And All Our Wounds Forgiven

by Julius Lester

  The office was a small room behind and to the right of the reception area. Bobby assumed the cells were behind the steel door at the end of the corridor past the sheriff’s office, where he now sat staring at the large Confederate flag tacked to the wall behind the sheriff’s desk.

  “I want to be up front with you,” the sheriff began with quiet earnestness. “If I was colored, I’d be doing what you and the others are doing. We both know that segregation is a stupid system and that it is not going to last the decade. I can hear you thinking that if that’s how I feel, why don’t I arrest Jeb Lincoln for shooting Charlie Montgomery and for putting that bomb outside that old nigra’s shack? I reckon if I thought it would do any good, I would. But, think about it. Let’s say I arrest Jeb. You don’t think any jury in Mississippi would convict him, do you? So, what would I accomplish? Well, I’d probably have to move out of the state for daring to arrest a white man for killing a nigra. You understand what I’m saying.”

  Bobby shook his head. “Right is right and wrong is wrong, sheriff.”

  The sheriff smiled. “That’s why I tell Jeb that you’re going to win. You believe you have right on your side. You can’t beat anybody who feels that way, and that’s especially so if you kill them. Somebody who dies for what they believe in impresses the hell out of people. I told Jeb the worst thing he could do was kill you. Hell, if you were to get killed, you’d never die.”

  The sheriff got up and motioned for Bobby to follow him. He walked down the corridor, unlocked the steel door, and moved to the side for Bobby to enter first.

  Bobby entered a corridor lined on each side with jail cells. The sheriff locked the door behind them and sauntered easily down the corridor.

  “There were five happy men this morning when I unlocked these cells and told them they could go. I told ‘em I was having a party here this afternoon.” He looked over his shoulder at Bobby and smiled. “Don’t you worry none. I ain’t going to kill you. In fact, I’m not going to leave a mark on you. But I guarantee you when I get done, you’ll never forget me.”

  At the end of the corridor Bobby saw two Negroes whom he recognized from Shiloh — June Boy, a big fieldhand whom he had seen at Ella’s, and Wylie, who had a scar that ran from his ear halfway to his throat.

  “I’m a muthafucking genius, Bobby,” the sheriff said as he nodded to the two Negroes. They took Robert by the arms and pulled him into the last cell where they threw him onto a blanket on the floor and held him down, one at his chest, the other at his legs.

  The sheriff kneeled beside Bobby, undid his belt buckle and pulled his pants and underpants down to his ankles. Robert closed his eyes as he felt the sheriff’s surprisingly soft hands take hold of his penis and tenderly stroke it until it, because it was it, became stiff and rigid and the sheriff reached in his pocket and taking out his pocket knife, opened it and began gently stroking the head of Robert’s penis with the sharp edge of the knife blade and Robert opened his eyes and stared intently at the paint peeling from the ceiling, hoping that by doing so he could subvert his body but the excitement rose in him and despite himself, his body twitched involuntarily as the sheriff continued stroking his penis with the knife blade, lightly, barely touching the skin so that the penis hungered for the next touch as the blade went from the head down the trunk of the penis, farther and farther down until it came to the base and then slowly back up, again and again and again until the orgasm came and it was more intense than any he had ever had with a woman and his will and determination not to scream his pleasure were not enough and the release was total and complete, his aspirated screams echoing off the stone walls of the jail cell, his body arching as the semen spurted out and down his rigid penis like milky tears and Sheriff Simpson looked up at Wylie and asked, “You want to lick him clean?” and Wylie said, “Yassuh,” and leaning over Robert, began licking and sucking on his penis, licking and sucking until another orgasm came, this one spreading down into Bobby’s groin and thighs and up into his abdomen and chest and Robert cried because there was nothing in this godawful world like the purifying grace of an orgasm and the penis didn’t give a shit about the stimulation and they left him there on the floor, limp, exhausted, sexually satisfied and intent on his own death.

  That night when he went to Ella’s, June Boy and Wylie were there and nobody understood why Robert, without a word, picked up a chair and hit Wylie over the head with it and when he fell, kicked him in the stomach, again and again and again, until Wylie puked everything inside him, and then did the same to June Boy. Either one could have beaten Robert with one hand tied behind his back but they did nothing to defend themselves, nothing at all and when Ella said, “Robert? What’s the matter?” he screamed, “I don’t know no muthafucking Robert. My name is Card. You hear me? Card, goddammit! Anybody call me Robert, I’ll kill their ass. My name is Card!”

  Clear-as-glass moonshine whiskey fused day into night and night into day as Card drank and fucked and slept, drank and fucked and slept, but the shame remembered him, was there waiting for him in an unexpected spasm of sobriety and lucidity until the afternoon he awoke to find himself alone.

  He opened his eyes slowly. Without moving his head, he looked around. Wherever he was, he hadn’t been here. He always awoke in shacks where newspaper had been tacked up as wallpaper and he could see between the floorboards to the ground beneath. There was actual wallpaper on these walls, a pattern of pink roses. Sheets covered the firm mattress, which not only was not on the floor but rested on a springbox in a bedframe with an ornate brass headboard.

  “Where the fuck am I?” Card asked, sitting up. He started at the image of himself in the mirror on the dresser against the wall opposite the bed. He looked around, realizing that this was a room, not the entire house, and the door separating it from the rest of the house was closed.

  He got out of the bed and peered through the window. In the distance he saw the water tower against the sky, SHILOH written large on the side facing him. There were houses around, but none he recognized. Just then he saw a plume of dust as a car went along a street. At least he was in the colored section of town since the streets were paved in the white section.

  He listened but heard nothing. He found his shoes beside the bed, slipped into them and tied the laces. Quietly, he eased the door open a crack and found himself peering into the main room of the house. At the far end was the kitchen with its wood-burning cookstove. In the rest of the room there was a table around which were placed four chairs, in one corner a rocking chair, and in another, a day bed.

  Card opened the door slowly and still hearing nothing, moved quietly into the main room of the house. He hadn’t stayed anyplace so neatly kept since he had left Mrs. Montgomery’s, not that he had formally left. He simply hadn’t been back in a while, and he wasn’t sure how long that was.

  “Don’t be scared.”

  He turned quickly at the sound of the voice behind him. Through the door off the kitchen from the back porch came a big man with a scar from his ear down and across his throat.

  “Muthafuck you!” Card snarled.

  “I ain’t did nothin’ to you,” Wylie said plaintively. “I swear.”

  His voice was surprisingly high-pitched for a man so big.

  “Then, what the fuck am I doing here? And where the fuck am I, anyway?”

  “This was my momma’s house. It’s mine since she died, though I ain’t never lived nowheres else. I found you laying longside the road out where that man’s house was blowed up. I brung you here.”

  “What time last night was that?”

  “It wasn’t last night. It was night before.”

  “What? You mean I been sleep for two days?”

  “I don’t know as I would call it sleep. I could hear you out here twisting and turning and cussing. I thought you was fightin’ Ol Boy. I wanted to come in and see if ‘n there was anything I could do for you but I was afraid you’d wake up and seeing me, think something else. So, I just waited. I figured you�
�d have to come out sometime. If you hongry I got some string beans I canned last fall, some collards, some Crowder’s peas, and I could fix up some rice to kind of hold it together.”

  Card hesitated, his mind wanting him to go, while one part of his body wanted to eat and another wanted to give Wylie a beating and yet another wanted Wylie to, to———

  “I ain’t proud about what happened,” Wylie said suddenly. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I am that way, if you get my drift. That’s how I got this,” he added, pointing to the scar at his throat. “There was this white gentleman here in Shiloh who asked me to do that to him and I done it and he liked it. One time I guess I done it to him so good and he liked it so much that he had to cut my throat.” Wylie’s head was bowed, his eyes staring blankly at the linoleum-covered floor. His high-pitched voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. “If you think being a nigger is hard, it ain’t half as hard as being a nigger faggot in a small town in Mississippi where everybody knows you a faggot and they treat you like shit but late at night, them’s the one that come scratching at your back door. The one who cut my throat? He was the first one when I come out of the hospital in Memphis. I felt real bad about you. You can’t help what your body feel. Your body don’t be caring about nobody’s name or whether they man or woman. It just care about itself. You couldn’t help that. And you seen how that man was with that knife. If I tried to refuse, I might be wearing a scar on the other side of my throat.”

  Card’s eyes opened wide and he started to say something but stopped. Wylie looked up at him and said, “Why don’t I fire this here cookstove up and fix us’n something?”

  It turned out that Wylie’s mother had owned a good portion of the colored property in Shiloh, which meant that Wylie now owned it. When he offered Card a house on, ironically, Liberty Street, a block off the main street, he accepted quickly. Wylie helped him paint a sign and nail it to the roof. It read, FREEDOM HOUSE.

  He supposed it was around that time he realized what he had to do and when he did, a calmness came, a peace he had never had. It would take patience and planning as well as the ability to make himself invisible. Now that he had his own house and his role, Freedom Rider, he no longer stood out. He was merely Card, who might get a little crazy sometimes, especially if he had had too much to drink, but otherwise, he was a good man. One of the best.

  after the lugubrious tempo of the eisenhower years no one was prepared for how rapidly history accelerated in the sixties. more happened than we knew at the time, more than we could pay attention to, more than we could know its meaning.

  for example:

  andrea was shaken by hemingway’s suicide. i was in the midst of the freedom rides and did not know of it until she told me months later. she liked his work for reasons i never understood. i had read a novel or two and not been especially impressed. but who was i to judge? i thought spinoza was sensually exciting.

  it was not that hemingway was dead. it was that he had not died. dashiell hammett, the playwright george s. kaufman, james thurber, carl jung, and gary cooper died that year. their deaths were not devastating because they were within the parameters of the normal. hemingway caused his death. he took a shotgun, opened his mouth, put the barrels inside and pulled the trigger. there was no possibility of misunderstanding his intent. ernest hemingway wanted to be dead. his death was a cultural statement, but what? perhaps it was nothing more than a reminder: in our need to bestow immortality on the living, we pressure them to remind us that they are mortal.

  the measure of our lives is found in how we live with history behind the doors and walls of our homes. I do not mean history as the extraordinary events — war, depression, disaster— but those times when history does not make itself as obvious as a clown’s slapstick, those times when history hums like the drone of a bagpipe, insistent, monotonous and present.

  andrea and i never learned. even before i became john calvin marshall, history lay stretched in the bed between us like a child who cannot sleep. that is another difference between being white and being colored. white people can live personal lives. history does not force itself into their homes, does not sit at their dinner tables uninvited and unwanted. the negro is history, our very skin color a product of the nation’s unrecognized and unacknowledged orgy of miscegenation. did andrea and i really and truly believe that we could be nothing more than dr. and mrs. philosophy professor? did we honestly think we could live personal and private lives?

  when i told her that winter of sixty-one that i was going to go on the freedom rides to test the ruling on interstate bus travel, her body shuddered. she went to our bedroom and closed the door. i heard her crying but refused to go in, hold her and ask her what was wrong. why would she not cry in my presence? I would have held her then. but not when her tears were dangled like false diamonds before my eyes. if i had had a son, i would have told him that the supreme and continual test of a man is to know when a woman’s tears are a plea and when a seduction.

  andrea and i cared more for the images we had of each other. she had married a philosophy professor. i had married a bright and articulate young woman, well-read, someone who would be able to talk with me about anything, and we talked brilliantly as long as it was about something out there in the world. we had insight into everything except ourselves. we had compassion for everyone except each other.

  for each other all we had was love, and love is not sufficient.

  that is not what we are told in church, not what all the pop singers proclaim with such yearning. god is love! they shout from the pulpits. if that is so, then he is a poor lover and would be well advised to try another attribute. i think god is pain and suffering and anguish and despair and hopelessness because there is so much more of those in the world than love.

  i learned that from ibj. he would call me late at night. it began before that awful november afternoon in dallas (an afternoon i responded to with a mixture of horror and envy because one of my responses when elizabeth passed me a note saying that kennedy had been assassinated was that his waiting was over and what a relief that must have been).

  it began during the freedom rides and my frustration with the president and his brother. as i have stated, i did not like the kennedys. i never trusted them. like so many white liberals of the sixties, the president and his brother “discovered” racial injustice and were outraged. but rage is not empathy; rage is not caring. rage is even self-indulgent, a posturing that shields one from that suffering which can transform a soul.

  i had been beaten severely at the bus station in birmingham. i remembered nothing, not even when i looked at the news footage, and i looked at it often because i wanted to remember the face of the man who swung the baseball bat and hit me in the head. i wanted to remember the expression on his face. i wanted to know if it had been murderous or bemused or detached. what was his relationship to his act? i never remembered.

  i awoke two days later in meharry hospital in nashville, thanks to andrea who managed to send a private ambulance from nashville to birmingham to bring me back. she did not trust the white hospital personnel in birmingham. not that they would have done anything. i was too prominent for them to murder me outright. but medical neglect is a lethal weapon and it leaves no traces.

  the human skull is amazingly hard and mine had withstood its encounter with the ash of the bat. in a few days i was at home, the beating had outraged the nation, and everyone was waiting to see if I would return to birmingham to continue the freedom rides.

  robert kennedy called while i was still in the hospital in birmingham to express his sympathy and wishes for my speedy recovery and to tell me that the federal government was going to do all it could and i could help if i called for a “cooling-off” period.

  i refused. the next day the president himself called. maybe it was the flat nasality of his and his brother’s voices that prevented me from believing either of them. but i believed lbj.

  it was the second night after i came home from the hospital. the
silence in the house was thick with estrangement. an-drea and i had not spoken. she was waiting to hear me say that i was not going back to birmingham. how can you speak when you know the other doesn’t want to hear what you have to say?

  she had gone to bed. i had fallen asleep on the couch after watching the eleven o’clock news. the phone rang.

  “hello?”

  “dr. marshall?”

  i recognized the soft southern accent of the vice president. i had not been pleased when kennedy chose johnson as his running mate. i felt it was a sacrifice of integrity for expediency because having a southerner on the ticket might win the presidency for kennedy but it didn’t bode well for the negro. i was wrong.

  “i hope i’m not calling too late’

  “no, sir.”

  “i’m not a hundred percent sure myself as to why i’m calling. i know the president and the attorney general have called and told you what they think you should do. so, i reckon it’s all right if the vice president does the same thing. even if he happens to have a different opinion than the president and the attorney general. now, you might think it presumptuous for me to tell you what i would do if i were you since i’m not you, but, permit me to be presumptuous.

  “quite frankly, dr. marshall, i’ve felt for a long time that if i was a nigra, i would kill every white person i could aim a rifle at. i don’t know that the president and the attorney general understand that.

  “but that’s almost beside the point, isn’t it? way i read it, history hasn’t given you much choice. if you don’t go back to birmingham and continue the freedom ride, the civil rights movement will be dead. the sale of bats will go up in the states of the old confederacy and the lives of civil rights workers won’t be worth a penny. if you go back, you might be killed this time, which will be a personal tragedy only for you and your wife and your parents.