Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  Policemen had been placed along the route of the march, and they were still there. They allowed the crowd of Negroes to march seven blocks, but they formed a solid blockade just short of Capitol Street. This was where they made everyone stop. They had everything—shotguns, fire trucks, gas masks, dogs, fire hoses, and billy clubs. Along the sidewalks and on the fringes of the crowd, the cops knocked heads, set dogs on some marchers, and made about thirty arrests, but the main body of people in the middle of the street was just stopped.

  They sang and shouted things like “Shoot, shoot” to the police, and then the police started to push them back slowly. After being pushed back about a block, they stopped. They wouldn’t go any farther. So the cops brought the fire trucks up closer and got ready to use the fire hoses on the crowd. That really broke up the demonstration. People moved back faster and started to go home. But it also made them angrier. Bystanders began throwing stones and bottles at the cops and then the crowd started too; other Negroes were pitching stuff from second-and third-story windows. The crowd drew back another block, leaving the space between them and the fire trucks littered with rocks and broken glass. John Doar came out from behind the police barricade and walked toward the crowd of Negroes, with bottles flying all around him. He talked to some of the people at the front, telling them he was from the Justice Department and that this wasn’t “the way.” After he talked for a few minutes, things calmed down considerably, and Dave Dennis and a few others began taking bottles away from people and telling them they should go home. After that it was just a clean-up operation. One of the ministers borrowed Captain Ray’s bull horn and ran up and down the street telling people to disperse, but by that time there were just a few stragglers.

  After Medgar’s death there was a period of confusion. Each Negro leader and organization in Jackson received threats. They were all told they were “next on the list.” Things began to fall apart. The ministers, in particular, didn’t want to be “next”; a number of them took that long-promised vacation to Africa or elsewhere. Meanwhile SNCC and CORE became more militant and began to press for more demonstrations. A lot of the young Negroes wanted to let the whites of Jackson know that even by killing off Medgar they hadn’t touched the real core of the Movement. For the NAACP and the older, more conservative groups, however, voter registration had now become number one on the agenda. After the NAACP exerted its influence at a number of strategy meetings, the militants lost.

  The Jackson Daily News seized the opportunity to cause more fragmentation. One day they ran a headline THERE IS A SPLIT IN THE ORGANIZATIONS, and sure enough, shortly afterward, certain organizations had completely severed their relations with each other. The whites had succeeded again. They had reached us through the papers by letting us know we were not together. “Too bad,” I thought. “One day we’ll learn. It’s pretty tough, though, when you have everything against you, including the money, the newspapers, and the cops.”

  Within a week everything had changed. Even the rallies were not the same. The few ministers and leaders who did come were so scared—they thought assassins were going to follow them home. Soon there were rallies only twice a week instead of every night.

  The Sunday following Medgar’s funeral, Reverend Ed King organized an integrated church-visiting team of six of us from the college. Another team was organized by a group in Jackson. Five or six churches were hit that day, including Governor Ross Barnett’s. At each one they had prepared for our visit with armed policemen, paddy wagons, and dogs—which would be used in case we refused to leave after “ushers” had read us the prepared resolutions. There were about eight of these ushers at each church, and they were never exactly the usherly type. They were more on the order of Al Capone. I think this must have been the first time any of these men had worn a flower in his lapel. When we were asked to leave, we did. We were never even allowed to get past the first step.

  A group of us decided that we would go to church again the next Sunday. This time we were quite successful. These visits had not been publicized as the first ones were, and they were not really expecting us. We went first to a Church of Christ, where we were greeted by the regular ushers. After reading us the same resolution we had heard last week, they offered to give us cab fare to the Negro extension of the church. Just as we had refused and were walking away, an old lady stopped us. “We’ll sit with you,” she said.

  We walked back to the ushers with her and her family. “Please let them in, Mr. Calloway. We’ll sit with them,” the old lady said.

  “Mrs. Dixon, the church has decided what is to be done. A resolution has been passed, and we are to abide by it.”

  “Who are we to decide such a thing? This is a house of God, and God is to make all of the decisions. He is the judge of us all,” the lady said.

  The ushers got angrier then and threatened to call the police if we didn’t leave. We decided to go.

  “We appreciate very much what you’ve done,” I said to the old lady.

  As we walked away from the church, we noticed the family leaving by a side entrance. The old lady was waving to us.

  Two blocks from the church, we were picked up by Ed King’s wife, Jeanette. She drove us to an Episcopal church. She had previously left the other two girls from our team there. She circled the block a couple of times, but we didn’t see them anywhere. I suggested that we try the church. “Maybe they got in,” I said. Mrs. King waited in the car for us. We walked up to the front of the church. There were no ushers to be seen. Apparently, services had already started. When we walked inside, we were greeted by two ushers who stood at the rear.

  “May we help you?” one said.

  “Yes,” I said. “We would like to worship with you today.”

  “Will you sign the guest list, please, and we will show you to your seats,” said the other.

  I stood there for a good five minutes before I was able to compose myself. I had never prayed with white people in a white church before. We signed the guest list and were then escorted to two seats behind the other two girls in our team. We had all gotten in. The church service was completed without one incident. It was as normal as any church service. However, it was by no means normal to me. I was sitting there thinking any moment God would strike the life out of me. I recognized some of the whites, sitting around me in that church. If they were praying to the same God I was, then even God, I thought, was against me.

  When the services were over the minister invited us to visit again. He said it as if he meant it, and I began to have a little hope.

  JAMES McCONKEY (1921- )

  James McConkey’s Court of Memory trilogy consists of three books: Crossroads (1968), The Stranger at the Crossroads (published in 1983 with Crossroads as Court of Memory), and Stories from My Life with the Other Animals (1993). Many of the full-formed segments of this understated memoir appeared in The New Yorker between 1962 and 1982.

  McConkey has written ten books. His novel The Treehouse Confessions won an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1979; “In Praise of Chekhov” won the National Endowment for the Arts Essay Award in 1967. Recently he edited The Oxford Book of Memory (1996). He taught at Cornell University.

  McConkey calls this chapter of Court of Memory “Hector, Dick and I.” Straightforward as it seems on the surface, it is as symbolic, crafted, and powerful a piece of literature as nonfiction can yield. Each of the three men—McConkey, his fellow graduate student, who is in medical school, and their landlord—confronts loss differently. One makes, one mends, one holds.

  Hector, Dick and I

  from COURT OF MEMORY

  Eighteen years ago I was a graduate student living with my wife in a trailer on an Iowa field. After a fruitless search for housing—we had arrived in the university town at the last minute, our decision to come a result, in those days before children and furniture and property, simply of our Ohio landlady’s anger at a party we had given that she claimed had cracked the ceiling of the
living room beneath ours—we had bought the trailer and rented space for it at the edge of town from Hector Bascomb and his wife Rowena. She was a cook at one of the fraternities; he was a retired, one-armed farmer. On successive Saturday afternoons of a sunny October, listening to vagrant bits of band music from the distant stadium, we dug water and sewer lines. Hector furnished us with advice, spades, pickaxes, and a flaring kit for making connections in copper tubing. I admired my wife for the way she lifted shovelfuls of dirt from the trench, and I imagined the pair of us to be out of some Russian novel, a sturdy peasant couple preparing our hovel against the Siberian blasts. Another student couple—the husband, Dick, was younger than I, an undergraduate taking pre-medical courses—bought a trailer exactly like ours, placing it between our trailer and the street. I had already put a flush toilet in the bedroom closet. Dick pushed back the overcoats to look at it and immediately decided to install a toilet in the same place in his trailer. He and his wife dug a ditch to meet ours so that the two trailers could have common sewer and water lines running across the field and into Hector’s basement. Hector judged the frost line in that part of Iowa to be forty inches; we placed our copper tubing at forty-one inches, not wanting to do excess work on a project that, after all, would revert to Hector after we left. Dick and I already saw him as a shrewd old man, a farmer so obsessed with property that he was not distinguishable from what he owned; and we would give him no more than we had to.

  An Army veteran studying for an advanced degree in English literature, I thought myself a writer preparing for his career under governmental patronage. Dick, also a veteran, was planning to be a surgeon. He had long and narrow fingers, and even then protected his hands with canvas gloves as he worked. His hands were capable of an agility and grace that mine were not; with my skull filled with arrogant notions of the supremacy and eternity of art, I thought it a pity he did not at the least give himself to the piano or violin. But he was a methodical and patient empiricist, most dubious of a spiritual reality or any subjective expression. Out of my imagination I would finally make something, I didn’t know what, that would be beyond the corruption of my body; out of his training and skill he would bring diseased and mangled bodies back to health. Before each of us lay that mountain of time, that solid mass in which we would work out our pure and uncomplicated conceptions of what we were destined to be; it allowed us to enjoy the trembling of our trailers in the winter winds. A sense of transitoriness was our anchor, our rock, our bond.

  Both of us were antithetical to old Hector, who, with his stump in a dirty sock, with his foul-smelling and nervous little rat terrier at his heels, puttered as if by habit in the debris of his field and barn. His field was a long, disorderly vista of his life. Beyond our trailers were chicken houses and dog kennels and a root beer stand, rotting remnants of enterprises he had taken up after the loss of his arm; beyond them a huge mound of dry and disintegrating manure. Beyond the manure lay rusted pieces of farm machinery from the days when harvesters were powered by steam; when plows and harrows were drawn by horses. Hector had given up only those possessions capable of bringing him better ones; in the year that I knew him, he managed, through an intricate series of barters, to exchange an old steam engine for a fairly new Ford tractor. Of course he had no use for it. He kept it locked in the barn, beside boxes of rags and bundles of paper and little kegs filled with bent nails and washers and screws; looking at it through a cobwebbed and grimy window, I thought it a perfect token of the meaninglessness of a life devoted to accumulation. He was inexorably placed by everything he had ever been or owned; placed by his dank stucco cottage and by the barn and the field to which, in his retirement, he had brought his past. Even his beliefs—time had turned most of them into superstitions—were possessions to be used. Professors of farming knew nothing, he told me one winter’s day as he rocked his terrier in his lap by the kitchen fire, about the importance of phases of the moon in planting corn; and he had heard with his own ears one of them on the radio, disputing the indisputable fact that hairs from a horse’s tail, dropped into a creek in early spring, will grow into worms by midsummer. He spat into the fire. “Do you believe me about the worms?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, and looked at me shrewdly. “But if you ever write a book about me, I want a share out of your poke.”

  I was born only a few blocks away from Lake Erie, in a Cleveland suburb; as a child I connected the blue expanse of the lake with some still-to-be explored inner expanse, believing even then I would eventually be a writer. Lying in bed in spring and early fall, listening to the deep cry of the fog horn at the harbor entrance, I thought with pity of the suffocating multitudes who were landlocked and held to some mundane occupation. Of course a field in Iowa is far from the Great Lakes; but I still had my dream of a destiny, and my trailer might well have been my boat, the vistas of rolling snow-covered fields the seas upon which I sailed to reach some harbor of the mind.

  And what a comfortable little boat it was! Twenty-five feet from the tip of its hitch to the bulging red eye of its taillight, its generous center, its heart, was the galley. A cupboard door, hinged not at the side but at the bottom, dropped down to make a table. A recessed light above the stainless-steel sink illuminated the counter, the Coleman bottled-gas stove, the white Frigidaire. The living room was a sofa and an oil space heater. A plywood partition separated the bedroom from the rest of the trailer. One is aware of the trade names of all appliances in a trailer: the exhaust fan I installed in one of the ceiling hatches was a Homart, the little radio on the bookcase I built by the sofa was a Philco, borrowed for the year from my parents. While we ate dinner, my wife and I would listen to a sonorous-voiced professor reading his way in installments through LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West. Late at night we would leave the galley light burning and walk in the snow, delighting in the graceful leaps over the high drifts of the rawboned dog who in the fall of the year had leaped through our flimsy screen door in a reckless and happy demand for bed and board. We lived near the airport, and as we walked the beacon would briefly illuminate patches of the somber clouds beyond us. We liked to walk to the railroad station to see the arrival of the day’s final passenger train, its headlight burrowing a brilliant cone through the thick flakes. Back home and under covers—we slept on the narrow sofa, having turned the bedroom into a study—I would tune the radio just beyond my pillow to station after station, trying to find, especially on those frigid and still nights when distant signals are carried without distortion or fading, all the cities in which I had ever lived and all the cities I hoped some day to visit. The dog would jump on top of us to escape the draft from the door. That winter I read myself to sleep with A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers; when I got to the end I started over. I thought it impossible to have more congenial trailer partners than my wife, a stray dog, Parkman, and Thoreau.

  In that tiny space my energy was infinite. I studied and I wrote; I picked up a hammer and saw and attacked the trailer’s interior. It pleased me to think of the trailer as the discipline, the form, within which my imagination had to invent; and, whenever a new and ingenious possibility for a cabinet or a shelf occurred to me, I would build it as hastily as I typed. Dick, who was having trouble with his calculus, often visited us in the evenings to get help from my wife. Before he left he would look thoughtfully at each new alteration in our trailer. He would rub his long fingers against the wood to see how well I had sanded it (usually I hadn’t sanded at all). And then he would say, “Do you mind awfully if I copy this? I think I might improve on it a bit.”

  Memory simplifies, for its impulse is order; in playing upon a given relationship, it can erode the irrelevant and ambiguous to leave the bones of allegory. If I remember myself as the maker, the little God of a portable world circumscribed by quarter-inch plywood, Dick has become simply the rebuilder, the patient craftsman who, with his kit of immaculate tools, remedies the imperfect original conception. His trailer
was the duplicate world of mine; where I had built a bookcase, he built a bookcase, and where I had managed to squeeze in a narrow cupboard for cans of soup and bars of soap, he did likewise. But his latches worked, his little doors were neatly trimmed with molding, his nails were recessed and hidden by putty, his wood contained a warm and flawless sheen. I am sure he thought me as careless as I thought him dull, and had it not been for Hector peering through the early-morning frost of our windows to get proof with his own eyes that we had left our faucets dripping, perhaps not even the bond that we had as transients would have held us together.

  Hector, of course, was the preserver, the hoarder; even then I had the sense that he was acting, however perversely, some traditional human role, though one which in my youthful assurance and egoism I felt far beneath my dreams. A part of his mundane task was to be guardian of the water meter, the reckonings of which he had to pay. When the frost line—its rate of descent was announced on the radio each day of that severe winter—reached forty inches, Dick and I tried to let the water drip all night; but Hector, who could hear the tick of the meter from his bed, would shut off the main valve in his basement. From our trailers we could see a dim glow in one of his casement windows as he descended the cellar steps in his nightshirt. Hector recouped any possible water loss by charging us fifty cents each to push our cars, which frequently would not start otherwise, in the mornings. He owned a 1924 Buick sedan; after each use of it, he would drain the contents of the radiator and crankcase into cans which he stored in the kitchen. A single flip of the hand crank—old Hector’s one arm was still a mighty one—made the motor, warmed by its morning fluids, catch and purr. Dick and I, pressing fruitlessly on our frozen starter buttons, hated to look toward the house, that dismal cottage of the fairy tales; Hector would be waiting at the window between the tattered curtains, an expectant smile on his unshaven face.