A View From the Mountain

Peer into any of a hundred human hearts;
you are sure to find, spun whole, those
moments buried in the new growth of time
passing; the far-into-the-night-early-dawn
exchanges, falling-outs and reconciliations,
the wrestle with words and the sky after rain,
forgiveness, the late turn to forgiveness,
promises and promises, and all the rest,
that for whatever reason, one holds dear;
that bundle of moments clutched hand to chest.
Lives are made of this found treasure.

Make your way to the young and golden summer;
when the unspoken questions gathered at the
back of the mind have gained voice and
in a swollen panic fill the head so like the
blackbird’s piercing squawk, exacting and sure.
In the calm that follows find where the
quieted past inhabits the present.

This much you know.

The bigger man fell first; hard, with a deadening thud you can never undo, all hope fleeing at the sound of it. The hot gate of hell that was Thermopylae had laid claim on him. Down to stay, he would not rise again. The pure, unburdened cry of the children, “Daddy get up, get up”, called after him, and in his heart he did; but try as he may, the stubborn, thick weight that was his old self would not obey. That “something darker than him”, which de la Beckwith saw spreading out across his back, was just him leaving the body.

All arms and legs, the second man stepped up onto the platform, gave the traditional Arabic greeting, “As-Salaam-Alaikum” (peace be unto you) and shortly thereafter was thrown backwards, falling over several chairs on the makeshift stage behind him, six shots to the chest? But reasoning until the end, was heard to say, “Don’t do this, don’t do this” before being gunned downed by his own, his wearied, princely head cradled in Kochiyama’s small hands. Medgar Evers and Malcolm X were now counted among the newly dead.

So, too, were four young, Black girls—Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair—in the basement of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15, 1963, the third such bombing in eleven days in Birmingham; the fourth in less than a month. And how unremarkable it was we had not come to know their names as Angela Y. Davis, Condoleezza Rice, Joyce Carlis, and Alice Walker instead, reciting them now with the same unknowing recognition. Put plainly, they could have been any of the unnamed, unnumbered others among us.

Freedom Summer had come and gone, the disturbed ground unearthing a dozen Black bodies in its wake; the very first day costing three “outside agitators” nothing less than everything they had and none of the perpetrators more than six years time served. U. S. District Judge William Harold Cox, declaring, “they killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved”.

Dr. King and Fred Hampton were effectively biding time, their fates already sealed.

There was talk of a minor dispute with Charon concerning these lost souls (we are told race related) that threatened to escalate until Malcolm, with a single gesture, intervened. The rest, no less historical than history, you would never know.

I turned fifteen that spring. The search for answers began almost immediately. Why were our lives so hard? Why had they been that way, forever? Why all the violence and bitter hatred directed at us? Why was always the most difficult. Largely because such objections, whenever they are raised, have never been a matter of much concern to this country. It had come to view this hostility as an exercise of power and control over others. It was not likely to take exception to those who carry out the cruel practices, nor was it dismayed or horrified by their actions. It was readily persuaded to think of it as “securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”, as “insuring domestic tranquility”, and keeping the Negroes in check. (You have always been very big on assuring White people they are safe from harm in the world.) So much so, that when we encounter Black bodies being abused, or shackled and warehoused, we are hard pressed to see anything inherently wrong with it. It is routinely regarded as nothing more than what has always been their lot.

As children we all grew up with the saying, “I would not do that to a dog”, meaning I would not even treat a dog that way, when referring to a thing having gone too far, particularly where harm or wrong had been unjustly done and was therefore morally suspect. I don’t think White people have such sayings.

But what had we done? What had warranted and sustained such ugly and active opposition and given everyone we came in contact with just cause for their vengeful acts? It had to have been monstrous, even unforgivable. It stood to reason. Were we Palestinian to their Israel, God not on our side? Had what we done rivaled the viciousness of apartheid in South Africa? Perhaps we had divided up their country in a great partitioning, setting them one against the other. Or had we been implicated in an attempted holocaust of some sort? I was sure even the smallest violation on our part would be revealed. All the wrongdoing documented, archived, codified, set into the record and so, true. That is your way. Otherwise, all this unrelenting enmity would appear so unseemly. Whatever the offense, this wild justice you so favor felt an awful lot like revenge for an old, old wrong.

Not at all an idle or pointless quest, I turned over many stones. I wondered if I might be on the trail of another of the many silent truths, best left unsaid, that fill so much of this country’s rough-and-tumble history. I wanted to make sure I overlooked nothing, that I started at the beginning. A head full of questions and an invaluable set of the Encyclopedia Britannica did most of the heavy lifting. I had read an abridged de Tocqueville on early America, with no mention of the deed. The “Africa has no history” contingent piped in with the usual bit of accomplished colonial prejudice focused on gyrating Black bodies and dark, faraway corners of the globe, but added nothing to the question at hand. A favorite son of the south, Shelby Foote, had not taken up the matter, a chance mention of Leon Litwack and James Baldwin in the same breath, a cadre of Black scholars associated with the University of Chicago—still nothing.

No matter how many histories I consulted, (American, British, French or Spanish), how far or wide I extended my reach, none spoke of such an offense. When DuBois and Frederick Douglass sat numbered among those with no knowledge of the great transgression, I knew I had come to the end of my little inquiry.

As far as I could uncover, Black people had harbored no abiding animosity towards Whites; had never kidnapped, stolen, purchased or sold them into slavery, or plundered their lives hundreds of years for every conceivable gain. In fact, they had given almost no thought at all to them.

There had been no crime.

No original sin.

Although never charged with a crime, clearly, we had been judged and condemned. Of that, there had never been any question. And with it our entire being, fixed in the mind of the country. I had come to understand a thing or two. None of which seemed even remotely inclined to being unlearned. This would not be one of those idyllic boys summers you never see coming, where you tumble out of yourself or some other and into the world as if new for the first time ever.

Quiet by nature, I tended to watch and listen when engaging the world. I came into my teens with much the same outlook. What I observed of the grown-ups was how hard they worked and how little it got them. How so much of life was beyond their grasp; the limits their blackness alone conferred on them and the calculated manner of the injustice exacted at the hands of a people who clearly and so deeply disparaged them; how so little of life was really lived.

Trying to make the best of an untenable situation, they settled in for the long haul. They scaled back their aspirations to those which the sweat of their bodies could secure for them. Forced to choose between putting food on the table and having to pay for what was shouted to the world as the “right” to vote, they put food on the table. Some signed over their souls to the devil, as it were, without ever knowing. With every humiliation resentment reared and had to be appeased. After a while it made no sense counting the days they sat abrupt and unapproachable reaching out into the silence; the nights smoking and drinking, cursing under their breath. Call it what you will, there was no getting around the fact that their lives were made to ring dull and untrue. And though it has from the start been supposed by others that they are unaware of how wretched their lives are, that they are in some way the cause of their own misfortune, that is utterly false. They know all too well the smallness of each of their lives insured the fullness of so many others. Aware, too, of the tremendous toll taken.

When they spoke of their lives they spoke of the backbreaking, “killing me” work of it, of open fields or country roads, the scorching sun at your back, of not so much a life as what had been made to pass for one. Not a word about the radiant smile of the woman he adored and how it just melted him. Or how she had once wished and wished that one day she would find herself in New York City, say the words out loud, owning them, and watch them fill up the world. Stretching out the words alongside their lives, examining them both, it was not their lives I found lacking.

The old marked time entirely different. They were a mystery you catch yourself staring at in unbelief, even as you try to look away. I never much cared for the idea that, being old, they did not matter. It seemed callous to regard a life of eighty, ninety or one hundred years as irrelevant or having no use now that all value had been wrung from it. It had gotten it into my head they were the dark of night and that by staring in at them (never completely free of fear) I might slip into that darkness they so fully occupied, never finding what I was looking for. Like the old the world over, they groan on and on, their days a lament. Searching their faces I could see clearly what life was capable of, but to hear it coming from their own mouths and then know forever how such a thing comes to be was more than my wide-opened eyes had bargained for and seemed a terrifying price to pay for knowing.

All the ill-fitting pieces of them—the rough, weathered skin folded over onto itself, the toothless mouths and thickened tongues, the way time struggled to fit them in—spoke of life in the South that so many here wanted you to keep quiet about, life as it really was, the truth of which gripped and held you to itself as if its life depended on it. But now, what you had only read about in books or pursued as an intellectual curiosity, was alive and staring back at you. Hundreds of thousands of such lives in Mississippi in 1860, taken from their rightful owners, renamed slaves, and given over in service to another’s dream. This Congo America easily extended a hundred years in either direction. Where had all the lifetimes gone was never asked. How had they come to this? That seemed to me the most frightful thing of all. Unlike with a hundred histories before, this truth I know and carry with me.

Still, you were nothing if not scrupulous in writing it all down. Your frenzied rush to quantify and value, to sum up the world and everything in it, had no bounds. I can speak directly to the “make one’s fortune” turn of mind that consumes you and informs every waking hour of your profit and gain lives. I can place you at the scrivener’s desks of New Amsterdam. I have seen your hand in the Lowcountry rice fields of South Carolina and on the millions of pounds of cotton, the records show 6,526,500 at (Juan Ponce de) Leon County, Florida. Never a hard day’s work, but profit enough to make Leon the richest county in the state. I can set out in rigorous detail a comprehensive accounting of five hundred years of such a mind­. Through it all I have found the heart of the country not only unchanged, but determinedly so. And what of this bristling indignation of the coarsest kind that seemed primed in me, for what, I didn’t exactly know? What I felt I did know was this: something about this whole story, something in the telling of it and the having been told of it, was all wrong, and filled our lives with endless stretches of memory emptied of everything else.

It was the mounting heap of unanswered whys that ultimately drove my mother, Aunt Vera and her husband and my older sister Lessie Mae, the hundred miles or so from Gulfport up to Laurel where I was living with my father. A hundred miles being much like a hundred years here in the South, this little group of shadow selves determined now was the time to make their way out into the world. Lives clearly burdened by the past, their singular purpose was to share news of a plan to leave the old country, heading north to Chicago, and to inquire if I, the spit and image of my father, wanted to join them.

They would have made their way along Queensburg Avenue past the Masonite Plant, where the few good jobs, angry and distrustful, kept to themselves, down to where the paved streets ended so abruptly even the workers on the asphalt truck were left scratching their heads thinking it a mistake to have come this far, and then turned right onto the hot and dusty, dirt and gravel of Walley Street, before a final left onto Palmer, 908 Palmer Avenue.

Had the dust swelled, rising clockwise into a little cloud before trailing off behind them the way it did when S. H. came speeding through on his way home checking on the kids during his lunch hour, I might have smiled; the low, lean company truck, straight as an arrow, Lomax Printers 530 Central Avenue (601) 426-6336 in black cursive on the doors, my mind recalling a host of such faint and fading prodigals. Ignorantly aware of the world and its largely unspoken intent, my brothers and I tracked barefoot in and out of those Piney Woods and the spoiled, backward streets of our looked down upon lives.

There was the old man himself / Sam Howze Sr. / the angriest of all the angry old men / his house the next street over on Center Avenue / our backyards nearly butting up against each other / doggedly mean and spiteful / he would outlive us all / Uncle Darro / having been halfway round the world / returning from Korea with a new wife and staring down a stone-faced granddaddy who disowns him for it / Robert Earl and Lane / daddy’s younger brothers / Lane younger than me / who together had christened him S. H. in fun / but only behind his back / and Miss Mildred / granddaddy’s second wife nurse housekeeper and more / all big as day / The bobbing heads of the smaller children that from the back porch disappear into the overgrown thicket / and scrambling blackberry brambles that stubbornly grab at every pant leg or shirtsleeve within reach / leaving red raised welts when they find their mark / and a sudden swarm of yellow jackets roundly displeased with so lawless an intrusion / an improvised baseball field next to the fenced-off electric power plant / home to make believe Mays’ and Mantle’s / Clemente’s / Gibson’s and Koufax’s / years before the Braves and the Little League park / an old worn-out catcher’s mitt and broken bats given by the semi-pro teams that came through town / making / for a bright and shiny moment / some dreams seem almost possible /  shaking down the sugar trees / chinaberries and pecans / the absolute joy of two-for-a-penny candy and the greater thrill it held / that wistful  faraway call of the fairgrounds at the edge of town /

Funny, the things that grow up with and nourish a life, and without which we would not be.

I watched from behind the screen door and then the front porch, my father from the window, as the burnt-orange station wagon, missing small portions of the wood side panels, slowed its approach and parked just short of the gate to our house. Some few motionless moments gathered, conspired and passed. The dust settled and the old car collected itself. When the doors swung open, a bearing not in keeping with what would have been called their station only ten years earlier, but now more bluntly understood as in their place, seemed to attach itself to each unfolding figure as they emerged from the car and followed them single file up the narrow dirt and brick path to the house. That presence, clearly not borne of privilege, ignited an awareness of something gone missing, thought lost, but now found again intact. I recognized it, having seen it before in my father and Uncle Willie James. Still, I struggled with the broken meaning of that disfigured promise.

There was a moment; the introductions and reacquaintances complete and everyone seated, tall glass of iced tea in hand; I noticed a change in my father’s demeanor. His eyes darted rather than surveyed, reluctant to settle upon any one thing, he elaborated with what seemed no real purpose, his movements stiff and deliberate. And a force at odds with the grudging tick of each passing moment weighted the room in and out of its proper balance. Between becoming fully aware of the change and the spent moment turned on its head at knowing, a feeling of things being the wrong way round began to gnaw at the illusion we were sitting, chatting comfortably in the living room of our house. The whole of the world flooding in through the big picture window could do little to dislodge it. Choosing not to catch his eye and let on I had observed his erratic behavior, I turned my attention to the small curio cabinet built into the front of the kitchen counter facing the living room. With its collection of two-dozen or so miniature figurines as distraction, I listened, and waited for the polite conversation to tire of itself.

I began to remember an incident from several years earlier, where, after a hurried separation (my mother no longer willing to tolerate the way he beat us) I alone chose to go live with my father. I sat silent and apart from them citing the unacknowledged: a dying down in the eyes, the words he won’t let come, the brusque, disinterested manner of his interest. And one thing more. This just between the two of them. A tacit admission, a capitulation of sorts, which rarely passes more than once between father and son and is then gone forever, that said he needed me to go with him. It seems fitting I have no recollection of how it fell to me, at that age, to make such a decision. I could hardly help thinking it happened then, much like it was happening now.

“There are plenty of jobs there. You could start anew.”

“Make a good living for yourself.”

“Be someone. Be someone.”

“I hear the American Can Company and the Canada Dry Bottling plants are hiring.”

“So are the Stockyards and both the Armour and the Swift meatpacking companies.”

  “And Sears & Roebuck and Illinois Central Railroad are headquartered there.”

“They say a whole host of smaller factories in and around Chicago are actively looking for workers.”

All the beaming white faces of the world, so full of optimism, gave reason to believe everything would be as advertised, their frozen grins plastered everywhere you looked; on billboards all along the highways, on the packaging of loaves of bread, on boxes of detergent promising whiter whites and brighter brights, and cigarettes that tastes good like a cigarette should; in newspapers, on the radio and on television, over and over, like a mantra or a meditation. The whole world as pure and true as Paul Harvey assures us it is. All of it attested to how good life was; or was about to be.

Your own experience informed you differently. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of years it took to disabuse you of the idea of your life ever being just like everyone else’s in this free, brave and amber grained Eden. The likes of Hattiesburg, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Parchman Farms and Willie McGee, of found bones and shallow graves, and Ross Barnett blocking the doorway of the University of Mississippi; these were merely the latest of those who had made your acquaintance, with their heavy-handed notions of blackness as condemnation. That your lives were so despised and made not to matter seemed to confirm an idea in the mind of the country that it wished to conceal, which your plodding, intolerable presence undermined.

This is the level of contempt in which the lives of Black people are held. It cuts deep. Deeper than the well-worn invective (nasty as that may be) that is spewed at you, spit collecting at the corner of their mouths; deeper than separate but equal; down to the heart of the matter: that apart from the profit and gain that rested squarely on the backs of our bodies, nothing in this country was ever meant for Black people. And to that end you must be kept in a state of ignorance, without power or influence, with no history or culture, and no language to express either.

Then with a jolt, awakened from my slumber, a trail of misgivings in tow, I know. It is this daughter of my mother, who sang in the choir, played high school basketball, trained and traveled with the N. A. A. C. P. as a student demonstrator, the dark-skinned one whose right hand, from birth, had all the fingers fused into one just below where the knuckles would have normally begun, leaving only the thumb and a marble sized drop of flesh tethered to the whole by a thread of fine black skin, her, that causes him to act in a way you have never seen. If panic were possible, in panic; insisting immediately after they have gone that I give everything in the kitchen and bathroom a thorough cleaning. And learning later that her blackness is the greater of her sins. Family history would show Sam, Sr. had been damning in his opposition to S. H. and Candies’ marriage, pointing out the obvious unsuitability of the younger’s choice (“she had been around”). The marriage would prove a disaster.

For my part, I puzzle at how “Ceylon” and “The Pearl of India” sprang so effortlessly to mind and would not relent when I saw her hand again. I turn it over in my mind and start to wonder what else might be at play here. I understand the obvious. But the “what else does it mean” eludes me. I am left only the intuition of new meaning attempting to make itself known, but finding no footing. Those disruptions—tiny little acts of resistance and revolt—strike at the root of my engagement with the world. 

We would leave the old country to itself. It was thought best we travel by day, which already felt like it was in collusion with the hot, sticky heat. It was as much an escape as anything else. So many Black faces in one place, at one time, were sure to attract attention. And near the top of all the lessons learned early in the South, was nothing good ever happens when the gaze of White people is directed your way. Attention invariably led to questions; questions that often required rehearsed answers or behavior beneath one’s dignity; questions that could, in an instant, completely unravel any of our patchworked lives.

Tucked discreetly in with the plans for departure, and resisting all our efforts to not speak of it, was the unresolved question of abandoning friends and community: leaving behind the Breeland’s and Frye’s, Coach and Mrs. Jones from across the street, the Stallworths, Arrington’s, Blaylock’s, Stinson’s, Thigpen’s and Mayfield’s, Colonel (then, BG) and Leontyne Price, Ms. Mann’s beauty parlor, where Ms. Mary and the girls had their hair done, Denise and little Tommie Lee Coleman, the Crosby brothers, the Carlis’s, James’ and Mindinghalls; the nearest in that neverending line of Black bodies that seemed forever taken to the river, washed in the water and offered up to God, the weight of the world tugging at their feet.

What of them?

The evening sky had reddened and slipped beyond the horizon. A young boy and his family sped quietly and uneventfully across a stretch of I-55 N out of the occupied territories and into the new world. Only a glance back over the shoulder and an uncertain smile from his mother marked the occasion. For a moment he held to the thought that he had begun to develop a sense of self in his young life.