And All Our Wounds Forgiven

by Julius Lester

  “well, i reckon that’s what i wanted to say to you, though i didn’t know it until i was done. forget i called. this was just one lonely man talking to another man who might be pretty lonely himself. you take care of yourself, you hear?”

  the line was dead. i replaced the receiver and sat without moving for some moments, not aware at first that my face was wet with tears. there was one other, it seemed, who understood what it was to suffer history.

  ANDREA

  It took a while.

  It took a while to put together the fragments of information that came in voices she did not recognize at first — except for Robert’s. She had wondered if this was death, a shadowy awareness without the ability to communicate, self-possession without grasp of time and space. She did not know how long it had taken to understand why words loud in her mind were not so in their ears, why no one moved or responded when she reached up to touch them. A voice she knew now belonged to a black doctor had used the word, stroke! This was not the gentle brushing of a hand over a body but the sweep of a scythe at the base of stalks of grain, severing fruit from root.

  Both her parents had died that way. “Vegetables” people had called them as they lay in hospital beds unable to move anything but their eyelashes. But when Andrea thought of a carrot, spear of asparagus, an artichoke or onion, she appreciated their colors and shapes and textures and understood their function. Should she have covered her parents with a lemon butter or hollandaise sauce, sprinkled them with salt and pepper, garnished them with a sprig of parsley? Perhaps if they had lain in bed next to a plump filet mignon she would have better appreciated them as vegetables. What purpose had they fulfilled lying in hospital beds able to move their eyes and eyelids only, one blink for yes, and two blinks for no? Yet there had been odd moments when she wondered if they had understood life and death and eternity and could not say. However, it was more likely they understood as little as she. Life, death and eternity were even more enigmatic now that she held the strands of all three.

  The voices had brought her back from self-pity. Not their words, not at first, but the sounds. Robert’s voice was polite, controlled, proper. There was a woman’s voice, sometimes alone, sometimes with Robert, a soft voice that made her think of fudge brownies and chocolate sundaes. And there were colored voices, nurses, she understood eventually. It was their voices that had made her realize the woman was white.

  It wasn’t just the accent that made colored voices different. White voices seemed to come through the head. At a fund-raising party many years ago Leontyne Price had chatted about the human voice and mentioned “head tones.” Andrea hadn’t known that you could choose where you wanted your voice to come from — the head, the throat, the chest, the diaphragm. Thereafter she listened and heard that white people’s words seemed to take a direct route from the brain to the first opening they found — the nose. Listening to them was odd because the words came from the mouth but the sound emanated in the cavities behind the nose. She found herself not knowing whether to believe the sound, the words, or neither.

  The words of black people did not seek an immediate egress but went exploring through the body as if it were a vast and multiroomed cave with many corners and levels. They dipped themselves in hot springs and darkness, robed themselves in fog and mist before finally making their way along the body’s narrow passageways to flow from the mouth and nose in an undulating stream whose sound had as much meaning, maybe more, than the words themselves. (That was what had made John Calvin so good. He understood the vibrations of sound that caused the soul to tremble like the skin of a drum beaten with rhythmic precision, evoking spirits from behind history’s veil.)

  The white woman’s voice sounded as if it knew about caves, and that was surprising. Not many white people did. Andrea liked the voice, though there was a plea in it, as if it wanted something from her. When she realized whose voice it was, Andrea understood. It was not her words. Not at first. Andrea did not pay attention to them until the voice mentioned John Calvin. Except it said Cal with a tone of erotic intimacy so assumed and taken for granted the speaker was unaware of it. Such innocent sexuality was supposed to have died in the Garden of Eden.

  Andrea was startled by her own lack of anger. She wanted to hear what Lisa had to say. Maybe Lisa could help her understand, though Andrea was not sure what she needed or wanted to understand. But she doubted she would have the opportunity if Lisa knew she was awake and hearing.

  “Good morning.”

  Robert. He made it seem like all the other days. Every morning for the past — how many years? — almost twenty? he had called to see how her night had been and what her plans were for the day. He was the son she and John Calvin had not had.

  She had understood that John Calvin’s effort to ride history bareback made him shine like hope fulfilled. Someone had to kill him, not from racial hatred but for the erotic fulfillment. From the moment she knew, she had thought of herself as the younger woman married to a man twenty years her senior who will die before her, a woman whose years of widowhood will exceed by decades the years of marriage. The knowledge was supposed to have engendered an intense immediacy of love. Andrea imagined that was the appeal of such marriages for younger women. A couple within the same age range spent years peeing here and shitting there as they marked the boundaries of their psychic territories. With a husband whose death you could see in his eyes, there was time only for devotion or resentment.

  She had thought she was marrying someone who received his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard on the day she received her bachelor’s in history from Radcliffe. She had imagined a life in a small New England college town where the white spires of church steeples amid the autumn colors created a sense of eternal order and universal well-being, where she would walk quiet streets lined with maple trees and no one would have ever called her by her first name. Formality and courtesy and respect were also stone fences that made good neighbors. Intelligent, well-read, gregarious but not garrulous, friendly but not familiar, she would have done much for race relations on the campus. Her example would have encouraged the school to admit more qualified Negro students, to hire more qualified Negro faculty.

  There weren’t many Negro anythings at Harvard and Radcliffe when she matriculated in the autumn of 1951. She and John Calvin had not had to make an effort to meet each other because the Radcliffe dean of students and her Harvard counterpart brought them together during Andrea’s first week. It could have been awkward, she supposed, but in those days white paternalism was not only not offensive, it made the difference in a world where white hostility was so much the norm that any gesture of friendliness from a white person appeared an act of senseless devotion. Neither she nor John Calvin had minded that two genteel white people who probably had never spoken to a colored person in their lives, who probably wondered what had possessed their respective admission officers to admit these colored students, nonetheless, made an effort to see that they would not be alone. Andrea could not recall that any of her roommates or classmates ever spoke to her. Not in all the four years did she have a conversation about homework, or snow on the Yard, or God or sex or anything else you went to college for. (Yet, when she became Andrea Williams Marshall, wife of civil rights leader John Calvin Marshall, it was without shame or apology that former roommates and classmates called to tell her how much they had always admired her and with what fondness they remembered their years at school.)

  As two Americans in a foreign country become intimates because there is no one else to whom they can talk, so it was with her and John Calvin. Calling him by his full given name had started as a way of teasing him. “What a historical burden your parents put on you,” she told him. What did it say about their marriage that she never relaxed with him enough to call him Jack or Cal or even, honey? His seriousness and intensity were as frightening as they were compelling.

  Would they have chosen each other if they had been in their own land? If there had been other black men to choose amon
g, would she have found John Calvin Marshall too intense, too serious? Would he have found her — what? — too ordinary, too prosaic?

  “. . . always attractive. Her hair is shorter now, but there’s still something about her. She was the first white woman I ever spoke to. Isn’t that something? I couldn’t believe a white girl that beautiful would come to a colored school in the South. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a nice white person, especially a white woman.”

  It was difficult to listen when you knew you weren’t supposed to. At least, to Robert. It was different when Lisa or the doctors and nurses spoke. She might learn something from them. Robert was more like a stuffed animal whose presence was a vital and necessary comfort but held no answers to the riddles of your life.

  Even so, Andrea did not like it when he spoke of Lisa. No woman liked to hear any man’s adulation of another woman. John Calvin had never tried singing Lisa’s praises to her, but he didn’t have to. A woman knew a man by his touch, not his words. John Calvin’s touch made her feel she was his sister. There was affection; there was caring; there was play. She would have drowned them all like a sack of kittens to have felt him desire her.

  “I think I’m still awed by her, still in love with her. Not her. But still in love with what she represented in my mind when I came to Fisk. And what she meant to me was possibility. You know what I mean? If she would be my friend, someone as blond and blue-eyed and, yes, American-looking as she was, then anything was possible. It sounds silly now, and I feel foolish hearing myself say it out loud, but I don’t know that we can help what we feel. You know?

  “A few nights ago we went to dinner. We went to the old Union Station on Church Street. It’s a fancy restaurant now, but she remembered where the colored waiting room had been. I never drive by that building without remembering but I never imagined she would remember and on her own behalf, not mine. That’s what separates blacks and whites in this country. White people don’t share our pain, don’t want to share it, don’t want to even know about it. I looked at her as she walked around what had been the main waiting room, watched her as she got her bearings, and then she looked at me, pointed, and said The colored waiting room was over there, wasn’t it?’ and I nodded and it was as if she felt the pain of all those who had sat on the hard wooden benches in that room, humiliated and demeaned. The massive granite stones of that building are awash with shame but only she and I knew. To eat there was to participate in a ritual of exorcism because every head in the place turned when I walked in with her and most of the heads stayed turned in our direction for the two and a half hours we were there.”

  Andrea stopped listening. After all these years she didn’t want to hear, yet again, about Lisa’s ability to feel the pain of black people.

  She tried to stop the thoughts and feelings and was amazed that though there were few sensations in her body, words and memories still created emotion. Even more marvelous, though she hated it, was that emotions did not go away. Hurts were as knitted with color after twenty-six years of interment as they had been that day thirty years ago when he had returned from a fund-raising trip to California with Elizabeth as his newly hired private secretary.

  Husbands wonder how wives know when there is another woman. It is simple. The wife feels something in her husband that has been absent. Passion. It is not just or even sexual. Passion is the love of wonder, and the wife knows when she has not authored it.

  Andrea remembered looking at the two of them standing in her living room, just off the plane. There was the obvious disparity in age and the discordancy of races, and yet, they seemed oblivious of both. They were not outwardly affectionate toward each other. If they had been, Andrea thought she could have shamed John Calvin about having a “fling.” Neither were they tense and ill at ease in her presence. If they had been, Andrea could have made the younger woman feel guilty for her adultery. But Andrea knew she was helpless because they shared silence so completely that it was she, Andrea, the wife, who was the guilty intruder. Was that what love was, a union not of souls but knowledge of the other exceeding knowledge of self so that knowledge of the other eventually became knowledge of self?

  He had died in her arms, head against her breasts. She hated breasts and men for caring so much about their size. Modified sweat glands. That’s all they were. She had looked it up once. Modified sweat glands made up of tissue and fat. What was it about large bags of flesh filled with tissue and fat and glands to produce milk? What was it that men expected of them? Were they trying to recapture an infantine innocence, preconscious memories of an Eden of soft, warm flesh against the cheeks, and milk and honey on the tongue?

  She would never know. Hers had been small. She had thought they were cute, like kittens and puppies and colts were cute. He had been disappointed. She could tell because he had not touched them that first time and she had wanted him to. In the wonder of her adolescence she had wondered what it would be to have a man’s hands hold one of her tiny breasts as if it were a bird, had wondered how the nipple would feel becoming erect at the touch of his fingertips, had wondered how it would be to have a man’s lips and tongue and mouth at her breasts, her arms cradling him as if he were her very own child. But he had not, and eventually, she asked him, tremulously, to suck her breasts and he had and tears of gratification washed her eyes as warmth flooded her like morning over the eastern rim. But she always had to ask. He would comply but for all the pleasure it gave him, a dog would have served her just as well and, with its tongue, done better. Was there anything more lonely than knowing your husband found no pleasure from your body, not even pleasure in your pleasure?

  Marriage was a succession of disappointments, the deflation of illusions until nothing remained except the person as he truly was, and that was someone you had never met. How could she have known John Calvin for four years and only discovered, within a week after they married, that he picked his nose with his finger rather than a tissue or handkerchief? Had he not picked his nose for four years? Had he wanted to pick it for four years but held back from doing so until they were married? Or was it something the marriage brought out in him? And though she had loved his library, why had it not occurred to her that to marry him was to live with books like a sailor lived with the sea? They were everywhere, and their first fight had been over her decision to take the stacks of books out of the bathtub so she could bathe, despite his arguments for the superiority and greater efficiency of the sponge bath.

  In the scheme of things, passion was without doubt the most valuable, because it was the lure that drew male and female to each other, beguiling them with fantasies of an eternity of lust and delight, and they married to ensure their eternity of sybaritism. But marriage was the discipline of learning that only change was forever, and the seeming disappearance of the qualities in the other that had elicited your passion the only constant.

  Or perhaps each quality had an evil Siamese twin and she had been too young to know that John Calvin’s fiery intensity was joined at the hip to an unrelenting restlessness of spirit, an inability to stop thinking and feeling and searching. His intensity had been an inspiration to Andrea the college girl. Being married to the eternal dissatisfaction of a soul seeking Truth was exhausting.

  When he told her that he turned down an offer of a position at Colby College in Maine to accept one at Spelman, she cried. When she had left Charleston to come to Boston it was with the thought that she would return South only for visits. The constant assault on her dignity of segregation with its laws and signs forbidding her to do everything but breathe had taught her to hate the South with a cold and unfeeling clarity.

  “A white college in Maine doesn’t have to worry about finding a good philosophy professor. White college students will learn philosophy. That’s a given. It is not a given for black college students.”

  He was right. He always was. She did not mean that sarcastically. That was another irritant in their marriage, his uncanny instinct for the truth. He
had never understood how she could remain unconvinced even when she knew he was right. Had it been stubbornness, or willful perversity? No. It had been a survival tactic, a desperate attempt to retain some scrap she knew as herself. It did not matter if she was wrong, only that she knew that she was.

  She did not always know.

  “. . . walked around downtown. At least what was downtown back then. We stopped at what used to be Woolworth’s where we were arrested that first time. We were so happy! It’s amazing to think about now. We were happy to be going to jail. I don’t know if I’ve had a feeling like that ever again in my life, a feeling of being in charge of my destiny. The outcome didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were going to end segregation or die. We acted like free people.”

  Had that been her mistake? Had she never acted like a free woman? What if she had said, choose. Me or going South. Me or the civil rights movement. Me or Lisa. But you don’t issue ultimatums if you care about the answer.

  Robert wasn’t free anymore. She could hear in his voice a yearning for who he had been (or who he thought he had been) thirty years ago. There had been too many days of walking through the valley of the shadow of death, too many nights of falling across a mattress with your clothes on until you couldn’t sleep any other way, too many years of believing that soon peace and freedom and justice would grow like flowers in the spring and after too many times in jail and too many confrontations with highway patrolmen and county sheriffs and white men with baseball bats and shotguns and well-oiled rifles, after too many times of seeing death looking at you with a cat’s indifference, one day you stopped believing and you stopped caring and when you did, you stopped knowing who you were and why. She had heard rumors that he had been committed to institutions in New York more than once. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day. And there was something a little too ordered and too proper about him as if every ounce of energy were needed to hold himself together.