Grace

by Robert Ward

  Now it was my turn to get out of the chair. I paced around, trying to absorb what she was saying.

  “You mean a ghost? Wingate’s ghost? Are you telling me that’s what I saw that night in the hallway?”

  “I’m afraid so, honey. Yes. What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know. A trick of light. The moon through the blinds. Or maybe we ate one too many crab cakes.”

  “At first I thought it was a dream, but it’s been a long time and I’m usually awake enough to kind of know what’s going on.”

  Naturally, I leaped on that:

  “But you’re not sure. Which means it could be a dream.”

  “Yes, I guess … but I feel his hand on mine. I felt him lead me to the garage.”

  “But that’s crazy. Ghosts only exist in stories and the movies.”

  “Well, there is one other explanation,” Grace said. “I could be stark raving mad.”

  I felt a chill go through me when she said that. It was the exact thought I’d had only a few days ago.

  “I don’t know anything about madness. Only maybe Dad … in the bathroom.”

  I stopped then. We’d never discussed my father.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You haven’t betrayed any confidences. I wish … Lord, I wish I could help him.”

  “But when Dad gets like that, it seems like craziness. You’re calm and collected. You sit there and tell me you’ve seen a ghost and … you sound sane.”

  “I suppose so,” she said. “But do I act sane when it happens?”

  She had me there.

  “At my worst moments, I’ve even thought, Bobby, that I’ve passed on my madness to your father. I felt so terrible about it that I secretly went to a psychiatrist a few years back.”

  “You did?” Grace lying on a psychiatrist’s couch? It seemed impossible.

  “He told me that what your father had was something else entirely. He thought I had invented a ghost to torture myself for my guilt about Wingate’s death.”

  I stopped pacing then.

  “That sounds right to me,” I said, “except for one thing—I saw something, too. And if you get involved with civil rights now, aren’t you putting yourself in danger all over again?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, then why?” I asked. “Why now?”

  “Because I had a sign,” she said. “A sign from God.” I felt a terrible sensation creeping over me. “What is it?”

  “You,” she said. “God sent me you to get me involved again. That must be it.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t say that to me. That makes me like Wingate.”

  “I know,” she said, and she was smiling. “It’s all come full circle. Now let me ask you something. Did you really think you could escape your troubles by moving in with me?”

  I said nothing for a long time. I was scared by what she had just said. Finally, though, her look compelled me to answer.

  “I guess I did,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” she said. But you may as well learn now that life is trouble, life is difficult, and the choices we make often backfire and lead to pain. And sometimes when a good person is struck dead early in life from a heart attack or cancer … or polio … life seems unfair. But the surest way I know of guaranteeing pain in your life is to pretend to an innocence you no longer possess. I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I’ve finally understood that’s what I was doing with Wingate. He may have been confused, and he may or may not have seen visions, but in his own way, the way that was right for him, he was becoming a man … and I was angry at him for leaving our little world of innocence and sweetness. Wingate understood Jesus when he said, ‘When I was a child, I spoketh as a child but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ My problem was that I was having a temper tantrum, the tantrum of a child who wants to return to an innocent state and is furious she must give up that innocence. But once innocence is gone, there’s no going back to it, Bobby. Better that you embrace the real world that is full of real dangers and real rewards, real pain and real joy.”

  I was overwhelmed by all she had told me. Much of it, I confess, washed over me, and it wasn’t until a good deal later that I understood it all. But there were two things I recognized even then. First, I had come to her house to try to extend my own childhood. Instead, I had found nothing but complexity and challenges.

  And second, that her young life seemed to be repeating itself in mine. And I didn’t want that kind of responsibility.

  “Look,” I said, “you can’t tell me that I’m a sign from God…. What if … what if something happens to you when we go on a demonstration? Then I’ll be guilty for my whole life just as you have been.”

  She smiled at me.

  “Listen, Bobby, you’ll have to take your chances out there on the street, and so will I. I have my own free will, and you have no responsibility at all for me. No more or less than you have for any other person in the world. We must behave as though we are all brothers and sisters … and when we don’t we’re wrong. I happen to feel that your coming to live here is a sign … but it’s my feeling, not yours. And you aren’t responsible for it. I risk what I risk because I must.”

  “That’s very fancy,” I said, “but I have to tell you that it still makes me very uncomfortable. Can’t you just say that you’re going out there to help the Negroes achieve equality because it’s the right thing to do and that’s the end of it?”

  “Bobby, you’re not a child anymore,” Grace said. “You must learn to both tell and hear the truth. And, honey bun, it ain’t always what you want to hear.”

  She smiled at me and opened her arms. And there was nothing to do but hug her … but it wasn’t the same kind of hug I’d given and received in the old days: the warm, reassuring kid hug, which made me feel that indeed everything was going to be fine.

  No, it was a troubled hug, a doubtful hug … maybe what you’d have to call my first adult hug.

  I wish I could tell you that I liked it … that I felt good about what I’d learned that day, that the truth had set me free … but that wouldn’t be true.

  No, truth had disturbed me greatly, and no hug or kiss or fairy tale was going to make it all go away.

  My grandmother, the wise and wonderfully complex woman that she was, could always sense my moods, and she put her hand on my cheek.

  “One more thing,” she said. “What you did to Buddy Watkins today?”

  “I’m really sorry about that,” I said. But she put her finger over my lips.

  “Don’t be. It was wrong, but as long as you did it, I’m glad you really knocked him for a loop. I’ve always wanted to see somebody do that to that kid. Nice going.”

  She smiled, then pulled away. I stood there, dazed, shaking my head.

  Grace at 23

  F our days later, Grace, the Reverend Gibson, and Sean Hunter met with Dr. Brooks at his rectory. Of course, I was dying to go as well, but there was no way a kid was going to be at that meeting. Instead, I did my part by inviting Howard Murray, his brother, and two other friends to play basketball with Ray Lane, Johnny Brandau, and me at the Waverly gym. They all showed up, and we ended up in a five-on-five full-court game that included white Waverly rednecks, North Avenue Negroes, and two Jewish kids from northwest Baltimore. The Harper brothers were there and Buddy Watkins walked in, and neither of them said a word. As for the other white kids, I noticed they all wanted Howard and his brother on his side … because they wanted to win. From that day on, and all through the ‘60s, Waverly Rec was interracial … and not a shot was fired.

  Meanwhile, at First Methodist Church, Dr. Gibson, Sean Hunter, and my grandmother walked into the Reverend Brooks’s office ready to lay out a list of their “concerns” … but Brooks had his own strategy, a preemptive strike designed to take the teeth out of the coalition’s demands.

  He sat behind the desk, smiling, and offered everyone tea, which they in their wisdom accepted. Then Dr. Brooks said
that he had thought it through and talked it over with several church board members, and they all agreed the church was living in the past and that Negroes should now sit wherever they wanted on Sundays or any other day. He was prepared to release an announcement to that effect and to mention it in his sermon on Sunday.

  He seemed very pleased at his own efforts. It was then that Sean Hunter spoke. He said that while this was all well and good, he wanted much more. He wanted the First Methodist Church and the Reverend Brooks to make statements that racism is wrong and that the church supported civil rights in spirit and in practice. And to illustrate what he meant, Sean Hunter asked Dr. Brooks to walk with Dr. Gibson and seven other groups of blacks and whites two weeks from now, when they would demonstrate at none other than my own parents’ shopping place, the brand-spanking-new Eastgate Shopping Center.

  Grace told me later that Brooks seemed shocked by the demands. He felt standing up for Negroes’ rights to sit where they wanted in church was practically a revolutionary act. But to actually go out there and walk with Negroes, and go to jail with Negroes … well, this was not the kind of thing he had gotten into the Methodist ministry for.

  He turned a bright red and looked at Grace for some kind of support.

  “Grace,” he said, his voice cracking. “Do you intend to … uh … demonstrate?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I expect to get arrested as well. The time has come for Christians to act like Christians and stand up for their beliefs. These people sitting here are my brothers and sisters in Christ, just as they’re yours…. We can’t turn our backs on their struggle and really call ourselves Christians.”

  “Well said, sister Grace,” Dr. Gibson added in his booming voice. “Let all of us who call ourselves Methodists stand up and be counted.”

  After a very long time staring at the whorls in his desk, Dr. Brooks said, “Well, of course, in theory I am with you. But I don’t work as an individual. I have people to see and to talk to about this.”

  Dr. Gibson smiled at him and put a huge hand across the desk, which Dr. Brooks at first shrank from, but then finally grasped.

  “Then let the talk begin, Dr. Brooks,” Dr. Gibson said. “And let the words you say be true and in the spirit of freedom. Remember, Jesus Christ was not a shrinking lamb, sir, He was a powerful force. He threw the moneylenders out of the temple. He fought and He died for our sins…. Some say that He was a revolutionary.”

  My grandmother gave him a very skeptical look when he said that … but as we came to know later, once Dr. Gibson got hold of a favorite metaphor, he let it work for him.

  At the end of that meeting, Dr. Brooks was covered in sweat. Laughing as hard as I’d ever seen her, Grace told me that evening she doubted if he had ever been in such a closed space with so many Negroes. He was terrified.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only emotion he felt. Two days after the meeting, he called my grandmother on the phone, which I happened to answer.

  “Hello, Bob, this is Dr. Brooks … uh, Wesley. No need for us to be so formal all the time. Is Grace at home?”

  “Yes, I’ll get her.”

  “Fine.”

  She was in the pantry, getting dinner ready. There was the smell of chicken gravy coming from the kitchen. I’d been hungry, but now I felt my stomach turn.

  “It’s the Reverend Brooks,” I said.

  She nodded and sat down slowly in the old phone nook. “Hello? Yes, I’m fine …”

  There was a long pause as she listened. I saw her sigh and put her hand up to her head.

  “I see,” she said at last.

  Another long pause. She pushed back a strand of her iron-gray hair. “Yes, I see. Of course … I understand your decision. Of course … I’ll abide by it. Good-bye.”

  I stood there looking at her, my heart racing.

  “Annette Swain will be representing the church in England this summer,” she said.

  “But that’s so unfair,” I said. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  “But isn’t there a vote?”

  “A board vote. And Dr. Brooks’s endorsement means everything.”

  “That creep,” I said. “He shouldn’t be allowed to be a minister at all.”

  “Bobby,” she said. “Don’t talk that way.”

  “But …”

  “He has his reasons. But he is going to say something about civil rights in the sermon. And we’re going to be handing out pamphlets about the demonstration at Eastgate Shopping Center. So we march on.”

  I went to her and put my arm around her shoulders.

  “I don’t understand. If he allowed all that, why isn’t he supporting you?

  “Because,” she said, “I embarrassed him by going into his office with Dr. Gibson and confronting him. This is personal, I’m afraid.”

  “Revenge,” I said. “Very Christian.”

  “No,” she said. “But very human.”

  In the following week, I readied myself for my first demonstration. My grandmother and I went to a special training session at Dunbar High School, a long way from Grace’s house in the black section of town. Three nights in a row we drove there in her old Studebaker, down the York Road, turned right at 33rd, and headed across town to Dunbar. There we met with over fifty other activists and learned the principles of nonviolence. We learned how to think of our goals, why it was important to sing (to inspire others and to block out our own fears), how to avoid injuries to your body if being hit (double up to protect ribs, hands over face to avoid injuries to the eyes).

  And ironically, given my experience with Buddy, we were broken into groups and taught how to respond to taunting. I remember a huge black man in a blue Baltimore Colts windbreaker standing one inch from me, screaming:

  “What’s your problem, nigger lover?

  “You’re worse than any nigger, white boy … “We’re gonna string you up first, boy.”

  I felt a fury as he screamed at me and an intense embarrassment. Though it was only play-acting, I think I felt one hundredth of what Negroes must feel every day of their lives. And it sickened me. But I knew, or at least I was pretty sure, I would stand up to it.

  But I was more worried for Grace. I winced as a middle-aged white woman screamed directly in her face:

  “What are you doing here, you old bitch?

  “You love niggers, lady? You ready to die for them?”

  I saw Grace stick out her jaw, trying to look defiant, unafraid, but to be honest, she looked fragile, like she very well might crumble … and I suddenly doubted her again. Maybe she was simply too old for this kind of action, or maybe … maybe the truth was that she had always been a parlor liberal, that she lacked the physical courage it took to get down and dirty in the streets.

  And, of course, I thought about her saying that my coming to her was a sign from God…. Man, to be honest, I appreciated her attempt to make me grow up, but I didn’t need that. And I was angry at her for laying it on me. Just as she must have been at Wingate.

  I tried to tell myself that the difference was that I wasn’t going to abandon her. I was going to be out there with her.

  But what would happen if she crumbled out there on the line? She might put other people at risk, and I knew she would never be able to see herself in the same light again.

  And I would never be able to see her in the same heroic light again.

  More important, if she couldn’t handle it, I would have to defend her, which was strictly forbidden. But what would I do if someone pushed or kicked her?

  I suddenly understood that nonviolence was so much more than mere physical bravery. I had to be brave enough to not strike back if I was hit, and brave enough to let her get hit, trampled, blasted with high-pressure hoses … whatever the cops used.

  During a break in the training, I walked over to the high school gym bleachers, deep in thought. How could I allow anyone to hurt her? She sat down next to me, small, fragile. Her arms looked like sticks.

  “What is it?” she said
.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know if you want to do this?”

  Her sweet face was open, not judging me harshly.

  “No, that’s not it. I don’t know if you should do this.”

  Now her eyes narrowed, and she stared at me intently.

  “Why?” she said. “Do you think I won’t hold up?”

  “No,” I lied. “It’s not that at all. I love you, and I don’t want you to be hurt.”

  She squeezed my wrist.

  “I can do this,” she said. “Believe me.”

  I stared at her, my heart racing, my mind filled with fear and doubt.

  “Okay,” I said. “Of course you can.”

  They must have been waiting for us all night, because we didn’t get back to Grace’s until after eleven o’clock. She pulled her Stude into the parking space, and we traipsed up the steps toward the bright, inviting lights of her house, both of us exhausted.

  But we never made it. Suddenly I felt someone pull me back, and I landed on the sidewalk. I looked up, confused, bleary-eyed, and saw Nelson Watkins standing above me. Buddy stood just behind him. They both had on black T-shirts, black Levi’s, and black garrison belts. All the better to hide themselves in the dark.

  “Look who’s coming home late,” Nelson said. “Out with your nigger friends?”

  Buddy Watkins quickly ran up the hill and blocked Grace’s way to the porch.

  “Mrs. Ward, the nigger’s friend,” he said.

  “You touch my grandmother, Buddy, and I’ll kill you,” I said. I meant it, too. Once again, I could feel it rising in me, something primitive, ugly … violent.

  There was a terrible silence after I said that. With six-foot-two, ex-con Nelson there, I wasn’t going to kill anybody, and we all knew it.

  “Tough guy. Well, listen, tough guy, we’re sick of you and your nigger friends in our neighborhood,” Nelson said. He laughed as he hovered over me. “I’m thinking that we should teach you a lesson.”

  “Go ahead then,” I said. “But leave my grandmother out of it.”