metal orb beneath the glass as if by doing so, that orb would take the place of the one going in its trough around the sun. He watched the metal ball bounce off the sides and inevitably toward the flippers, which he flicked precisely to send the ball back toward the top of the machine. He didn’t care how many points he made or how many games he won. He just shoved nickel after nickel in the machine until the noise of the ricocheting ball and the flashing lights, the bells and buzzers and moonshine had anesthetized him and some woman would protect him with her unadorned beauty.

  But there was no protection, especially that afternoon in February of 1962 when he was driving along Highway 51, not going anywhere, just driving, not thinking about anything, especially not thi
nking, and when he finally noticed the flashing red light in his rearview mirror, he wondered how long it had been there and why.

  “Bobby,” the sheriff said simply, leaning down to stare at him.

  “Sheriff Simpson,” Robert said in quiet acknowledgement.

  Zebadiah Simpson was not the stereotype of the southern sheriff. His stomach did not hang over his belt. Not only wasn’t he fat, if anything he was underweight. He was five-six at most, and on first glance, the pleasantness of his facial expression made one wonder why he was in law enforcement. He had never been anything but polite since Bobby had come to Shiloh and even seemed sympathetic to civil rights. “I don’t make the laws. I simply enforce them, the ones I like and the ones I don’t.”

  Bobby remembered those words after Charlie Montgomery’s death and wanted to ask the sheriff if he enforced the laws against murder but, hell, in Mississippi killing a nigger really didn’t qualify as murder. That was more on the order of pest control or rubbish removal. You could only accuse somebody of murder if they killed a human being, and although nobody had quite figured where niggers fit, you had to be a goddam Yankee to call ‘em human.

  “Why don’t we go over to my office in Gillam and talk, Bobby?”

  Not a day would pass when he did not wish he had refused and invited Death. Sheriff Simpson was more dangerous than other sheriffs because he eschewed beatings and murders. There was a stillness in his blue eyes that hinted at an intelligence notable for a subtlety of malevolence. Where other sheriffs would have sought to destroy the bodies of those who threatened them, Zebadiah Simpson knew he needed only damage the soul. That was why he had left Charlie Montgomery to lie in the dust for two hours. That was why he never acknowledged the bombing of Ezekiel Whitson. His indifference unsettled Bobby far more than rage would have.

  Gillam was the county seat ten miles south of Shiloh. Like many small southern towns it was built around a square at the center of which stood the county courthouse. In the basement of the courthouse was the jail and sheriff’s office.