Grace

by Robert Ward

  Buddy must have sensed it, too, because his walk to the center of the street took him longer than I would have expected. He wasn’t exactly frightened—God knows he had never had any reason to be afraid of me—but there was something tentative in his stride now. And a little hitch in his walk, a hint of indecision and confusion. I could sense it all the way up on the porch. He was thinking, But this isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. Ward isn’t supposed to yell back.

  My God, I thought, he is actually unsure of himself. Maybe even scared.

  But it was only for a second. His history of dominating me went back too far for him to really feel any significant fear. I saw him suck in his breath and smile up at me. Now, standing there in the very center of Singer Avenue, he shaded his eyes with his big right hand and crowed:

  “You’re a chicken shit, and your grandmother fucks niggers.” I waited for a brief second, feeling an insane pressure building in me. Then I let out a cry, a crazed, lunatic battle cry: “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  And I tore down the three wooden porch steps, picked up speed on the top sidewalk, then ignored the cement steps altogether and instead made a running, flying leap down Grace’s grass hill, crossed the pavement, and ran into the street, barely keeping my footing.

  I kept right on running and screaming until I slammed my head into Buddy Watkins’s stomach.

  He gave out a loud groan and fell straight backward, his head bouncing on the concrete as I landed on top of him.

  It was only a second before I came to my senses. Good Lord, what had I done?

  If he ever got up, he was going to kill me.

  Okay, then, that’s easy: he must never, ever get up.

  I threw myself on his chest as he looked up at me, his blue face and pop eyes reflecting the agony of fighting for air.

  I took no pity on him.

  I hated him, and I wanted to kill him.

  In full sight of his big brother, Nelson, who looked so astonished at what had transpired that he did nothing at all to help him, I grabbed Buddy’s ears and began to smash his head on the street. And each time it hit, I screamed:

  “You got something to say now, Buddy?” Bash.

  “You want to tell me something about my family now?” Bash.

  “How come, Buddy?” Bash.

  Buddy Watkins was crying, screaming, in total terror … and I was gone … mad, insane. All the frustrations and agonies of my parents’ crack-up, Grace’s confusions, and my own cowardice were being wiped out in one violent act.

  Or so I thought … if I thought anything at all. But suddenly I felt someone pulling at me.

  “Son, son, this isn’t the way. No, Rob, no …”

  I turned and to my horror felt the huge hands of the Reverend Gibson pulling me off Buddy. Behind him was Grace, her mouth hanging wide open, and behind her, up the steps, on the lawn and on the porch were the Negroes who had come to my grandmother’s house for their nonviolent protest meeting.

  Dazed and half-crazy, I let Dr. Gibson pull me away from Buddy, who was bleeding from his mouth and from the back of his head.

  For a second I panicked, thinking I had killed him. But he made it to all fours, then crawled across the street toward Nelson, who looked down at him with disgust and disbelief.

  Dr. Gibson led me slowly back toward Grace’s house now. I felt confused, exhausted …

  Who was that who had run down the hill like a madman?

  It couldn’t have been me. I was a nice, bookish boy, sweet-natured and thoughtful.

  But the look of huge disappointment on Grace’s face told me that it was none other than myself.

  “How could you?” she said. “How could you?”

  I had never seen her so furious, so humiliated. I thought for a second that she would do the unthinkable and slap me.

  “You … you go right up to the bathroom and clean yourself up, mister,” she said to me through pressed lips. “And you stay there until I come and talk to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. He was saying things about you and …”

  “Go!” she said. “And be quick about it.”

  I went. Quickly.

  It would be a lie to say that I felt no pride in attacking Buddy Watkins. Indeed, it was probably a signal moment in my life. For despite all the proclamations of the new sensitive man, physical courage is the dream of every man I’ve ever met, no matter how intellectual, no matter how artistic, no matter how weak or strong, no matter how committed to nonviolence. No man can bear to think himself a coward, especially when matters of honor are on the line.

  I knew all this at age fifteen, knew it intuitively, and yet I also aspired to a higher goal, the goal of nonviolence, because I also understood the wisdom of what Gandhi wrote:

  “It is the law of love that rules mankind. Had violence, i.e., hate, ruled us, we should have become extinct long ago.”

  This I also knew at fifteen, and I learned its true spirit in the person I loved and admired most, Grace.

  As I sat in her bathroom, wiping the dirt and grime from my face and cleaning my scraped-up knees, I felt cheated. I had heard other boys brag about the day they overcame fear, the day of their coming-of-age, and I wanted to revel in what I had done to my enemy. (And he was my enemy, of that I had no doubt.) Not only that, but I had done it for a righteous cause, my own good name and that of my grandmother and not the least to avenge what he had said about Negroes, whom I considered far and away higher and greater people in every way than the Watkins brothers and their white-trash neighbors.

  But my victory was hollow.

  I knew as I sat there listening to the meeting dying down that I had revealed myself to be nothing more than a self-indulgent white man. I had humiliated my grandmother, and embarrassed and maybe even endangered the valiant Negroes who had dared come to this cracker neighborhood … and all to prove my own dubious manhood.

  And so instead of reveling in my day of glory, the day every good and sensitive boy secretly dreams of, “the day I bashed the bully,” I sat in my grandmother’s room and wept.

  Tears rolled down my cheeks in an unending flow, and I felt such a mass of adrenaline and confusion and pride and self-disgust and, most of all, shame for embarrassing Grace—who had, I knew, overcome a huge mental block of her own to commit to the Reverend Gibson and Sean Hunter—that I felt almost more tortured than I had before I made my crazy dash down the hill.

  “ ‘Think with a pure mind, live right,’ “ Grace once quoted the Buddha to me. But what was right?

  I knew the answer to that question … knew it all too well. The answer was that I would never know. All was confusion and anarchy in my soul.

  Finally, the last person left, and then I heard my tired, bruised, and humiliated grandmother coming slowly up the steps toward me. Tears streamed down my face.

  I didn’t know how to face her. I knew that she hated me now, that she was the last adult who had cared for me, and that when she opened that door, she was going to tell me that she was through with me, that I had disappointed her just as I had disappointed my parents.

  I was alone in the world, and what’s more I was so confused, so incapable of doing the right thing, that I deserved to be alone.

  My grandmother opened the door and stared at me.

  I looked up at her and started to cry again, and then felt like a fool. I was too old to cry, too sensitive, too weak …

  “I’m sorry, Grace,” I said. “I don’t blame you if you hate me.”

  She shook her head and stared through me.

  “What on earth came over you?”

  “I don’t know … I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and I was going to do it, but then something happened inside me…. I couldn’t control it … it was like a runaway train … and I …”

  I cried again.

  “I’m just no good,” I said. “No matter what I do, it’s wrong.” I slumped down on the side of the tub, and my grandmother stood above me.
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br />   She handed me a towel. “Wipe off your face,” she said. I did it, and sucked in my breath.

  “I’ll go home tonight,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m just no damned good.”

  “That’s not true at all, honey,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, it is. You … you’re good. You take your time, you make up your mind, and then you do the right thing.”

  I looked up at Grace, and she smiled down at me.

  “And why do you think I’m like that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve always been that way, I guess. I mean I know you have faults and all that … but really, I think it comes down to the fact that you’re good and I’m a mess…. I don’t even do the right thing when I know what it is.”

  There was some self-pity in what I said, but on the whole I felt that I was being sincere. I was lost. And I saw no way out of the confusion.

  Grace must have sensed it, too, for she smiled slightly.

  “You’re a very good and kind person,” she said. “And you’re very wrong about me.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not,” I said. “Everyone knows how good you are. Dad told me you’re the best person he’s ever known. Sue, too …”

  “They’re prejudiced.” She laughed. “No, the truth is not very glorious, I’m afraid. I know what people think about me. I’m a saint. I’m Baltimore’s answer to Eleanor Roosevelt. But all that proves is how successful I’ve been in creating an image for myself.”

  I started to disagree with her, but something stopped me. It occurred to me that I’d been having those very same doubts about her myself.

  Just a few days before in church, Grace had failed to back Sean Hunter. I remembered accusing her of forsaking civil rights so she could grab power and get her trip to England.

  I thought of the absolute weirdness on the garage rooftops.

  “Come downstairs,” she said. “I think it’s time you heard the truth.”

  I got up slowly and followed her. I felt my throat grow dry. After all we’d both been through lately, I didn’t know if I could stand any more truth.

  Grace at 19

  G race sat under her antique reading lamp, and I sat across the room in the big green overstuffed chair.

  She put her tired feet up on the satin footstool Sue had made for her and began to talk. Her voice was firm, but there was a strain in it, as though she had finally willed herself to tell me something, though at great personal cost.

  “This all happened in a very different world,” she said. “The past … when I was only a year older than you, sixteen.” She cleared her throat and went on:

  “It all began in the summer of 1920 when my family and I were living over on Fairmont Avenue. My father and mother worked at Hampden-Woodberry Mills off the Falls Road. Together they were working many hours, but they were doing fine. As you may have heard when you were so busy eavesdropping on Dr. Brooks and me the other day, I had a tutor for a while.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  Grace raised her eyebrows, then continued:

  “Anyway, this story really begins when my father was laid off, for drinking. I know I told Dr. Brooks that my father had been injured, and it was true. He’d hurt his arm in a press, but it was because he was drunk. Shortly after, my mother took sick, probably from overwork trying to keep the family together, so I was forced to go to work in the mills. It was a hard job, very hard, and I hated it. Sewing, working twelve hours a day … just terrible. And yet the tutor I had, Caroline Wright, was a wonderful woman, far better than anyone I’d encountered in the public school system. She encouraged me, taught me math and English…. I still remember the books she got me to read that year as if it was yesterday … Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and they all had a tremendous effect on me. I mean they were very different books, of course, but all three of them were very critical of middle-class society … the stifling and boring compromises people made so they could be part of the herd. You’ve talked to me a lot about conformity … and how much you hate it … and believe you me, I understand only too well, dear, because in those days I was sure I would have to conform to ever fit in. And I hated it, too. You best believe, I didn’t plan on becoming some housewife who gives up her dreams and ends up like a female version of George Babbitt. And there were other things going on then as well … terrible things that seemed to me to be the real price of conformity. There were the A. Mitchell Palmer raids on so-called Communists. My father read about them every day from the Sun to us. Palmer was the U.S. attorney general, and he spent all his time ‘exposing Communists.’ “

  “I’ve read about him in history,” I said. “He reminded me of Senator McCarthy.”

  “Exactly the same kind of animal,” my grandmother said. “A hypocrite and a grandstander. He constantly warned us all that the country was going Red … which couldn’t have been any more absurd in 1920. Though I was always taught to be charitable and to love my neighbor, the truth is I hated him and all he stood for … and he wasn’t the only one. This was also the time when Sacco and Vanzetti were being railroaded for a holdup in Boston. Of course, they both had airtight alibis, but in those days, anyone who appeared to be a Red was automatically suspicious. And so they were arrested…. There was a great outrage about it in progressive circles. And my tutor, Caroline, was very much in those circles. Of course she was circumspect about it all. She had gotten her job through one of the richest women in Baltimore, and she didn’t want to be tagged a Socialist herself … but there was a real affection between us, and once I expressed my own feelings of outrage about the unfairness of the world, Caroline let down her guard and began to teach me history in a totally new way. And believe you me, it wasn’t history as taught in Baltimore schools. She taught me how the Indians had befriended the original Pilgrims, only to be slaughtered by them. She taught me how J. P. Morgan swindled and smashed his enemies on the way to creating his great fortune. And she taught me how women had been systematically taught not to think about any of these things or even of their own rights. She was an ardent admirer of Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes. You must remember this was 1920, the year women got the right to vote, and there was a great to-do about it, oh, yes indeed. The very first demonstrations of any kind at the White House were held by women. Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, smiling.

  “Well, my dear grandson, all this was as exciting to me as what’s going in our country now is to you. You best believe it. And finally, Caroline taught me about what she called the worst crime committed by any people—slavery, and the subjugation, organized murder, and destruction of the Negro races.”

  My grandmother stopped then, shook her head, and shut her eyes.

  “As you get older, honey, your body falls apart, and you forget where you put your glasses and the darn house keys, but the past becomes so clear. You can see it, hear the voices of people you haven’t seen in years … just like they were standing by your side.”

  She smiled and opened her eyes. And looked at me sharply.

  “Like you, I was eager and idealistic … and what my tutor taught me shook my whole being. I was shocked, horrified … and when I learned about these inequities I wanted to strike them from the earth. If poor people had to suffer, like my own parents had suffered, then there should be no more millionaires. If anyone touched another Indian’s land, I would have him jailed for a hundred years. And, needless to say, if anyone said women couldn’t vote, they were idiots, my sworn and total enemies. Never was one to go halfway. But most of all, I was affected by what Caroline told me about Negroes. She was a great teacher, had an ability to make history live. She told me of the slave narratives she’d read…. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them …”

  Somewhat guiltily, I shook my head.

  “Well, you should be, honey,” Grace said. “You’ll never fully understand what’s going o
n now until you understand what terrible things Negroes have had to go up against from the first days they were brought to this country in chains. They were beaten, hung, shot, their bodies cut in two. And, I’m sad to say, things like this happened right here in good old Maryland, too. Their children were taken from them and sold, and if they protested, they were murdered. When I learned about such infamy, my heart went out to those people, and I promised Caroline and myself that if ever I had a chance to help even one of them, I would do it, no matter what.

  “It was such an exciting time for me. That year, Caroline and I lived in our own little dream world. Though I worked hard at the mill, I was in a constant state of intellectual excitement at learning what I took to be the whole truth and nothing but. She even began to teach me mythology, some of which I had learned from my mother … but this was different. Caroline had gone to New York and attended salons in Greenwich Village, and there she’d met people who studied the secret meanings of symbols and what she called ‘poetic reality.’ Soon I was reading poets and understanding myths and legends in a whole new way. I loved it all, ate it right up, I’ll tell you. I felt that at every session with her I was on the brink of something new, impossibly exciting. But even so, my schedule got me run-down. It was all too much for a girl of my age, sixteen. Endless work and endless study and not much sleep in between. Finally, I took sick, very sick, with a strep throat first and then, because it wasn’t treated properly, I came down with rheumatic fever. It was touch and go for a while. I had spiking fevers of a hundred and five, and terrible, terrible pains in my joints … especially in my arms … truly unbearable. What was worse was that my parents were themselves sick, my mother with a serious case of pneumonia and my father … well, my father was sick from drink. Anyway, my parents had one other child, my brother, Bill, whom you’ve never met, because as soon as he could get about on his own, at age sixteen, he ran away to live in Texas and never returned. I hear from him once every year, at Christmas. But he was a boy, the only boy, so he was the one my parents pinned their hopes on.”