by Robert Ward
I just sighed. On this kind of thing there was no arguing with her.
Then it occurred to me that in all the commotion I had never said what I needed to tell her.
“Grace,” I stumbled. “The other night … those things I said to you … they were awful.”
“Yes, they were,” she said. “No one speaks to me that way.”
“I know. I know,” I said. “Listen, please. What you do about the civil rights movement is your business … okay? I mean, who am I to tell you how to live your life?”
“You’re my grandson, that’s who,” she said, her eyes narrowing in pain.
“Okay. But I just want you to know that I—”
“Quiet! Gosh you go on a lot. Now listen to me, ‘cause I’m feeling lousy and I’m only going to say this once. Here is the deal. You were impolite, overbearing, self-righteous … a totally unearned self-righteousness, by the way …”
“I know, Grace. I couldn’t agree more.”
“Shhh. I’m talking now. Show some respect.”
I nodded as I sank farther and farther into the chair. This was going to be worse than I had expected.
“And the thing that is positively the most annoying factor to me,” she said, “is that you were right.”
“Huh?”
“You were deeply and annoyingly right. And I’ve decided now … I know what to do, which way to go.”
“You do?” I was flabbergasted.
“Yes, and I’ve already done it. Dr. Josiah Gibson and his contingent from African Methodist and Sean Hunter and his contingent from dear old First Methodist will be here on a week from Sunday at one o’clock for dinner and a serious discussion group on nonviolent action. Do you think you can make it?”
“You know it,” I said. “But that’s in ten days. You’ll still be—”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve known what to do in years. But obviously I’ll need your help with the food and preparations.”
“Of course,” I said. I must have been smiling like an idiot, because she waved her hand as if she was going to hit me.
“Don’t gloat,” she said. “It’s unchristian.”
“Sorry,” I said. “One thing, though. What about Dr. Brooks and your trip to England?”
“He’ll just have to live with it,” Grace said. “And as for England, I’ve been there many times with Mr. Dickens as my guide. Now get out of here and go play some basketball up at the Waverly Rec with Howard Murray.”
“You knew about that?”
“Of course. It’s the talk of the neighborhood. I figure if you can pull that off, maybe I can dig up a little courage myself.”
“You can’t do this because of me,” I said. “What if you have another spell?”
“I’m not doing it because of you,” she said. “Don’t get that idea. I’m doing it because I need to for my own soul. But if you inspired me a little, that’s okay, isn’t it?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But I’m not that brave.”
“Bull,” she said. “You don’t even know how tough you are. So relax.”
I tried smiling, and after patting her on the head I left the room.
But that didn’t stop me from worrying. I didn’t want to be her inspiration. What if it was all too much for her and she had a spell? A fatal spell? If I was her inspiration, then wouldn’t it be on my head?
I took a long walk and thought on it. Life was so complex. What one person did purely for his own reasons could affect someone else in a way that the first person never dreamed of.
I had gone from really wanting to get my grandmother engaged in the civil rights movement to practically wanting to talk her out of it.
Finally, I offered up a little prayer, and suddenly I felt clear about it.
I had to take what Grace said at face value. She was doing what she wanted, what she really felt she needed to do … and it was up to me to swallow my own doubts and to support her.
And, I reminded myself, thinking of some of our less-than-evolved neighbors, to protect her if it came to that.
Graduation from woodbourne High school, 1958
A ny secret and guilty hope that Grace or I had that the contingent of Negroes would come unnoticed by the neighborhood ended abruptly when the Reverend Josiah T. Gibson and his group arrived in a big black Lincoln, replete with running board and white-walled tires.
As the minister got out from behind the driver’s seat, three other well-dressed Negroes—two men and a spectacular-looking tall and very dark woman—opened the doors, and the little block of Singer Avenue was amazed.
Grace and I stood on the front porch, she dressed in a pink taffeta dress, seashell brooch, and white shoes, me in a navy blue jacket, rep tie, and loafers.
Dr. Gibson fairly bounded up the cement front steps, covered the little walkway with two big steps, and came up the final three wooden stairs with enough thunder to shake the whole front porch.
“Mrs. Ward,” he said. “You look exceptionally beautiful today.”
“And you look very dashing yourself, Dr. Gibson,” she said.
With that said, Dr. Gibson and my grandmother proceeded to give each other a very natural and spontaneous hug of affection. And as they did, I heard the chorus from the street whooping out the universal adolescent mockery—“Whoaaaaaa!”
I turned and looked down at them.
Sherry Butler was hanging on a taillight, along with her latest paramour, some tall balding guy named Mick, with a pot belly and an Oriole cap. She and Mick were passing a bottle of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose back and forth, and laughing, as they pointed at the porch.
And just behind them were the Watkins brothers, Nelson and Buddy. They were leaning on their own porch rail, their big red faces contorted in dismay and disbelief.
I felt my stomach turn, and there was the copper taste of fear in the back of my throat.
I remembered what I had promised myself and my grandfather.
But inside I felt sick as I watched the Watkins brothers come down off the porch and drift over to the curb, where Nelson took the bottle out of Mick’s stubby hands without even looking at him.
“Well, look at that,” Nelson said loudly, squinting up at us. “Mrs. Ward and the nigger must be real old friends.”
That got a big laugh out of Sherry, Buddy, Mick, and a couple of the other hillbilly neighbors from down the block whose names I didn’t know, but I recognized them as pals of the Watkins brothers.
I was furious at the comment, and though I was scared, I suddenly wanted to strike back at them.
The Reverend Gibson must have sensed my mood because he took me by the shoulder and turned me toward one of the other people in his group.
“Hello, young Robert. Allow me to introduce my associates from African Methodist.”
I turned and shook hands with the two Negro men and the long, willowy woman, but I barely got their names because out of the corner of my eye I was still checking the street. And listening to what sounded like the bleating of goats and pigs:
“Look at ‘at up at Grace Ward’s … niggers in big cars.”
“Yeah, and wearing suits, too.”
“Dress ‘em up anyway you want, and they’re still monkeys.”
“I don’t even beleef it. Right here inna neighborhood, for Christ’s sake.”
“It ain’t right, Nelson. You gonna just let ‘em take over or what?”
The last line almost made me laugh. The problem was that it wasn’t really funny. To these imbeciles, any Negro’s appearance in the neighborhood for any reason was tantamount to Negroes taking over the world.
I shook hands with the tall dark woman, but my nerves were jangling.
“Hiiiii, Bobby,” Buddy Watkins now yelled up at me in his most mocking high-pitched voice. “Having some of your friends over for lunch?”
That bit of wit got all the rest of them on the street chattering and laughing.
Now my grandmother put one hand o
n my shoulder, and I turned toward her.
“You simply have to ignore them,” she said. “Remember why we are here. Nonviolent protest.”
“Okay,” I said. But I didn’t feel nonviolent. I felt jacked up, scared, and at the same time anxious to do something, anything, before the little mob did it to us first.
At that moment two more cars drove up the street, a bright shiny Chevy and a maroon Buick. More T-shirted neighbors piled out into the street now, and I saw the Harper brothers down at the corner hanging on the lamppost, watching like hunched buzzards. Both of them looked goofy-eyed and dangerous.
As Sean Hunter and the six other Negroes—all of the men dressed in suits and the women in tasteful Sunday dresses—got out of their cars, the Harpers started making apelike noises, scratching themselves on their ribs, and dancing up and down.
“Chhhheeeeeeeeee, cheeeeeeeee, cheeeeeeee.”
I felt such fury and hatred for them, such intense pain for the Negroes who walked up my grandmother’s street, that I suddenly remembered an old hunting rifle Cap had stored away in the attic Time was he had used it every season to hunt rabbits and geese down on the Chesapeake Bay. Now that he was older, he didn’t use it much anymore, but he had always taken extraordinarily good care of it, and I even recalled where the shells were—in an old rolltop desk.
He had even taught me once, a couple of years ago when Grace was not home, how to load and shoot it.
If they charged us, what were we supposed to do? I thought of what my grandmother had read me of Gandhi, and I knew what was expected. If attacked, we were supposed to offer nonviolent resistance—form a human chain, let them beat us, just as the people of India did when the British beat them with steel-shank lathis.
Die if necessary.
Not that I thought it was going to come to that. But I thought about that gun nonetheless. I was fifteen and didn’t want to die or get hurt, and beyond that I especially didn’t want my grandmother to suffer at the hands of moronic assholes like the Watkins brothers.
And suddenly it occurred to me again just how disciplined and courageous the blacks and the young whites who were doing voter registration work in the Deep South were. They faced scenes ten times as bad as this every day, yet they held their ground and didn’t fight back. They were the true heroes and heroines of my generation, without question, and I felt an awe for them that day, which I’ve never lost.
As I watched the street action becoming more and more menacing, I felt an amazing kinship with people in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but at the same time I felt something growing in myself, and it was a far cry from nonviolence.
As I fantasized about blasting away, Hollywood marine—style, on my redneck neighbors, Sean Hunter and the six other young Negroes from First Methodist came up to the porch and politely introduced themselves to my grandmother and me, all smiles and very cool, as if this was a typical day on the street.
I remembered my own cowardice, and I felt a wave of self-disgust and shame wash over me so powerful that it nearly made me physically ill.
“I’ve seen you up at church,” Sean said. He didn’t even sound nervous. It was as though he had utterly tuned out our charming neighbors.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling haywire, not at all sure of what I was saying. “What you guys are doing, that takes guts.”
“Not really,” Sean said. “Not when you think of what people are doing every day down south, brother.”
“That’s true, I guess,” I said.
The clatter on the street was rising now. Emboldened by cheap booze, Sherry Butler was yelling “Jigaboos!” and doing some parody of Aunt Jemina dancing with her fat, drunken boyfriend.
“No place like home,” I said as we went inside.
“Don’t let them get to you,” Sean said. “They’re scared to death. All of them.”
He smiled at me again, and I didn’t know what to say. His coolness under fire, the coolness of all of them, amazed me. I knew, as surely as I’ve known anything, that if it came to a fight, Dr. Gibson and Sean Hunter and the two well-built young Negroes with him could knock the hell out of the Watkins family and their moronic minions.
But there was no question of its coming to that, because the Negroes had already been tested, and they came at all this from some mysterious position of inner strength and faith in their mission.
I, on the other hand, felt jumbled, confused, alternately terrified and furious.
For now as we sat down in the living room and got ready for the meeting, I could hear Buddy Watkins yelling both Grace’s name and my own.
“Bobby Ward is a chick-chick-chickie … and Grace Ward is a nigger lover.”
I felt a violent hatred rising up in me. I looked around, but my grandmother had gone into the kitchen to get some refreshments. The two factions of Negroes were acquainting themselves with each other, shaking hands and making small talk.
The call from the street came again, Buddy’s voice:
“Grace Ward is a nigger lover. The Wards are all pussy assholes.”
I took a deep breath and shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, my eyes lighted on a book by Gandhi that Grace had left out for our guests to leaf through. I picked it up and held it so tightly that sweat from my hands dripped onto the pages.
Finally I opened the cover and was puzzled by what I saw. There on the flyleaf where my grandmother invariably wrote her name and address was another notation:
W.W., Mayo County.
Adrenaline coursing through me, I opened it and mindlessly flipped the pages, trying to keep my rapidly disappearing cool.
And again I heard Buddy and Nelson yelling at me from the street below, this time in unison:
“Bobby loves the niggers.”
They were challenging me personally.
I knew precisely what I had to do. Be together. Be impervious. Cool.
I stared down at the book. Maybe, I thought crazily, maybe I had seen this book for a reason. Maybe if I opened it and read a transcendental quotation or two from Gandhi, the prince of peace, I, too, would gain control of myself.
Desperately, I flipped through the book, and soon I found a quote … but what it offered me was not solace. Gandhi’s exact words were:
“Nonviolence is not a cover for cowardice, but it is the supreme virtue of the brave. Cowardice is wholly inconsistent with nonviolence. Nonviolence presupposes ability to strike.”
I looked down at those passionate, thoughtful words, and I heard myself make a bleating noise, more like a donkey braying than a laugh. My stomach curled up inside of me. I knew that any attempt to appear nonviolent was for me purely bogus, that in my tormented and twisted heart I had secretly hoped nonviolence would bail me out of having to fight back against the Buddys of this world.
Hey, guys, I would battle the racist jerks, but I’m nonviolent.
Standing there among the Negroes, some, like Sean Hunter, only a year or two older than me, I realized how pathetically lame I was. The Negroes in Grace’s room were cool because they were nonviolent out of strength. I was frightened and dreamed of violence because I was a coward.
And outside I heard the taunts again:
“Ward is a chicken shit. Grace Ward is a nigger lover.”
I felt my face burn with hatred.
Slowly, as the Negroes all sat down and the Reverend Gibson and Grace made ready to explain what the new coalition hoped to accomplish, I let myself out the screen door and went on the porch.
I was so jumbled with fear, hatred, self-loathing, and fury that I couldn’t see the street clearly. Indeed, Singer Avenue looked unreal to me, not black macadam but instead a melting black river of tar, which was guarded by wolves and weasels. And behind me I could hear the Reverend Gibson’s powerful voice through the window as he said, “My friends, we are here today at our friend Grace Ward’s house to make a plan, a nonviolent plan, which will accomplish our goal of successfully integrating the First Methodist Church. O
ur protest will be, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, a protest not of hatred, not of desire for revenge, but one of love. For only love can conquer hatred, ignorance, and fear.”
I heard all this in some strange fog … as though Dr. Gibson was in some movie that was playing inside … a pretty movie, a movie about love and the ultimate dignity of man.
Only just now, outside on the street, it didn’t make any sense. There was another movie going on. A movie about how little we all cared for one another, how close the street people were to the apes we all descended from.
Again I heard the voices from the street, mocking me, my family, the Negroes inside the house:
“Grace Ward is a nosy old bitch.”
I thought of Jerry Watkins and his three goons beating my grandfather in the alley behind the Boulevard Theater all those years ago.
I thought of Buddy pushing me over Harper’s back down at Rado’s Drugstore, of the way they laughed at me like I was less than nothing …
I heard Buddy call my grandmother a nigger lover … nigger lover … nigger lover …
And then, amazingly, and against my will, I heard my own voice scream down into the street at Buddy:
“You come out in the middle of the street and say that again, you asshole.”
Suddenly, Singer Avenue became deathly quiet. I checked my own emotions—for signs of fear, the quivering hand, the feeling of dread, bubbles popping in my chest, the desire to turn and run …
But I felt none of those things.
I was no longer afraid of any of them.
I had Cap inside of me and, God help me, Grace, too.
Buddy Watkins looked around at his friends. At Shirley, who sucked on her wine; at staggeringly drunk Mick, who looked confused; at slit-eyed, bad-skin Nelson who was watching his little brother with a morbid curiosity in his eyes.
“What did you say, Ward?” Buddy yelled.
“I said come out in the middle of the street and say something about my grandmother, you stupid, ugly, son of a bitch.”
I had no idea where these words were coming from. They seemed to be emanating in some deep, dark place in my soul, because they were not merely words at all. They were the condition of my consciousness. I was ready for him, no matter what happened. I hated him totally and absolutely. And, God help me, I wanted to destroy him.