He finished the last of the hash browns, pushed the plate to the side, took another of Maureen’s cigarettes, lit it and repeated, “Alive.”
It was a little after seven when he left the diner, giving Maureen a hug and warm kiss on the cheek, and got on the Fourteenth-Street crosstown bus. It was not time yet for the bus to be crowded, and he had the long backseat to himself. After all those years of having to sit in the back of the bus, he still sat there when he had a choice. What you chose didn’t matter when it was your choice.
He stared idly through the window at the people walking along the street. He’d never understood why New Yorkers looked as tired at seven in the morning going to work as they would at six coming home. They hurried along but there was no spring, no liveliness in their steps. They walked as if the weight of the skyscrapers was a heaviness in their souls.
Card left the bus at Seventh Avenue and took the IRT local uptown. He had plenty of time. Amy didn’t leave for work until eight-thirty, he recalled. He didn’t know why he assumed she was living in the same place. Maybe she had gotten married and moved to the East Side or out of the city altogether. He didn’t think so.
They had lived together — on and off — for six years. He had put her through a lot — the two nervous breakdowns, having a child by another woman, the drinking. And here he came again. This time he didn’t know why.
He got off the subway at Seventy-second and Broadway, walked the long block over to West End Avenue and continued north. It was cool, almost chilly in the dark morning shadows of the apartment buildings. Back in the mid-sixties he’d gone to a “movement” fund-raising party at Harry Belafonte’s apartment, which was somewhere on West End. He didn’t remember much about it except that Lena Horne had been there and he’d told her that he’d eat a mile of her shit just to see where it came from and she’d wrinkled her nose, smiled coldly, and said, “I take it you’re a gourmet.”
He had met Amy at a fund-raising party after Cal got him out of Shiloh. Those were the days when whities loved niggers because they were nonviolent and didn’t mind getting their asses kicked and their heads cracked and their hearts shot out. Some rich whitey would call up his rich whitey friends and organize a party in his big apartment on West End Avenue, Central Park West or some damn street where more black poodles lived than niggers. They all wanted John Calvin Marshall to be there but Cal wouldn’t go near one of the fund-raisers unless there was a guarantee of a million dollars being raised. Of course, Cal never said that. Lisa handled those negotiations. Rich whiteys knew how to talk to each other.
He had been astonished to find himself in the same room with white people, white people who spoke to him with respect, white people who admired him. It was a while before he experienced their admiration as little different than that lavished on a dancing bear, or a lion trained to go against instinct and leap through a flaming hoop. He was the Mississippi colored boy who grew up without running water or indoor toilet, the eighth of thirteen children who had been taken out of school in March each year to plant cotton and didn’t return until after the cotton scrapings were picked in November. Yet, he had persevered and learned to read and write, had finished high school and gone to Fisk University for a year before dropping out to work with John Calvin Marshall.
It took him a while to understand that white people cared only that his presence absolved them of guilt for the poverty he had overcome. He was Exhibit A for the defense. “Look how much he has become like us. If the rest of you niggers don’t, it’s your own damn fault, which means it is our duty and obligation to continue kicking your black butts as hard as we can.”
The anger had already begun when he met Amy. Her father was a lawyer, a close friend and advisor of Cal’s and a good political strategist. He was one of the few white people Card liked and respected, though he doubted Paul had any affection or respect for him anymore.
The party had been at Paul’s brownstone in the Village on a narrow, quiet street where all the buildings had heavy oak doors and brass knockers. She opened the door and for the first time in his life he felt he was not alone and was not surprised when her first words were, “I’m really sorry you have to go through something like this. I hope it won’t be too much of a drag.”
She was a little shorter than his five feet, nine inches, with curly black hair crowning her oval face. Her complexion was swarthy and Card wondered if there was a nigger somewhere in the woodpile. He learned later that there were Russian Jewish ancestors “who lived near the Black Sea.” That night, though, standing in the doorway, he had been more immediately aware of her sturdiness, and that was the word that had come to him then. She stood there as solid as the oak door. Separately, her features were not attractive — the mouth was wide, too wide for a white girl, the nose was thick, and the eyes large but devoid of innocence. The body was heavy, an impression created more by a large bone structure than fat, though the breasts seemed large behind the peach-colored blouse and the hips wide beneath the black skirt. Yet, the sum overwhelmed the parts, making them insignificant. In the years since, he had not been able to grasp if that sum was the smile that made you glad, if only for a moment, that you were alive, or if it was a generosity of spirit that permitted her a fearlessness where caution would have been wisdom. Whatever it was, he thought she was beautiful.
Later, after he had given his speech about justice and equality and love and democracy and the checks had been written and he had had his hand shaken and back patted and cheek kissed and told what a good job he was doing for America, he loosened his tie and the top shirt buttons and slumped on the couch in the living room. The maid was clearing the buffet table of dishes while a Puerto Rican houseboy went through the room picking up plates, ashtrays and glasses.
“Would you like some champagne?” she asked, coming out of the kitchen with a bottle and four fluted glasses on a tray.
Her parents sat with them for a while, sipping long enough to invite him to spend the night. He stayed for a week, stayed until her spring vacation was over and she went back to Oberlin College. He knew it was serious because he hadn’t tried to fuck her.
He sat on the steps of the service entrance of her building. Anyone passing by would assume he was killing time before going inside to mop the hallways and shine the doorknobs. He looked up each time he heard footsteps and one of those times she came out of the building, turned south, saw him, and hurried in the opposite direction.
He ran after her. “Amy!”
She stopped but did not turn around.
He walked up to her, his head lowered. “How are you?”
She did not turn around but started walking. “What do you want, Card?”
He walked beside her, not sure if he was happy that she was as beautiful as ever. She had on a white silk blouse and a dark jacket and pants. She was clutching a leather VIP case in her left hand, which he was relieved to see bore no ring. Her hair was shorter now, cut closer to the head but still a mass of playing curls. He wondered how many cases she had won by looking like a little girl and making an argument like a Supreme Court justice.’
“What do you want?” she repeated.
He did not respond immediately, and the unusual silence slowed her step and finally stopped her.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
Her anger wanted to speak but something in Card’s voice caused her to check it.
He looked at her, and she saw the tears forming. “What happened, Bobby” she asked softly.
“George is dead,” he blurted.
It took her a moment to find the memories to fit the name, and when she did she found a love for Card she would have thought had died.
“What happened?”
“He shot himself. Blew his brains out.”
“Oh, God, no! Oh, God!”
1961
The first time he identified a body he stayed drunk for three days afterward. But he was young then. Cal had asked him to go home to Mississippi, where colored people looked
at trees and saw gallows, where when you went fishing you thought about taking along a winding sheet because you were as likely to reel in a dead nigger as a fish, where black babies in the womb inhaled and exhaled fear instead of amniotic fluid.
He was 19. If he had known how young that was, he would not have left school. He certainly would not have gone to Shiloh where the general store/post office on the short main street, a white diner/bar and a colored one across the street were the only visible sign of the community scattered along dusty streets and roads and through the cotton fields owned by Jeb Lincoln.
“There’s a man named Charlie Montgomery in Shiloh who has been trying to get the Negroes to register to vote.”
“But what am I supposed to do when I get there?” he’d asked Cal.
Cal smiled ruefully. “We’re all new at this civil rights stuff, Robert. You talk to people and you listen. When it comes time to do, either they or you will know what.”
Fear. One would’ve thought he’d get used to it eventually. Not only had he not but the fear intensified, weaving itself into the fabric of the ordinary and there, like larvae, ate away the innards of dignity, feeding until neither sunlight nor shade existed, feeding in tiny bites on the already fragile trust that he mattered in the scheme of things.
the price was so high and the stakes were so low. a life for the right to cast a vote? absurd. as time went on andrea lived in a state of rage at me because i chose to risk my life and hers for some vague ideal called freedom, something i would have assumed had i been born white.
that’s what it means to be white in america, even now. white people are able to make assumptions about existence that a negro can’t. when you are white you assume that the cab driver who refuses to stop for you (a) didn’t see you; (b) is on his way somewhere; (c) is listening to the radio and not paying attention; (d) is a son-of-a-bitch who deserves to die a slow and painful death. When you are black you are deprived of the security of such assumptions. whatever the adversitym the look of a clerk in a store to the destruction of your house by a tornado, it is safer to assume it happened because you are black, you must make that assumption because the world has never invited you to be part of it and its assumptions that constitute the norm. if you are negro, the world is to be dreaded and avoided because it is poised to kill you if you dare make the same assumptions about your existence that whites do about theirs.
murder is the act of denying another the intrinsic integrity of an existence separate from my own.
the sixties were the decade when murder became an accepted form of political discourse. kennedy’s decision to send the first combat ready troops to south vietnam was an act making murder the primary instrument of foreign policy.
whom have we become that we think we have the right to decide who shall live and who shall die? perhaps it has never been any different throughout history. what is different — and this is significant — is the scale. the final solution has become a diplomatic option.
near the end andrea noticed a sadness in my eyes, a sadness that did not leave even when i laughed. she had wondered why i felt no sense of victory when i went to the white house for the signing of the 1964 civil rights act that effectively banned segregation and the 1965 voting rights act that insured the franchise for the negro. i asked her to remember, and i started to list the names of all those who had been murdered. i listed the names of those civil rights workers we knew who had spent one day too many in a missis-sippi, alabama, louisiana or georgia small town, who were now becoming alcoholics, who abused women, who burst into tears for no apparent reason. death had claimed their souls but, as a cruel joke, decided to leave their bodies behind.
dammit, my object had not been the passage of new legislation. i was not elated as i watched ibj sign those two pieces of legislation. i felt defeated and undone.
when i gave andrea frantz fanon’s book the wretched of the earth, i told her, this is the future. fanon was a black psychiatrist from martinique who became involved in the al-gerian revolution of the fifties and treated both algerian revolutionaries and the french soldiers sent to put their fingers in the dike. fanon made a distinction between kinds of violence. i do not recall now if this was his language or if this was sixties rhetoric but the distinction was between revolutionary violence and reactionary violence. the former, he argued, was an absolute necessity, being the only means by which the colonized could liberate themselves from their state of colonization. in the blood of the colonizer, the colonized achieved catharsis. wright’s native son had become a political ideal.
the book frightened me as nothing else had because it provided a moral foundation for murder. it gave blacks an ethical framework from which revenge became not only justifiable but necessary. the means of one’s freedom became murder of the other.
even as ibj signed the bills into law, i knew we had lost.
He went. The first week no one spoke to him, not even Charlie Montgomery. Why should they have? He wasn’t one of them. The car in which he had driven into town could also take him away at the first sign of trouble.
Anybody could come to town and talk about freedom and registering to vote. Hell, every colored person in Mississippi knew they should be free and able to vote. That wasn’t news. What they needed was to be convinced there was a way, and even if it meant wading up a bloody stream without hip boots, they needed someone to show them how to keep their balance while treading on slippery rocks. They needed someone to show them who they could be. They knew who they were.
Bobby’s words would make little difference. Their literacy was in the ways of people. So, he sat on their front porches and chatted about the weather and the cotton, and with the older ones he commiserated about the errancies of the younger generation, and with the impatient youth he commiserated about the blindness of the old.
Finally, one day a big man blacker than suffering, wearing coveralls and a straw cowboy hat, came up to him as he sat in The Pink Teacup, the colored cafe, and said, “I’m Charlie Montgomery.” He stuck out a hand big enough to have grasped Robert’s entire head, and Robert Card had found a home in Shiloh, Mississippi.
World War II had changed Charlie. “I felt like some kind of fool over there in Europe getting shot at defending a country that was killing niggers everyday. I’d lie there in them foxholes, man, the Germans zinging bullets through the air, and think to myself that if I got out of there alive, I was coming back to Shiloh and do some fighting for me and mines. You understand what I’m telling you? Me and mines!” Charlie Montgomery invited him to stay in the four-room house where he lived with his wife, Ruth.
Every morning Bobby got in his car and drove over rutted, dusty plantation roads, stopping to talk to anyone he saw about starting a sharecropper’s union, or registering to vote, and almost daily there was a confrontation with some white man, a plantation overseer, the sheriff, or just a good ol’ boy with a wad in his cheek and a rifle in his hand, and Bobby learned how differently the twin barrels of a shotgun felt against the stomach from the single hole of a rifle, and how different they were from the miniscule opening in a pistol, but whichever, he had to stand with the iron hole pressed into his navel and stare the white man in the eye, and the look had to be just right because if his fear showed itself as defiance, the cracker would pull the trigger, he would, and if his fear expressed itself as servility the cracker would also shoot, so the look had to be calm, relaxed, even bemused, permitting the white man the space to back down without losing face. Before the white man returned to his pickup truck, the news would be spreading throughout the Negro community. “That boy stood there and went eyeball to eyeball with that cracker as cool as morning during hog-killing time. You shoukfve seen it!”
The colored of Shiloh had their first images of freedom.
But freedom cost, and the bill could be paid only with blood. Death had a smell to it. Bobby never knew if white people in Mississippi smelled Death, but the colored sure did.
“You be careful, son,” the old
folks started telling him. Maybe Negroes in Shiloh knew Death so well because it lived on the outskirts of town, sitting in a shack like an old man whose intimacy with loneliness made his only comprehensible conversations the ones he had with himself. O1’ Boy, as they called him, was moving through the world that year in a new way, not only taking people with the usual cancers, heart attacks, old age, murders, car, train, plane accidents and the freakish ones you read about in the tiny fillers in the newspaper like the girl in Germany who was playing in a cemetery and a tombstone fell on her and crushed her or the Japanese fisherman killed when a swordfish leaped from the water and with its broad bill stabbed the man in the heart and returned to the water with the grace of an Olympic diver. Death seemed to take on new life because it was the consort of the change Bobby and others his age knew had to come if they were to stand erect beneath the sky and he didn’t know who Patrice Lumumba was, was not even sure how to say his name and did not know what countries bordered Zaire or where it was on the map of Africa, but he did not have to know the details to understand that Huntley and Brinkley were telling him that a Negro had been assassinated because he wanted to be free. Change was in the air like the smell of winter on Thanksgiving Day.
“Man done broke the bonds of earth,” Mrs. Montgomery said with Biblical accuracy one evening sitting on the front porch looking at the paper. “Charlie, you see here that them Russians done sent a man into space and he circled the world from out where the stars twinkle?”
“Everybody wants to be free of what holds ‘em down, even when it’s gravity doing the holding.”
And All Our Wounds Forgiven Page 9
