He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”
“That spiritual. God’s gonna trouble the water. Why would God want to stir things up, to make them muddy? Why would God want to be an agitator, a disturber of stillness and peace?”
“Perhaps there are some waters that need disturbing.”
I could tell that he hadn’t thought about it himself, that he was trying to cover up that he didn’t know and was too tired to really think about it at that moment.
A week later he was dead.
I hadn’t thought about those words since and there they were on his tombstone. Well, his death had certainly troubled the waters. Had that been God’s doing? If so, to what end? What did God benefit from troubled waters?
Next to his grave was the open earth where Andrea would be laid. Do you remember my writing earlier that each death returns you to all your deaths? When I stared into Andrea’s grave, it was also Jessica’s and it was the grave of all those who died in the sixties, most of whom I knew only from the accounts I heard others give Cal, but I have made it a point all these years to remember their names and I recite them to myself at odd moments because everyone can’t forget, Gregory. It isn’t right that everyone go on with their lives as if they had not lived or died.
Rev. George Lee
Lamar Smith
Emmett Till
Willie Edwards, Jr.
Mack Charles Parker
Herbert Lee
Roman Ducksworth, Jr.
Paul Guihard
William Moore
Medgar Evers
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carole Robertson
Cynthia Wesley
Virgil Ware
Louis Allen
Rev. Bruce Klunder
Henry Dee
Charles Moore
James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Michael Schwerner
Col. Lemuel Penn
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Rev. James Reeb
Viola Liuzzo
Jonathan Daniels Samuel Younge, Jr.
Vernon Dahmer
John Calvin Marshall
I have forgotten some names and I am sorry. And I don’t know the names of all those like Bobby who are living but only barely, those who hemorrhage from wounds they don’t know they carry, those who hurt and don’t know it is from pains thirty years old.
I lay down on Cal’s grave and it reminded me of all the times I had lain atop him after we made love. No, he did not tell me what he was thinking about the future of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War or what Kennedy or Johnson had said because there was no space. There were other matters that needed saying.
We talked a lot about death. His.
I hated it. Every time he started I would want to shut him up, but, over time, I understood: he cared for me. I did not think about the difference in our ages. He did. He knew that he was the only thing of significance in my life and he worried about what would happen to me when he died. He would make me fantasize about what I would do — go to graduate school, start a surfing school, get involved in Daddy’s business in which I was major stockholder. Marrying a dentist and living in Vermont was not one of the fantasies.
The night before he was killed he knew. We both did. It wasn’t the kind of knowing that is in words; it was a knowing of the heart and the body. But to understand the death of John Calvin Marshall you have to understand what those last years were like.
One cannot live on intimate terms with his mortality for too long without becoming mad or free. Most of us became mad. Some of us dramatically like Bobby. Most of us quietly. Cal became free.
Everyone knows he is going to die, but how many really believe it? Deep down, everyone thinks that everybody else will die except him. Our deepest secret is that we are the one who is going to live forever.
Those of us who worked in the civil rights movement could not have that illusion of immortality. Firefighters risk death but only when fighting a fire. Policemen risk death but only when on the job. The majority of policemen go through their entire careers and are never in a situation in which their lives are threatened. I cannot think of anyone in this century who lived in constant relationship to death like those of us who sought to make America whole and broke ourselves into pieces instead.
There was no escaping death. Death came suddenly. Was that car behind you just a car or was it following you? What about that car passing you? You learned to rely on your peripheral vision to catch any untoward move, or the hint of something pointing at you. When you stopped at an intersection you were aware of every car and every person on the street. Your eyes and mind were constantly finding escape routes, constantly plotting evasive maneuvers if a car came at you from this direction or that. You assumed death and so you never relaxed. The rifle which fired the bullet that killed William Moore belonged to a man Moore had had a friendly conversation with hours before. When the reality is death, you do not trust appearances.
That is something of what the daily reality was like for the average civil rights worker, someone working in a small town in Alabama or Mississippi. But that civil rights worker could go into the next county and there he was anonymous. That was why every six months or so, people who had been working in those small towns would pile into a couple of cars and go to New Orleans and party for an entire weekend. They had to remind themselves that joy existed and it was something for which they still had the capacity.
Imagine that you are John Calvin Marshall. Where do you go when you want to be reminded of joy? Where do you go to be out of the imaginary rifle-sight you know someone is always aiming at you in fantasy? The threat of death is constant. Death becomes your context for what is ordinary. If death is the ordinary, then where is life?
But this describes only one aspect of death with which John Calvin Marshall lived, and the least. Cal was fatalistic about assassination. When Kennedy was killed, he said, “If the Secret Service can’t protect the president of the United States, what kind of protection do you think there can be for John Calvin Marshall?”
What almost drove him mad were the deaths of others. He felt responsible for each one, because their murderers had been impelled to action by the historical forces he had untied. He never permitted it to be publicized, but whenever there was a murder connected with the civil rights movement, he visited the survivors. Most of the time we went at night, just him and me in my pickup. No one ever knew. Sometimes it would be two or three in the morning when we would knock on the door of some shack in the middle of nothing. The family would not believe it was him. Sometimes we would not stay more than a half-hour. He would hug whomever the survivors were — the mother, father, wife, the children — and tell them how sorry he was.
The deaths and the grieving began to wear him down, especially after Shiloh. I don’t know what happened there. All I remember is getting a call from him a little after midnight, Christmas morning. He told me to get Bobby out of the South as quickly as possible. I slipped on a pair of jeans and a shirt, jumped in my truck and left. When I got to Shiloh, it was Christmas morning, an overcast gray Christmas morning. I walked into the Freedom House. Bobby was seated on a sofa, staring into space as if he were incapable of speech and would never be again. George was sitting beside him.
I had seen him only occasionally since returning South. At staff meetings, primarily, and we never had the chance to talk. I’m not sure why.
“Bobby?”
He did not look at me or respond.
“What happened?” I asked George.
“If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”
I never liked George. He was the first black I ever met who didn’t distinguish between those who were on his side and those who weren’t. He hated white people and he hated me.
“What’re you going to do?” he continued. “Cal send you?”
“If I want you to know, I’ll tell you,” I shot back.
I got
on the phone and called someone who taught at a college in the midwest. I told him I was going to be leaving Shiloh within minutes. I had had two hours sleep and figured I could drive twelve hours without stopping to rest, which should put me close to him. He was to meet me and I would tell him what to do from there.
I hung up and made another call to a psychiatrist in New York who had started to treat some of our casualties. I told him I had a major one and he should expect me in the next twenty-four hours. He knew that if I were bringing someone personally, it was serious.
George helped me put Bobby in the truck. It was Christmas and I didn’t think the highway patrol or state police would be on the roads to wonder about a white woman and black man in a truck.
I made it to Ohio and the person I’d called was waiting and together we drove nonstop to New York, deposited Bobby who looked as if he had never even blinked his eyes, drove back to Ohio and I went back to Nashville.
I went by to see Cal and told him where Bobby was.
He nodded his approval.
“You want to tell me what this was all about?”
He was silent for a long time. “No,” he said finally. “I really really don’t. It’s a nightmare and I fear it is only going to get worse.”
There was another long silence. “I’ve always known the dangers. I’ve always known that to awaken the Negro to take action against the evil stifling him would also mean rousing the Negro’s own evil. Even before I embarked on the bus boycott in Atlanta in the late fifties, I worried about that. What would I do, what could be done when the centuries of anger extravasated?
“The stupidity of white America is terrifying. It does not require great intelligence to figure out that if you hate a people all you are doing is giving them lessons in how to hate you. And that’s what Negroes have been learning all these years. Just because they haven’t expressed it yet doesn’t mean they haven’t been taking notes and practicing in quiet.
“It was my hope that by creating a movement for social change I could circumvent the hatred. I was wrong. It is from within my very own movement the lava has begun to flow.”
I understood his words but had no context. What had happened? Had Bobby done something awful? What was going on?
All he said was, “Thank you. You must trust me very much to do all you have just done and know so little.”
“You know I trust you.”
“I know. Your trust enables me to doubt and question and regret.” He smiled weakly. “You are about to collapse. Go home and unplug your phone.”
What Cal said that night didn’t make sense until two years later at the famous staff meeting in the spring of sixty-six. Bobby was there, his eyes glittering with fever. He had been fund-raising in New York and had begun to acquire a following because of his impassioned rhetoric and a new-found ability to touch the guilt of whites in a way that made them write very large checks to assuage it.
Bobby had changed.
“He’s gone mad,” I told Cal.
“No. He is suffering the madness white America will not take responsibility for.”
I was unprepared for the challenge to Cal’s leadership from those who had gathered around Bobby. I was not prepared to hear Cal called an “Uncle Tom.” I was especially unprepared when the motion was made that all whites in any way connected with the organization were to leave immediately.
I was sitting to Cal’s right. I did not dare look at him but I had the feeling he was surprised too.
The motion was quickly seconded and the debate began.
The argument was simple: While there might have been a place for whites in the civil rights struggle, it was now a struggle for black liberation. The ideal of integration had failed because whites were not interested in living with blacks on an equal basis. The only alternative was for blacks to live with each other, to create the black economic, social and cultural institutions that would teach African values and sustain black men and black women.
I have never felt so dumb in my life. How could all of this have been going on and me not notice? I knew nothing about black people. Absolutely nothing.
Then I remembered something. I looked through the folders I always had with me at staff meetings, found the document I was looking for, underlined a particular passage and handed it to Cal.
The debate went on for some time. Those who spoke against the motion did so weakly. It was apparent that the defenders of the motion had history on their side.
Finally, when it seemed everyone had had his say, Cal spoke. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “We must be careful that we do not become the evil we have been so intent on killing. We must be careful that our desire for justice is not so ardent that it becomes a thirst for vengeance. We must not only be careful; we must also take care. And taking care means pulling up the weeds that threaten to choke the fragile green new life breaking the earth. Taking care means watering that new life so it will not wither from lack of sustenance. Taking care means picking off the bugs that would eat the tiny leaves.
“The arguments put forth here are very appealing. If I were not careful I would be seduced by them. Who would not be? How simple it would be if we could create a world of blackness. How comforting it would be, and God knows, we need comfort. But this is not comfort. It is death.”
His voice was stronger now but it was still not loud. He spoke conversationally and with deep sadness.
“It is obvious that my time is past. However, that does not mean I will hand over my organization to you or anybody. If you feel as you do, then be honest enough and men enough to go out and build your own organization instead of trying to take over the fruits of another man’s labor. But, please understand. I will decide when I go. I, or a bullet. Nothing else.
“The motion on the floor is the expulsion of whites. The motion is out of order.”
There was an outbreak of shouting and yelling. Cal waited until it died down.
“The motion is out of order because in Section 1, Paragraph 1 of our Constitution,” and he picked up the sheet of paper I had underlined and slipped him when the debate began, “you will notice that it says, ‘The Southern Committee for Racial Justice is founded on the principle of racial equality. Membership in the organization is open to people of all races, colors and creeds without restriction or qualification.’
“The motion is out of order. Next order of business.”
Over the next few months three-quarters of the staff would leave to start a new group, Black Revolutionary Liberators. By this time, Bobby was in a hospital.
Without an effective organization any longer, Cal spent most of his time speaking on college campuses. The money was good and he had never had much of that. I went with him and I noticed that his audiences now were practically all white, but he never commented on it and neither did I.
Winter, 1969. I was the one who took the call in Cal’s basement office. Gary Dunbar, one of Cal’s oldest friends and a civil rights leader in Tackett, Georgia, had been shot and killed. Could Cal come?
It was the first time I had seen him want to say no.
Tackett was one of those little towns with only a general store and a post office to indicate there was an entity called a town. The place smelled of ancient deaths and unquiet ghosts. One would not have been surprised if the blue sky rained down blood.
We arrived early the next afternoon. Cal met briefly with the local leadership, and agreed to speak at a mass meeting that night and at his friend’s funeral the next morning, but he refused to lead a march from the cemetery to the sheriff’s office.
“Your march will be more effective if I am not involved.”
“Our march will be more effective if we have somebody leading it who can get us some TV coverage,” a young black kid said, glaring at Cal. “That’s about all you’re good for anymore. At least do that much.”
Cal’s head dropped to his chest. “I will not lead the march,” he repeated.
But if there had been any doubt if people
still wanted to hear John Calvin Marshall it was put to rest that night. The little church was filled, with people sitting in the windows and standing three deep outside.
I could not remember how many times I had heard him speak. From the first sentence I could tell which speech it was going to be. He had three basic ones and moved their various parts around to fit the situation.
That night though the beginning was unlike any I’d ever heard.
“The waters are troubled tonight. God has taken his servant, Death, and used him to agitate the placid stream. What was clear is now muddy. What was smooth is now roiled. What was placid is now disquieted.
“I came to bring peace and did not see the sword in its scabbard at my side. I did not see that it is not possible to correct injustice without committing it. I did not see that good is the creator of evil when good leaves evil unbe-friended. I did not see and God has troubled the water.
“Oh, say, can you see?
“No, no, you can’t. This afternoon when I came to town, some became angry with me because I would not lead them in a march to demand the sheriff find and arrest the murderer or murderers of Gary Dunbar.
“Oh, say, can you see?
“No, no, you can’t. Can’t you see that Gary’s murder is not the author of your anger, and the prosecution of his murderers will not assuage your anger? Your anger makes you feel that, at long last, you have been blessed with righteousness, but righteousness humbles; self-righteousness emboldens.
“Oh, say, can you see?
“I see Ol’ Death riding his white horse and he is taking a strange path. He is passing up the homes where the white folks live and is just stopping at those where black reside. But Death ain’t no racist. Uh-uh. What does Death know that we don’t? Death knows that white folks are already dead.
“Oh, say, can you see?
“Yes, they are. Only people who are passionately in love with Death build atom bombs and hydrogen bombs that can destroy the world many times over. Only people who are married to Death would spend more than half their national budget on weapons to kill. Only people who themselves want to be dead would think that accidents and killings are news to be put on the front page of papers and heard first on television. Only people who lust for Death would think skin color and hair texture and eye color could ever tell you anything about the quality of another human being.
And All Our Wounds Forgiven Page 17
