And All Our Wounds Forgiven

by Julius Lester

  “And now, black people are beginning their own love affair with Death.

  “Oh, say, can you see?

  “Black is beautiful! That’s what they say. I’m black and I’m proud! Why? I want to ask. What effort did you put into becoming black? None. Then, why are you proud of it?

  “Black is NOT beautiful. Don’t you understand that if black is beautiful, then white has to be ugly, and doesn’t that sound familiar?

  “If I need to tell myself that I am black and proud, if I need to tell myself how beautiful blackness is, am I not confessing my self-hatred? Am I not confessing how ugly I appear to myself?

  “You are angry with the sheriff. No. You are angry at yourselves for having spent all your life as niggersniggersniggers. Don’t blame the white man. Just because he may want you to be a nigger doesn’t mean you have to oblige him.

  “Oh, say, can you see — nigger?”

  I am glad I thought to set up the tape recorder because I would not have believed it if I could not have heard it again. I suppose I could give the tape to some biographer. No one knows it exists. There are rumors about a strange, incoherent speech he gave in Tackett the night before he died, but there has never been corroboration.

  Most of the people left early. This was not the John Calvin Marshall they had heard about. They did not know who this crazy man was, and the nigger had to be crazy to drive into Tackett with a white woman, not to mention get up and say what he said.

  But I understood.

  John Calvin Marshall and Cal had become one. He was now free.

  “You want to march to protest the killing of Gary Dunbar. Damn! That is not what Gary wants. He wants you to go out and do whatever it is he was doing that got him killed. You’re angry! No angry person has ever been free!”

  The church and the grounds were practically deserted when he finished, but Cal walked off the pulpit with a bounce in his step and a smile on his face.

  He was approached by some of the men who had spoken with him that afternoon and I heard them say that they were sorry but they had to withdraw the invitation to speak at the funeral the next day. They were trying to get in touch with Jesse Jackson and they might delay the funeral a day or two if Jackson could come.

  We got in the truck and I asked him if he wanted to go home. He thought for a moment and shook his head.

  “We have a free night. Let’s make the best of it.”

  I saw the car pull in behind us when we drove out of Tackett. We were silent. The lights of the car following us were on bright and I put on my sunglasses. I did not dare speed to try to get away. It could have been the sheriff or the highway patrol, or one of them could have been waiting on a side road for us to come speeding by.

  As we neared Atlanta and traffic became heavier the car lowered its beams and dropped back. I sighed deeply but was unaware of it until Cal asked, “Something wrong?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “You sighed.”

  “I did?” I remembered. “Oh, the car that followed us from Tackett just lowered its beam and I guess I had been more concerned about it than I realized.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  I thought. “Seven years.”

  “You sound tired.”

  Some of our most intimate moments were the nights we were going someplace in the truck. It was hard deciding whether it was more risky travelling at night or in the daytime. We preferred the night because he was a more difficult target and a following car was easier to see. I think he also preferred the night because the darkness intensified the stillness of the world around us until it seemed that no one existed except him and me in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. We seldom spoke. He would reach over, lift my dress or skirt and put his left hand between my thighs. I did not wear underpants then.

  I have made love to only two men in fifty-two years. You and Cal (and, Gregory, you may never read any of this. The gap between what I seem to need to say — everything in graphic detail — and what you may need to hear is increasing). And I have never made love with you.

  That is no fault of yours. Nor mine. Making love requires a vision of who the two of you are, a vision as grand as any architect’s for the ideal city but a city that will never be completed, regardless of how many structures are erected. We make the mistake of thinking that love is something that can be established once and for all, at which point, we marry and then work at maintaining what has been established.

  That is one model, I suppose, but there is another. To make love daily by being attentive to the opportunities of transforming a mundane moment into a vehicle to express that the other matters.

  His left hand would rest between my bare thighs, the heel against the mons veneris. I suspect other men would immediately institute the hunt for the orgasm. Not Cal. His hand would rest between my thighs, warm, and I would become aware of my thighs, my pubic hair, the labia majora. To make love is to awaken the beloved to her own being.

  Cal said once that it was not his responsibility to make me have an orgasm. He only wanted to give me pleasure. He only wanted me to experience how beautiful I was. He only wanted to tell me — with his hands — how much I mattered to him. If he could do that, orgasms would come. Or they wouldn’t.

  “You haven’t taken a day off in seven years,” he continued.

  “Neither have you,” I countered.

  “But you need a vacation more than I do,” he said seriously.

  I started to protest and he cut me off.

  “When I got my doctorate and Andrea and I married, she expected that I would secure a position at some nice small college in one of those postcard New England towns and we would live happily ever after. I, however, assumed that she had felt at Radcliffe as I had at Harvard, which was like a sun without a sky to shine in. I couldn’t wait to get back to the South. As lovely as Boston was, as much as I learned there, the bricks of the buildings and the bark on the trees did not connect me to a history that was mine. When I am in the South, I know who I am.

  “I could not have done what you have. Seven years without an ocean wave. Seven years without strapping on skis. Seven years of living among a people not your own and I doubt that any of them has ever said thank you.”

  My hands gripped the wheel tightly and I didn’t know if it was from wanting to deny what he had said or anger at its truth.

  I drove to a hotel downtown. “Wait here,” I said.

  “What’s up?” Cal wanted to know when I came back.

  “We’re taking a vacation. I just got us the penthouse suite. It has two bedrooms, each with kingsize bed and its own bath and a common living room big enough to house a family of eight easily. I explained to the manager that you would be occupying the suite and that you wanted privacy. I told her that I wanted one of their better bottles of red wine, two filet mignon tender enough to be mistaken for pudding, a hollandaise sauce delicate enough to feed a baby, asparagus tips, rice pilaf, a green salad with a lemon-mustard dressing, and we wouldn’t need dessert because we would be eating each other.”

  He laughed.

  As I turned into the hotel parking lot, the car behind me turned up its high beams, turned them down and continued along the street.

  We knew but we did not acknowledge it in words to each other. And what would we have said? What words can express seven years of graceful intimacy? We were partners, two entirely separate beings creating a whole no other two people in either of our lives could have made.

  A bellman met us in the parking lot. He was an old black man, a stereotype of the South with his ingratiating smile, eagerness to be of service, the shining blackness of his bald head.

  I pointed to the bags in the bed of the truck. When we reached the penthouse I started to tip him and he refused.

  “Ma’am, I carried the bag of Dr. John Calvin Marshall and saw him with my own two eyes. That’s all the tip I need. God bless you, Dr.”

  The bellman had scarcely left when I answered a knock a
t the door and opened it to see the hotel manager standing there, flanked by two assistants, each holding a vase of flowers.

  “Where would you like these?” she asked.

  “I didn’t order any flowers.”

  “Compliments of the hotel.”

  There was a vase of yellow and white roses, a vase of orange and red gladioli, and a vase of mixed wildflowers, zinnias, asters, and the like. The next knock was champagne, and an assortment of cheeses, crackers and dips.

  God held back time that night. Each moment was as languid as a summer afternoon on a tropical island. We ate slowly and in silence.

  He broke it once when he was holding the goblet of wine up to the light. “Look!” he exclaimed. “Look at the color! How extraordinarily beautiful. Look at the light sparkling off the redness of the wine!” He was like a child on Christmas morning looking at the Christmas tree. He lowered the goblet and sipped. “I suppose it isn’t possible to do everything in one life, but I am sorry there was not more time for looking at the color of wine and the texture of hollandaise sauce.”

  When we finished I called room service, who came and removed the dirty dishes while Cal ran water for a hot bath. I was lying on the couch in the common room when I heard his voice.

  “Elizabeth?”

  I looked up. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom dressed in a thick wine-red bathrobe monogrammed with the hotel’s initials. He beckoned for me to come. As I came abreast of him he took my hand and kissed me lightly on the lips.

  He led me into the bathroom with its raised circular tub over the top of which the bubbles sparkled like light in wine. He unbuttoned my blouse, slowly, without hurried eagerness, slowly, as if there was no act more important in all the history of humankind, slowly, he slipped the blouse from my shoulder, down my arms and onto the tiled floor.

  Lightly, his fingertips brushed my shoulders and down my arms. Deliberately he stayed away from touching my breasts, still covered by a black bra. There was wonder in his eyes as he stared at my torso and I wanted to know what he saw when he said, “I like the whiteness of you.”

  He unhooked my bra but did not remove it. Instead he took his index finger and moved it slowly from the tip of my chin, down my throat and chest, slowly, again and again, never touching my breasts as he passed them but slowing each time as if he were going to and then continuing past to my abdomen. I closed my eyes and there was no other meaning in the universe than the tip of his index finger barely touching my skin from throat to abdomen, over and over, patiently, as if he ruled time and held it in the palm of his hand.

  Then, he added a second finger and I gasped as my body shivered involuntarily. Now as the two fingers moved down my torso, they came closer to the sides of my breasts, closer and closer. When a fingertip brushed the nipple of my left breast and then the right, I cried out and reached to pull him tightly to me, convinced that he would not be taken as long as my arms were around him.

  He let me hold him for a moment as his fingertips now moved slowly up and down my back. Then, he moved back and gently removed the bra. We were still standing on the top of the platform next to the tub. I opened my eyes and saw him staring at my half-nakedness with the tenderness of a mother for a child. There was no lust or even desire in his gaze. There was only the passion of gratitude that I was and he was and that we had met and loved.

  He unzipped my skirt, unholed the button on the side and slid it gently down my hips to the floor where I raised my feet for him to move it out of the way. He looked up at me, his eyes lingering at the mons veneris before continuing to my abdomen, my breasts, my face.

  Finally, he stood and taking my hand, motioned for me to step into the tub. I expected him to follow, but instead he knelt beside the tub, pushed up the sleeves of the robe and taking a bar of soap, lathered his hands and began rubbing the suds across my shoulders, my back, my chest, his hands gradually sliding farther and farther down until he was fondling my breasts and I was spun into silk.

  He had me stand and I felt I was being covered with a smooth body cream as his hands, lathered and relathered with soap, found my abdomen and then the firm globes of my buttocks, round and round and it was as if I had never been touched by those hands as if I had not known how beautiful I was to him and now a finger between the halves of my buttocks sliding easily into my anus while with his other hand he held the small oval of soap and moved it back and forth between the lips of my vagina, slowly, from the clitoris to the vaginal opening, pushing the end of the soap gently inside and then out, inside and out while the finger of his other hand slid in and out of my ass and I bent my knees in a modified skier’s tuck so as not to lose my balance and my hips began moving back and forth in answer to his hands and as my thrusts became more definite and excited, his motions eased and rather than continuing toward a peak, he withdrew his fingers from my anus and vagina, and taking off his robe, stepped into the tub.

  By now the water was tepid and he drained the tub until it was half-empty and pulling the shower curtain, turned on the shower to wash the lather from my body and when the tub was full again, I turned off the shower, took the bar of soap and began covering him with lather as thick as desire, but this was not the desire for sexual union as the desperate desire that he should live and not die, that this body which I knew so well, that this body whose every pore I had touched with my hands, my tongue, my breasts, that this body, which I had held close to mine night after night not begin its journey toward dust so soon, not while I had so much more love to lavish upon it upon his chest with its tiny nipples erect and hard beneath my fingernails and as his body leaned back against my breasts my nails dragged along his flesh from his abdomen up to his chest with ever increasing pressure, harder and harder and harder until he gasped with pain and the deeper my nails clawed, the slower I pulled them along his skin and he screamed and writhed, his body pushing backward into mine and I took a washcloth, rinsed off his neck and shoulders and with the quickness of a snake, my mouth and teeth grabbed the flesh of his neck and squeezed while my nails raked his body and his scream was not a loud explosion of noise but a thin high-pitched wailing like the sound of all the Africans captured on the winds of the ocean, a keening as the souls of all the African dead came from their graves on the floor of the Atlantic, from their unmarked tombs in the mud of Mississippi rivers coldwater sunflower tallahatchie pearl mississippi strong noxubee yockanookany homochitto Big Black yalobusha tombigbee from unquiet graves with lyncher’s knotted ropes still hanging from their broken skeletons carrying the hard petrified remnants of their castrated members in their bony hands and he spun around and clung to me and his sobs reverberated with the hollow echoes of stone walls in the slave factories that had lined the coasts of Senegal Gambia Guinea sobs torn from lungs filled with ocean salt water when the sick were thrown over the sides of slave ships when the defiant leaped over sobbing sobbing sobbing the mothers and fathers of not only the slain the lost the forgotten but the sobbing of all those souls who would have been born from the slain the lost the forgotten if they had lived and his keening reached higher until it was barely audible but sustained and I heard him whisper “I am so sorry I am so sorry” but I did not know whose ears the words were for the fog was thick over the fields of shiloh that sunday morning new year’s day morning as if this land which had seen more blood than anyone would ever know as if the land itself did not want to see anymore and wrapped itself in a winding sheet i had entered the fog within minutes after crossing from tennessee into mississippi and welcomed its protective secrecy enabling me to reach shiloh without anyone knowing i was in the state enabling me to be alone and unseen and to think about what i would say and i knew it didn’t matter whatever i said would not be heard at least not then at least not that morning but maybe the land would hear or maybe nothing would suffice except my life for theirs which i would not have called justice but was i not the one who had come to trouble the waters was i not the one who forgot it is not possible to evoke good without also evoking
evil and evil begets evil with gleeful innocence in the souls of the young and idealistic and i did not know how to befriend evil i knew only that to treat evil as an adversary would only embolden it but what was the alternative it was a little past seven when i drove into shiloh and there was a young colored boy sitting beside the sign that said welcome to shiloh as if god had sent him there to wait for me and i asked him for directions to the house of jeb lincoln or sheriff simpson and he told me and i made my way through the fog to the lincoln plantation and the nondescript white farmhouse with the wraparound porch the yard was still and empty as i drove in and turned off the key i walked onto the porch but before i could knock the door opened and i faced a beautiful white woman with short dark hair, freckles and blue eyes she was holding a baby on one hip and i knew even less what to say because i had been expecting an older woman with the ample body of one who has borne her children and equally i supposed the woman holding the baby had not expected to open her door and see john calvin marshall and i knew she recognized me but i said anyway “i’m john calvin marshall” “even the dumbest nigger would know that” came the matter-of-fact response “i’m sarah lincoln, jeb’s second wife his first one died of cancer this here is jeb the third” she stopped and looked at me with open and curious eyes as if despite the occasion she wasn’t going to pass up the chance to see a celebrity to see if i looked just like i did on tv “never expected to see you standing on my porch” “who is it, sarah?” came the voice of a white man from inside the house “nothing to be concerned about” she yelled back and closed the door stepping onto the porch motioning me to follow her off the porch across the yard and to the other side of the barn where we would not be seen from the house “jeb has this thing about niggers like his pappy granpappy and their two pappys probably don’t get me wrong or nothing i ain’t got no brief for niggers and except for lucy the cook and thomas what clean up around the yard and do errands this is the closest i ever been to one of yall and i certainly don’t agree with all the trouble you be stirring up niggers and white folks been getting along without no problem for a hundred years until you started stirring things up but jeb was never satisfied with just not liking niggers he had to let niggers know in the worst way that he didn’t like ‘em and who knows what he has done to niggers over the years it was a hobby like hunting and fishing and going to new Orleans or memphis a couple of times a year to fuck black whores but it ain’t like it used to be thirty forty years ago which is before my time but back then you could treat niggers however you wanted and wasn’t nobody to say nothing about it but now if you look at one of them wrong john kennedy will send the fbi to your house and you’ll be on the tv telling the niggers to rise up so i don’t know why you come or what you want but it was a nervy thing to do and i guess just seeing you there when i opened the door was good enough for me i mean you ain’t elvis or nobody like that but i ain’t never seen nobody famous jeb never would take me up to nashville to see the grand ol’ opry lots of famous folks there but ain’t none of ‘em famous as you and someday i might tell one of jeb’s grandchildren that i met john calvin marshall it’s a good thing i was coming down the steps when you knocked otherwise jeb might’ve answered the door and well you look like you’re a good man john calvin marshall and thank you for coming” and walked me to my car and stood in the yard the baby perched on the shelf of her hip and she watched me drive into the fog and i didn’t go to the sheriff’s house and i didn’t go see george stone but drove back to the highway north toward memphis and east to nashville and even though i had not told jeb lincoln or the sheriff that i was sorry that two people who worked for me had wanted to kill them i was glad i had gone because i was free now to grieve without guilt and I buried his head on my breasts and eagerly he took a nipple in his mouth and suckled, his arms tight around me as I cradled his head and rocked him.