Three Days Before the Shooting ... (84 page)

Like that reporter asking me how come I was crying over a man who hates my people so. First place, I didn’t realize that I
was
crying. At a time like that was I supposed to be thinking of how I looked? Did those senators think about how they looked when they were breaking for those doors like a crowd of crapshooters when a raid is on? Sure, I must have looked pretty foolish crying in a place like that, but tell me, who can simply look at his own reflection at such a time? I guess that reporter, that McIntyre, was looking at himself looking at me while all I could see was a great part of my life blowing up to a snick-snick-snick of bullets. Was I supposed to observe some kind of etiquette that has nothing to do with how I feel about things? And surely he didn’t understand my saying that I was crying because I didn’t know what else to do—me, a man of prayer. But hadn’t I been praying for Bliss all these long years? One thing is sure, I couldn’t bat those bullets down in midair. Oh no, too much was riding with those bullets, and when I missed that boy I missed my chance to stop the outrage. Yes, and maybe we lost all those hard, hopeful years…. “Rejoice when your enemy is struck down, why aren’t you rejoicing?” That’s what that reporter was saying; but what if it’s too mixed up for that? What if there’s more than appears on the surface? You live inside it for years, moving with it and feeling it grow and change and getting more complicated and making you grow more
confused and complicated—except that you keep the faith; while folks outside think it’s simply just a matter of “a” or “b,” or else they think that it disappeared and no longer matters; while all the time it has been growing and sending out its roots until it touches everything in sight and all the streets you walk and all the deep actions of a man’s mind and heart—yes. So I was deep upset, that’s all. I lost control. I admit it and no apologies. Because when something hits you where you live you have
got
to go. Dignity, I guess that’s what that white boy was talking about. I suppose to his mind I should have been worrying about those senators who have never thought a single thing about my dignity except maybe as a joke. Dred Scott’s cross is mine—Anyway, I’ve known crowds that had sharper teeth and more searching and penetrating eyes just because they were my own and so knew something about what it really costs to keep your dignity under pressure. In the old days I kept playing even when the bullets got to flying. We all did. I shouldn’t have paid that reporter any attention because when I reacted I almost let him provoke me into telling him something, which would have been a mistake arising out of pride. I almost let him know that there was a secret to be revealed. Asking me why I was crying—well, if we can’t cry for Bliss, then who? If we can’t cry for the Nation, then who? Because who else draws their grief and consternation from a longer knowledge or from a deeper and more desperate hope? And who’ve paid more in trying to achieve their better promise?

But, Hickman, you almost gave the thing away!

Well, maybe so; but what if I had, nobody would believe it. And maybe that’s because everybody dreams in the night that in this land treachery is the truth of life—so they can’t stand to think about it in the light of day. That reporter—McIntyre?—yes, waiting out there in the hall. He would’ve just thought that I was crazy the same as he does anyway. He wouldn’t know how to add up the figures; couldn’t get with the beat, even if I gave them to him. It would be like him walking down into a deep valley in the dark and looking up all at once to see two moons arising up over opposite hills at one and the same time. Ha! He’d either go cross-eyed and fall on his face in trying to deal with the sight. Or maybe like the fellow in the depot who was too tight to invest a nickel, he’d simply stand there twisting and turning and trying to make up his mind until he’d invented a new kind of dance and stank. No, Hickman, not his kind; he’d simply shut one eye and swear that one of those hills and one of those moons weren’t there—even if the one he was trying to ignore was coming streaking toward him like a white-hot cannon-ball…
.

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed. Maybe it’s just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality. Maybe wise men are just those who have had the power to stay awake and struggle. And who can blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated truths
we
have to struggle with? In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever
having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation
.

But look Hickman—Alonzo … this is
here
and
now
and the stuff has begun to bubble. The man who fell and the man lying there on the bed is the child, Bliss. That’s the mystery. How did he become the child of that babyhood … father to the man, as it goes? And how could he have been my child, nephew and grandchild and brother in Christ as he grew? The confounding mystery of it has to be struggled with and I wish it was all a lie and we could go back home and forget it. Still there was Robert, my brother-son. He was the second, dropping out of all that confusion. Yes, and there were all those long years before I had learned not to puzzle out questions about the babe anymore and could come to accept the sheer quickening wonder of him growing up, a young life being lived without regard to the consequences of its being put there among us, and without regard to the violent circumstances of its bawling birth. There was blood on the land and blood on my hands. I made my peace with that beginning too long ago for vengeance and finally I found my way to my ministry. Yes, the Lord and Master calls a man in strange tongues and voices, yes, and among strange scenes in stranger weather. I was never one to argue Genesis, not even in my heathen days. A start is a start, and “is” is
is,
not “was.” Still, there had to be a beginning. Used to hear that crab lice came from a man and woman’s unwashed secreting and that was ignorant superstition—even though there’s no denying the biting and the scratching, or the fact that the big crabs made the little ones…. I’m so tired and sleepy that my mind’s falling into the cracks and crevices. Wonder if that young nurse would bring me a cup of coffee? No, just hold on. Wait. You’ll be asleep a long time and soon. Meanwhile stay awake and watch the story unfold. By right, he should be dead and cold, but he’s holding on so you couldn’t let go even if you wanted to. Stay. Yea! I wait and hope for me, because ain’t this the time for me, as well as for him? Here in his condition, so late in the day, asking me to tell him and me holding back the little I do know to keep him holding on and still not knowing fully how I became the man I am but merely the start. It sure changed my life around. I was never the same afterwards and it left an ache and emptiness that I’ve had to live with ever since. Oh, yes, you tried to cover it over with rectitude, tried to move on up above it and grow on top of it and you didn’t try to sermonize from it either. Not directly. You just allowed it to teach you to feel for others…. Hickman, you ache like he aches, and he aches, they ache, everybody aches and aches. Hickman, the guards outside the door think you want

to get out, to leave. And that’s the truth…. Most will to forget, they drink denial like they

drink whiskey. Yes, but where’s the true contrast coming from? Sugar without salt. Life without death, what kind of a world? What kind of reality? Yes, but I must live by what I’ve seen and remember. And I have seen my people face Death and even go a piece with him and then wrestle with him and get away, thank the Lord, and return. Yes, but how many have I seen pass on and die? How many, where there are no hospitals to take them
in, passing on in little ole stuffy rooms lit by a dim flame guttering low in sooty chimneys? And me sitting in some rickety rocking chair on a bumpy boarded floor looking across the pain-wracked face to ole Death crouching like a big bird on the head of the bed; just sitting and a-waiting like the great-granddaddy of all poker players. Just crouching there while I tried to give myself over to some poor soul’s trial, trying to absorb his agony into my own inadequate flesh. Humming a little comfort from the Scriptures, sometimes from one of his favorite hymns, and sometimes praying until I grew mute and numb with weariness, and then leaving it up to the Lord…. Bliss, sometimes I’ve seen Death arise and leave like smoke from the chimney when dawn grayed the room. I’ve seen him wait with patience and then take off in silence, like a cat hunting in the grass that’s waited until it sees the bird break his spell and fly away. And sometimes I’ve seen him come down to claim the prostrate soul and heard the rattle in the dying throat as life left the body and the soul took flight. And sometimes in the quiet of the early morning, around the still point of three, the simmering time, when back there in the old days the dancers would have been bear-panting and rocking to the shouting of those horns, getting with it, while I played the blues. Then here comes the to-be-or-not-to-be time, the crisis time, and found me sitting and a-rocking along beside some sickbed with sleep weighing heavy on my lids and almost exhausted with the watching and the struggle and there heard some wife or mother give voice in the dark to woman’s old cry of heart-loss. I have heard it rip and tear up suddenly out of sleep as though the whole night had drawn itself together and screamed, and me looking up then and amazed as always to see their nightgowned forms flashing past to get to the bed to confirm what their souls had already acknowledged and accepted across sleep and distance, known it the way a fisherman knows when his line goes slack in the water that the fish is gone. Then I’ve heard them screaming again with the full realization of eternity come down. That’s something to remember and think about, here and now. Something to remember even beyond the question of being ready for the time when it comes. But who can stand to stare steady into Death’s blank face and all-consuming eye all the time, every day—even as the tens of thousands fall around us? Better to lift up our eyes to the hills and prepare for what’s on the other shore. A man has to live in order to have a reason for dying as well as for having a reason for being reborn—because if you don’t, you’re already dead anyway. Now hush, because you’re simply thinking words, old saws. So hush … all is noise
.

Yes, but what a time this has been. What an awful time this has turned out to be. And I thought we’d make it with something to spare. I still did, even after that young gal kept turning us away. I thought we’d contact him somewhere along the line and we’d talk a while somewhere in private and tell him what we felt and hoped and prayed, both for him and for us and for the country, and then go on back home and wait. Just that. Just that; that was all, even though there wasn’t a thing to justify the feeling that it might come to pass except our old habit of hoping. Maybe it just sneaked up on me, stole me while we were out there where I took them so they could see it for the first time and probably for most of us the last, and that got my hopes up and made me reckless. Maybe I let them down right there. Maybe the place and the image and the associations got to me
.
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand. That’s the dangerous shape, the engraven image we were warned about, the one that makes it possible for him to hear his inner hopes sound and sing and see them soar up and take wing before his half-believing eyes. Faith in the Lord and Master is easy compared to having faith in the goodness of man. There are simply too many snares and delusions, too many masks, too many forked tongues. Too much grit in the spiritual greens. But then, there that something is. There sits his hopes made manifest and a man knows that it’s not simply the mixed-up hopes and yearnings within his own mind and most secret heart that grabs him and makes him stand tiptoe inside his skin and reach up through the dark for something better and finer and more durable than he knows himself to be capable of, but something felt by a lot of other folks and even achieved and died for by a precious few…
.

So I walked them out there just so that we could ease off from the frustration and runaround that we were getting, and so that I could have time to figure out our next move. Then we had arrived and there it was … there
.

He slowly shook his head, staring across to the sleeping face and feeling it become almost anonymous beneath his inward-turning vision, the once familiar cast of features fading like the light. He closed his eyes, his fingers clasped across his middle as the mood of the afternoon moment returned in all its awe and mystery, and he found himself once more approaching the serene, high-columned space. Once more they were starting up the broad steps and moving in a loose mass still caught up in the holiday mood evoked by seeing the sights and scenes which most had only read about or seen in photographs or in an occasional newsreel. Then he was mounting the steps and feeling a sudden release from the frame of time, feeling the old familiar restricting part of himself falling away as when, long ago, he’d found himself improvising upon some old traditional riffs of the blues, or when, as in more recent times, he’d felt the Sacred Word surging rapturously within him, taking possession of his voice and tongue.