by Sid Holt
For Claire, the first clue that something was not right with Sirak came in 2007. Then a month shy of graduating with a music degree from Union College, in Nebraska, Sirak had called her late one night. “Mom, my thoughts are racing and I can’t make them stop,” he confided, adding that he had not been sleeping much. Claire offered reassurance, certain these were the typical jitters of a graduating senior. But that July, shortly before he was set to begin a prestigious teaching fellowship in the University of Nebraska’s music program, he called again and begged her to take him home. Rather than try to reason with him, she made the ten-hour drive from Colorado. When she arrived, she found Sirak standing in the parking lot of his apartment complex, wide-eyed and on edge. He refused to step foot inside his apartment by himself. “He was terrified, shaking, talking so fast,” she told me. “That’s when I knew something was really wrong.”
At home, his behavior only grew more erratic. Sirak, usually a modest person, would walk to the mailbox at the end of their driveway in nothing but his underwear. He slept little and was reluctant to venture far from the house. Once, after he and Claire ate out, he told her he was sure that the restaurant’s staff had put laxatives in their food. She took Sirak to see a series of mental-health professionals, but no one could offer a definitive diagnosis; a prescription for Lexapro, a popular antidepressant, did little to lessen his anxiety. Sometimes he would slip into a manic state, and Claire would coax him into her car and head for the emergency room. “At the hospital, I always got the same question: ‘Is he threatening you or trying to hurt himself?’ ” she said. “And I would say, ‘No,’ and they would tell me that they couldn’t help me.”
Rather than face his descent into mental illness alone, Claire reached out to his biological father, who had been granted asylum in 1999. (Her ex-husband, Brian, had remarried and largely receded from Sirak’s life.) The rest of Sirak’s family—his mother, two brothers, and two sisters—had immigrated when Sirak was thirteen and settled with his father in Atlanta. Sirak had visited them nearly every summer since, and he and his siblings had forged an easy bond. Claire believed that Atlanta, with its big-city mental-health resources, would be a better place for him than rural Colorado, and in 2008, it was agreed that he would go live with his Ethiopian family.
In Atlanta, a psychiatrist finally diagnosed Sirak with bipolar disorder and prescribed him lithium, a mood stabilizer. During long, discursive phone conversations with Claire, Sirak assured her that he was taking his medication, but despite his sincere longing to get well, he never consistently followed his treatment protocol. Though he managed to hold a number of menial jobs—he bagged groceries, worked as a drugstore clerk, cleaned out moving trucks, delivered auto parts—his employment was often cut short when a manic episode overtook him. By 2012, during one of many voluntary commitments to Georgia Regional, a large, state-run hospital with a psychiatric ward, his diagnosis was modified to reflect his worsening condition. “I have Bipolar One, manic severe, with psychotic features,” Sirak explained to me matter-of-factly, referring to the most severe form of the disorder.
When Claire saw Sirak on a visit last July, she was stunned. His doctors had put him on a powerful antipsychotic drug to keep his most serious symptoms in check, but it was plain that he was overmedicated. Sirak absently raised his feet, walking in place where he stood, and looked unfocused, his clothes rumpled, his hair uncombed. When he sat, he sometimes drifted off to sleep, and when he spoke, his voice was a curious monotone. “I’m not enjoying being alive very much right now,” he told her. Eager to find a way to dial back his medications, she moved him to Texarkana the following month and gave him her spare bedroom. She found a psychiatrist to fine-tune his prescriptions and arranged for weekly talk therapy sessions. The change of scenery seemed to help him, at least at first. “Today Sirak told me he no longer wants to die,” Claire e-mailed a handful of close friends in late August. “Rejoice with me.”
By the time of my visit, he had lapsed back into a depression, and he announced that he wanted to return to Atlanta. (Several weeks later, he did.) Though he had once devoted hours each day to the piano—in 2012 he even went to New York to audition for the master’s program at Juilliard—he had stopped playing, he told me, because he had lost his passion for music. “My doctor said I have something called anhedonia,” he said. “It’s like hedonism, but the opposite. It means I don’t feel pleasure anymore.”
He brightened only when he changed the subject to an obsession of his: his conviction that he will one day be reborn as a “child of prophecy,” or a sort of modern-day messiah. As he described the superpowers he would possess when the prophecy came to fruition, he grew elated, his face alight. Beside him, Claire sat in silence, staring down at her clasped hands.
• • •
What if Whitman’s bullet had never found her? Claire sometimes thinks about the intricate calculus that put her in his sights that day. What if her anthropology class had not let out early? What if Tom had lingered over his coffee one minute longer before they had gone to feed the parking meter? Such deliberations have never satisfied her, because each shift in the variables sets in motion other consequences. If she had not been shot, she might never have found God. If she had given birth, she would not have known the exhilaration, at forty-one, of becoming a mother, or the hard-won joy of raising Sirak. Sometimes she finds herself calculating the age of her first child, had he lived, and the number always astonishes her. She wrote it in my notebook one afternoon, carefully forming each numeral: forty-nine. He would probably be a father by now, she observed, and she a grandmother.
She rarely gives much thought to Whitman, who remains, in her mind, remote and inscrutable. “I never saw his face, because we were separated by so much distance,” Claire said. “So it’s always been hard to understand that he did this—that a person did this—to me.” Paging through Life on her library visits all those years ago, she studied the photos of him, and one particular image—taken at the beach when Whitman was two years old—has always stayed with her. In the picture, he is standing barefoot in the sand, grinning sweetly at a small dog. Two of his father’s rifles are positioned upright on either side of him, and Whitman is holding on to them the way a skier grips his poles.
“That’s how I see him—as that little boy on the shore, still open to the world, just wanting his father’s love and approval,” Claire said. She cannot grasp how, in such a short span of time, “he became so twisted and decided to do what he did,” she said. “But I’ve never felt it was personal. How could I? He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him.”
It will have been fifty years since the shooting this summer, an anniversary that, for Claire, has brought the tragedy into clearer focus. A documentary that tells the story of the day of the massacre from the perspective of eyewitnesses and survivors, with an emphasis on Claire’s ordeal, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin in March; directed by Austin-based filmmaker Keith Maitland, Tower will air nationally on PBS later this year. (The documentary is loosely based on a 2006 Texas Monthly oral history; I served as one of its executive producers.) The film, and recent efforts to plan a memorial for August 1, have reconnected Claire to people she thought she would never see again. “I felt so isolated by the years of silence,” she wrote to Maitland during filming. “Now I feel restored to the community from which I was ripped.”
Last spring, Claire found herself at the Capitol once again to testify against legislation that would allow concealed handguns on college campuses. While the bills she opposed in 2013 had ultimately failed, this time her testimony did little to deter gun-rights advocates, who succeeded in passing a campus carry bill by a two-to-one margin. Though supporters argued that the measure would make universities safer, Claire was heartened when protests erupted at UT, where an overwhelming majority of students, professors, and administrators balked at the Legislature’s actions. In what Claire sees as a grotesque insult, the law will go into effect on August 1, half a cen
tury to the day that Whitman walked onto the Tower’s observation deck and opened fire.
Like many survivors of the shooting, Claire will return to campus to mark the anniversary. The university, now a sprawling, multi-billion-dollar institution whose shiny new research facilities dominate the landscape, is drastically different from the one she entered in 1966, but the unsettled legacy of that summer remains. Though the gaping bullet holes left by Whitman’s rampage were quickly patched over, not every scar was filled, and anyone who takes the time to look closely at the limestone walls and balustrades that line the South Mall can still make out tiny divots where his bullets missed their mark.
Claire longs to lie down, in the shadow of the Tower, on the precise spot where she was shot. “It’s beyond me why I would feel comforted there,” she told me. “But I want to lie down, and remember the heat, and remember Tom, and remember the baby.” That wide-open stretch of concrete is the last place they were all together.
Oxford American
FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
“Daddy had a blues all his life that I couldn’t begin to know, though I had so desperately tried to understand it”: so writes Zandria F. Robinson as she begins looking for her late father in the music that he loved: church choirs, radio waves, the heartache of Bobby “Blue” Bland. In the end she finds insight but also something perhaps more valuable—hope. The Ellie judges used just one word to describe this extraordinary essay: “transporting.” The author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South, Robinson now blogs at newsouthnegress.com. Oxford American describes itself as “dedicated to featuring the best in Southern writing.” The magazine won the Ellie for General Excellence in 2016.
Zandria F. Robinson
Listening for the Country
When I finally cranked the truck, WDIA came in raspy but sure over the insistent roar of the hemi. Together, the engine and the r&b made a Monday-morning kind of sound—time for coffee and work. I adjusted the mirrors, preparing to put the truck in gear. My feet were still swollen from wandering sticky-thighed downtown through packed Memphis parking lots as I looked for the truck in the spring’s first real, wet heat. The swelling was useful, I thought, so my foot could lay heavy on the gas pedal without much flexing and force. I thrust it forward in search of the brake and hit it before I expected; Arthur Lee Robinson was taller than me, but I didn’t have to adjust the seat. In thirteen years, I had never driven his truck, which he bought when he found out I was pregnant with his first grandchild.
Daddy would have fetched his own truck the Friday prior, but he flew away to heaven in the early morning hours of the last day of his jury service. His launching pad had been the sequester hotel on the other side of town, where Shelby County had been holding him and eleven others who would decide if Ricky Patton had murdered Terrance Covington a few Julys back. One juror had been dismissed for discussing the trial. Another had injured himself on the way to the jury box. Daddy’s death, an apparent heart attack from diabetes complications and poor medication adherence, was the third strike. It triggered a mistrial and a brief wave of click-bait infamy, as local and national news-aggregating outlets picked up the story from our paper of record and included all of the facts: Arthur Robinson, sixty-four, was found on the bathroom floor of the sequester hotel by his fellow juror and roommate. The local paper quoted the judge as saying she’d never heard of such an occurrence. She wrote Mama a letter of condolence.
Daddy’s truck was one of those places—like a grandmother’s house, a real and actual soul food restaurant, or a barbershop owned by an older black man who guards the radio by silent threat of the revolver in his drawer next to the good clippers—where one could reliably expect to hear either (and only) 1070 WDIA or 1340 WLOK. It was the other side of sound, the other side of Southern blackness, a steady if muffled undercurrent that persisted and quietly buoyed new generations. I left the radio on WDIA, listening for what he might have heard when he parked his truck in that lot the previous week.
Daddy was country complex. You had to listen for the undercurrent, the Delta lower frequencies, to hear who he was. I knew he wouldn’t be the type to haunt me and offer answers to my many questions from the beyond; he wouldn’t come if I called him forth with my altar of rainbow candles, stones, and cowries. I pictured him in the Hereafter, seated at his table eating a sausage link on a rolled-up piece of white bread, raising an eyebrow in the direction of my summons.
No, Daddy couldn’t be conjured in life, so he certainly couldn’t be conjured in death. Instead, I tried to listen for him, as I had learned to do when I embraced countryness—my father’s, my father’s people’s, black people’s, and my own—as an adult. WDIA. WLOK. The various gospel compilations Daddy had somebody burn onto CDs, now thoroughly scratched from neglect. Songs he sang in the three choirs of which he was a member at St. John Missionary Baptist Church. Field hollers. B. B. King. My investigation was sensory, and I had to just catch the feeling of it, because I could never know for sure. With Daddy, you could only suppose and reckon.
• • •
Mama was and is no mystery. As she reminded everyone often, she was born an entire twenty days before Daddy and raised in the city. She said “country” with a deep, monstrous snarl one might use to say “from a can” in reference to vegetables at a family dinner. Country was dirt and rudeness and Delta and blues and double-wides and pig intestines and outhouses and racial repression. It was also violence and hurt and infidelity and excess spilling everywhere and onto everything. Mama was raised in Orange Mound, a historically black neighborhood in the middle of Memphis. She took the city bus while Daddy ran the dirt roads of Glendora, Mississippi, and was baptized in the Tallahatchie. Mama was a teetotaler dedicated to V8 until NPR said it contained too much sodium. Daddy’s whiskey water and pills mangled our home lives until the rehab finally took. Daddy said “nigga.” Mama, “the N-word.” Daddy was Stax and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Mama was Motown. She had preached a quiet and dignified resistance, while I found The Autobiography of Malcolm X in Daddy’s bathroom when I was eleven and read it with baby insurgent interest; I made the tiniest dog ears and mentally charted Daddy’s and my separate progress before absconding with it altogether. Mama went to the doctor more than she went to Sunday service and had the blood pressure of the most unbothered house cat. In the truck, I found at least a month’s worth of Daddy’s diabetes and hypertension medicine strewn about, still in the baggies Mama had carefully packed. Together for more than four decades—most of their lives, until Daddy’s death—my parents were baked chicken and chitlins, wheat and white. Mama was fact; Daddy, feeling. WKNO and WDIA.
• • •
Although the Delta was only a ways down Highway 61, my sister and I didn’t visit until we were eight and nine. That was where Daddy’s mama, our country grandmother, Celia Mae, lived, along with the brothers and sisters and cousins with whom Daddy had spent twenty-one years of his life before migrating to Memphis in 1972. He came then to introduce himself to his father, Jack Rose. Granddaddy Jack’s affair with Celia Mae begot Daddy and Daddy’s older brother, his only “whole” sibling. Within five years of coming to Memphis, Daddy had met and married Mama, and we came, starting with me, five years later. In the Delta, we discovered a whole world that we hadn’t seen or heard or known, a world where Daddy had already spent a majority of his life when we came along. A world we could only imagine through stories Daddy told playfully to aggravate Mama; he loved when she fussed and cussed in response. A world we knew from stories Mama told us to cope with hurt and to warn us not to get country dirty. I became an ethnographer in part to understand that world empirically, with facts, so I could translate it for Mama and they could get along better. I always listened, and am still listening, for that world, the formative one that made Daddy. The one that Mama would say made her a widow too soon.
Mama didn’t want that country to get on my sister and me. We knew the mechanics of their country mouse–
city mouse skirmishes, deftly navigating around what signified which side. Mama didn’t even want the sound of the country in our house. She was explicit about her disdain for the B. B., Robert Johnson, and Bobby “Blue” Bland blues Daddy played in defiance on our living room radio on the Saturdays he had off. Things that went wrong—Daddy’s alcohol and drug addiction, his infidelities, his son, their hoarding—were country.
Daddy wasn’t warring for our souls, but Mama was. And for a time, she won handily. A black Tiger Mother, she contained us in the relative urban privilege of a two-child, two-parent, two-car home in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Memphis. We began classical violin lessons before we began elementary school because she loved the sound of the studio strings on Motown recordings. My sister and I were always enrolled in accelerated and gifted programs, and each graduated valedictorian of our respective classes. In our house, getting a B was like not voting—we knew people had died for us to get A’s. My sister grew up to be a Japanese interpreter, and I am a college professor. Our careers are racially and regionally indistinguishable from those of any other children of middle-class Americans.
But country always has a way of sneaking and winning, and with two children, there was liable to be a split decision. Mama’s mama said I should have been named Arthurine because I looked so much like Daddy when I came out. All my life, when I did something that painfully reminded Mama of him—like let money burn a hole in my pocket or shamelessly two-time on a boyfriend—she called me Arthurine with the same kind of malice she said “country.” I thought my sister was the favorite because she was impeccably city. She is measured and reserved and probably still has money saved from childhood. Mama would say I should save like my sister, advising her not to lend me money for the candy lady when I had spent my own. I still borrow money from my sister to this day. Country.
