by Robert Ward
I looked at her once beautiful face, and I felt things breaking inside of my chest.
“Are you and Dad gonna …” I couldn’t finish.
“Get a divorce? I don’t know. I don’t know about anything. You … you should go back to Gracie’s for a while. I mean while we sort things out.”
“Okay,” I said.
I got up from the chair.
“You don’t have to go now,” she said. “You could eat dinner here. It’ll just be the two of us, you can count on that.”
“Sure,” I said.
I sat back down, and suddenly I started laughing. I felt like a puppet, popping up absurdly, then collapsing in a heap.
“We’ll have dinner together,” my mother said. “It’ll be nice.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good.”
I looked up at the clock, figuring exactly how long I’d have to stay.
The shock of my family’s overnight disintegration left me reeling, and yet I was strangely functional. Instead of freaking out I performed a kind of emotional lobotomy on myself. I guess the classic psychoanalytic term is “denial.”
In short, rather than fall apart, I not so simply told myself a little story as I left that night. I remember saying to my imaginary friend Warren, “Well, Warren, old friend, it’s you and me and Grace now. (And let’s just hope she hasn’t completely copped out, too.) Because Rob and Shirl have lost it. They’re finished. The family is dead, and we’ve got to move on.”
The cynical, wise-guy voice I used was an amalgam of old movie voices, tough guys on television. I was some kind of fifteen-year-old Boston Blackie or Bogart’s Marlowe. I kept the feeling inside me (like some giant crater of black ash that threatened to engulf me) at bay by jiving with myself in heroic movie voices.
I know now, of course, that this desperate and purely intuitive strategy could only work for so long … that, in fact, by turning myself into a wise guy, by denying the pain, I was only buying myself time. In the end, when bad things happen to us, we pay; and when your family cracks up, you pay for the rest of your life.
You never really trust people again, never really believe they are going to hang around. From that day forward, my life has been a battle to regain trust. It’s a battle I’m still fighting … and to be honest, I don’t know if I’ll win it or not.
But I’m jumping ahead. Way ahead. Which is, a wise friend once told me, another problem….
That night, as I made my way back to Grace’s, I didn’t feel the pain directly. I was simply glad to be out of my home, happy I had some place to go.
I told myself that I wasn’t going back home again. If they wanted to go mad, they could, but I wouldn’t let them get to me. No way, no way …
I lay in bed that night and told myself I would keep at least one of my new resolves. Maybe I couldn’t help myself by getting into moral complexities, but I’d still work hard in school, become brilliant and successful, and then all my relatives would be so sorry they’d messed with me….
Bobby Ward, boy genius.
To that end I spent the next days doing my schoolwork, losing myself in history, math, English. It was Thursday afternoon, and I’d just seen the first fruits of my labor. I’d received an A on a short essay I’d written on Silas Marner. I carried it home as a badge of my new seriousness in school. I knew that Grace would love it and would tell me I was wonderful … the “perfect grandson” … words, frankly, I was dying to hear.
I burst into her house, paper in hand, and was shocked to see a huge Negro man sitting in Grace’s old green reading chair, a copy of Gandhi’s works in his massive hands.
When he saw me, he stood up and smiled, and I must have looked like an idiot. I’m certain my jaw dropped flat-open.
“You must be Robert, Grace’s grandson,” he said. “Right,” I said.
“I’m the Reverend Josiah Gibson,” he said, “from African Methodist. Just come to pay a visit to your grandmother, and she’s been nice enough to invite me to stay for dinner. She’s gone up to the market to get some crab-meat.”
“Oh,” I said, brilliantly. “That’s nice.”
Everything about the Reverend Gibson was larger than life. He looked to me like Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the Baltimore Colts’ great defensive tackle, which turned out not to be such a wild guess after all, because the minister had played college ball at his alma mater, Morgan State, the Negro college that was only five blocks from my parents’ home.
He frowned at the paper I was waving in my hand.
“What do you have there, son?”
“Oh, this? Just a little essay I wrote for English class. On Silas Marner.” “Is that an A I see emblazoned on the top?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Good for you. Did you like the book?”
“I liked getting it read.”
He laughed in a generous way.
“Good answer. I read old Silas when I was in school, too. It’s about the power of love, its regenerative and spiritual power, but the thing I remember best is it’s about a hundred pages too long.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. The minister laughed with me, and I felt his warm presence sending out sparks in the nearly dark room.
“Guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” he said.
“Yeah, sort of.”
He began to pace the room then, and I swear the old floorboards shook.
“Well, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but your grandmother’s a pretty well-known lady in church circles.”
I smiled and nodded.
“Fact is,” he said, “when it comes to politics and church matters, there’s no one who can make a difference quite like your grandmother—”
Just then, Grace appeared carrying a bag with celery stalks sticking out. I quickly went and took it from her.
“The reverend was just telling me how well known you are,” I said.
“So I heard,” she said. “Now Reverend Gibson, if you are going to brainwash my only grandson into thinking his grandmother is some kind of saint—”
“Listen to you,” Dr. Gibson said. “A typical Methodist.”
“What on earth does that mean.” my grandmother asked. “Hide your light under a bushel,” he said. “Well, I never,” my grandmother said.
“Mrs. Ward, you know I’m telling the truth,” Reverend Gibson said. “Now you take the Catholic Church, for example. What do they do when they want to build a monument to God? They build the Sistine chapel in Rome, that’s what. Full of magnificent art, fantastic architecture, a towering monument to their faith in the Lord.”
“No. A towering monument to their huge Catholic egos,” Grace said.
The minister laughed with delight and hopped on one foot. The floor shook.
“You’re making my point for me, Grace,” he said. “You see, as Methodists we disdain shows of ego. Our churches are simple country church houses by comparison. Even our oldest churches, like First or Lovely Lane, are modest affairs compared to the Catholics’.”
“Which is the way it should be,” Grace said. “We’re not trying to impress the world … all that material wealth … it’s got nothing to do with faith. Quite the opposite.”
“True,” Dr. Gibson said. “But sometimes our modesty gets the best of us.
“Anyone who stands up for others like you do should still be leading the troops into battle, not acting like a meek little lamb. Now I don’t love the Catholic Church and I happen to agree with you that their love of worldly power and wealth has often led them astray, but still, if they had a warrior like Grace Ward working for them, they would know exactly how best to use her. Whereas we modest, unassuming Methodists … we’re afraid to show off our talents for fear of being thought vain. How many times have you heard a Methodist say, ‘Don’t be a show-off,’ or ‘Let your light glow warm but low.’
“Or ‘The meek will inherit the earth,’ “ I said, laughing.
My grandmother shot me a look.
“And with
good reason,” she countered. “Vanity is a sin. And to my mind, not a small one. It leads to the love and worship of appearances rather than truth.”
“Yes, well and good, but losing one’s passion is a bigger one,” the minister said, and smacked his huge fist into his hand. “And we Methodists are prone to that one. We try so hard to be modest and spiritually pure that we forget that Jesus Christ himself threw the moneylenders out of the temple. Yes, he did! For he was a passionate man!”
The Reverend Gibson smacked his big fist into his palm again, and I stood there in total silence. I had never thought about the issues he was bringing up, but I recognized them at once as essentially true. All my life I’d been told not to be too loud, not to make waves, to be modest, useful, a helper. Never once in my life had anyone said to me, “You’re brilliant. You’re smart. Take the bull by the horns and lead.”
Modesty—quiet, decent, boring, unmemorable modesty—was the Methodists’ watchword.
And where did it get you, I thought? My father goes out with some woman at the office named Helen who tells him he’s a god. Maybe that was it … maybe my father had gotten tired of being so damned modest.
My grandmother looked at me.
“If you’ll be so kind as to bring that food into the kitchen, I’ll make us all some dinner. And we can hear Reverend Gibson here enlighten us some more on the wonders of the Catholic Church!”
I looked at Dr. Gibson to see if he had taken offense, but on the contrary he was smiling.
“Not my intent at all,” he said. “Just wanted to discourse on the virtues of blowing one’s own horn and keeping passion alive. Praise God!”
My grandmother made a harrumph kind of noise and led me into the kitchen. Dr. Gibson followed. I could hear him chuckling. He seemed the kind of man who enjoyed upsetting the applecart, and I didn’t quite know what to make of him. Nor, I think, did Grace.
As Grace made dinner, the Reverend Gibson smiled and leaned his huge frame in the kitchen doorway, completely blocking out the view into the dining room. I sat at the kitchen table shucking peas.
“I bet young Robert here has inherited some of his writing talent from you,” the minister said, winking at me. “I’ve read your essays in the church paper.”
My grandmother blushed, then looked at me.
“What’s he talking about, honey?” she said as she took a plate of her crab cakes from the icebox.
“I got an A on my Silas Marner essay in English,” I said.
“That’s great!” she said. “You certainly worked hard on it.”
She came over and kissed me on the head, then turned toward Dr. Gibson.
“I’m very proud of this young man,” she said. “He’s got a lot of artistic ability.”
“Yeah, I’m going to be the next Hemingway,” I said, rolling my eyes. I felt my cheeks redden. But Dr. Gibson completely ignored my discomfort and looked at me with his big luminous green eyes.
“If you have any talent, you should push it to the limit,” he said. “To be the best you can you have to make demands of yourself. I do some writing myself, for the church and for various movement papers, and I know how hard it can be.”
“Really,” I said, “Is it hard for you, too?”
“Writing is always hard,” he said, “but I’ll tell you a secret. I find its difficulty is in direct proportion to what I have to say.”
“How do you mean?” my grandmother said.
Dr. Gibson sat down at the table and picked up some pea pods. They disappeared in his hands, then three popped out at once and plopped onto the plate.
“Well, take Bobby’s English project, Silas Marner. When I read that back in school, I found it dreary reading, so writing about that would be drudge work. But when I’m writing something that I feel passionate about, like, say, integration, and what’s going on with voter registration down South … well, then, it’s not half as hard. Because I’ve got a passion for the subject, I can’t wait to share it, and sometimes the words just roll right out.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
But my grandmother shook her head.
“Yes, I can see your point, but passion for your words can create some of its own problems.”
“Really?” Dr. Gibson said. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
My grandmother stopped cooking for what seemed like a long time, and her face was thoughtful. When she finally spoke, I felt it was as if some great effort was being expended.
“The problem with passion is that anybody can claim it,” she said.
She stopped then, and in that moment she looked every bit her age.
“Some of the most despicable people I have ever known overflowed with passion,” she said. “And some of the worst crimes have been committed in its name.”
She stared at the floor and seemed to be lost in thought. There was a long, uneasy silence.
I felt dizzy, confused. Not by what she had said but by the anger in her voice.
“Yeah,” I said finally, to break the silence. “Look at the Nazis. They were really passionate about genocide.”
“I would disagree with you there,” said Dr. Gibson. “I think real passion is always guided by reason. Bigots are filled with anger and hatred, but that, to my mind, is not passion at all. Duke Ellington is a passionate man. Adolf Hitler was an insane man. That’s the difference.”
My grandmother stirred the vegetables on the stove and smiled at him, a kindly but nevertheless challenging smile.
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “But there’s a thin line between passion and insanity. We’ve seen that in the arts for years. Take van Gogh. He was a passionate genius, but he was also insane. He cut off his ear and eventually committed suicide.”
“Because no one bought his paintings, and he was alone,” Dr. Gibson said. “No one appreciated him. That’s too much to ask of anyone. Not even a great artist can live in the world alone. We need each other as brothers and sisters.”
I thought I knew where he was going. It was obvious the minister was steering the conversation back to the civil rights movement … just as obvious as the fact that Grace was steering the conversation in the opposite direction.
Later on, I followed the two of them into the dining room and helped myself to my grandmother’s cooking, but that night I scarcely tasted the food. The Reverend Gibson told my grandmother that he had been in touch with the great civil rights leaders Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King and that the movement was spreading almost faster than the leaders’ ability to chart it.
He talked about how Rosa Parks had started the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, how she had called her friend E. D. Nixon, president of the Pullman porters’ union, and a white lawyer named Durr, and how everyone agreed she was the perfect person to test the laws of Montgomery. My grandmother and I were fascinated.
The Reverend Gibson went on to discuss the movement’s different strategies for different states, how Alabama’s laws varied from Mississippi’s, and what might happen when demonstrations erupted in each state. I sat there dumbfounded, listening without opening my mouth. My grandmother mainly listened as well, but when she did speak, she held her own and seemed to understand complex legal strategies that left me in the dust.
To say that I was surprised by what I heard that night would be too tame a description. I realized that I knew nothing at all about the civil rights movement and next to nothing about Negroes. Indeed, as I listened to Dr. Gibson explaining court decisions and the kinds of planning and coalitions the black leaders had formed and how they had to anticipate what President Kennedy might do (and how little he had actually done), it occurred to me that “civil rights” was too bland a phrase for their struggle, that what Gibson was describing was nothing less than a strategy for war. It so happened that I was studying the American Civil War in school that semester, and what I was hearing here was not unlike that conflict. As I sat there eating crab cakes and helping myself to seconds of mashed potatoes,
I began to understand for the first time that the Civil War and the current struggle were all part of a continuum, that Negroes were still in many ways “slaves.” Negroes were fighting a battle that had begun when they were brought to this country in chains from Africa, a fight for their dignity, their families, their very lives. And they were fighting a war in which the other side had most of the money, all the guns, truncheons, fire hoses, and Jim Crow laws on their side. The Negro generals—Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Ralph Abernathy, and many others I didn’t know—had only their own courage, cunning, and passion.
To win this war, Negroes not only had to have mind-boggling courage; they also had to be smarter than whites.
That thought was like cold water in my face. Everyone knew that Negroes were brave, but few whites understood that they also had to be more intelligent than the white lawmakers, too—smarter than college-educated lawyers, smarter than sharpie businessmen, and smarter than savvy, racist politicians.
Smart like the Reverend Gibson was smart.
I sat there silent, learning more in one night than I had in a lifetime about my black brothers and sisters. And by the time dessert was served, I was in awe of their brains and courage. Now I understood, all at once, how amazing the nonviolent movement really was. How truly great King and Abernathy and all the others were….
As the evening wore on, we moved into the living room, and Grace poured Dr. Gibson coffee.
“Grace, this has been a wonderful evening,” he said, his eyes shining. “It’s heartening to meet a person with a fine mind and a passionate spirit.”
They both smiled at his reference to their short philosophical debate.
“You know,” Dr. Gibson continued, “Jesus Christ was Himself a fighter for the underdog. I have even heard some people say He was a revolutionary.”
Grace smiled.
“I’ve heard that, too,” she said, “but it’s the kind of line usually spouted by Communists.”
They both laughed again, but I was sure now that Dr. Gibson was feeling her out. He wanted to ask something of her, some favor … but what would it be?
I didn’t have to wait long.
