By the story’s end, Meg’s greatest weaknesses prove to be the source of her inner strength. What are her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was her faults that she turns to to save herself.
Unlike the fictional Meg, I did not recognize that weaknesses, either Mama’s or mine, could be useful. For the next year or better, I struggled to iron out wrinkles in my own blurred reality. I traveled along dark borders and traipsed through warped places that Mama couldn’t see or comprehend. I had absolutely no coping skills to handle the fright that seized me each night or the guilt and anger that I harbored toward Mama by day. I never understood why she couldn’t just hold me and tell me everything would be okay. What difference did it make if I was eight or eighteen? I was scared. I missed Daddy, and Frank, and I was haunted by the thought of losing Mama.
The guilt I felt over my sprawling fears was as heavy as an iron maul. I lugged it around all day long. I’d tell myself how stupid it was to be so afraid. I’d resolve each day at noon never to let darkness frighten me again. But every night at suppertime, as the sun set and the sky’s light dimmed, a big swell of dread filled my belly until it ached fiercely. I’d try to fight off the anxiety with prayer, but that was never as comforting as having a grown-up nearby. I suspect Mama could see the fear clouding my eyes, but she turned away from it.
Years later Mama told me: “The more hysterical I saw you becoming, the more I tried to push you away. And that just made you more hysterical. I should have just let you get into the bed with me. I should have just comforted you. But I didn’t know that then.”
DADDY’S LAST INSTRUCTION to me was to stop crying because it upset Mama. I tried as best I could to do as Daddy had asked. But what he didn’t know then is that Vietnam would upset a lot of people. I learned at an early age to handle the burning things of life with mitts of silence. So for many years I didn’t talk about losing Daddy, about death, or Vietnam. I especially didn’t talk about such things with Mama. Yet, neither one of us could escape Vietnam’s far-reaching shadow. It was featured prominently in the nightly newscasts and in the daily papers. Political debates reached a feverish pitch once Fort Benning was selected as the site of the court-martial of Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley, Jr., for his role in the My Lai massacre.
Whenever Mama watched the newscasts or read the newspaper reports about the Calley trial, she’d gnaw on that worry gristle inside her cheek, over and over again. It was as if she had a mouthful of words she was chewing on but couldn’t quite spit out. I could tell she was troubled by what she was hearing and reading, but she wasn’t one to divulge her worries.
November 1970 was a month chock-full of news. A lot of it was election stuff. Jimmy Carter, a plainspoken peanut farmer who promised to be a “working governor,” handily earned Georgia’s top spot. It was the biggest Democratic victory Georgians had ever seen.
But not everybody in the city or state was rejoicing. Family members of the sixty-seven Georgia servicemen listed as missing in action or prisoners of war gathered in Atlanta and drafted a letter to the Viet Cong delegation at the Paris Peace Talks. They also urged their fellow Georgians to join in a “Write Hanoi” campaign, asking the Communists to release names of those being held captive, and they pleaded for the release of any prisoners who were sick or wounded. At Columbus High School several of my classmates wore engraved bracelets bearing the names of those men. I didn’t need a bracelet to remind me that our family was held hostage by what had already happened in Southeast Asia.
Some of the jury-selection proceedings in the Calley trial occurred on my fourteenth birthday—November 12—the day after Veterans Day.
Calley, then twenty-seven, was charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, in Quang Ngai Province of South Vietnam. Several other soldiers were also facing murder charges because the troops, under Calley’s command, reportedly killed as many as five hundred unarmed civilians during that same rout.
The highly publicized trial was never discussed in my classes at Columbus High. Most of the kids there were the children of civilians, yet many had fathers or grandfathers who’d once served in the military. Columbus has always been very patriotic and deeply loyal to the military community at Fort Benning. Churches and civic organizations make it a point to “adopt” young servicemen and to give them a family away from home. Sometimes literally. But soldiers are warned not to marry local girls. A fellow fishing off the banks of the Chattahoochee once told me, “They taught us at Fort Benning, ‘Don’t marry a Columbus girl unless you intend to stay here because Columbus girls don’t leave home for long.’”
Lieutenant Calley, a Florida native, was one of the many soldiers who married a local girl and made Columbus his home. He married Mrs. Tilly Vick’s daughter. The Vicks were a prominent Columbus family. Well loved and highly regarded, they own the popular V. V. Vick Jewelers at Cross Country Plaza. Calley still runs the family business.
Teachers weren’t given any edict about avoiding discussion of the trial; it was just part of the constrained society in which we all lived. It was considered uncouth to discuss unpleasant topics. The trial that made daily headlines nationwide was largely ignored at dinner tables and in civics classes. But occasionally I would overhear discussions among the students as we waited between classes for the bell to ring:
“Do you really think he killed all those people?”
“Yeah, I do. He’s a murderer. A trained killer, like all those other soldiers over there.”
Frank said the teachers at Lyman Ward Military Academy weren’t making Calley’s trial a point of current events there, either. He said the general feeling among the teaching staff was that Calley was being made a scapegoat. “This was a military community,” Frank explained. “Everyone in the military community knows a lieutenant doesn’t have that much rank. The only teachers I heard talk about Calley felt that he was just doing what he was ordered to do.”
That wasn’t the case among Frank’s peers, though. The talk in the locker rooms and dorms painted Calley as a bloodthirsty maniac. Frank listened in silence as his classmates debated the issues among themselves. He never once chimed in. And he certainly made it a point to not divulge that his own father was a casualty of Vietnam. “There was no point in saying anything,” Frank noted. “The attitude of the day was that all American soldiers were just like Calley. I was made to feel ashamed over Dad’s participation in Vietnam.”
The worst part of it all was that there was no place for kids like Frank and me to escape from the daily deluge of stories about the trial. We had no one we could talk to about it, not even each other. And so it was, month after month after month. Calley’s trial was one of the longest-running military trials in history. A verdict by a six-officer jury was returned on March 29, 1971. Calley was convicted of premeditated murder of twenty-two civilians, including women and infants. He also was convicted of assault with intent to murder a child, believed to be about two years old. Throughout the trial, Calley maintained that he was acting upon the orders of Captain Ernest Medina, his superior, to kill everyone in My Lai. The jury didn’t buy it. Calley was sentenced to life in prison. On November 9, 1974, a few days before my eighteenth birthday, he was released on bond after a federal judge overturned his conviction. I was a freshman in college. He had served three and half years, most of that under house arrest at Fort Benning.
CHAPTER 22
oh! happy day!
WE SPENT MUCH OF THE FALL OF 1970 RUNNING BACK AND FORTH TO LYMAN WARD MILITARY ACADEMY in Alabama, where we cheered Frank as he played lineman on the school’s football team. He came home for the holidays, but the family gatherings had turned into unpleasant affairs after Frank and Lewis got into a spat over Thanksgiving.
Lewis and Mama had prepared a festive dinner while we kids sat in his living room watching his big console television. We knew better than to cause a disturbance at Lewis’s house, so we did our best to act like little grown-ups. We were p
racticing what Mama called “our best behavior.” A lace tablecloth was spread across the shiny wooden table. Thin sheets of plastic covered the satin upholstery of the dinette chairs. Creamy tapered candles in brilliant silver candelabras and gleaming plates with delicate rims as thin as paper decorated the table. Frank and Mama were seated on one side, with Linda and me on the other. Lewis sat at the end, like a king on a throne. I was picking my way through a saucer of ambrosia when Lewis looked over at Frank trying to eat a slice of turkey with his left hand and a fork.
“Frankie, pick up that knife and cut that meat,” Lewis ordered.
My brother lifted his right arm. It was wrapped in a cast from above the elbow down to his palm. He’d broken it playing street football with his buddies at Crystal Valley. “How do you expect me to do that?” Frank replied. “Can’t you see my arm is broke?”
Lewis didn’t tolerate backtalk. “Damn it!” he replied. “I said, pick up that knife!”
Frank shot him a look that clearly said “Go to hell, buddy.” Then he put down his fork and didn’t take another bite. I looked at Linda. She kept her head down and kept eating. I looked at Mama and could tell she was annoyed at Lewis for speaking so harshly to Frank, but she didn’t say a word. It was a miserable holiday.
Frank didn’t come home much after that. Maybe because the staff at Lyman Ward was never as demeaning to him as Lewis was.
Besides, at Lyman Ward Frankie had found a way to alleviate some of his teenage angst—Colombian gold. The military academy had a generous population of boys whose fathers had sent them to the historic school with hopes of turning them into solid citizens and tough soldiers. But folded between the pairs of white socks neatly ordered in their dresser drawers were Baggies of potent pot. Frank grew especially fond of his cadet pals and their pot. By the time he returned home that spring, my brother and I had grown distant. I barely recognized him as the boy I’d once adored.
I’d changed, too. Patsy helped me escape from the shadow of terror that had besieged me. She and I attended different schools—she was at Jordan High—so there wasn’t opportunity for us to see each other every day. But she would call me nearly every other week, just to see how I was doing. And she made a couple of trips to Lyman Ward with the family to watch Frank play football. Mama didn’t readily embrace my friends, but Patsy was a rare exception. Mama liked having Patsy around and often invited her to join us for Frank’s games.
During a slow weekend in March, Patsy invited me to spend the night with her. She drove out to Crystal Valley and picked me up before dinner. Her grandmother fixed us a meal of pork chops, mashed potatoes, and green beans. Her brother Danny asked her to iron one of his shirts, which she did without complaint. Then I sat on the foot of one of the twin beds in her room while Patsy pinned her hair up into large pink curlers. We talked about church. Patsy told me she wasn’t attending Grace Baptist anymore. She was at Rose Hill Baptist, a bigger church out on Hamilton Road.
Without going into a lot of details, I told Patsy that I’d been having some problems. I didn’t tell her about sleeping on the floor in Mama’s room, but I did tell her I’d been having a hard time sleeping and that no amount of prayer seemed to help. I didn’t say it aloud, but what I really believed was that God just didn’t favor me as much as he did Patsy. As I told her about the growing anger I felt toward Mama and the guilt I felt over not being a good Christian girl, I began to cry.
Rather than coming over to comfort me, as she normally would have, Patsy got up and left the room. She said she had to fetch something and would be back in a moment. I learned later that she’d been so worried about me that she’d left the room to call someone for advice on how best to help. When she returned, Patsy told me a story.
“Ever try to make a fire?” she asked. “A fire with one log doesn’t burn nearly as well as a fire with several logs. You’re like the log burning by itself, Karen. You need to be with others to keep the fire going.”
I had no idea why Patsy was telling me some campfire story. I quit crying and fell to sleep. The next week Patsy called and asked me to attend a prayer meeting at Rose Hill Baptist Church. It was a Monday night, an odd time for a prayer meeting. But Patsy told me it was for teens only. She said to meet her at the youth building out behind the church, about a twenty-five-minute drive from our house. Mama dropped me off but only because Patsy promised to drive me home.
Patsy hadn’t told me what to wear. I showed up in an eggplant-colored skirt and jacket. All the other teens turned out in cutoffs and T-shirts. Patsy wore jeans and a halter top. I couldn’t have been more conspicuous if I’d been an armor-clad knight at a nudist camp.
Wide steps of concrete led to the front door of the youth building, a brick house modified into a meeting place. Prayer meeting was held in the living room and dining area. Orange shag rug covered the hardwood floors. Folding chairs were circled around the rooms and around a musty old couch. There was a kitchen at the back of the house with an empty refrigerator and a white wall phone that was continually in use.
“Hi, I’m Steve Smith,” one of the older boys said. He held a Bible in one hand and offered me his right one.
“Hey, I’m Karen,” I said as I shook his hand.
“This your first visit?”
Nothing like a purple suit to blow a girl’s cover. “Yes,” I said. “Patsy invited me.”
“She should be here soon,” he said. Then Steve began introducing me to the other kids, many of them siblings—Jimmy and Jerry Burke; Andy Kelley; Steve’s sister, Sharon; Sherri Davis; David Toney; Jimmy Owens; Debbie and DeeJo Baker; Debbie Harrison; Karen and Ken Mendenhall; Lynn and Buddy Wilkes. Steve explained to me that his father, “Smitty,” was the pastor at Rose Hill.
When Patsy finally arrived, she introduced me to the youth pastor and his wife, Charlie and Gail Wells. I don’t remember much else about that evening other than the praying. Kids sprawled across the shag carpet, the couch, and the folding chairs. They took turns making prayer requests for upcoming tests, friends, and troubled family members. I sat stiffly in a folding chair in a corner between Steve and Patsy.
When somebody reached up and turned out the lights, I was startled. I’d never been at a meeting where anybody prayed in the dark or out loud. I hoped they didn’t expect me to pray. Although I’d asked Jesus into my life the previous summer, I wasn’t accustomed to the ways of the devoted. When I needed to talk with God, I did it one-on-one, when nobody else was listening. I clutched the Bible on my lap and listened as kids around the room prayed for their mamas and their daddies, their teachers and their friends.
But when Steve began to pray, I lost my composure. “Lord Jesus,” he said. “I don’t know Karen or what her life might be like, but you do. You know everything there is to know about her. And you care about her. I ask that you meet her where she’s at. Thank you for bringing her to us tonight.”
I’d never had anybody pray over me like that. I was weeping. Steve didn’t know how hard the previous years had been for me. He didn’t know anything about my family’s history. He didn’t know about Daddy bleeding to death in South Vietnam or of Mama’s subsequent drinking and running around. Or of Frank getting us kicked out of the trailer park or his fondness for pot. He didn’t know about the boys in the trailer park who had enticed me to have sex with them before I was old enough to menstruate. And he didn’t know about the anger and guilt and fears I had toward Mama or the terrors that were seizing me at night.
But his simple prayer of concern touched me. As I wept, Patsy put her arm around me, and then she prayed for me, too. Patsy didn’t know about all my sorrows, but she knew about some.
The group prayed for an hour or more. Long enough for me to wipe away the streaks of black mascara staining my cheeks and to regain my composure. Charlie Wells, the youth pastor, closed the meeting.
I crawled into bed later that night and thanked God for giving me a friend like Patsy. Then I slept soundly for the first time since Frank went away. Something
about those prayers lifted the despair that had been hanging over me like mosquito netting.
With Patsy serving as my chauffer, I began attending Rose Hill Baptist. The church gave me a place to feel safe and to root my faith, and it gave me something else as well—a group of sorely needed friends who would come to love me no matter how badly I disappointed them or how quirky I acted. Those friends I made in those tender teen years remain among my most cherished pals.
Most of these new friends came from two-parent families. They lived in subdivisions with fancy names like Brookstone or Windsor Park. But when we gathered at Rose Hill’s youth house, none of that seemed to matter much.
Rose Hill Baptist Church is located not too far from downtown. There’s a well-known seafood joint nearby, a barbecue house down the way, and a complex of low-income apartments around the corner, usually referred to as the Peabody projects or just plain ole Peabody. Nearby are a few once-stately historic homes, many of which have been converted to medical offices or some other functional purpose. The neighborhood is definitely low-income and mostly black. It’s that way now, and it was that way in the 1970s. But at one time, during the 1960s, the church drew people from all over Columbus and even across the Chattahoochee, from Alabama. There were fourteen hundred people on the attendance roll, and it wasn’t uncommon for as many as eight hundred to attend Sunday school. That’s why they built a new sanctuary.
Rose Hill was an imposing place of worship. Instead of using the pine so common to Georgia, they crafted the facility from expensive walnut. Gilded lights dangle from the ceiling that, from the inside, looks to be three stories high. The sanctuary can easily hold eight hundred people, although fewer than a hundred attend today. A magnificent organ, with more than fifteen hundred pipes, is situated directly behind the pulpit, in the choir loft. Striking white columns face Hamilton Road. Over the years, those columns have provided a good spot for the deacons who smoked to lean and loiter.
After the Flag Has Been Folded Page 19
