And All Our Wounds Forgiven

by Julius Lester

  the director sat behind an enormous desk, and i smiled to myself. the bigger the desk, the smaller the man. he did not rise or smile. he did, indeed, look like a bulldog — the recessed forehead, the heavy cheeks, the squareness of the skull. but a bulldog’s eyes were free of malevolence. the director’s eyes scintillated with it.

  he motioned to the chair on the opposite side of the desk.

  “i’ll get straight to the point, marshall.”

  he spoke rapidly, the words spilling out of him as if he were afraid their stoppage would reveal his vacuity.

  “i have never liked you. i think you are the most dangerous man in america. i think you have misled the negro and stirred up trouble for no reason. you want too much too soon and the white people of this country will never stand for it. if you aren’t careful somebody is going to kill you and i say good riddance. i am a patriot, a true american. i love my country and anyone who is a threat to it is my enemy.

  “i suppose you read this morning’s papers. it must have made you feel mighty important. i wanted to throw up. i don’t know what gets into these newspaper people. you make a speech and they want you to be president. this country is not ready for a colored president and the kind of race-mixing you believe in. i listened to that speech of yours yesterday and it made me sick. i said to myself, what if the american people knew about you what i know about you? what would they think then?”

  he had a folder in front of him and shoved it across the desk at me.

  “what do you think the american people would say if they saw some of those pictures? i’ve got tapes, too. ill say this for you: you can make bedsprings squeak.”

  i opened the folder to see a grainy photograph of a naked elizabeth astride the naked me. beneath it there were more: she with my penis in her mouth, me with my head between her legs, me atop her, me entering her anally.

  there was such a welter of emotions: embarrassment, shock and anger and outrage that i had no privacy any more. yet i was also fascinated. we all have photographs of ourselves at picnics, family reunions, weddings, graduations. but we never have the chance to see ourselves making love. part of me wanted elizabeth to see the photos and to reminisce with her about where we had been in this photo and where in that one.

  behind the photos was a sheaf of papers, a log of the motels and hotels in which we had made love. i knew we made love a lot but seeing it documented that way, i couldn’t help but be impressed.

  i closed the folder and looked at the director.

  there was a smirk on his face.

  “the choice is yours, marshal!. if you should suddenly become seriously ill and be unable to keep up your activities in the civil rights arena, then i wouldn’t think there would be any reason for the american people to know that you are fucking a white girl almost young enough to be your daughter. quite frankly, i don’t care if you fuck a hundred white women. any white woman who prefers a negro to a white man is nothing but trash. good riddance to them. but if you persist, then the washington post, new york times, every columnist, tv station and radio station in america will receive copies of what’s in that folder.”

  i thought about opening the paper one morning to see stories about my relationship with elizabeth and a giddiness swirled inside me unlike any i had known even as a child. my god! i thought. i would be free! i wouldn’t have to be john calvin marshall anymore. i could just be ... be ... i didn’t know what. i could just be.

  “well, i suppose you better start licking the stamps,” i said to him.

  the director turned red. “i don’t bluff, marshall!” his voice had taken on an ominous tone.

  “i didn’t think you did.”

  he paused. “well, i think i’ll send the first copy to your wife.”

  that stopped me. i had no desire to hurt andrea anymore than she was hurt already, she knew about elizabeth. how could she not? but to see photos, to see names of motels and dates, to hear tapes, that was another matter.

  there are moments in all our lives when we must choose the truth of ourselves. such moments are never dramatic. nor can they be seen from the outside. only we know what the moment is calling us to do.

  i looked at him. “do you need any help licking the stamps?”

  He came back after meeting with the director looking wan. ‘They know everything about us.”

  “Everything?” she repeated.

  “We can start with the size of my penis and your admiration of it and go from there.”

  “Oh, God, Cal! What did he say?”

  “He said he didn’t care if I screwed a hundred white women. The American people were not, however, as understanding. So, unless I withdrew from the civil rights movement, he would make sure the editors of every major paper in the nation received photos of us making love, a tape of our lovemaking, the john calvin marshall fucking hit parade, I guess, and a list of the hotels and motels. I told him that if he wanted some help licking the stamps, I would give him a hand.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Yes, I did!”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I’ll leave. That’ll make a difference. He can’t force you out of the movement. The movement will die without you and he knows it.”

  “Please don’t go. I need you.”

  Men lie about everything in the world, including “I love you.” It is not malicious on their parts or even conscious. The intent is not to hurt or deceive but to protect the fragile heart within. But a man cannot say “I need you” and lie. The admission of his incompleteness, the acknowledgement of his inability to be himself unless you were part of his life was the kind of humility in which the soul could sink roots and a rare love flower. A whimpered and whispered “I need you” was a truth all the roses and boxes of chocolate could never equal.

  “And if we pick up the Washington Post in the morning and we’re on the front page, what will you do?” she asked.

  They were sitting on the balcony. Below were the monuments of the nation — the phallus of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the breast-shaped dome of the Capitol. Almost directly below was the White House.

  On that hot August night they sat like a normal couple whose lives extended no further than the care and love of each other. It was a moment of delicious illusion that they savored because nothing was normal for them. She was white; he was black. He was 35; she was 24. She was single; he was married. He was a man in whose very body the suffering and aspirations of black history combined to make tangible the soul of a people and the agony of a nation. She was Elizabeth Adams, Lisa to everyone except him. He needed her.

  They were seldom alone, except at nights in the tiny rooms of Negro motels in southern towns. She sensed often that it was only because he knew the nights would come that he got through the days of demonstrations and evenings of mass meetings and after those, the staff sessions where he would have to assuage this ego and salve that hurt and parry a challenge to his leadership here and put down open rebellion there. She would sit quietly behind him like an aide at a congressional hearing who produced a document the congressman didn’t even know yet that he would need. That was Lisa. Because she was so efficient and unobtrusive at what she did, blacks accepted her — for a while.

  Many wondered and others suspected there was more to her relationship with Cal, but in public they were never less than the model of propriety and professionalism. She was the executive assistant who made the plane reservations, rented cars, served as liaison with the local police when Cal went north for fundraisers, answered his critical correspondence, handled speaking engagements and sent cards and gifts in his name to his parents and Andrea on birthdays and anniversaries.

  If anyone had dared or cared to see their adjacent rooms with connecting door at motels, it was obvious their relationship was also sexual. She had concluded, however, that people avoid truth because, if they know it, they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. Truth compels action. A lie maintains the status quo. Regardless of how uncomfortable or ev
en painful the lie, stasis is safety. Truth makes known the unknown. Who needs it?

  It would be midnight or 1 a.m. before they got back to the motel. They would sit on the edge of beds with mattresses softened by too many roiling bodies, mattresses smelling of sweat and semen and the thick mucus of vaginas and menstrual blood and moonshine whiskey. Wallpaper hung from the walls in shredded strips as if seared by witnessing too much lust. She would have gotten food, and they balanced paper plates on their laps and ate barbecue ribs, greasy hamburgers, french fries, fried chicken, collard greens, biscuits, cornbread, and drank Coke, beer, moonshine. Never in all those years were they able to go to a restaurant, movie, concert, play or even the park. He was John Calvin Marshall and people believed he could make the blind see and the lame walk.

  Sometimes she feared that he hated himself because he couldn’t, and she would stroke his naked body with her breasts, slowly, up and down and up, over thighs and buttocks and back, up and down and up until his body shuddered and trembled, and later, sitting astride him, his penis deep within her, she would implore him to thrust deeper and deeper into her until he came and knew himself again as mere flesh and blood and remembered how good that was.

  i do not know how it is for white people on a daily basis. i always imagined that hi-story for them was merely backdrop, a muzak heard only when turned up too loud. i imagined that for them hi-story was benign and beneficent, an assumed harmony of which they were only aware when a dissonant chord intruded — the bombing of the world trade center, an economic recession, the assassination of the president.

  that is not how it is for blacks, and I suspect, jews. for us, history is, by definition, dissonance. we know history as terror, an omnipresent beast that will devour us if its leash is merely allowed to slacken. history has defined us as its enemy because, by our very beings, we are seen as challenges to its essential premise about order and civilization.

  what is that premise? that the essential worth of a human being is determined by his or her race. the tragedy of western civilization is that white people regard themselves as superior because they are born white. the very premise of western civilization — the superiority of the white race — is evil incarnate.

  “If the newspapers had made public our relationship, we would have had a chance to be normal. It would have taken a while, but eventually Cal and I would not have had to continue to relinquish privacy in the public sphere.

  “I suppose you and I shared that. Were you and he ever able to go to a restaurant, movie, concert, play or even the park together, or walk along a street secure in anonymity? He was John Calvin Marshall. Through television he entered everyone’s living room, and because he had, everyone felt they knew him.

  “I don’t watch much TV anymore. I found myself on constant emotional overload because in the course of an evening I would have fifty relationships, intensely liking this one, disliking that one, wondering what this actor and that actress was like, that politician or that celebrity without portfolio. It is psychically disorienting having powerful emotions about people you know only as images. But television seduces us into trusting image as reality. Daily I watched people approach him. There was always an instant when they realized that all the love and emotion they had for him was not reciprocated, that he had been in their homes and had not known it, that his existence was crucial to their lives while they were nonexistent in his. They had no alternative but to make themselves known to him because they had been forced into a relationship with him.

  “He was not allowed a space around himself that no one could enter without permission. But by now television has taken from all of us the space between ourselves and others. It deprives us of the separateness necessary for relationship. If there is no privacy, there is no safety for the soul. If there is no safety for the soul, there is only unrelieved and un-relievable terror.

  “I was his privacy, the place of safety for his soul.”

  On the balcony of the twenty-fifth floor, there was some hint of breeze trying to leaven the moist heat. Cal had taken off his suit coat, removed his tie and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his white shirt, revealing his brown, smooth chest. He slumped in the uncomfortable white-painted wrought iron chair, his legs raised, feet resting on the terrace railing, his head on the back of the chair, hips on the edge. His eyes were closed, as if he were napping. A hand rested lightly on her thigh.

  He thought for a moment. “I would live on the side of a mountain and listen to the silence. I would live with the trees and the sky. I would read books and cook gourmet meals and I would love you.”

  “And what would the silence be like?” she asked, ignoring his declaration of love, disappointed he had felt the need to make it.

  “It would be the silence which is the absence of words. It would be the silence which is the absence of presences. It would be the silence that would indicate my release from duty. The silence would be God’s declaration that I no longer had to be John Calvin Marshall, that I only had to be who and what I wanted to be.”

  God didn’t say that. Cal never told her what the FBI director had done, and only through one of the biographies did she learn that Andrea received the tape, the photographs and the list of dates and motels and room numbers, and, she learned later, so had the New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers and national magazines. Nothing appeared in print.

  But those were the days when the media at least still understood the distinction between private and public. Those were the days when a man could act with integrity in the public arena while his private life was a paradigm of immorality. Who could say? Maybe Jack Kennedy would have blown the world to hell in his confrontation with Khrushchev in 1962 if he hadn’t been so intent on fucking every woman he could. Elizabeth trusted a president who was fucking like pussy was going to be banned, because his interest in the continuation of his pleasure would keep his hand away from the nuclear button. If the president was really getting off in bed, then launching nuclear missiles wasn’t much of an orgasm. (It had made her wonder if the most important thing to know of a presidential candidate was if he was getting good head from someone. The fate of nations could hinge on whether the head of state was getting blown regularly and properly.)

  Americans used to understand that adultery, sexual immorality and perversion had nothing to do with the quality of your work. How many of them were screwing a male lover their wives did not suspect, fondling the hairless vaginas of their daughters, or licking the clitoris of their wife’s best friends, while also doing superior work at the office or the factory?

  It was sentimental to believe that bad people didn’t do good things. The private and public were mutually exclusive realms, and they required vastly different talents and skills. Few lived in both with equal facility. During the presidential primaries of 1988, when Gary Hart was caught with another woman, Lisa had written and told him not to drop out of the race but ‘Go for the adultery vote. It’s the largest untapped voting bloc in the nation. Don’t apologize, dammit! Be proud! Good sex is where you find it, and that ain’t always at home.’ She never got an answer.

  Given how much adultery there was in the country, it seemed that good sex was seldom at home. Hart lacked the courage for adultery. Cal didn’t. Anyone who permitted himself to be used to further history’s ends deserved sympathy and gratitude, not scrutiny of every corner of his private life.

  The nights she remembered most were the ones he cried. Some couples had an animal magnetism and you could smell the lust between them. Other couples had an aura of devotion, the sense of belonging together as surely as two parts of hydrogen belonged to one part oxygen to create a unique, life-giving whole. She and Cal were joined by pain. If there was a hurting inside him, she had only to touch him and he would cry.

  Often he was unaware of any pain until she put her arms around him in the most ordinary of embraces. He would gasp, and feeling the shudder through his body, she would pull him closer, hold him tightly, merge her body into hi
s. She would take off her clothes and then his so he could feel her breasts against his naked chest, could feel her pubis against his penis, her thighs alongside his, and holding him tightly, she would force the tears up and out and he would cry.

  Afterward, when his sobbing subsided, often he would take one of her breasts and suckle like an infant, eyes closed, fingers resting gently at the side of the breast. Sometimes that led to lovemaking. Sometimes he fell asleep, her nipple between his lips.

  How many nights he came to her broken by the demands, the needs, the factional infighting, the jealousies, the stubbornness of white southern mayors, the hatreds of white southerners, and toward the end, of blacks, too. How many nights he came wounded by the hands that reached out to touch any part of him, the old black women who came and bent their decrepit bodies to kneel and kiss his hand, the suspension of heartbeats as people received his every word as if each were a drop of plasma restoring life to a blood-depleted body. They called him ‘The Savior,” some to his face with so much hope etched in their voices you thought their hearts would break, some derisively and behind his back. Both shattered him.

  Night after night she took the shards and, with her body, made the vessel whole.

  APRIL 7, 1964: CLEVELAND, OHIO — REVEREND BRUCE KLUNDER, WHITE, 27, KILLED WHILE PROTESTING THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SEGREGATED SCHOOL. PROTESTORS HAD LAIN DOWN IN FRONT OF A BULLDOZER AT THE CONSTRUCTION. REVEREND KLUNDER HAD LAIN DOWN BEHIND THE BULLDOZER. ATTEMPTING TO AVOID THE PROTESTORS IN FRONT, THE BULLDOZER BACKED UP, CRUSHING REVEREND KLUNDER TO DEATH.

  JUNE 21, 1964: PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI — JAMES CHANEY, 21, ANDREW GOODMAN, 21, AND MICHAEL SCHWERNER, 25, MURDERED.

  JULY 11, 1964: COLBERT, GEORGIA — LT. COL. LEMUEL PENN, 49, MURDERED WHILE RETURNING FROM TWO WEEKS OF ARMY RESERVE TRAINING BY KLANSMEN WHO WANTED “TO KILL A NIGGER.”