Several years after I was discharged from University Hospital, I went to the Lurleen Wallace Tower again, as part of an invited tour. The Red Dress portrait in the basement was gone. They didn’t do ECT treatments there anymore. Instead, they used the facility for cancer research. It contained a large cyclotron. I was there with Burns and Mark, and it felt as though we were supposed to be there together. When the tour was nearly finished, our guide told us there was one more thing we should see. In the main atrium, an entryway of glass and natural light, hung a new portrait of Mama. As Burns and I stood looking at her, a new certainty bloomed in me, the knowledge that she would have been proud of me for fighting through my depression. It was one of those stunning moments that take your breath away.
“In the darkness there is light.” —Peggy Wallace Kennedy. Me and Mark, August 20, 1988.
27
Letters from Baghdad
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
It was after midnight when we drove through the gates of Pope Air Force Base, on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina. After fifteen months, our son Army Captain Leigh Kennedy was coming home from the Iraq War.
Mark, Burns, and I joined a collective crowd of expectant loved ones in a large, unheated aircraft hangar. Some sat on wooden bleachers scattered about a concrete floor while others moved about to keep warm. A young woman, probably in her twenties, sat away from the rest of us. Her strapless evening gown was not made for cold nights in hangars. Next to her on the bench sat a pair of glittering high heels.
The crowd was diverse: a melting pot of race and religion. Our political views probably ran the spectrum. We were probably also divided in our opinion about the justness of the war that our soldiers were fighting. But in that moment our diversity was unimportant—we were all Americans.
The engines screamed as the DC10 raced down the runway. Then it slowed and turned, bringing our children, husbands, and wives back into our arms.
Behind a flag-carrying entourage of army officers and a military band, a young soldier was pushed toward the plane in a wheelchair. Injured in combat and sent home for treatment, he now wore a neck brace, and one of his legs was in a cast. A truck trundled out a large metal staircase. Two men descended from the plane, carried the wounded soldier up the steps and into the plane while the band played the “Army Song.”
The night my son Leigh Kennedy arrived home from war, March 19, 2008, at two fifty-five A.M.
The wounded soldier appeared in the plane’s doorway, on his feet, supported on either side by two soldiers with whom he had served. The three linked arms and descended the stairs. They had gone to war together, and now they were coming home together. A cheer went up.
“There’s Leigh. He just came off the plane,” Burns cried. “Hey Leigh. Over here!”
Leigh embraced me. “Mom. I’m home.”
In January 2007, after Leigh deployed to the war in Iraq, the yellow ribbons well-intentioned friends tied around two of the front yard trees that Leigh climbed when he was a child only reminded us that he was gone. My pride in his call to serve did little to quell the fear that I would lose him, which haunted my days.
The American people were told the war in Iraq was fought to make America safe again, to avenge the deaths of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, and send a message to the Muslim world. But we believed it was really just a war to make war, and for others, to make money.
If winning meant destroying the government of Saddam Hussein, the war in Iraq was a success. But in all other ways, it was much more than just a failure. It was the beginning of the end of “peace in our time.” The war in Iraq tarnished America’s image abroad, destabilized the Middle East, and incited anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. One company, Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, once run by Dick Cheney prior to his becoming vice president, was awarded $39.5 billion in government contracts during the Iraq War.
There were times when the only passion I could muster toward the war was anger. A kind of anger that if it isn’t checked becomes rage. I had argued with Leigh about his decision to join the military in the first place and played every mother card in the deck. I shed tears on the “What about us left here to do nothing but worry” theme. All to no avail. I ran hot and cold, seeking whatever it was going to take to dissuade Leigh, until he finally said, “You and Dad always talk about the importance of public service. My grandparents were both governors. Dad was a supreme court justice. So now it’s my turn.” Checkmate. There really was nothing more I could say.
Friends and acquaintances offered bland reassurances: “No need to worry. He’ll be fine.” Most of the people I knew had never sent a child to war. Their children were bound for lives in banking, law, medicine, or perhaps best of all, taking over the businesses that their great-grandfathers had started.
“With all your connections, why in the world would Leigh join the army? Somebody would have hired him right here at home,” one acquaintance said. Most days I was just too tired to argue.
“Busy hands make for happy hands,” Mama used to say. “Keep you out of mischief.” Perhaps busy hands will take my mind off the war, I thought. I pulled out some cardboard boxes from the back of my closet I hadn’t seen in years. One of them was sealed. A stick-on tag on top said there were photos inside.
“I found this today.” I showed Mark a photo when he came home. “It was like Mama was sending me a message. I couldn’t believe what I saw. All I could do was cry.”
Mama was standing on a military parade ground flanked by a uniformed officer of the Alabama National Guard. She was reviewing her troops. She was their governor and commander in chief. As I held the photo in my hands, I began to think of the pride Mama would have had in her grandson’s call to serve.
“Mama, I wish you had lived long enough to see Leigh in his uniform,” I said to myself.
I became determined to spend my time honoring our soldiers, praying for their safe return, engaging friends and family to send parcels and letters to Leigh and the members of his platoon and reading his letters from Baghdad. I wanted others like me, who never thought about war, to read letters from someone they knew, a childhood playmate, the boy that sat next to their daughter in school, a kid that waved when they drove by.
We had the first casualty in our battalion. He had a wife and four children. Mom, he was killed on your birthday.
______
A lot of our soldiers are teenagers. You have to be at least nineteen to operate a .50 caliber machine gun. I had to leave my operator behind. He is eighteen.
______
A friend of mine was killed today. He was in 2nd platoon. We secured the area so the medevac could land. He had been shot in the head. He died before they landed. He had an eleven-year-old son.
______
I was on patrol in Sadr City. I had my interpreter with me. We stopped a man who was walking toward us. It looked like he wanted to talk, but he wouldn’t say anything. He whispered to my interpreter to follow him to his house. When we got inside, the man broke down and started crying. He told me his two sons had been beheaded two weeks ago. He was afraid that if anyone saw him talking to us, he would be next.
______
We were setting up a perimeter for a medical unit in Sadr City. There were tons of children that flocked to the trucks once they saw us there. They know that Americans are known for passing out toys and candy. The bigger kids will use the younger kids as a fortification to get close to our trucks to lob a grenade inside the turret. So, we are constantly telling them to get back. At one point I got out of my truck. I noticed this one little girl. She kept wanting to play guess which hand with a marble she had. We would play; then she would get knocked out of the way by the larger kids. After being outside for a while, I got back in the truck. I lost sight of her. Then I saw her coming outside a house with a tray of water in her hands. I got back out of my truck and she gave
me some water to drink. I reluctantly drank it knowing the water probably was not purified. Then she made sure she went to the other trucks and gave them a glass, as well. I was amazed at the kindness of this little girl.
______
I had a big bag of candy under the seat. I knew I would be playing with fire if I got out of the vehicle with candy in my hand but I wanted to give it to the little girl. She was scared when I motioned her to come to my truck. There was an Iraqi man standing not far from me. I managed to explain to him that I wanted to give her the bag of candy. We got the candy to her and watched until she got to her house. That man and I were enemies in the midst of a war, but for that moment we were on the same team.
______
One hundred fourteen soldiers were killed this month. Forty of them were between the ages of 18 and 21.
______
There were two suicide bombings in a market in Sadr City today. They strapped bombs on two mentally challenged women and told them to walk around. When they got in the middle of a lot of people, the bombs were remotely detonated.
Twenty thousand soldiers were deployed to Iraq in what was referred to as the Surge, in January and February of 2007. Leigh was one of them. During the fifteen months he was there, 7,085 soldiers were wounded and 867 soldiers were killed. There were no ticker-tape parades for those who returned. It was over and forgotten.
I used to wonder how can there be dignity in the death of an American soldier who dies in the midst of an unjust war. But for those mothers who lay flowers on the graves of their sons and daughters who died in Iraq, perhaps dignity is all that is left. And who are we to think less of their grief than the grief of those who lay flowers on the tombs of heroes who died to protect American liberty and justice for all?
28
Back to the Bridge
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
—Helen Keller
On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and spoke to the heart of America. It was one of his finest moments. He told America, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream. I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
It was March 2015. I thought of King’s speech as thousands of people marched up Dexter Avenue to the Alabama state capitol for the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march. Dr. King’s daughter Bernice and I held hands as we stood on the steps of the Alabama capitol as the marchers approached.
Me and Donzaleigh Abernathy at the Faith and Politics Civil Rights Pilgrimage, March 2017.
I could not help but wonder how the course of history might have been changed if Martin Luther King and Daddy had known that one day, right down here in Alabama, that little black girl and that little white girl holding hands would be their own daughters.
On March 8, members of a congressional delegation took their seats beneath a tent in front of the Alabama capitol. John Lewis and I sat together on the street-level plaza of the capitol grounds. We were gathered there to celebrate and honor the memory of the Selma to Montgomery march.
The ground under my feet was where my past resided, reminding me of the life I had lived: floats and waving beauty queens, bands and majorettes, adoring crowds at five Wallace inaugurations. I thought of Daddy’s words: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” and the malevolent roars that followed. And I also remembered the mourning crowds of whites and blacks, twice gathered and inching along for hours, some beneath the stars, to pay their respects to the memory of my mother and father whose bodies lay in state in the capitol rotunda. I remembered taking Mark to meet Daddy beneath a Confederate flag waving high atop the capitol dome.
John and I sat together on what was hallowed and embattled American ground. It was a place of opportunity for me to do for John what he did for me on the day we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
John smiled and nodded at me as he adjusted the lectern microphone.
“On March the 25 of 1965, as Ralph Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and thousands more gathered in the shadow of this capitol, there was never an opportunity to address their concerns or state their grievances to the one person who could have changed the course of American history then and there,” I began.
For Governor Wallace watched through a window in the privacy of his office, while others persevered and changed the history of America without him.
Today, we must not allow others to make the right choices for us. We must have courage each day to stand up for equality and the rights of all Americans. We must lead by example and live our lives with inspiration, always aspiring to make the choices that lead us to higher ground, that guide us to understanding and purpose of not just who we are but who we can become.
An opportunity for each of you, an obligation for all of us, to see others, feel others, and celebrate others, respecting their humanity for who they are. Working each day to inspire the nobility that lies in the heart of each of us. How can Americans reach for higher ground if we do not inspire others with what we do? We must promise that when we say all men are created equal, it means something. Tolerance must be more than what we believe, it must be what we live, and leading by example is what we must do. Tolerance does not always mean agreement, but tolerance always requires understanding and compassion for others.
I am most thankful for the life and inspiration of Congressman John Lewis. And standing here by his side, there now comes an opportunity for me, in some small measure, to return to you what you gave to me as we stood together on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Fifty years ago, you stood here in front of your state capitol and sought an opportunity as a citizen of Alabama to be recognized and heard by your governor and he refused. But today as his daughter and as a person of my own, I want to do for you what my father should have done and recognize you for your humanity and for your dignity as a child of God, as a person of goodwill and character, and as a fellow Alabamian, and say, welcome home.
John and I held hands as we walked to the Civil Rights Memorial several blocks away. In the midst of a stark and solemn plaza stands a black granite wall engraved with Martin Luther King’s paraphrase of Amos 5:24: We will not be satisfied “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” In front of it, an inverted black granite cone rises from the ground. On its flat top, names of the martyrs of the civil rights movement are etched like the hands of a clock, marking moments we should never forget.
Congressman John Lewis, me, and Mark on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, 2018.
John and I put our hands on the tabletop. The water that flows across the memorial rippled over our hands. Our fingers touched. The water flowed over the names of those who died, then into the ground to find its way to the Alabama River. It would flow beneath the Edmund Pettus Bridge where we had found each another. It would flow south to the Delta into Mobile Bay and out into the Gulf.
On March 8, 2017, following a dinner at the Alabama State Archives in Montgomery, I spoke to a congressional delegation, including Congressman Lewis.
While there is never a bad time to honor the struggle for civil rights in American history, there is no better time than now to heed the call for freedom and justice for all that was the hallmark of the civil rights movement …
When we say all men are created equal, it means something, protects something and encourages us to embrace the belief that the diversity among us has nothing to do with equality but has everything to do with strength.
There are lessons to be learned along the roadways that others have traveled in pursu
it of their dreams of enjoying the full measure of equality. There are great moments in history when men, women, and children stood their ground to demand the rights that were guaranteed to them. And now is the time to fulfill the promise we pledge each time the American flag goes by.
There is never a bad time for us to engage in acts of public service that create opportunities for enlightenment and change. For we cannot expect the next generation of Americans to do something to change the world if we do nothing to recognize our individual obligations to service.
Following my speech, I took a seat on the front row of the auditorium as John and a moderator came to the stage and sat down side by side. After several general comments, the moderator turned to John and asked him to reflect on Daddy’s life, what legacies he left behind.
John paused, as if he were gathering his thoughts, before speaking. He turned in his chair and pointed a finger directly at me. For a moment, it was as if all of the oxygen had been sucked from the room.
“How could I say anything bad about George Wallace, when this is his daughter?” he said.
With those words, John Lewis, who grew up in Troy, who had lived just thirty-eight miles from me when we were young, allowed me to realize that I was perhaps Daddy’s most important legacy of all.
AFTERWORD
We are born in moments that turn to days then months and years of dawns of hope and sunsets of despair. But the moments we should remember first are those of conquering our fears, standing our ground, sacrificing for someone we love, and standing up for the rights of a perfect stranger because it is the right and righteous thing to do.
The Broken Road Page 20