The Cross of Redemption (43 page)

And let the record show, we went the route—were much nicer, for example, when the chips were down, to Bobby Kennedy than Bobby Kennedy ever was, or could have dreamed of being, to us. Let us scuttle the Camelot legend. I am weary of Lincoln Memorials, of the American piety, which is nothing less than a Sunday-school apology for genocide.

I have earned the right, from the moment of my own stupendous performance on the auction block, to tell you that this Republic is a total liar and has never contained the remotest possibility, let alone desire, to let my people go. (I know that that offends grammar, but it be’s that way sometimes.) The Lincoln Memorial is a pious fraud. Lincoln freed those slaves not because he had the remotest interest in human liberty, still less in the freedom of the slave (a freedom which no one dared, or dares, imagine), but because—to paraphrase him—he was determined to preserve the Union. Which, indeed, for what it’s worth, he did.

Blacks have never had a President, in these yet to be United States, who cared whether they lived or died. (Roosevelt didn’t dare pass an antilynch bill, as he explained to Walter White of the NAACP, because the Congress
would have prevented him from doing “great things” for America and, said the most “liberal” President in American history, “I just can’t take that chance.”)

And as for Bobby and his brother JFK, they were millionaire sons of a Boston-Irish adventurer, who made his money through one of the American Puritanical convulsions, Prohibition. Well, when Bobby K. decided to channel the black discontent into voter registration, he was doing exactly what Lincoln had done, a century before: he was immobilizing, with the promise of freedom, those slaves he could not buy.

To be a black American is much worse than being in love with, tied to, inexorably, mysteriously, responsible for, someone whom you don’t like, don’t respect, and don’t dare trust.

Read Roger Wilkins’s record of how it is. Few documents will, in your lifetime, equal it. Do not read it as a missionary. Do not imagine that anyone is asking you to do anything at all. You have done quite enough already.

Read it, if you have the courage to love your children. This book is an act of love, written by a lover and a father and one of the only friends your children have.

(1982)

•      •     •

O
N THIS SAME AVENUE
down which he hurried now, he had once walked with his father on bright Sunday mornings and vibrant Sunday nights. Churchgoers and heretics passed them, dressed in their brightest clothes. On Sunday the sun never failed to shine; on Sunday nights the stars were brighter and the sky was a deeper blue. When they turned the corner that led to the church, they saw the lighted windows and heard, with a fierce excitement, the sound of tambourines and singing and the clapping of hands. Then they hurried to reach the house of God. So had his father lived in the Southern cotton fields; so had his mother lived before him; who,
born a slave, and with no knowledge—“as men call knowledge”—yet turned, sobbing, on her final pillow, “A mighty fortress is our God.” When Johnnie was very young, though he feared his father and was frightened and troubled at church, he did not doubt that the gospel his father preached, to which the church bore witness, was the truth; that under the shadow of His everlasting wings was all love and all power and the assured redemption of his soul. One wintertime, while his mother was again pregnant and his father had no job, and they lived, his mother and his father and his two brothers and himself, in two cold rooms at the top of a tenement where rats whispered behind the plaster and harlots made love behind the stairs, Johnnie had cursed God. But to curse God is not to doubt Him. His father stripped him naked and beat him until he lay on the splintery floor, in feverish sobbing and in terror of death.

In a hospital in Long Island his father now lay dying. He had been ill a long while, but Johnnie, who no longer lived in Harlem, had never been to see him. And he hurried unwillingly now, only because his mother was ill and had called him at his downtown rooming house to beg him, for her sake, not to let his father die with only strangers at his bedside. By strangers she meant white strangers; she surely knew that Johnnie was a stranger in his father’s eyes.

According to the vision of their church, in which, at length, he became a burdened hope, the son of a prophet, all that was in the world was sin. He was not allowed to go to movies or to plays; smoking and drinking were forbidden. It was not thought wise to read more at school than was absolutely necessary, for schools also, it had been revealed, might function as the anteroom to hell. One read the newspapers only to remark how exactly, how relentlessly, the Word of God approached fulfillment. From his pulpit his father warned them of the wrath to come. “Behold, in the last days there shall be wars and rumours of wars; nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.” Many an ancient throne shall topple and many a king, like Nebuchadnezzar, crawl raving in the dust. But all these things (and Amen! cried the church and once his own heart had cried, Amen!) should bring rejoicing to the hearts of the redeemed. For it meant that their trials on earth were nearly done, their salvation was at hand: in the twinkling of an eye that same power which raised Jesus from the dead would lift them from the guilty earth and, for their reward, they would triumph over death and hell and reign forever with the Father and the Son.
But by this time Johnnie was a child no longer, but an eighteen-year-old about to leave high school, where he had read too much. What he had read undermined his faith and, equally, what his faith had been distorted all that he had read. His faith was nothing but panic and his thoughts were all confusion. Then he hated his father. He fought to be free of his father and his father’s God, now so crushingly shapeless and omnipotent, Who had come out of Eden and Jerusalem and Africa to sweeten the cotton field and make endurable the lash, and Who now hovered, like the promise of mercy, above the brutal Northern streets.

He began to backslide as an angel falls: headlong, furious, anxious to discover the utmost joys of hell. The joys of hell are as difficult to discover as the joys of heaven and are even more overrated. He began to smoke, though it made him dizzy, and he began to drink, though it made him sick. He forced his tongue, which had shouted Hallelujah! and Praise the Lord!, to use a more infernal language. The boys he knew then, in his last year at high school, were more civilized than he and more worldly. He listened to their version of the Scriptures. Yet when one of them, a boy named David, one afternoon took him to a movie (he had said very casually, Yes, I’d like to go) he sat in the dark and trembled, waiting for the ceiling to fall, for the awful light of the second coming to fill the theater, and the wrath of God, unloosed, to hurl him into the lake that burned forever with brimstone fire.

David and his father met once, just before Johnnie left home. David called for him one Saturday afternoon to take him downtown somewhere. As David, very hot and uncomfortable in the little living room, rose to leave, his father held out his hand and said, “Are you a Christian?” David reddened and tried to smile. “No,” he said. “I’m Jewish.” His father dropped his hand and turned away. Johnnie opened the door quickly and pushed David in front of him into the hall. When he pulled the door shut behind him he looked into his father’s eyes. His father looked on him with that distant hatred with which one considers Judas; and yet with more than that, for, his father’s eyes told him, he was henceforth damned by his own wish, having forsaken the few righteous to make his home in the populous Sodom and entered into an alliance with his father’s enemies and the enemies of the Lord.

The conductor called out his station and he walked to the door, waiting for the train to stop. There were trees along the road he took to the hospital
and a few neat, characterless houses, with here and there a hedge, clipped into a round shape, as unreal-looking and as fragile as the glittering baubles that hang from Christmas trees. This was a world he might never enter, the world his father had despised. The world had rejected his father as it now rejected him. But “Fear not,” his father had preached, “them that are able to kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.” When his father spoke from the pulpit one did not ask whether he spoke with the fire of bitterness or the fire of love. In the leaden days, the wintry days, in their several, precarious homes, when they were alone with no singing, and no transfiguring light made his father’s head majestic, was he sad? When he wept and trembled on his knees before God in the overwhelming joy of his salvation did he also weep to see that his children grew thin and surly, that he was not always able to provide their bread? Then for the first time he tried to imagine his father lying helpless on white sheets, among strangers, being handled and ruled by strangers, his own will being set at naught.

He passed through the gates and began a half run up the walk, for suddenly he had to look at his father’s face again. At the end of the walk stood the great silent building in which his father lay; silence covered these grounds and all the buildings, a silence that frightened him unreasonably.

The nurse considered him with cold, almost hostile detachment. “Yes?”

He realized that his face was wet. He stammered: “Is Gabriel Grimes a patient here?”

“Are you a relative?”

“His son.”

Without a word she opened the door so that he could enter and, as he entered, locked it behind him. Then she turned and he followed her. The corridor was much longer than it had seemed when he peered in from the outside and the white pressed on his temples. The floor was white, of some material like marble, slippery and veined with gray. They opened a door and mounted a flight of steps, marble like the floor and whiter. At the top of the staircase was a series of doors, secret, dark-brown, against the pressing white. The thin fall sun crept in through opaque windows; it was like an old house in mourning.

The nurse opened one of the doors and they faced a tall man, nearly bald, who wore a white coat and gray trousers. He was standing in a very small room, which seemed to have no windows and was of a dull, smoke-like color. On the desk, in an ashtray, was a smoking cigar.

·      ·     ·

“Yes?” said the doctor.

“Grimes,” the nurse replied. It was as if some secret signal for his destruction had been exchanged over his head. She left, closing the door behind her.

“Have a seat,” the doctor said; very kindly, so that Johnnie knew that the doctor was uncomfortable. He sat down in the soft leather chair, looking about the room for some object which would engage his attention. The doctor sat down behind the desk, facing him; he opened a folder.

“You’re his oldest son?”

“Yes.”

The gray-green eyes looked at him sharply. He looked away.

“You’ve never visited your father here before?”

“No.” He coughed. It sounded obscene, diseased, in the antiseptic room. “I—I haven’t been living at home.”

The doctor turned back to the folder. “He was admitted here nearly two years ago. Had you left home then?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know he’d been admitted?”

“Yes.”

Again the gray-green eyes whipped him lightly, pursuing some conjecture of their own. Johnnie looked down at the smoldering cigar. The string of his loins threatened to snap.

“Do you know what it was your father suffered from?”

“No. I—my mother told me something—it wasn’t very clear.” He tried to smile; the doctor ignored it.

“It was a kind of paranoia. He was always religious, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He was.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

The doctor looked at him. “He may have brooded about this. You left very shortly before he was brought here?”

“Yes.”

“You and he had quarrelled?”

“Yes.”

“Your father stopped working and stopped preaching, stayed at home and read his Bible and prayed. He refused to eat because he said his family was trying to poison him. Your mother has told us that he would steal out of the house and buy a bag of fruit, oranges or the like, and come back and sit in a corner and eat them, rind, pulp, and all.”

He said nothing and watched the doctor. The doctor picked up the cigar and put it down.

“We had a great deal of trouble with him here. When he had been here a short while we realized that he was tubercular. We did what we could—” He paused and looked at Johnnie. “He is in a coma now. Would you like to see him?”

“Yes,” he said.

The doctor rose from the desk and, standing, crushed the cigar. Automatically, Johnnie rose too, bracing his shaking legs. The doctor moved to the door. “He is just down the hall,” the doctor said.

He followed the doctor out of the door. He stared at the doctor’s moving back and looked away, for the doctor’s jacket was white and the motion made him sick. He felt that he was being slowly, irrevocably trapped.

They entered a small room with curtained windows. There was a shaded bulb high in the ceiling. There was nothing in the room except a bed and a chair and a screen around the bed. The shaded bulb was black-gray in the socket.

“He has been quite ill,” the doctor said.

He nodded, but did not move. The doctor looked at him kindly for a moment and motioned for him to follow behind the screen. He moved slowly behind the doctor. At the edge of the screen the doctor stopped; he looked at the doctor, wondering what was wrong, and realized that the doctor was being tactful. He did not feel that he should be present at the last meeting of a son and his father.