And All Our Wounds Forgiven Read online

  Also by Julius Lester:

  Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama

  To Be a Slave

  Revolutionary Notes

  Black Folktales

  Search for the New Land

  The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B.

  Du Bois

  Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History

  Two Love Stories

  The Knee-High Man

  Who I Am (with David Gahr)

  All Is Well

  This Strange New Feeling

  Do Lord Remember Me

  The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit

  More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer

  Rabbit

  Further Tales of Uncle Remus

  The Last Tales of Uncle Remus

  Lovesong: Becoming a Jew

  How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have?

  Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky

  Copyright © 1994, 2011 by Julius Lester

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-510-6

  To

  Milan Sabatini

  evermore

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Lisa

  Chapter 2: Card

  Chapter 3: Andrea

  Chapter 4: Lisa

  Chapter 5: Andrea

  Chapter 6: Robert

  i do not know where the story begins, though i am integral to it, i am not sure i know even what the story is as neither my life nor death constitutes the story.

  nor is the story always the one we recall, rarely is it the one we tell.

  in its etymological root, story means to see. hi-story is, then, the record of what was seen, there’s the rub, to coin a phrase, what constitutes seeing? is such profundity even possible? who is seeing determines what is seen, can we hope, then, for more than awareness of what we think we see, though what we see may not be there at all?

  example: in the mid-fifties i saw that the time had come to end racial segregation in the south. the 1954 supreme court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools was like a second emancipation proclamation for us. the highest court in the land was, at long last, ready to uphold the constitutional principle of equality under the law. by decree-ing segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the court, wittingly or unwittingly, had declared segregation illegal in every aspect of american life.

  i was under no illusion that ending segregation on buses, in restaurants and in other areas of public accommodation would be easy. i and others would give our lives. dying for the right to sit on a torn seat at the front of a bus was not an even exchange. but such obscene inequity was inherent to the story. i thought that was all i needed to understand.

  how little i knew about the nature of story. i still believed stories had the calming order of beginnings, middles and ends, with unambiguous heroes, heroines and villains, if i acted for the good, the good would prevail and justice would roll through the land with the meandering majesty of a mighty river.

  what gave me such confidence to think i knew what the good was? i equated recognition of injustice with apprehension of the good. such elegant symmetry is only in the minds of political ideologues. whatever judgement history makes of my life, it will not record that john calvin marshall was an ideologue.

  yet, i, too, was guilty of oversimplifying, of trying to contain the story within the parameters of my subjective landscape. i believed that if you sincerely and honestly acted for the good, goodness would be the consequence.

  how little i knew.

  once set in motion, social change, regardless of its noble intent and pure righteousness, cannot be controlled, you think you are changing “this” and you are. but you did not anticipate “that” changing also, by the time recognition of the unanticipated consequences comes, it is too late to do anything — except hope you survive.

  i thought social change meant the enactment of laws to modify behavior and eliminate or at least reform institutions that acted unjustly and punish those who refused to alter their behavior, if not their attitudes.

  i learned:

  social change is the transformation of values by which a group and/or nation has defined and known itself, such change is like pregnancy; a woman is aware of it only a month after conception. a nation becomes cognizant of a shift in its values only when facing a phenomenon it does not understand and can find no precedent for.

  example: 1956: i was 26 years old, a harvard ph.d. andrea and i had been married for a year. congress authorized the construction of an interstate highway system. i’m sure we read about it in the paper. i have no doubt that huntley-brinkley mentioned it one evening in their droll, offhand way that made cynicism not only acceptable but attractive. there was probably a picture in the atlanta constitution of president eisenhower in the rose garden or oval office using thirty pens to sign the bill into law. we did not pay attention because we thought it was a wonderful idea. we remembered the drive from boston to atlanta the year before. part of the new jersey turnpike had been built by then and what a treat it was to drive at 65 miles an hour for unbroken stretches. but most of that journey was made on two lane highways through small southern towns where the speed limit was 35 and, if you were colored, you got arrested for doing 34. i greeted the projected interstate highway system with anticipation. that i did so indicated a transmutation of my values of which i was as yet unaware.

  like all other americans in the fifties, i had become a believer in the ethic of saving time, (bear with me if i appear to be rambling. i am not. for some the exercise of logic means moving straight ahead. on this side of the veil, we tend to go sideways but are no less logical.)

  saving time is a peculiar concept. what does it mean? and how do you do it?

  theoretically, you reduce the time used for one task and free time for other activities. sounds reasonable. but is it? Shakespeare “wasted” a lot of time because he wrote in long hand with quill pens. it would be logical to conclude that if he had had a ballpoint pen, typewriter or computer, he would have written more plays and perhaps, greater ones, yet, no user of a ballpoint pen, typewriter or computer has equaled or excelled him in applying the english language to human experience. it is possible Shakespeare would have written less and less well had he used a computer.

  perhaps Shakespeare neither spent or saved time but lived in different relationship to it. perhaps he wore time. perhaps it wore him.

  the twentieth-century metaphor for our relationship to time implies ownership. “how much time do we have?” is a common question. “i wasted a lot of time sitting in traffic,” is a daily plaint. “i have some
free time tomorrow afternoon.” we conceive of time as a commodity to be expended, hoarded or wasted. the marxist — when such existed — would have said the metaphor reflects capitalism. it is not so simple.

  the interstate highway system was created to save time. how much time? if two cars leave new york city for albany at noon, one driving 65, the other 55, the first car will arrive twelve minutes before the second. i suppose if you had to go to the bathroom badly, knocking twelve minutes off a three hour drive would be helpful. otherwise, what would one do with the twelve minutes saved?

  but what one does with the time saved is not the issue. an american axiom: better to have wasted the time you’ve saved than not to have saved it at all. some are so conscientious about saving time they drive 80 and 90 miles an hour and save themselves the most time of all — the rest of their lives.

  what was not anticipated was the enormous social change the interstate highway system would bring into being. for centuries we had been rooted to place. home and work and leisure occurred in one place and created a whole — community. the interstate highway system made it possible to live thirty, forty, fifty, sixty miles from where you worked. work and home and place ceased to be interrelated. you could work in a city whose people and institutions were alien to you. you could live in a place and be indifferent to its people and institutions. you could live and be unknown at work and at home. You could live without belonging to a community (enter the nuclear family as locus of society. but the family is too small an entity to withstand the intricate permutations of relationship. the pressures of family are alleviated only if the family knows itself as part of a community. when it does not, we should not be surprised that one out of two marriages end in divorce.)

  the interstate highway system brought into being a geopolitical entity called sub-urbs as people discovered they could have the amenities of country living on city incomes. eventually, stores and corporations moved to where their workers and consumers had gone. the middle-class white collar workforce and corporations that had provided the tax base for the urbs took their tax dollars to the sub-urbs. the cities deteriorated because the majority of the inhabitants remaining were blacks, hispanics and poor whites who did not have incomes to generate sufficient tax revenues. amer-ica became a nation of predominantly white sub-urbs encircling black and poor urbs. why? is it too harsh to conclude that we cared more about saving time than about the structure of our society?

  saving time became a national priority. the fifties saw the introduction of ballpoint pens, minute rice, tv dinners and fast food restaurants — mcdonald’s, kentucky fried chicken and pizza hut. why did we become obsessed with saving what cannot be saved?

  world war ii. it taught us that we could die — not individually, each in his and her own time, but all at once, together, with no one left to remember who we had been, or even that we had been.

  truman said he slept peacefully after he made the decision to drop the atomic bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki, that he never had a second thought because the decision shortened the war and saved american lives. that is good. but it is a good encompassing so little. we see only the magic circle we draw around us and ours, and by definition, whatever protects us and ours is the intrinsic good. we remain oblivious to the intrinsic evil snoring quietly on the other side of the circle.

  truman’s limited good changed the fundamental definition of how we lived on the planet. i was 15 when the bombs were dropped. a profound difference between me and those young people who gathered around me in the civil rights movement was they grew up knowing sentient existence on the planet could be destroyed by human volition. they grew up numbed by the second world war, which deliberately, willfully, knowingly made civilians the objects of mass destruction. dresden, auschwitz, hiroshima, nagasaki. 54,800,000 people, mostly civilians, died in world war ii. the object of war was no longer territory; the object of war became death. how could anyone born after 1946 trust life?

  being born in 1930 i grew up in a world in which the continuity of life was unquestioned. after hiroshima and auschwitz i could not trust life naively anymore, but neither did I distrust it. instead, my generation was infected by a virus called existential anxiety. we were not comfortable with life or death and lived in fear of both.

  those born after hiroshima were beyond anxiety. anxiety implies that life can be trusted if you learn how to relate to it. the post-hiroshima citizen trusts only death, because it is the singular and ultimate security, the one experience that can be depended on to be what it claims to be. those of us whose consciousness predates hiroshima retain an ancestral memory of the nobility of the human experiment. our angst is leavened by faith in the dignity of the human being. when faulkner stood at Stockholm in 1949 and declared “man will prevail,” he affirmed the secular catechism that had held the west together since the renaissance. then he went and had a bourbon-and-branch.

  that first generation of post-hiroshima youth loved me, for a while, because they longed for this secular faith. however, during the last days of my life, i saw them swallowed alive by the idolization of race. blacks placed racial exaltation above a love of humanity and did not understand: their love of race was passion for death, a passion ignited in the extermination camps, and at hiroshima and nagasaki.

  when civilians became the targets of government weaponry, whatever semblance of safety government represented was destroyed. it did not matter that it was our government against someone else’s. truman miscalculated the extent to-which people were willing to go to save american lives. we saw photographs of the mushroom clouds in life magazine and read the stories of women and children vaporized from the face of the earth, leaving behind only their shadows burned into the ground. no shots were fired on american soil in ww ii. no bombs fell on american cities. yet, americans seemed to understand inchoately that murder carried to its logical extreme is self-murder. when the soviet union acquired a nuclear capability, it became clear: governments were now willing to destroy the world to save the nation.

  after auschwitz, after hiroshima, saving time became an obsession because we could no longer assume that the human experiment on planet earth would continue until its natural end was reached hundreds of millions of years later when the sun’s heat consumes the planet. our descendants were no longer guaranteed to us. we were compelled to save time because at auschwitz and at hiroshima, time was destroyed.

  we mistake for the Good the limited good we see — or think we see — or rationalize that we see — or lie about. we do not want to see that what is good today may spawn evil tomorrow. evil is not an absolute. evil is ambiguous, and sometimes, it does not seek to negate the good but merely hold its hand. for many of us, this is worse. good that is ashamed of itself loses its vitality. it should not. good and evil are not distinct. they interpenetrate each other continually until it is unclear which is which. if one is patient, you eventually understand that it does not matter. good or evil are merely opinions we offer based on notions of what is convenient and inconvenient to us, our group, our nation.

  and if i had known . . .

  LISA

  A tall woman, straight blond hair brushing her shoulders, sat by the bed of a comatose black woman in a Nashville, Tennessee, hospital.

  The white woman had appeared early that afternoon. Shyly, almost fearfully, she asked if she could see Andrea Marshall. If not for the offering of respect in her voice, the head nurse, an almost equally tall black woman, would have assumed she was a reporter. She was about to tell her someone was in the room already, the man who had come in the ambulance with Mrs. Marshall last night, when, from the far end of the corridor, she saw him coming toward them. As he got closer he looked up, saw the white woman at the nurse’s station, stopped, and said, “Lisa?”

  “Bobby?”

  They embraced with the overeagerness of two who had been absent from each other more years than had been shared. Yet, the looks they exchanged (once past the comparing of hairlines (his) and gray strands (hers)) were a
tentative affirmation of the memories joining them, memories as defining of their lives as if they had been married and buried their only child. They embraced again with a tremor of anxiety at this unexpected resurrection of a past that, apparently, had not been buried and now appeared not even to have died, and, unlike them, had not aged.

  They released each other and stepped back. “You look as trim and fit as ever,” he commented, admiringly.

  She nodded, “I stay in shape.” She couldn’t help but note that he had not. It had been — what? — almost thirty years since she had sneaked him out of Shiloh in the middle of the night and taken him to New York (for reasons she was never told). That man had been thin, almost emaciated. This one was rounded, like a balloon blown up slowly, care being taken to cut off the air before the wisp that would pop the skin. He had become a sphere of a man, the dome of his bald head atop an even rounder body supported by legs that appeared too thin for the weight imposed upon them.

  “It’s good to see you.” The earnestness in his voice would have made her blush if it had come from an adolescent boy. But he was not a teenager and there was a bewilderment in his eyes, not at the present moment that had brought them together but about life itself. There was something he had failed to grasp, and sooner than he would have thought, a half-century of living was past tense and more sentences began with “I remember when ...” than with “I am going to . . .” and he was alone, a pain in his heart like the aching of milk in a woman’s breasts as the tiny coffin of her child was placed tenderly in the grave. Such loneliness lacked even the illusory edge of a horizon. Elizabeth preferred gazing into the night sky when she wanted to contemplate infinity.