And All Our Wounds Forgiven (22 page)

But what are the odds for a life that fears truth? Maybe Andrea was merely an excuse and it was time to stop lying. If you sit beside the bed of a comatose person and talk aloud for ten days, it becomes obvious quickly that it’s yourself you need to talk to.

Like now. This moment. Am I talking to you, or am I continuing the conversation with myself? Am I using you to hear myself?

Perhaps it is both.

Speaking aloud is different than saying words to oneself. To speak aloud is to make the effort to couple with the other. What is important is to make the effort. Trying is its own success even if the loneliness is not bridged.

A few nights before Andrea died, Bobby and I sat in her house. It was a typical American ranch with a finished basement, which would have been the rec room if they had had children. I still had my key to the basement where Cal’s private office had been.

Bobby wanted me to look at the manuscript, to tell him what I thought, and, I think, to feel me out about finishing it if Andrea should die.

There was scarcely anything to finish. Fifty pages of piety whose sweetness would have compelled readers to kick their children and shoot their dogs as the only means to restore a semblance of psychic balance.

There was no hint that John Calvin Marshall had had a relationship with another woman for most of his public career. According to Andrea, he was a devoted husband.

She might be right. The way she wrote of intimate conversations they had over coffee in the mornings and in the kitchen late at night, of phone calls when he would talk over problems and concerns he had about the civil rights movement, how to deal with presidents Kennedy and later Johnson, and his increasing agony over the Vietnam War.

I remembered clipping articles about the war and giving them to him from late sixty-two on. I read books and wrote precis for him. When Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam, was killed in a coup, I suggested to him that there might be CIA involvement. I was the one who first mentioned that one could not fight for civil rights at home and support a government depriving a nation in Southeast Asia of its right to choose its own destiny.

Why had he discussed all this with her and not me? I felt betrayed, as if he had had an affair with his own wife. He wasn’t supposed to be talking with her about matters he would not have known about if not for me. He wasn’t supposed to be talking to her about anything that mattered to him, about anything that mattered at all

He never told me about his conversations with Kennedy and Johnson. I have been trying to remember what we did talk about? I can’t remember anything. Maybe that is why I am silent with his biographers. I have nothing to say. Maybe I talk so much about his penis because that is all I knew of him.

I try to convince myself that Andrea was lying, that she was creating a public fiction. For some reason I know she was not. Cal had to have a confidante, someone whom he could use as his sounding board. I was so self-centered that it never occurred to me that it would be his own wife. That’s logical, right? That makes sense, doesn’t it?

I feel so stupid.

Yet, his tears were not a lie. He may have shared his musings with her, but I was the one who lanced his pain and healed his soul.

I do not like myself very much at this moment. I read over what I have just written and I am ashamed. I am upset because I had fancied that I was the only one in the life of John Calvin Marshall and maybe I wasn’t. Or maybe I was the only one in one part of his life and not another. Maybe he simply used me. Well, I was obviously anxious to be used.

No.

That is not how it was. Maybe what she wrote is true. Maybe it isn’t. But lust cannot last seven years. No man sleeps with a woman for that many years from physical desire alone.

But at this moment, I am not sure.

Saturday — Evening

I have just returned from the cemetery. It is the first time I have seen where Cal is buried. Although it is not the setting I would have put him in, it is appropriate.

He is buried in a large cemetery near a shopping mall. His grave stone is a block of granite, and not having been here before, I was surprised by the words on his tombstone. “God’s Gonna Trouble The Waters,” they read. I would not have given Andrea credit for such insight. The words are from a spiritual called “Wade in the Water.”

At large mass meetings Cal would end his speech by breaking into that song. It was a familiar spiritual all across the South, and all he had to do was sing the first word and every black voice in the church would come in on the second. It would send chills through me every time because it was as if I was hearing not only their voices but the voices of their ancestors going back in time to that absurd moment white people made the decision that it was in their best interests to import dark-skinned people from halfway across the globe and enslave them. (And there are those who want to argue that white people aren’t insane.)

I don’t know that I ever understood the song as much as I loved it. What did it mean that God was going to trouble the water? Such a strange and unusual use of the word, trouble. Was it a corruption and was the line originally that God was going to tremble the water? It bothered me so much that I finally went to a library and looked it up and much to my surprise, I learned that there is a definition that means ‘To disturb, agitate, ruffle (water, air, etc.); esp. to stir up (water) so as to make it thick or muddy.”

One night I asked Cal, “Why would God want to trouble the water?”

He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”

“That spiritual. God’s gonna trouble the water. Why would God want to stir things up, to make them muddy? Why would God want to be an agitator, a disturber of stillness and peace?”

“Perhaps there are some waters that need disturbing.”

I could tell that he hadn’t thought about it himself, that he was trying to cover up that he didn’t know and was too tired to really think about it at that moment.

A week later he was dead.

I hadn’t thought about those words since and there they were on his tombstone. Well, his death had certainly troubled the waters. Had that been God’s doing? If so, to what end? What did God benefit from troubled waters?

Next to his grave was the open earth where Andrea would be laid. Do you remember my writing earlier that each death returns you to all your deaths? When I stared into Andrea’s grave, it was also Jessica’s and it was the grave of all those who died in the sixties, most of whom I knew only from the accounts I heard others give Cal, but I have made it a point all these years to remember their names and I recite them to myself at odd moments because everyone can’t forget, Gregory. It isn’t right that everyone go on with their lives as if they had not lived or died.

Rev. George Lee
Lamar Smith
Emmett Till
Willie Edwards, Jr.
Mack Charles Parker
Herbert Lee
Roman Ducksworth, Jr.
Paul Guihard
William Moore
Medgar Evers
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carole Robertson
Cynthia Wesley
Virgil Ware
Louis Allen
Rev. Bruce Klunder
Henry Dee
Charles Moore
James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Michael Schwerner
Col. Lemuel Penn
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Rev. James Reeb
Viola Liuzzo
Jonathan Daniels Samuel Younge, Jr.
Vernon Dahmer
John Calvin Marshall

I have forgotten some names and I am sorry. And I don’t know the names of all those like Bobby who are living but only barely, those who hemorrhage from wounds they don’t know they carry, those who hurt and don’t know it is from pains thirty years old.

I lay down on Cal’s grave and it reminded me of all the times I had lain atop him after we made love. No, he did not tell me what he was thinking about the future of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War or what Kennedy or Johnson had said because there was no space. There were other matters that needed saying.

We talked a lot about death. His.

I hated it. Every time he started I would want to shut him up, but, over time, I understood: he cared for me. I did not think about the difference in our ages. He did. He knew that he was the only thing of significance in my life and he worried about what would happen to me when he died. He would make me fantasize about what I would do — go to graduate school, start a surfing school, get involved in Daddy’s business in which I was major stockholder. Marrying a dentist and living in Vermont was not one of the fantasies.

The night before he was killed he knew. We both did. It wasn’t the kind of knowing that is in words; it was a knowing of the heart and the body. But to understand the death of John Calvin Marshall you have to understand what those last years were like.

One cannot live on intimate terms with his mortality for too long without becoming mad or free. Most of us became mad. Some of us dramatically like Bobby. Most of us quietly. Cal became free.

Everyone knows he is going to die, but how many really believe it? Deep down, everyone thinks that everybody else will die except him. Our deepest secret is that we are the one who is going to live forever.

Those of us who worked in the civil rights movement could not have that illusion of immortality. Firefighters risk death but only when fighting a fire. Policemen risk death but only when on the job. The majority of policemen go through their entire careers and are never in a situation in which their lives are threatened. I cannot think of anyone in this century who lived in constant relationship to death like those of us who sought to make America whole and broke ourselves into pieces instead.

There was no escaping death. Death came suddenly. Was that car behind you just a car or was it following you? What about that car passing you? You learned to rely on your peripheral vision to catch any untoward move, or the hint of something pointing at you. When you stopped at an intersection you were aware of every car and every person on the street. Your eyes and mind were constantly finding escape routes, constantly plotting evasive maneuvers if a car came at you from this direction or that. You assumed death and so you never relaxed. The rifle which fired the bullet that killed William Moore belonged to a man Moore had had a friendly conversation with hours before. When the reality is death, you do not trust appearances.

That is something of what the daily reality was like for the average civil rights worker, someone working in a small town in Alabama or Mississippi. But that civil rights worker could go into the next county and there he was anonymous. That was why every six months or so, people who had been working in those small towns would pile into a couple of cars and go to New Orleans and party for an entire weekend. They had to remind themselves that joy existed and it was something for which they still had the capacity.

Imagine that you are John Calvin Marshall. Where do you go when you want to be reminded of joy? Where do you go to be out of the imaginary rifle-sight you know someone is always aiming at you in fantasy? The threat of death is constant. Death becomes your context for what is ordinary. If death is the ordinary, then where is life?

But this describes only one aspect of death with which John Calvin Marshall lived, and the least. Cal was fatalistic about assassination. When Kennedy was killed, he said, “If the Secret Service can’t protect the president of the United States, what kind of protection do you think there can be for John Calvin Marshall?”

What almost drove him mad were the deaths of others. He felt responsible for each one, because their murderers had been impelled to action by the historical forces he had untied. He never permitted it to be publicized, but whenever there was a murder connected with the civil rights movement, he visited the survivors. Most of the time we went at night, just him and me in my pickup. No one ever knew. Sometimes it would be two or three in the morning when we would knock on the door of some shack in the middle of nothing. The family would not believe it was him. Sometimes we would not stay more than a half-hour. He would hug whomever the survivors were — the mother, father, wife, the children — and tell them how sorry he was.

The deaths and the grieving began to wear him down, especially after Shiloh. I don’t know what happened there. All I remember is getting a call from him a little after midnight, Christmas morning. He told me to get Bobby out of the South as quickly as possible. I slipped on a pair of jeans and a shirt, jumped in my truck and left. When I got to Shiloh, it was Christmas morning, an overcast gray Christmas morning. I walked into the Freedom House. Bobby was seated on a sofa, staring into space as if he were incapable of speech and would never be again. George was sitting beside him.

I had seen him only occasionally since returning South. At staff meetings, primarily, and we never had the chance to talk. I’m not sure why.

“Bobby?”

He did not look at me or respond.

“What happened?” I asked George.

“If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

I never liked George. He was the first black I ever met who didn’t distinguish between those who were on his side and those who weren’t. He hated white people and he hated me.

“What’re you going to do?” he continued. “Cal send you?”

“If I want you to know, I’ll tell you,” I shot back.

I got on the phone and called someone who taught at a college in the midwest. I told him I was going to be leaving Shiloh within minutes. I had had two hours sleep and figured I could drive twelve hours without stopping to rest, which should put me close to him. He was to meet me and I would tell him what to do from there.