Walking through a small town, Jesus sees a crowd milling about, preparing to stone to death a woman who has committed adultery. Just as in the Bible, he steps forward, raises his hand, and proclaims, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The crowd falls silent, abashed. They begin to disperse, and then a lightning bolt zings out of a clear sky and blasts the woman to a charred lump of flesh.
In an anguished voice, Jesus looks up at the sky and, through clenched teeth, says, “I’m trying to make a point here, Dad!”
The joke depicts people’s uneasiness with forgiveness, especially for sexual sins. But more than that, it brings together as comedy the tensions of the faith. How do those two forces at the core of Christianity—judgment and forgiveness—work in practice? For all its talk of forgiveness, and the real dedication of many believers to that ideal, the faith I grew up in often took more pleasure in the failings of others than joy at redemption. The knowing remarks about how Mr. Holcomb was going to roast in hell for all eternity and how Mrs. Sloan might be enjoying life now but she was going to be paying for it for a long time in a very warm place elicited more smiles than any confession of faith I saw. So I appreciated the beleaguered Jesus of the joke who was balked in his effort to teach compassion. And it’s just fun to see one of the great trump lines of the Bible trumped, one of the great moments of enduring wisdom turned upside down.
The tension between judgment and compassion is at the base of a religion that rests on the paradoxes of its tenets. I love the Christian faith for those paradoxes. Whether we are believers or not, we make judgments; we extend or withhold forgiveness every day. The two impulses are rich, true, decent, and irresolvably in conflict. So it’s impossible not to imagine that those Christians who see this life as a tragic fleshly trial and those who see it as a wonderful precursor to heaven are simply living out visions that are determined more by temperament than theology. Their preconceived worldviews determine which side of the gospel they focus their eyes on. And that, sadly enough, is something else to laugh about.
Here’s how I resolve them. Here’s my theology:
At the end of a powerful and emotional sermon, Billy Graham looks out over a packed arena and asks those who have felt the Lord working on their hearts to come forward and be saved.
One man slowly makes his way down the aisle. When he reaches the front, Reverend Graham holds up his hands, the music stops, silence falls over the huge hall, and into the microphone Billy Graham says, “Brother, who put those clothes on your body?”
The man replies, “The Lord did!”
“Amen!” roar a hundred thousand voices.
“And who, my brother, puts food on your table?”
The man replies, “The Lord does!”
“Amen!” roars the crowd with one voice.
“And who, my dear brother in Christ, put that smile on your face and the joy in your heart?”
“The Lord did.”
“Amen! Hallelujah!” roars the crowd.
Billy raises his hands again and calls for silence. He leans in, holds the microphone closer to the flushed face of the new convert, and asks, “And, brother, what did the devil ever do for you?”
The man pauses for a second, thinking. “Nothing,” he says. “Fuck him.”
Amen, brother.
Five
Everybody Out of the Pool
“Get in the car. Find your brothers, and everybody get in the car! Right now!” my father yelled out the side door of my uncle’s house. Behind him in the kitchen, Uncle Buddy yelled at Dad’s back and kept yelling. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but as we moved in confusion through the carport to the car I heard despair in my mother’s placating voice, trying to calm her husband and her brother. Then we were slamming out of the driveway, braking hard, and still slipping backward on loose gravel and red clay as Dad banged the shift lever from reverse to drive, and our green Impala wagon with the big fins accelerated furiously away.
From the backseat I studied the side of my father’s face. He glared down the road in front of him, violently silent, his jaw tight, his neck rigid and flushed. Several times my mother turned to him and opened her mouth to say something. Each time she stopped herself, turned, and stared hopelessly out the window away from my father, twisting a damp Kleenex in her hands. My brothers and I were very quiet.
Only much later did I work up the courage to ask Mom what had happened. After everyone’s nerves had stopped humming and I had wheedled a bit, Mom said Buddy had told a joke Dad didn’t approve of. After I wheedled a bit more, she told me the joke.
A colored man collapses on the street, clutching at his heart. He thrashes around for a moment and then quits moving. Two white men dash over and kneel at his side. One man says, “I think he’s having a heart attack!”
“He needs artificial respiration,” the other says.
“What’s that?”
“You put your lips on his and blow down into his mouth to keep him breathing.”
“You do what? You put your lips on his lips? I’m not going to do that. You do it.”
The second man thinks for a moment. He curled each hand till it formed a tube and stacked one atop the other.
My mother acted out the scene. She looked at me through the tube of curled fingers, letting me see that the man could breathe through them without letting his lips touch a black man’s.
“Then the man,” Mom said, “leaned down and put his hands next to the black man’s ear,” and, imitating the man in the joke, Mom put her fingers to her mouth, leaned over, and whispered through the trumpet of her fingers, “Nigger, you gonna die!”
The last word—die!—blasted through her hands with delighted triumph, propelled by the laugh she was already laughing. I laughed too, enjoying the twist in the joke and the delight Mom took when the Good Samaritan’s concern for a dying man is trumped by his racism.
Dad didn’t think any part of such a joke was funny. When Buddy had told it in his living room, Mom laughed, though nervously, knowing Dad was steaming. Driven over the edge by the punch line, Dad had angrily ordered Buddy not to use that kind of language in front of children. The only children in the room were my brother Mike, who was three, and my cousin Steve, who was two. What my uncle had been screaming as we rushed to the car, my mother told me later, was “This is my house! You can’t tell me how to talk in my own goddamn house!”
“Nigger” would’ve rocketed Dad into Earth orbit. “Goddamn” would’ve kicked in the afterburners.
The joke sparked the first racial quarrel I’d seen, but I had begun to be wary about race a couple of years earlier, when I was six. When my father was transferred from Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, to Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina, our family had to wait a year for a unit to open up in on-base housing. My parents rented a small brick ranch house out in the country, and I rode the bus to the county’s consolidated school for first grade. The second week of school, as I hunched over the dining room table, coloring in a picture of Porky Pig with smooth, even sweeps of pink crayon, my mother asked me if any of the kids were different.
“I don’t know,” I said, and kept on pinking in Porky’s outline while trying to decide if pigs’ feet were black or brown. In real life, they seemed to be somewhere in-between. And were cartoon pigs’ feet the same color as real ones? I didn’t know what different meant. Tall or short, mean or dirty, bulge-eyed or hare-lipped? I’d been preoccupied with keeping my juice money and lunch money separate, my pencils sharp in the cracked plastic pencil box, and my sandwich unsquashed. It’s very difficult not to sit on your lunch bag, step on it, or clutch it too tightly when you are six, drowsy, and your bus jounces off asphalt and down a dirt road and then back onto asphalt again five times on a forty-five-minute circuit through a North Carolina dawn.
“I mean, do any of the kids look different?” Mom asked.
“I guess.”
“Well, are any of them a different color?”
&
nbsp; I thought about it and then offered up—was this what she wanted to know?—that one of the girls was chocolate.
“Chocolate!” Mom said, laughing. “Chocolate!” After she stopped laughing, she chuckled about it, off and on, for the rest of the afternoon.
So chocolate isn’t a word for describing people, I thought. She told and retold the story to my father, my grandmothers, aunts and uncles, and her friends, all of whom laughed at my charming innocence, which at that age was indistinguishable from ignorance. That’s why they were laughing at me, wasn’t it? I wasn’t just wrong, I thought, feeling mocked and ill-used: I was so wrong it was funny. No, not just funny: hilarious. Yet from the way she’d pussyfooted around asking me, trying not to let me see there was anything charged or complicated about the color of the chocolate girl, I saw too that she was trying to protect me from the very information that she was trying to extract. But once she heard my answer, she was so amused by the cluelessness of my misunderstanding that she had to tell everyone. So I became alert to race, its secret importance, and its uneasy connection to humor.
I had not until then noticed that the characters on Amos ’n’ Andy were black. When we got our first TV, I left the room while Mom watched As the World Turns, which she called “my show,” as did both my grandmothers. The gloom and fraught intensity of the drama drove me away, but I always came back to sit by Mom as she ironed, smoked, and watched Amos ’n’ Andy. I cannot think of that show without seeing it through the rickety, pincered legs of an ironing board, hearing the flick of water as Mom sprinkled the wrinkled laundry with water to moisten it, and smelling Pall Malls smoldering in an ashtray. Damp shirts sizzled under the hot iron and the stringent smell of spray starch filled the room.
I was often baffled by what was actually going on with the Kingfish, Amos, Sapphire, and the Mystic Knights of the Sea; and I puzzled mightily over why the show was called Amos ’n’ Andy, since sweet-natured, ineffectual Amos had such a vanishingly small role. I laughed at the predicaments into which the raffish Kingfish constantly enticed Andy, and I identified with my namesake’s childlike gullibility and desire to be in-the-know. But most of all, I was enchanted by the pleasure they took in rolling the words off their lips to such exaggerated effect, especially the Kingfish’s affectation for pretentious words that he mispronounced: “Andy, I’se re-gusted!” Sometimes I even understood the gap between what he meant and what he said, especially when my mother repeated the mispronunciations and chuckled. That’s what I really loved, the plushness of her chuckle. It is a sound that I have been susceptible to in women ever since. What a respite my mother’s laugh was from the sorrow that, like standing water, dampened our house, a sorrow I could not then name. But I could recognize when laughter came in, and for a few minutes, divided the waters.
My mother’s pleasure in Amos ’n’ Andy must have been partly racist and partly, like mine, innocent, motivated by the high jinks and malapropisms of the characters, irrespective of race. Still, along with the brilliance of its comedy, Amos ’n’ Andy was also teaching me the conventions of racist humor and the assumptions behind it. Though no one ever said so, the show was whispering, Look at those ignorant colored folk and laugh at the comical troubles they cause for themselves by pretending to be smarter than they are. No one ever said it out loud, except my grandmother, who growled, “I can’t abide looking at that nigger foolishness.”
• • •
A graduate of Spalding County High School, my mother had worked in the Dundee Mills before marrying my father in the chapel at West Point. She was uneasy with officers’ wives who had Ivy League degrees and attitudes. Part of her never left her mother’s house on Vineyard Road in Griffin, Georgia.
My grandmother, her mother, was the angriest person I’ve ever known who wasn’t actually unhinged; in fact, she might have been. Much of her explosive rage was aimed at “niggers.” With every casual use of the word nigger she hit the short i and hard g of the word, her voice crackling with contempt, fury, and, though I was slow to see it, fear. She packed a lifetime of negation into the word. Toward the end of her life, my parents’ repeated strenuous opposition forced her to modulate the word to “nigra” most of the time when we visited. She could never quite bring herself to say “negro,” the polite word of the time, though occasionally she’d allow herself “colored,” the polite word of her youth. But when she genuinely wanted to praise a black woman she’d unself-consciously declare that Annie or Willa was “a good nigger.”
Knowing that “nigger” sometimes ruffled my mother, always infuriated my father, and jolted me, made it even more tempting to her thin lips—an orneriness I admired in general, though I was uneasy and embarrassed when it amplified her racism.
As Grandmomma grew older, her swollen legs made it harder and harder for her to walk, even with a walker. For a couple of years before my aunt and cousin moved in with her, my mother and my Uncle Buddy hired a black woman to clean the house and look after Grandmomma during the day. Angry at having to turn her house over to someone else’s care, Grandmomma at first referred to the woman as “that nigger Carrie.” Later, as Grandmomma warmed to her, the woman became “the nigger Carrie,” and, later still, as Grandmomma grew to like the idea of having “help,” she began to refer to “my nigger Carrie”—proud at last to have one, the way the rich folks did. Though I was squirmingly uncomfortable with how her pleasure expressed itself through the possessive pronoun and the word nigger, I was pleased, and embarrassed to be pleased, that she had found a way to enjoy her growing helplessness. When I whined to my mother, “I wish she wouldn’t say that,” Mom just laughed and answered, “Let her enjoy herself. She’s not hurting anybody.” It’s hard not to think of Huck Finn’s conversation with Aunt Sally. Huck, lying, tells her there’d been an accident on the steamboat.
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
My mother and Aunt Sally’s instinctive empathy extended only so far and then it ran into a wall so tall and thick and long that it seemed like the end of the earth instead of a wall. Yes, Grandmother’s antipathy was monumental, but as instinctive as her empathy.
In the months after the Watts and Detroit riots, Grandmomma was so incensed by the looting and burning she’d seen on TV that she could barely talk. While I sat at her kitchen table eating grits and country ham or fried chicken and mashed potatoes with redeye gravy, my uncle argued that the only goddamn solution was as plain as the nose on your face: line the niggers up against the wall and machine-gun them. Buddy railed that only machine guns and tanks and bodies bulldozed into mass graves would put a stop to all this nigger bullshit, and Grandmomma nodded in furious agreement, occasionally spitting out half a syllable of inarticulate rage.
I loved her.
Short, hugely squat, Grandmomma had a round bulldog face, her blunt pink features laced with broken veins and her small chin jutted forward as if to say what she often said, “Don’t mess with me, boy. I’m not going to take no mess off you.” Will emanated from her face the way heat emanated from the bedroom gas heater she used to overheat the whole house. It emanated even from her legs. They’d bloat till the skin was so taut it shone, and then they’d deflate slightly. The skin, distended and slack at the same time, looked like blotchy crepe de chine.
At the ends of her painful feet grew thick, dirty-yellow toenails, humped and twisted. She had to soak them for hours in warm water before she could trim them. I was fascinated. To me, a child of relative ease, those malformed nails represented an older, harder world, the physical consequences of forty years standing at a loom in the Dundee Mills making towels, and I loved to look at them because I was not supposed to. It was rude, Mom said. But Grandmomma never seemed to mind. I was her favorite, perhaps because I was a listener, and to a talker, few things are more tempting than an attentive child who is blood kin.
We lay on our bellies on her lumpy, buc
kled mattress and watched Queen for a Day, our favorite show. We had opinions. We discussed, dissected, and evaluated the relative misery of the wretched women who told their sorrows in competition for a prize that always turned out to be a Maytag washer-dryer combination.
It was nice, that Maytag washer-dryer combination, nicer than the wringer-washer Grandmomma kept on her back porch, and which she still loved because it was a magnificent improvement over a washboard and tub. When she washed, I got to turn the crank.
Because she understood the value of a new washer-dryer combo, which she did not possess, Grandmomma possessed a flawless and unchallengeable eye about what women might say to get one.
“She’s lying,” Grandmomma said as a woman ended her tale of woe.
“How can you tell, Grandmomma?”
“Just look at her! She’s lying and you can see she’s lying.”
Grandmomma also had a sure sense of what true suffering was. “Pfft!” she said, “that’s not so bad”—meaning, though I did not know it then—that she’d lived through worse. When Jack Bailey named the day’s champion sufferer and draped the queen’s robe on her shoulders and set the crown on her head, we sometimes teared up a bit. We tried to conceal our tears from each other because we were tough eggs, not easily fooled or satisfied. We were cynical and sentimental in exactly the proportions that Jack Bailey and Maytag required us to be. Because its life-transforming properties were deemed so evident as to need no explanation, I never had the courage to ask Grandmomma how a Maytag washer-dryer combination or, more rarely, a refrigerator, compensated for a husband crushed to death by industrial machinery (Grandmomma: “He’d been dranking. You just know he’d been dranking.”), a son in reform school, and a daughter crippled with polio. Obviously something about women’s lives improved, spiritually as well as materially, when the burden of laundry was eased.
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