by John Lawton
“Now we are five,” he says, and I knew he meant like the ten little Indians, being knocked off one by one by one.
‘Next day I flew out to Honolulu. Day after that I landed back at Seattle. The real world. There’s this banner says “Welcome Home Returnees”. Not soldiers, not men. Returnees. Is that word even in the English language? Some other second lieutenant collars me for a “debrief”. I show him my papers. Honorable Discharge dated three days back, April 15. Purple heart, full pension. The Presidential “thank you”. I tell him to fuck off. Catch the next plane back here. Spring the biggest surprise you can imagine on my Momma. I spent a week or two just thinkin’. Like I’m Dana Andrews or Fredric March in The Best Years of Our Lives. But, I’m due a cash payment as well as the pension, and I know what to do with the money. Always did. I bought the lease on a little studio and set up Mouse Photo. That’s the way it’s been for more’n a year now. I tell nobody what happened. Nobody asks, least nobody you can’t satisfy with a standard answer. “You had to be there.” Works on most. Then you show up. I guess I always knew somebody would. Never thought it would be you. I thought one day it might be Jack Feaver himself. Hard to believe men like Feaver can just breeze into your life with a mission and then breeze out. You know, I never did find out what the “mission” was.’
I slept on the couch. The light woke me early. I lay an hour or more watching the sun bleach out the day. I pulled on my jeans and wandered out to the yard. There was the clumsily built brick barbecue, something glinting dully in the ash. I picked up a piece of charred cloth. It crumbled in my fingers and a brass uniform button dropped back into the pit. I poked around, found a couple of strips of colored ribbon. The last vestiges of whatever medals Mouse had had pinned to his chest. He called to me from an upstairs window, ‘Come in and get some eats. Momma’s got coffee on the go. After, I could take you down the studio.’
I sat at breakfast feeling like a faithless child as Mrs Kylie asked me a couple of dozen questions about my family to which, largely, I did not have answers. In the end she said what Lois would not, ‘You should get home more often, son.’
Mouse drove me downtown to a concrete strip of modern lock-up shops on the south side of 19th. ‘Mouse Photo’, and a caricature fat mouse, on the shingle. He rattled through a big bundle of keys, thrust back the door and flicked on the overhead lights. It was the opposite of the photoshop I’d been in in Chicago only a couple of days before. It was spotless and minimal. Uncluttered by design, white beyond white, and with one of those infinity curves along the side wall so he could photograph people or things without lines or corners. A couple of light boxes, a workbench, a door marked Keep Out, which I assumed led to his darkroom, and on the back wall a blow-up, bigger than you’d think photos could ever be, bigger than life, of the old woman from Village 77. Staring that blank stare back at the camera, minutes away from death, knowing it and not flinching or moving.
‘Mouse. Why?’
‘It’s what I do. I take photos. I snap life, make it smaller, sometimes make it bigger.’
The sheer size of it served to bring home the magnitude of what had been done. There wasn’t a mark on this woman, but plastered across the wall, eight foot high, I could not help but see the mark of death. After all Mouse had told me it would have been a man of little imagination who did not imagine it however unwillingly.
‘How . . . how did you ever expect this to stay a secret?’
‘Johnnie, this is ’Nam—way out in the jungle—not some town in Kansas half a mile off the interstate. Who was ever going to know? Wasn’t the first time the United States Army shot up a bunch of gooks for no reason. Of course I expected it to stay secret. Who would tell? I wasn’t going to tell. What do you think I’d say? That I did nothing while a squad I’d help train killed a hundred or more unarmed women, old men and kids?’
‘These things have a way of getting out,’ I said, hearing Carrie Fawcett’s voice in my head saying ‘these things happen’ even as I said it.
‘These things? These things! Johnnie have you any idea what “these things” are? Have you any idea what goes on in war? The guy you pass on Main Street on his way from the drug store to grocery, with two kids trailing behind and a shopping list his wife give him—what do you think a man like that does in combat? He does what the fuck he’s told, that’s what. And after a while it gets so he’ll do what he was told like it was just a shopping list. A bottle of aspirin, a new toothbrush, a gallon of root beer and a box of Cheerios—and while you’re out kill every goddam slope you see. Soldiers are no different from you or me. They just kill when they’re told to and most of ’em get not to mind. You been there, you’d have done the same. You want to know why I told no one? ’Cause doin’ nothin’ don’t make me one ounce less guilty than the guys who pulled the trigger or lobbed in the frag grenade. This didn’t come out—“these things” don’t come out because they’re done by regular guys and when regular guys get home they just want to put their heads in the sand and pretend it didn’t happen, ’cause once they’re home they can scarcely believe it did happen. Johnnie, I don’t tell no one cause I was guilty as sin. Believe me, nobody told nobody nothin’.’
‘Somebody did.’
‘Yeah. Right. Else you wouldn’t be here.’
‘And you’re telling me.’
‘More than that. I’m giving you all the proof you need and saying do your worst.’
‘What?’
He reached under his workbench, slapped a big buff envelope into my hand.
‘Keep the photos, Johnnie. I got copies, I got the negs. Just do what you gotta do.’
‘Mouse, I don’t get it.’
‘It’s out. You come all the way home to find me and you got what you wanted. Now tell who you gotta tell, show ’em the photos and let’s see what breaks loose.’
‘Mouse?’
‘I’m ready. I’ll take what’s coming to me.’
I tipped the photos out onto the bench. Seeing is believing, but I couldn’t look again. They lay there white side up. Mouse flipped the top off a Coke bottle and stared at me as he put it to his lips. I scooped up the photos and put them back in their little folder, put the folder back into the envelope. The man felt so brittle I was actually scared to say what had to be said.
‘I need a name, Mouse. I have to talk to one of the others.’
‘What?’
‘Look, I’d just like to have corroboration, to hear it from someone else.’
‘Those photos ought be all the co-robberation you need.’
‘Doesn’t work that way. Just give me a name. Doesn’t matter who.’
‘Yes it does. I wouldn’t urge you to talk to Braga or Puckett. They’re as likely as not to answer you with a bullet. Shit—if you’d gotten to Marty Fawcett he’d as likely shot you himself. If I send you to Braga he’ll kill you without blinking. In fact—if Al even hears that you’re askin’ questions about Village 77 he’ll come lookin’ and you better not be around. Hell, if you have to talk to someone, then it had better be Gus. I kept in touch with Gus. I kept track of one other guy—leastways he drops me a line from time to time—but Gus is your best bet. Just don’t go steamin’ in there—remember you might as well be asking him to commit suicide.’
‘That’s Marcellus Gore, right?’
‘Right. Good kid.’
‘And he took part?’
‘Yeah—he did what he was told. Johnnie, I can’t pretend I know how Gus’ll react. But if he blows you off, you go with what I give you and you don’t mention him ’cept as a member of the squad. I don’t want to see Gus singled out. You get me?’
‘Yeah, I get you. Now—where does Gus live?’
‘He went home. Jus’ like me.’
‘And where’s home?’
‘Mississippi. Lazarus, Mississippi.’
If I had to
draw up a list of places I never wanted to see again—Mississippi, anywhere in Mississippi, would be top.
§
1960. I wanted Sam to understand. I would have liked him to understand. I had made the journey home from Washington at least twice a year while I was in school. Driving halfway across the nation. The obvious line from DC to Memphis to Fort Smith, Oklahoma City, Lawton and Lubbock was something I liked to vary. I’d swung South, Deep South, a few times, to Atlanta, Montgomery, Natchez and home through Dallas. I do not know that I was surprised by what I saw—the ‘whites only’ rest rooms, the ‘colored’ drinking taps—but I was shocked. The bare fact of segregation so much sharper than the abstract notion embodied in ‘separate but equal’. Now, I’d grown up in a segregated Lubbock—and I doubt my hometown was any better from the black point-of-view. We had a place that was ‘across the tracks’ that was strictly black—call it the ’hood—I used to drive over just to hear the music, saw Little Richard and Ike Turner rip it up when I was seventeen. And I do not doubt my family was better—I never saw my father abuse a black man or heard him speak ill of one just for the sake of it—but my hometown, the fact of its segregation notwithstanding, had never achieved the numbers and proportions to make race the threat it seemed to be in Alabama or Mississippi—or Washington. It was in-your-face. It was the rot eating the heart of America. So easy to ignore.
Washington itself was a city that would have surprised my father—the nation’s capital, as laden with symbolism as you wish to make it, was a southern, black town, much, much more so than Lubbock—a reclaimed swamp as hot as Cairo—in which southern Blacks counted for nothing, a town that was clearing its black people out of the center under the guise of urban renewal and making the Anacostia River the boundary of another country—call it the ghetto.
Sam said, ‘But it’s not your fight.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘What have we ever done to the nigras? I hire and fire men without looking at the color of their skin. I never told you not to play with the nigra kids. Wasn’t me segregated your school. That’s just the way the town was.’
Indeed it was. I was ‘bussed’ (no—not that sense of the word) to school. The school bus began and ended its route at Bald Eagle. I was the first kid on it in the morning and the last off in the afternoon. All the way to Lubbock High on 19th Street—an all-white school in which I was not happy—though I doubt the two matters are related—until the bell rang. Like I said, Lubbock having no skyscrapers I could see Bald Eagle from miles off on the way back, and given the family propensity to daydreaming my head and heart would reach home long before my feet. When, at the age of nine or ten, I had asked Sam why Mouse and I could not go to the same school he had not ducked or dived, but had explained as simply as he could the plain, brutal facts of segregation. That Mouse and I had struck up a friendship was against the odds, but Sam did not discourage us—indeed he was never less than welcoming and pretty soon Mouse’s mother came out to meet my mother, checking her out as surely as she was being checked, and they swapped recipes over the kitchen stove. And when, years later, the advent of ‘bussing’ (yes—that sense of the word) meant that Huey and Cousin Gabe could and did go to the same school Sam would pass no comment.
Whereas now he had something to say. Not much but he was saying it.
‘Dad—nothing you say is wrong. But the question is what did we ever do for them?’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want . . . I want to change America. I want . . .’
As ever Billy’s words came back to me.
‘I want to invent an America. I want an American revolution.’
‘Son, I think you’ll find we had that back in 1776.’
‘No, Dad. That wasn’t a revolution, that was just a change of ownership.’
He didn’t understand me. If he had, I think that last remark would have provoked him to fury. My dad, like many a Texan, flew the stars and stripes as proudly as the Lone Star of Texas or the flag of the Confederacy and saw no contradiction.
‘Son, you can’t change the world.’
He’d been telling me that for years. I suppose three-quarters of the dads in America had said that to their kids at one time or another. It was the adopted slogan of the parents of the baby-boomers.
‘I’m not trying to change the world, just my part of it.’
Billy, out in Arizona, quoting me one of his heroes, ‘You read the H.G. Wells I gave you, right? The First Men in the Moon? Well, he used to say, “If you don’t like the world change it.”’ I could not have quoted that to Sam. The very mention of Billy’s name would have numbed him into silence. He’d have found something that needed doing out of the house, mumbled his excuses and left the argument hanging—Billy’s ghost translucent in the air between us. I had made a hash of it. All Sam could see was that I wasn’t coming back. I was leaving him. Mel might have put it better, but I’d not been able to persuade Mel to make the journey. And if I had? Mel would like as not have convinced my father that changing America was little more than a euphemism for blasting our way through it. Mel was not so much into inventing America as tipping her upside down and shaking her.
Sam did mutter excuses. I found him an hour or so later down on the plain splitting wood. It was one of the tasks he’d saved himself when wealth had relieved him of every task but managing and counting his money. I’d no longer find him sprawled under a truck with a set of wrenches but he did those things that gave him not so much simple pleasure as a centre of gravity. He’d keep the stove fed, he’d do any task involving a horse.
He’d achieved a rhythm close to metrical. Stick a log on the stump, whack it twice across the compass, boot it onto the pile. The longer he chopped wood the more he had to think about.
‘Will you need money?’ he said at last.
‘I have a job. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.’
‘The what?’
‘SNCC—most people just call it Snick. They’re the guys who pioneered the Sit-Ins. You heard about the sit-ins, didn’t you, Dad? Y’know. Desegregating the diners and the lunch-counters and things. I volunteered. So did Mel.’
‘Is it a real job?’
‘It’s a real job.’
‘A real job that pays?’
‘Ten dollars a week.’
‘That real, huh?’
‘I’ll be OK. I can teach. I won’t starve. Look at this way. It’s the unknown. Full of possibilities. Who knows what opportunities are there?’
Sam split a log with about twice the force he needed to use on it, then he swung the axe one last time and buried its blade in the block.
He stuck out his hand, shook mine fit to crack bone, and said, ‘You just call if you need anything. Anything at all. It’s what Western Union’s for.’
He looked at me—him, the greatest opportunist of all time—as though he did not believe in the possibility of anything so casual as chance.
It wasn’t long before opportunity arose. I knew something would. I had felt for about four years, ever since Elvis broke nationally, although that is another symptom rather than a cause, that we were a nation about to break. This was the way the pieces fell. Interstate travel had been officially desegregated in the 1950s. Like a lot of federal laws it counted for little in the South. Schools had been desegregated in 1954—by ’57 Ike was sending troops into Little Rock, Ark., to enforce it. But, late in 1960 the Supreme Court desegregated the bus terminals. It was a gauntlet thrown down. Just what Mel and I and thousands of others had been looking for. The Congress for Racial Equality, a black organisation twenty or so years old now, decided to test the law. They would put riders on the long-haul buses out of DC, bound for New Orleans, black and white, side by side, who would try to ride together—that was the easy part—and when the buses stopped try to eat and piss together in towns where lunch
counters and toilets more often than not bore ‘whites only’ signs if they felt themselves to be civilised and plain ‘no niggers’ if they didn’t. CORE would organize but kids like us, SNCC and so forth would mostly do the riding.
Mel and I volunteered and went into training. We were schooled in the disciplines of non-violence and passive resistance—the techniques that had helped Mahatma Gandhi shut down the British Empire. There was more to it than just letting your body go limp and offering no resistance. It was, our instructors, told us, a discipline of the mind as much as the body—not even to think of wanting to retaliate. I had no trouble with this. Mel did. Even the going limp would just result in a rigid little man, feeling, as the people playing the cops told him, like a washboard. Mel kept saying ‘fuckit’ but wouldn’t quit. He achieved the semblance of passivity, but I knew he was itching to hit back. We trained three days—cover the back of your head over the brain-stem with your hands, guard your genitals with your knees, and re-paper your mind. Even had a reading list—Thoreau, that was pretty predictable, Tolstoy, and Gandhi himself. I think it fair to say that Mel did better on the texts than on the practical.
A guy came in to tell us what could happen to us, not the legal penalties, but the illegal ones—the beatings and the kickings that might be just around the corner. Scared me. I could not see that it did anything for Mel but feed his anger, but then, as it came, anger so often masked fear. I’d lived in the South, he hadn’t—I was scared and complacent at the same time. I spoke the language, felt that I had lived with the beast and looked it in the eye. I hadn’t.
A woman came to impress upon us the philosophy of the Movement. Althea Harris Burke. A short, muscle-bound black woman with a strong Arkansas accent looking for all the world as though she had come to teach us self-defense.
