by Caryl Rivers
One night, as she waited in front of his house, a car pulled up, full of boys, and Harry climbed out, laughing. As he walked not too steadily to the door, Mary ran out and grabbed his hand. She couldn’t believe what she was doing; some part of her seemed to be watching from someplace else. She grabbed his hand and said, “Harry, help me. Help me!”
“Mary? What’s the matter?”
“I’m pregnant. You made me pregnant, Harry. Oh, God, what am I going to do?” His eyes glittered, bright with drink. “Help me, Harry.”
He put his arms around her. She began to weep hysterically. “It’s all right. It’s all right, Mary.”
He held her and wiped away her tears. She was amazed at his gentleness. She thought he would curse her or hit her.
“Don’t cry. It’s all right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll get married. We’ll get married right away.”
He held her and kissed away the tears. “It’s all right. We’ll get married.”
It all happened so fast that nothing seemed real. They walked down the aisle together in First Presbyterian Church and then went to Ocean City for three days. On the wedding night she wore an absurd-looking negligee that she had gotten at her shower, which was green with ribbons on it. This time it was really sort of OK when he touched her, but very quickly he was inside her again, and once again, there was no pleasure. That was it, she was frigid for sure. But she had something worse to worry about. It was all a lie, everything was a lie, she wasn’t pregnant, and he never would have married her if she weren’t. What was she going to do? What the hell was the new Mrs. Harry Springer going to do?
Journal: Donald A. Johnson
Our next assignment is writing about a place we grew up in, and the impact it had on us. For me, that’s easy. Growing up in Washington, D.C., does something strange to you. Maybe it’s some weird kind of ray that all the marble gives off. It hits your skin, and zap! You’re American. Branded, eternally.
I try to explain that to my friend Rafe. He’s named for the angel Raphael, who wrestled with Jacob. A prophetic name. Rafe will spend his life wrestling with men and angels — and with intolerance. He will not go gentle into that good night.
Rafe is alienated from America in a way I am certain I could never be. He looks, instead, to Africa. Sometimes he even wears an African robe (I call it his bathrobe; that pisses him off), and he is studying African history. He says he may even change his name to an African one, to unburden himself of the slave name he bears in white America.
I understand what he is doing, but it’s not my way. I try to think of Africa as something other than a strange, exotic place under a tropical sun, but I have trouble with that. I tell Rafe I’ll never really feel at home anyplace but in the U.S., despite all the crap that floats around. (Note to me. Find another word for crap. It is not elegant; James Baldwin would not settle for crap.)
My feeling has a lot to do with my growing up where I did, and maybe being stuck with an excessively romantic temperament as well. I am a sucker for Great Dreams, and Washington is stuffed full of them, all cast in bronze and marble and stone, giving off that damn Kryptonite stuff, as powerful as the substance that makes Superman wilt.
Rafe would laugh and say they are white men’s dreams, they have nothing to do with me. But I can’t believe that because I grew up here, next to the monuments. I always assumed they were mine; they spoke directly to me.
I still find it hard to stand inside the great dome of the Jefferson Memorial and not be stirred to the very core by the words carved on the frieze: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
Because none of it —no country, no constitution — existed when Jefferson was my age. He only dreamed it, and then helped to make it happen. Where do men come from, that dream so? And if they could, so can we. That’s what I try to say to Rafe, that dreams are what this country is about. And we can be the dreamers. We already are.
Jefferson, he said, had slaves. And even though he knew the issue of slavery would haunt the corridors of the Republic for generations to come, he let its cancer be calcified into law.
“Jefferson,” he said, with that ironic grin of his, “wasn’t talking to you, nigger.”
But he was, even if he never meant to. I believed all the great words were meant for me, and because I thought so, they were. I read them all. “Give me liberty or give me death. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I saw them everywhere, carved, printed, etched, written. No one can tell me they’re not for me and make me believe it.
Rafe answered with his Realpolitik rap — about who controls what and how the white power structure keeps us down, and it’s all true. I can’t argue with his analysis. It’s right. It’s just … incomplete. There’s no way it can account for what I feel as I stand in the Jefferson, certain that the place is mine. Certain that there are tracks to be made in history, and that I can be a part of making them. Entitled to make them, because this man said what he said. I used to ride my bike around under all that marble when I had a messenger job junior year, and I guess I got a good dose of the Kryptonite. I’m baked.
Rafe shook his head. To him, Washington is merely a city of other people’s history. But it’s my neighborhood. My graffiti comes from the Constitution and the Archives and the Declaration of Independence — which maybe does give you delusions of grandeur. Other people’s walls read, “Marsha is a whore” or “Jersey City sucks”; mine say, “That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Maybe that makes you terminally patriotic.
“Just words,” Rafe said. “What do they mean to me?”
I said that these words are the ultimate refutation of the white power structure he hates so much. I tell him that you can’t say these words to people and not expect them to believe them. Words are more powerful than guns because they can create alternate realities. What people can imagine, they can create.
Rafe laughed and called me hopeless, but I stayed with it. “It’s what we do with nonviolence,” I said. “We create a different idea of who we are. We’re not victims. We’re not Toms. But we choose not to be violent. We resist, and a new idea is born. That we deserve the rights we are fighting for.”
“We always did,” Rafe said. “Whether white people believed it or not isn’t important.”
“Yes it is,” I said, “because we didn’t have the power to claim them. Now we do. We created the idea of ourselves as equal. And it can’t be stopped.”
“Maybe,” Rafe said.
“It’s either that, or all power comes from the barrel of a gun. And where does that get you?
Rafe grinned. “To the fucking palace, my man.”
“No,” I said, “then power just becomes one self-interested group killing off another.”
“You’ve just summed up history.” Rafe laughed.
I refused to argue any more. When Rafe gets into his Marxist rap he’s impossible. But no one in SNCC has worked harder to make things happen. Next to Rafe, I’m a slacker. He throws himself into things, never lets up for a minute. I sort of slide in and out, emotionally. Rafe tells me I have a bourgeois soul, and he’s right. It’s odd, the way I grew up. It was like being inside the circle of the wagons, with the Indians out there taking potshots and whooping like crazy, but under the wagon Grandma was giving me chicken with rice soup, so I was safe. (Rafe would say there’s a racist whitey image for you, all those whooping redskins.) Maybe I would have been better off growing up the way Rafe did, in the projects in Detroit, with all of it right out there raw — the poverty, the self-hate, the despair. Sometimes I wish I knew it the way Rafe does, the knife blade against the throat, the anger always glowing. I’m too middle class, I knew too much comfort. Can I ever be a writer after growing up like that?
But there’s something else. I’m trying to sort all this out, and it’s complic
ated. Rafe is much braver than I am. I’ve seen him look death in the eye. Not simply the idea of death, but the real thing — your brains being splattered across the sidewalk by the club that’s two inches from your head. And he never flinched. He made me brave. I was more scared of Rafe thinking I was a coward than I was of the 230-pound trooper with the billy club and the roll of fat around his collar.
But there was this one day, in Alabama, when we were going to meet with some officials from the Justice Department. I went to the house where Rafe was staying, to pick him up. He was his usual jaunty self, but as he buttoned his shirt, I saw that his hands were trembling.
It hit me like I’d run into a brick wall. Rafe was scared. Not of some redneck who had a shotgun leveled at his crotch — that happened once and Rafe didn’t blink. He was scared of some white guys from the Justice Department. Bureaucrats. GS 15’s.
I’d never been much of a leader in the group. Mostly I let Rafe or the others do the talking. But that day I talked a lot. I mean, talking to middle-class white people was easy for me. Hell, I’d been doing it for years. The fathers of my friends at school were like these guys. And when I was talking to those Justice guys, as they perspired into the collars of their white shirts, I remembered the argument my mother and father had about where I would go to college.
My father wanted me to go to Howard University, his alma mater. He said I’d get a good education there, and I’d be comfortable in an all-Negro school.
My mother had gone to a Quaker college, where most of her classmates were white. She wanted me to go to George Washington University. She came to my room one day and closed the door, and she said, in that quiet way of hers, “I don’t want to contradict your father. His ideas are not wrong. But, Donnie, one thing you must understand. White people are not smarter than you are.”
“I know that, Momma,” I said.
She sighed and was quiet for a minute. “If you do well in a world where there are white people,” she said, “you will never doubt it. If you stay among your own…” She was quiet again and seemed to be lost in her thoughts. Then she spoke.
“Things are going to be different for you, I believe. Your father and I, we did what we could. But doors will open for you that never opened for us. You have to be ready to walk through them, and not look back. So you see, you must know that white people have no secret. They are just like us.” Then she spoke very slowly, each word sliced off and distinct: “They have no magic.”
It was when I saw Rafe’s hand tremble that I understood for the first time what my mother had said. And it was then that I felt rage, a searing, gut-piercing rage that I hadn’t been able to feel even at the worst of them — the bullies, the rednicks, the stupid rabble. I wanted to grab Rafe, to shake him until his teeth rattled, screaming at him, “They have no magic!”
Rafe was the best of us, the smartest, the bravest, the angriest, the most compassionate. But somewhere, deep in his soul, Rafe had ingested a lethal part of the myth, the one my mother so feared. He believed that these ordinary white men, these guys mopping their brows in the heat and wanting to get the hell back to their homes in Bethesda or Silver Spring, had powers beyond his ken, that he had to be afraid. (Though I could have torn out his fingernails one by one and he’d never admit it.)
My God, I thought, as I tried not to look at Rafe’s hands, this is the worst of it. The worst that white people do. It’s not the dogs or the fire hoses, the layer of fear that frosts the lives of so many of the brothers and sisters. It is that white thoughts pass through the layer of our skin like gas, through our pores, our nostrils, our eyes. They are inside our heads, where they make themselves giants.
We did OK that day. We gained some allies at Justice, made them understand that we weren’t just going to melt away, that they would have to deal with our movement. But beside the satisfaction I felt about my own performance, there was a cold lump inside me. Was it ourselves we had to fight most of all? Could an army of people with giants inside their heads ever make the walls come tumbling down?
I’m a sound sleeper; I was always able to drop right off, even with the tear gas still clinging to my body. Rafe says I’d sleep through Judgment Day. But that night I couldn’t sleep. I walked around and around my little room, worrying about those giants. I had been so sure no one could turn us back. But now —
And then I thought of Rosa Parks. One ordinary Negro woman who said no. No, I won’t move to the back of the bus. Not an activist, not a philosopher, just one ordinary person who said, No, no to your whole system. No, I won’t move to the back of the bus.
How was she able to do that? From what well of strength did it come? This ordinary, middle-aged woman, and she started the whole thing, the Montgomery bus boycott, with one word. No. From what well of strength did that word come?
I never figured it out. But I could sleep, after that, because it was there. It was there. It was strong enough to kill the giants inside our heads. And they had to die — they had to — if we were ever going to be whole. If I’m a writer, can I kill them even faster than I could if I stay on the course of action? I’m good at organizing, I know that. I have the skills, I know how to talk to white people. But as a writer, can I reach much further, reach all the way across the world?
If I can, then I know the course I must follow. But what sort of talent do I really have? I read James Baldwin, and he makes me want to pack my pens and tiptoe away. He is so eloquent, he has so much anger. Mine is a different voice, thinner, smaller. But maybe I can grow. I’m only twenty-four. I hope so. Because I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Mary sat in the third row of the State Department auditorium, waiting for John F. Kennedy to appear. She was no longer a stranger; several reporters nodded to her as she entered. She had been around long enough to be recognized, and she had been in the Oval Office. Reporters traipsed in for photo ops with heads of state or delegations from labor or the arts or boys’ clubs, hoping to get a newsworthy quote from the president. They rarely did. Kennedy was too savvy to let juicy nuggets out unless he wanted them out. But now and then they’d get a quip to use in a political roundup column, or to repeat at a dinner party, thus letting their hosts marvel at their intimacy with the President of the United States. Jay was standing with the photographers, adding to his by now considerable portfolio on JFK. Charlie Layhmer liked running the pictures, because Blade readers were as fascinated as everyone else with the stylish young president, whether they agreed with him or not.
A door opened, and John Kennedy walked in, with his usual briskness and grace. There was something so American about him, Mary thought, a jaunty confidence that was somehow right for the country that had won the Second World War and now stood astride the earth like a colossus, everywhere triumphant. It was right that such a country have a president like Kennedy.
When she had gotten over simply being struck with awe at seeing the president in the flesh, she could look at him analytically. He was at his best in the press conferences, because he was so good at thinking on his feet. He had an amazing command of facts, and he was as quick with an ad-lib as many a stand-up comedian. When you read the transcript of one of his conferences, it did not seem so remarkable; you had to be there. It was the personality and the presence that made it seem so.
The New York Times asked about the possibility of pulling American advisers out of Vietnam. Kennedy said he hoped to start doing so by the end of the year, but he would have to wait and see how things went over the next few months. Reuters asked about the trade talks in Geneva, and the LA Times about the lease on Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Then, with at least a dozen other reporters, Mary raised her hand and called out, “Mr. President!” not expecting to be heard. He saw her and nodded in her direction.
“Mr. President, are you going to ask Congress for new civil rights legislation, in view of recent developments in the South?”
God, she’d gotten it out, and it even sounded coher
ent.
He said that he was considering several new proposals, which would be decided on in a few days. Mary scribbled furiously.
“I would hope that we would be able to develop, ah, some formulas so that those who feel themselves, or who are as a matter of fact, denied legal rights, would have a remedy. As it is today, in many cases they do not have a remedy, and therefore they take to the streets and we have the kind of incident they have in Birmingham.”
The next questioner said that some students in California were upset because a $1,000-a-plate dinner he was going to was displacing their prom. Kennedy grinned and said if satisfactory arrangements could not be made for the prom, he’d go to California another time.
As she and Jay walked out to the car, Mary said, “Would it be really bush to say that President Kennedy told the Blade he was thinking of sending new legislation on civil rights?”
“Why would it be?”
“The Times doesn’t do it.”
“We’re not the Times. Charlie would piss in his pants to have everybody know the president answered one of his reporters’ questions.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
He turned out to be right. Charlie told her to write a little sidebar about asking the question, which would run with a picture of her that Jay had snapped. Several reporters even congratulated her as they gathered for the social staff meeting the editor had called.
They met, as usual, in the storage room, and its lone window had a panoramic view of the neon sign on the building next door that flashed SAHARA ROOM. The young staff members were fond of the bar’s owner, Jules Galliano, because he served cheap, watered-down beer and stayed open after hours for their union organizing meetings, which went nowhere. The manner in which Jules had acquired the Sahara Room was sacred writ around the paper. It was said that he had been walking down Main Street one day when the awning on Dudley’s Hardware came crashing down, striking Jules on the shoulder. Jules knew manna from heaven when he saw it, and he fell to the ground, moaning piteously. The store settled out of court, giving Jules a stake to bribe somebody to get a liquor license. It was said that he was not averse to writing a number now and then, but he never took money from Blade employees. Jules’s dog, an irascible mongrel, had bitten Charlie Layhmer one night in a fit of pique, and Charlie had never forgiven Jules. So Jules was careful.
