Wasn’t that how she, too, had managed to accumulate all these years of twenty-four-hour days and sixty-minute hours? She had maintained control over the chaos and maybe, sometimes, it took a drink or two more than the usual to keep chaos penned, and so what if maybe, sometimes, a pill was required to put a smiley face on a hurting heart. Wasn’t that better than entrusting one’s soul to the chaos?
Now that the end was imminent (she hoped), she was sorry she could not put her arms around Robert and hold him like a mother and let him cry or rage, and was there much difference between the two?
How had John Calvin Marshall become the only force that had given their lives meaning and purpose, contour and texture? How had he done that, not only for them, but for an entire nation?
She didn’t know. How was that possible? She had been married to the man, but if her words could have had tongue, she would have asked Lisa, who was he? That was why she had started the book. Perhaps a retrospective vigilance could redeem a slothful inattentiveness.
There could be no more lies or illusions, not with death hovering like an anxious mother at the crib of her first-born. If she didn’t owe herself a certain honesty, she owed the unmitigated truth to death.
But truth could wound the heart and kill the spirit. Why? Why did it hurt to see what was before one’s eyes? That was all truth was — the acknowledgement of what is.
That was the problem. Who wanted to know what was? We wanted reality to correspond to our needs, our desires, our dreams. The only acceptable world was the one made in our own image. That was why John Calvin had been different. He saw the world for what it was and had the audacity to remake it as it should have been.
And that was why she had hated him.
And that was why she had married him.
To keep close to herself that which was most threatening, and to prevent someone else from having it close to them. She had failed. Until he was killed.
When the reporter called and told her, there was not only relief that the waiting was finally over, but an overwhelming elation that finally, at last, at last, he belonged to her. In his death, she finally became his wife and the past twenty-six years she had publicly lived the marriage that had never been.
As Mrs. John Calvin Marshall she was the guardian of his legacy and spoke on issues of national and international importance with the authority of his merit, which had automatically passed to her as his widow. When she spoke, it was as if he had not died.
No one would ever know. The last twenty-six years were also a truth, as if illusion were not a more credible and more powerful truth than bared veracity. The vice president would be at her funeral as well as leading political figures of both parties, black congressmen, entertainers and celebrities of all kinds. They would eulogize her as the widow who had been the backbone and strength of John Calvin Marshall and shouldered the burden of his vision after his death.
What harm had been done? Whom had she hurt? Hadn’t she earned what had come to her? Hadn’t she paid for it with loneliness as piercing as the whiteness of snow in sunlight? Hadn’t she?
Yes, she had, but that could not justify self-deception, and he had tried to teach her that much. There had been no lies about Lisa. John Calvin had told Andrea about the FBI tape so that when it came she had a choice about whether to listen. She had.
Sometimes, when she focused only on John Calvin, when she thought of him instead of him in relation to her, she was surprised at an almost frivolous happiness that he had had Lisa, someone who seemed to know him instinctually, someone with no other need than to love him. But ego cannot abide selflessness, and Andrea did not understand how the peace that came when she loved Lisa’s love became a bewildering and numbing pain when she herself posed at the center of her vision field.
Was that why Lisa had come? To help her stand to the side in her life so she could see herself? Was the pleading in her voice not a yearning for her own forgiveness but a brief for Andrea’s?
But what had been her sin?
Dear God, what had been her sin?
Had it been that she had not loved John Calvin well? Had it been her unrelenting selfishness in refusing to relinquish illusion? Had it been her usurpation of John Calvin Marshall’s legacy and subsequent presumption to immortality? Had it . . .
“. . . never asked. I appreciated that. You didn’t ask me any questions or anything. You took me in and found a little work for me to do around the house and let me drive you to the airport and pick you up and when I got on my feet a little more, I would go with you on your speaking trips and to meetings. You saved my life.
“I don’t want you to die without knowing. Lisa gave me the idea. She said she came because there were things she had to say even if you couldn’t hear. She said she didn’t know whether it was more important for her to say or you to hear and decided that all she could do was the saying. That got me to thinking about how I would feel if you died and I hadn’t at least tried to tell you.”
There was silence and Andrea waited, not knowing if he had paused or if time had passed and he had spoken and been gone for an hour. She heard a chair creak and then —
“George Stone. Me and him were the best two organizers in the civil rights movement. He came to Shiloh to work with me in the spring of 1963. Cal knew it was getting to be too much for me down there by myself. One morning I woke up, looked up from the mattress on the floor where I slept, and there was this nigger with a scrawny beard looking down at me, saying, ‘Get up! Black folks ain’t free yet!’ I looked up at him and started laughing. He laughed and that was that.”
There was another pause. She found herself shrinking from his voice, wanting the polite, controlled tones of the Robert she had known. This voice had serrated edges and she was not sure she wanted to hear.
“I had been thinking about it for almost a year, just waiting for the right time. I didn’t know when that would be, but I knew it was going to happen. It had to happen or I didn’t know if I could go on living. When George came, I knew the time was near. Near, but not yet.
“With two of us organizing, things began to happen. One of the colored preachers told us we could use his church for meetings and we started teaching people what they had to know to register to vote. Once a month the voter registration office was open and once a month, George and I would have a few people lined up at the window at nine A.M. One month the window wouldn’t open until eleven-fifty-five and we would be told we were too late. The next it would be open but the clerk would spend three hours talking to somebody in the office in plain view of us in the corridor. Then, there came the month when we drove up to the courthouse and Sheriff Simpson, his deputies and damn near half the white men in the county were standing around the courthouse, lining the steps and all up and down the sidewalk. And they just happened to have their rifles and shotguns with them.
“Generally, we got to the courthouse by eight-forty-five so as to be in line when nine o’clock come around. That morning we were running late. It was me, George and two women and Mr. Peter Howard, who was almost as old as God. He had told us he would meet us there.
“I pulled the car up to the courthouse. The sheriff and his men were at the top of the steps. There must’ve been a hundred or so white men lounging on the lower steps and along the sidewalk. Wasn’t nobody doing a thing or saying a thing. They were just standing.
“I got out of the car slowly.
“’Where you going? What are you going to do?’ George asked and started out of the car.
“’Stay put,’ I told him. ‘Stay with the women.’
“I had no idea what I was doing but I knew that if we drove away from that courthouse, the movement was dead in Shiloh. My getting killed that morning would not have frightened the Negroes of Shiloh as much as my showing fear of those white men. I could feel every eye on me. I didn’t wait for the crowd to let me pass but I kept walking as if expecting them to. They did, but only enough so that I wouldn’t brush against anybody but still close enoug
h to smell the Garrett’s snuff, Bull Durham chewing tobacco, moonshine and sweat.
“I started up the steps, which were lined on both sides by gun-carrying white men. I still had no idea what I was going to do or say. I figured that this was the day I was going to die and that felt good to me. Real good.
“About halfway up the steps I saw the body. It lay on its back, arms raised over its head as if they were wings in the motion of flight. He was a tiny old man, wearing the overalls of a sharecropper, overalls that had been washed so often in lye soap, they were blotchy with white spots. I saw the single bullet hole in his head, the blood congealing around it, and the flies settling on his shoulder and walking on their hair-strong legs up the neck and toward the rouge hole.
“All I could figure was that Mr. Howard had gotten there on time and started in the courthouse by himself instead of waiting for us. Obviously from all the white men at the courthouse, that day was also the day they had chosen to teach us a lesson. Mr. Howard probably saved our lives by getting killed first. Take that thought to bed with you at night.
“I willed myself not to think, not to feel. I looked at Sheriff Simpson and didn’t nod or speak. I looked down at the body, at that tiny black man and felt the Mississippi heat heavy on me and heavy on him as if we were nothing more than the pants legs of a pair of trousers beneath an iron. Without a word, I stooped down and lifted the body in my arms.
“‘Card? What the hell you think you doing?’
“It was Sheriff Simpson. I lowered the body gently. ‘What does it look like?’ I said softly.
““That body has to stay put ’til the coroner comes. And he’s gone fishing. I got one of my men looking for him.’
“I smiled because I was genuinely amused. ‘Sheriff? You know and I know that when the coroner gets here he’s going to say it was death by parties unknown. Personally, I think it’d be a shame to interrupt his fishing for something like that. I hear the catfish are biting pretty good in the Tallahatchie this week.’
“The sheriff’s face turned a dangerous red. ‘You trying to be smart, nigger?’
“I didn’t respond but stared at him with a look that was on the edge of defiance but didn’t cross over, a look that dared the sheriff to stop me but did not challenge him, while my body stance was casual, indifferent, relaxed almost to the point of somnabulance. Sheriff Simpson didn’t know what to do.
“Finally, ‘Get him out of here. Dead niggers draw more flies than live ones.’
“He and his deputies laughed. I picked up the body, carried it down the steps and set it up in the backseat with the two women. Later that week at the funeral, when the preacher came to the lines in the Twenty-third Psalm and read, ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me,’ I leaped up and yelled, ‘Bullshit! Wasn’t nobody on them steps with Mr. Howard. Nobody ‘cepting the flies. The Lord was a shepherd all right, driving his sheep to the slaughter.’
“That night George asked me what we were going to do about Mr. Howard’s murder.
“‘Kill the sheriff and kill Jeb Lincoln.’
“George waited for me to laugh or crack a joke. When none came he said, ‘Feels like you got personal reasons, too.’
“‘I nodded. ‘Jeb Lincoln killed Charlie Montgomery and Ezekiel Whitson. The sheriff knows it and I figure he killed Peter Howard. Even if he didn’t, I got my own reason for wanting to see him dead.’
“‘How do we do it?’
“‘We wait until Sheriff Simpson is out of office, which will be in November. Elections in November and he can’t succeed himself. If a sheriff ends up dead, every cop in America feels threatened. Killing an ex-sheriff will not cause as much of a stir. We’ll do it around Christmas when everybody is thinking about presents and getting drunk and stuffing themselves with turkey. We will fuck Christmas up for every white muthafucka in this town.’
“Then we laughed.”
Silence.
Andrea remembered a night, a Christmas night. She was awakened by the sound of John Calvin on the phone, a shock and anguish in his voice unlike any she’d ever heard.
The next morning she asked John Calvin. They were sitting in the dining room drinking coffee. He didn’t answer at first.
“You look worried.”
He nodded. “I think I know how Jonah felt in the belly of the whale. Political movements attract the idealists and the crazed, and it is not always easy to tell them apart. But I am learning it does not matter which you are if you live, day in and day out, knowing you might die that day. I’m not talking some generalized stuff about any day might be the last day of your life. That’s true but no one really believes that until it happens. I’m talking about being in your early twenties and being shot at. I’m talking about living with the knowledge that there are persons — and you know who they are — who will kill you at the first opportunity. I’m talking about going to bed at night and awakening each morning with surprised relief that you are alive.
“Andrea, what I hate this country for most is that it has forced a generation of Negro young people into an intimacy with death that they do not have the capacity to withstand.”
Why had she forgotten the moments like that one, and there had been many, when they sat in the dining room drinking coffee in the morning, or late at night in the kitchen when she was getting her customary nighttime glass of milk before retiring and he would come in, not because he wanted something but because she was there and they would talk, quietly, easily, and gladness would be on both their faces. She could see the scenes in memory but they evoked no emotions. Why did she remember the pain more easily? Even at the core of their moments of intimacy, had there been a hollow place where the heart should have been?
She envied Lisa the love that remembering released for her. How incredible it must be to remember and to reenter the love, even though the other is no longer present. It did not matter. Relationship did not require fleshly immediacy. Only submission.
“I never told anyone why I cracked. Not Cal. Not even the psychiatrists. George was the only one who ever knew.
“On Christmas Eve the sheriff and Jeb Lincoln would have a little party at the jail for anyone that wanted to drop by. They’d drink a little moonshine and everybody would get a nice buzz on. Nothing heavy because they had to look halfway straight to go to church the next morning and for dinner at their momma’s houses. The sheriff and Jeb Lincoln lived on adjoining pieces of property and I guessed they would drive home together in Jeb Lincoln’s car. They lived on a dirt road off the main highway. About a half mile after you turned onto the road, it went down a little hill. At the bottom of that hill was a huge oak tree that sat back. It was the perfect place for an ambush. We could park the car in the shadows of the tree and no one would ever see us. When we heard them coming, I was to pull our car out into the road and block it. Before the sheriff and Jeb Lincoln knew what was happening we would jump out of our car, shoot them, get back in our car and be on our way.
“Well, ’long about ten-thirty we heard the car coming. You live in a small town you learn to identify people by the sound of their cars. That’s true! Mr. Montgomery taught me that. Wasn’t a car in the county sounded like Jeb Lincoln’s. It was a Buick and he kept that baby in mint condition. It was the one car that you almost couldn’t hear.
“‘They’re coming,’ George said.
“‘I hear ‘em,’ I answered. I was supposed to turn the key and start the engine. My fingers were on the key, but I didn’t turn it.
“The car was closer.
“‘Start the engine!’
“I couldn’t turn the key. I could feel the lights of Jeb Lincoln’s car coming down the hill. George reached over and tried to turn the key. I grabbed his wrist. I’m still not sure why.
“‘Goddammit, nigger! Start the fucking engine. Turn the goddam key!’
“I held his wrist so tight I was afraid I was going to cut off the circulation to his hand.
&n
bsp; “‘Fuck you, muthafucka! Fuck you!’
“The car drove slowly past us. I watched the red eyes of its taillights recede into the distance. When I couldn’t see them anymore, I turned the key. The engine started. Slowly I turned the wheel and made a U-turn and headed for the main highway. I didn’t know I was crying until George asked me if I was OK. Then I became aware of the wetness on my face. I heard a low-pitched moaning and knew it was me.
“‘You OK?’ I could hear concern in his voice. ‘I’m sorry I said what I said to you. Hell, them crackers ain’t worth killing.’
“‘But they are,’ I said, my voice cracking with tears. They are! I froze, man. I froze! I was scared to kill a white man. I was scared, man!’
“‘Don’t worry about it, homes.’
“We were at the main highway now. I turned left and headed back toward town. Tell me the truth. You weren’t scared, were you?’
“There was a long silence. Finally George said, ‘I ain’t been through what you been through down here. Maybe I didn’t know enough to be scared.’
“I knew otherwise. I had failed. How the hell could I be free until I could do to a white man what white men had no problem doing to us? How could Negroes be free until we made white people as afraid of us as we were of them?”
Andrea stopped listening. Here, waiting patiently and eagerly in Death’s vestibule she understood — too late — that until we knew the pain of another, our relationships were no more than exercises in an acting class. Until we knew the sizes and shapes of our own pains, and more, allowed someone else to glide their fingers over their misshapen contours, we were no more than shadows on the wall of a cave. But there was something more, it occurred to her as Robert’s voice was breaking through again. You had to love the pain with all the fervor of teenage lust. And when you did that, you ceased judging others; morality was no longer a simplistic good against a one-dimensional evil. Instead it became labyrinthine and twisted and turned back on itself and good changed into evil and back again until each ceased being distinct and separate and became instead a new kind of whole constantly shifting and rearranging its parts. To be moral was to live one’s singular and unique truth, regardless of the price, and there was always a price, she suspected.
And All Our Wounds Forgiven Page 13
