Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

“No she wouldn’t. I saw her picture. She’s too beautiful and sophisticated for me. She probably went to one of those fancy girl’s schools where they teach you how to serve tea.”

  “She looks like that kind of woman, but she went to Smith College because it was free. She grew up in Northampton and she was allowed to go there because as a resident—” He glances into the rear-view mirror again. The headlights are larger, closer. He thinks of an owl’s eyes. He presses on the accelerator.

  “I mean, does she know what a good deal she has, married to a guy like you?”

  “I’m no saint. You don’t know everything, Nicky. You don’t have to live with me day after day.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you say. Nobody’s easy to live with who amounts to much.” Nicky takes a deep breath. “Oh I may not know a lot, but I know that men like you don’t come down the pike every day and that I never had a crush on anyone this bad. Shit. Leave it to me to pick a happily married man who’s old enough to be my father.”

  “Not so. I’m only twenty-nine—I’ll be twenty-nine in September.”

  The speedometer passes fifty. They are still three miles from Rose Morgan’s house. Aaron tries to remember the roads, to figure out if there is a way to cut back so that he can head for the S.N.C.C. headquarters in town.

  “I’m still a virgin, you know.” She moves away from him, her back to the door. “There. I said it and now you know and now you’ll feel responsible for me, right?”

  “We’re being followed and I’m going to try to make some speed. I only wish I knew these roads better. Damn! Hold on—”

  Nicky sits up straight.

  “Don’t fight them, Aaron. Promise me that? If they catch up with us and do nasty things to me, don’t fight them. Promise. Promise me now.”

  “Shut up.” Aaron floors the gas pedal. The car lurches over a rise in the road so that their heads bang against the car’s roof. The road is dark, without houses.

  “I won’t shut up. I’ll be a broken record. I’m very talented at repeating myself. You have to promise me not to fight them. Promise me that if they catch up with us and try dirty things with me, you won’t fight them or try to protect me. You have to remember that I’m just a friend, that I’m not even your daughter. You have to start talking to yourself now, so you’ll be ready for them. Remember the games we played in Ohio? We have to start following our better selves, trying to remember that their meanness and hatred come from the absence of love. Their hatred is not a force we have to resist and fight against, for nothing is there. We must descend into that part of ourselves we’ve been reserving for just such a moment. Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed—”

  “Just shut your fucking mouth!” Aaron strikes out sideways, his knuckles catching Nicky on the side of her jaw. The car skids, barely misses a tree, barrels along, two wheels on gravel, two on grass.

  “Hit me, but don’t hit them,” Nicky says. “There you go. You’re listening to me. Get it all out, Aaron. Hit me—”

  They make a sudden right angle turn, the rear wheels spitting stone.

  “Don’t look now but I’m putting in one of the things we went to the store for.” Nicky speaks in a monotone. “I’ll tell them I have the rag on. The rest is up to them. Wanna play stinkfinger with me? Goddamn Tommy Huckowicz. I had a mad crush on him our junior year and all he wanted to do was play stinkfinger. Once you get past the smell you’ve got it licked, right? Shove it already, I’d say. Where? he’d reply. I like to talk tough and dirty so people think I’m experienced, but oh God I’m scared, Aaron. I’m awfully scared.”

  Aaron sees light ahead, something flat and glittering and wide. A lake, reflecting moonlight. A thin layer of silver on water, like dust on furniture. He sees a spray of orange flames, men huddled around a campfire, squatting, as if the evening is cool. What makes sense? They repeated it to one another every day: when they are in Mississippi, the rest of America seems unreal; when they are in the rest of America, Mississippi seems unreal. He starts to steer left, sees two headlights turn on, from the lakeshore. White light blasts through the rear window, a police spotlight illuminating the inside of the car, the dashboard. Nicky lowers her head. He remembers a dead owl, ravaged by heat, caught in the crawl space of a house he was building two summers ago. The owl’s skull, beneath all the feathers, was astonishingly small, the size of a lemon.

  “I think we’ve bought it,” he says.

  He turns the car around so that they are heading in the direction from which they came.

  “You didn’t promise me yet. If you don’t promise me not to fight them, I’ll fall apart and do something crazy right now. I swear. Promise me you won’t fight back.”

  “What I want to do is to ram straight ahead and take a few of the bastards with me. Damn!”

  “We have to love them too, Aaron.”

  “No we don’t. Not me.”

  “Hold my hand, please? I put the plug in and my hand stinks bad, but I’m shaking like crazy and trying to remember what we learned to do in a situation like this, but I can’t do anything except be scared and want you holding me. I wish I was dead. I wish I could die and come back to life later on, but I doubt if we can arrange that. Oh Jesus Christ, Aaron, somebody inside my head is starting to pray for me and I think it’s my mother.”

  Aaron stops the car, puts it in park, turns off the ignition. He takes Nicky’s hand, which is ice cold. She holds onto his middle finger—the shorter stump—so tightly that he thinks she may squeeze blood from it. He imagines the top of the stump opening, a slit like a small eye, red juice spurting upwards.

  “I promise.”

  Her hand relaxes. A man is at his side, peering into the window, reeking of beer.

  “You’re a long way from home, ain’t you, boy?” The man wears a sheriff’s hat, but there is no badge there, or on his shirt. His face, lit from behind, is flat and gray, like the blade of a shovel.

  “Yes,” Aaron says.

  “You lost?”

  “Yes. I think I must be, officer.”

  Aaron hears voices tell the sheriff—his name is Ben—to stop wasting time, to enforce the law. Ben’s eyes seem, to Aaron’s surprise, kind. They are soft and brown, the left one scarred, a vertical yellow crescent, like a fingernail paring, slicing it. In a different uniform—a white smock—Aaron imagines Ben behind the counter in a drugstore, filling prescriptions.

  “I think you’d best step out of the car, boy. We got to do an inspection, make sure you ain’t hiding any contraband in here. Lots of guns and stuff been coming down here from up North, you know.”

  “Me too?”

  “You too, ma’am.”

  They step out and are shoved forward into the crossfire of headlights. Nicky stands next to him quietly, eyes downcast. She trembles. Aaron sees men emerge from the shadows, moving up from the campfire, from the woods that surround them. Some of them carry clubs, some carry rifles. He sees two large russet-colored dogs—Irish setters? retrievers?—straining against leashes.

  “Hey Dad—you want me to see what they got in their car here? Want me to open the trunk?”

  “Sure, son. You go ahead. Take the key from in front.”

  “Maybe we can talk things over,” Aaron offers. “We mean no harm.”

  Something stings his mouth before he is aware that anyone has come close enough to touch him. He tastes blood. His lower lip is split.

  “Don’t want none of your smart city talk, neither,” a man says. A dog snarls, snaps at Aaron’s leg. “What for all you nigger-lovers comin’ down here anyway? Whyn’t you stay home in Harlem where you belong, burn them cities to the ground?”

  Aaron sucks blood, touches his lip, and something whips him across the back, low. He is on the ground at once, head down, knees to stomach, hands covering his back. He glances sideways and sees that Nicky has done the same, her f
orehead touching earth. He hears men laugh, feels the lash on his rear end, on his fingers, on the backs of his legs. The pain is extraordinary, lightning-white. He hears a dog close by, panting.

  “Get on up, boy, and get them hands off your back. We want to see that yellow streak you got there. You get on up so we can make sure you are who you are. You got identification?”

  Aaron hesitates for a second—will he be safer obeying them or covering up?—and in that second something crashes against his ear and cheek, sending him sprawling, a streak of fire searing his brain. Fiery white stars explode, filling his skull with heat. He rolls over, feels warm liquid pour down along his neck. Nicky is bent over him before he can move again, covering his body with hers, sideways, her stomach across his back, her hands cupping his ears, and she is screaming at the men to leave him alone. Doesn’t she know what they’ll do to her? Is this how he’ll die, then, far from home, a thin young woman draped across his back? He hears himself moan, wonders if he has been hit with a baseball bat, wonders why he is still conscious. What will Susan think when she gets the news? Do you miss me, Aaron? Nicky screams at them to go away, to get a doctor. The dogs howl. Aaron’s mouth is clogged with dirt, pebbles, blood. He spits. He lets his tongue roam, searching for open spaces, for missing teeth. You won’t hurt yourself, will you? Nicky keeps screaming: do they want to kill a man who won’t fight back? Can’t they see that he is unarmed, that he was telling the truth, that he means no harm. They threaten Nicky, tell her they will ram red-hot pokers up her nigger-loving cunt, feed her to the dogs, bury her alive in horse shit, coil her in barbed wire and sink her in water, cinder blocks on her ankles. They will split her wide open but give her what she really wants first. They will make her beg for it. She recites words they had rehearsed during role-playing sessions in Ohio. Her voice is calm, like that of a schoolteacher addressing fourth-graders.

  “We’ve got nothing against you. We are not your enemies. We’re just here to help teach some children for a short while, and we’d like to hear your opinions too and understand how you feel about us. We’re human beings just like you are. We have nothing against you. We know some of you have wives and parents and children you love as much as—”

  He feels her weight being lifted from him, and he crouches again, covering his neck and ears this time. His left ear and cheek feel pulpy.

  “But you got something against him there, girl, don’t you? You got your goddamned filthy body right up against him, you little cock-teasing slut. Same cocksucking body you been giving to all them niggers. Don’t you spread them legs for every black dick you smell?”

  “No!”

  “You been suckin’ black cock, ain’t you, girl? Your teeth ain’t fell out yet but you been doing it, ain’t you? Ain’t you?”

  “No!”

  Aaron lifts his head. Nicky stands with her hands pressed flat against her thighs, her head held high, eyes blazing.

  “No! I’m not like that. I’m here to teach. I’m a member of the First Baptist Church in my home town and I know you don’t really believe that I do things like you say I do. Why should you think so? Let us talk about this reasonably, so that—”

  “Iffen you ain’t done it yet, you’re gone to before the night’s over, ain’t she, Homer?”

  “Like they say, lots of plowin’ gets done by moonlight. Lots of plantin’ too.”

  “But I could be your own daughter!” Nicky pleads. “I could—”

  Before she can finish, the man named Homer whacks her so ferociously across the face with the back of his hand—Aaron hears a cracking sound, like that of a thick branch breaking—that Nicky rises bodily from the earth before she falls.

  “You watch your goddamn foul mouth, girl. No daughter of mine ever sucked black cock.”

  Aaron realizes that he is standing. Nicky screams, her body heaving up and down, but Aaron knows he helps her most by not going to her, by not touching her.

  “I brought the girl here,” he says, his tongue thick. “It’s my responsibility that she’s here. Why don’t you let her go and just deal with me?”

  “We’ll do that too, boy. Don’t you worry none.”

  “You could let us both go. Haven’t you hurt us enough? I’d like to take her to a doctor.”

  Nicky is on her knees and Aaron hears a man talk about dog-fucking her. Nicky rises, eyes glazed. She steps one way and then the other, her hand outstretched as if she is blind. Aaron estimates that there are twelve to fifteen men around them. He tries to find a picture inside his head that he can fix on, a picture that will enable him to restrain himself, to keep from erupting, from trying to kill the bastards.

  “I can’t find any of your goddamned dark rooms,” Nicky whispers. She stands beside him. “I’m losing everything, Aaron. Oh good Christ Almighty but I’m scared—”

  He sees her hand reach toward him.

  “Don’t,” he commands.

  “Bring ’em down to the water,” Ben says. “Let’s go now.”

  “Oh good Jesus Christ, Aaron—we’re all gonna gather by the water, like in the hymn, only—”

  “You wanna pray, girl, you get down on your knees the way you know how, like you do for all them coons.”

  Aaron eyes the gun barrels, thinks of how beautiful the blue metal is in moonlight. His left eye throbs, but behind the pain there is a picture now, and the picture is very clear. He, Nicky, Holly and Dwayne are driving across the state to attend James Chaney’s funeral. Chaney is the black civil rights worker whose body was found, along with Andrew Goodman’s and Michael Schwerner’s, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The funeral is in Meridien. Chaney, who was twenty-one, has a twelve-year-old brother, and at the Freedom School in Meridien, the brother plays in a jazz band: piano, washtub bass, cardboard boxes, bongos. Is he pleased, in the midst of grief, to have so much attention paid to him because his older brother has died? There are about 150 marchers, and Aaron walks with them, from the church to the school, in silence. A phalanx of TV personnel and vans move along with them, drawing closer each time they find a pair of eyes in which there are tears.

  Walking down to the lake, beside Nicky, he tries to recall what he felt during that other walk, that hour of silence. He sees James Chaney’s face, as if in a sketch: brown pencil on beige paper, tints of rose-red. He hears Dave Dennis’s voice—Dennis, the Assistant Director of the Mississippi Summer Project—and Dennis is calling out the roll of death: Mack Parker, Medgar Evers, Herbert Lee, Lewis Allen, Emmett Till, four little girls in Birmingham, two boys in the Mississippi River. Dennis says that he is sick and tired of attending funerals. If you cannot go ten blocks to the courthouse, he asks, how will you ever go nine million miles up to heaven? Dennis damns the souls of everyone in the church where James Chaney lies dead. He is angry—sweet Lord, he is angry!—and it is high time others became angry too, angry enough to go to the courthouse and register, angry enough to teach children to read and to write, angry enough to do whatever they have to do to stop the murder and the hate….

  Aaron feels a gun barrel jab the small of his back. Nicky’s face is twisted, swollen.

  “I won’t hurt myself,” he says.

  “Them neither. You promised.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, Dad. Look here what they got hidden away—”

  Aaron turns. To his surprise, he and Nicky have walked only a few feet. Aaron remembers James Chaney’s mother, in the front pew, weeping. Will what he felt then give him strength now? He recalls believing that Susan was there with him, and he wonders why he never told her so.

  Ben’s son drags a young, shivering black boy—Aaron does not recognize him—into the circle of light.

  “You hold on to him, son.”

  The sheriff takes Aaron’s wallet, looks through the cards and photos, counts the money.

  “What’s a nice clean-cut young guy like you want down here with us?” he asks. “I see you got a family. What for you want to go messin’ around in other people’s yards for?” The softness in his eye
s fades. “Now what you got to see, Mr. Levin, is that we heard all about how you roused up them people last week like you was savin’ them for Jesus, and what you got to see too is that we know it was some lying son-of-a-bitch Jew like you that cut up them other three so’s you could bring the feds in, ain’t that right?”

  “No. I don’t know why you—”

  A blow to his right kidney sends Aaron staggering forward. The sheriff sidesteps, lets Aaron fall, kicks him in the stomach.

  “A big boy like you, got a shave and a haircut and a wife and kids, you could be up home doing good works for that family instead of messin’ around where you don’t belong, makin’ trouble for honest folks. I got a mind to cite you for loitering and insurrection and intent to cause a riot and speeding and operating under the influence—” Aaron feels beer splash in his face, drip down. “I got a mind to cite you for all kinds of things. There ain’t much I couldn’t cite you for. You know that, don’t you? I could find things to cite you for would keep you locked up down here till your own kids wouldn’t recognize you no more.”

  “He’d make a good tight end, Ben, if he don’t get all his muscles broke first.”

  “Where’d you find the little boy, Horace? You tell your father the truth.”

  “He was locked in their trunk, Dad. I think they was fixin’ to kidnap him up North, sell him to somebody.”

  “Jesus,” Nicky whispers. “Oh sweet Jesus, Aaron—”

  Aaron and Nicky are pushed forward. They stumble down toward the lake, hear the men jeer, hear the men ask if they want to go wash the nigger smell off. Will putting them in the lake kill all the fish? The men laugh. Aaron thinks of escape. There are no lights—no houses—on the lake that he can see. No boats. He imagines himself and Nicky holding hands underwater, swimming along the bottom, bullets spraying the lake’s surface like pellets of hail. He sees blood burst from their ears, dark streams of it rise through the water like smoke. He thinks of old Jon Hall movies, South Sea natives diving for pearls, staying underwater too long, legs caught by giant clams. When he and Nicky are near the campfire, about fifteen feet from the water, they stop. Aaron sniffs in through swollen sinuses and he can tell that the black boy has lost control of his bowels.