CHAPTER 14

So now I suppose that the medicine is taking him over again, Hickman thought. The needle has reached through his flesh into his mind. Those hypos into the vein then … The way he looks at me, still wanting to talk and his eyes dulling. But the hopeful thing is that he’s fighting to live, to stay alive. Regardless of what it will all have to mean if he does, he still wants to live. So my task is simply to help him to keep on fighting, to keep on wanting to live. What else is there, other than what a minister always tries to do to help? Comfort and consolation—no, not just that, because there’s still the mystery to be understood. Reverse the time. Lord, but I’m tired … cramped in muscle and confused in mind.… Maybe I ought to go out and stretch my legs, get a little fresh air in my lungs. No, you can’t risk it because it would be just like him to come to while I’m out and if he did, what would be the next move? Forget it; you’ve waited all this long time so you can afford to sit still and wait awhile longer—tired or no tired.… Those hypos … He’s sleeping hard, quiet in his body if not in his mind. Hypos. I sure hope so, because the time has come when everything has to be understood and I mean to be here to try.…

Just look at him, Hickman, there he is: Bliss at last. Out of all the time and racked and tiered-up circumstance, out of all the pomp and power-seeking—there’s ole Bliss. It makes you wonder all over again just what kind of being man really is; makes you puzzle over the difference between who he is and what he does. But how do you separate it? Body and soul are all mixed together and yet are something different just the same. One grows in the way it’s destined to grow, flesh and bone, blood and nerves, skin and hair, from the beginning; while the other twists and turns and hides and seeks and makes up itself as it grows and moves along. So there he is and for whatever the world knows him to be, somehow he’s still Bliss.… It’s like hearing a firecracker go off at a parade and you look up and see the great and bejeweled king of the Mardi Gras, sitting high on his throne in all his shiny majesty, and he starts to shake and cough and there, before your eyes, a little ole boy looks out from behind his mask. Well, the child is father and somewhere back there in the past, back behind little Bliss’s face, this twitching, wounded man was waiting. No point of dreaming about it either. I was in the picture and a lot of other folks too, and we made a plan, or at least we dreamed a dream and worked for it but the world was simply too big for us and the dream got out of hand. So we held on to what we saw, us old ones, and finally it brought us here.

But just look at him—who would have thought that it would come to this, that our little Bliss would come to this? But why, Master? Why did this have to be? Back there in our foolish way we took him as our young hope, as our living guarantee that in our dismal night You still spoke to us and stood behind Your promise, even when things were most hopeless. Now look at him, all ravaged by his denials, sapped by his running, drained and twitching like a coke-fiend from all the twistings and turnings that brought him here. All damaged in his substance by trying to make everything appear to be the truth and nothing really truthful, playing all the old lying, obscene games of denial and rejection of the poor and beaten down. And even at the very last moment, refusing to recognize us, refusing to even see us who could never forget the promise and who for years haven’t asked anything except that he remember and honor the days of his youth—or at least his baby days. Honor, oh yes; honor. But not to us but honor unto Thy dying lamb. We asked nothing for ourselves, only that he remember those days and what he had been at that time. Remember the promising babe that he was and the hope we placed in him and his obligation to the babes who come after. Maybe that was our mistake, we just couldn’t surrender everything, we just couldn’t manage to burn out the memory and cauterize the wound and deny that it had ever happened … that he had ever existed. Couldn’t treat all of that like a hobo walking along the tracks back of town who passes and looks up and sees your face and spits on the cinders and crunches on. Gone without a word … After having been born so close to the time of whips and cold iron shackles we could fly up here in an airplane—which is like the promise of a miracle fulfilled … which is no longer miraculous—but still there on the bed lies the old abiding mystery in its latest form and still mysterious. Why’m I here, Master? Why? And how is it that a man like him, who has learned so much and gone so far, never learned the simple fact that it takes two to make a bargain or to bury a hatchet, or even to forget words uttered in dedication and taken deep into the heart and made sanctified by suffering? Blood spilled in violence doesn’t just dry and drift away in the wind, no! It cries out for restitution, redemption; and we (or at least I—because it was only me in the beginning), but we took the child and tried to seek the end of the old brutal dispensation in the hope that a little gifted child would speak for our condition from inside the only acceptable mask. That he would embody our spirit in the councils of our enemies—but, oh, what a foolish miscalculation! Way back there … I’m no wise man now, but then, Lord, how mixed-up and naive I was! There I was, riffing on Thy Word and not even sure whether I was conducting a con game or simply taking part and leading in a mysterious prayer—Forgive me my ignorance.… Yesterday after the shooting started.… Was it yesterday? It was, wasn’t it, Hickman? How long? Have you been sitting here all that time? How many hours in this hospital waiting and talking and talking and remembering and revealing and talking and not revealing? And all because I slipped up and was sitting there in that gallery looking on like a man watching a scene unfolding in a dream instead of acting on the facts already exploding in my face. I could have stepped in front of that boy—or at least have picked him out of the crowd and stopped and tried to talk some sense into his head. But my eyes, my old eyes failed me. So now this sitting and waiting. It was awful! Truly awful! But what’s a man to do, Hickman? So you try, you do your best as you see your best. Yes, but you realize that there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work. The best intentions have cracks in them, man, and that’ll never change.

Not until somebody puts the Lord’s sun into a bushel basket—ho now! So here we come all this way and after all these years and there was no stopping even a fraction of it. Talking about sending a boy to do a man’s work, this coiled spring has been stretched out so far that when it started to snap back I’d almost reached my second childhood. Talking to myself and belching in crowds and in the deep of night dreaming kindly of my wicked days and all against my duties and my soul’s need. Lucky my bladder’s still what it was years ago and I still have good breath control because my strong old slave-borne body has held up pretty well as bodies go.… Still, you failed. You were in the right place but not enough in it. You saw what was coming because Janey had warned you. You knew something was going to happen but not its shape or its outrageous face. So I simply couldn’t stop it. Sometimes everything mocks a man—even his own tongue, his eyes and hands. Then babes judge him and fools ignorant of his strengths leap on his weaknesses like a mosquito finding the one tender spot at the back of his knee where it knows it can draw his blood.

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 wasn’t there—even if the one he was trying to ignore was coming streaking toward him like a white-hot cannonball.…

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 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-racked 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 awhile 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 graven 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 grab him and make 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 they—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.

And now his heartbeat pounded and his footsteps slowed and he was looking upward, hesitating with one foot fumbling for the step which would bring him flush into the full field of the emanating power, and he felt himself shaken by the sudden force of his emotion. Then once again he was moving, moving into the cool, shaded and sonorous calm of the edifice, moving slowly and dreamlike over the fluted shadows cast along the stony floor before him by the upward-reaching columns, and he advanced toward the great image slumped there above in the huge stone chair.

From far away he could hear some sister’s softly tentative “Reveren’? Reveren’?” and now their voices fading in a hush of awed recognition; creating but for her echoing Reveren’? Reveren’? a stillness as resonant as the profoundest note of some great distant bell; still staring, still hearing the sister’s soft voice, which sounded now through a deep and doom-toned silence, her Reveren’? Reveren’? reverberating through his mind with the slow, time-and-space-devouring motion of great wings silently flying.…

Then he, Hickman, was looking up through the calm and peaceful light toward the great brooding face; he, Hickman, standing motionless before the quiet, less-and-more-than-human eyes which seemed to gaze from beneath their shadowed lids as toward some vista of perpetual dawn which lay beyond infinity. And he thought, Now I understand: That look, that’s us! It’s not in the features but in what that look, those eyes, have to say about what it means to be a man who tries to live and struggle against all the troubles of the world with but the naked heart and mind, and who finds them more necessary than all the power of wealth and great armies. Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us. It wasn’t in the dirty dozens about his family and his skin-tone that they tried to ease him into, but in that look in his eyes and in his struggle against the things which put it there and saddened his features. It’s in that, in being the kind of man he made himself to be that he’s one of us. Oh, he failed and he knew that he could only take one step along the road that would make us free, but in growing into that look he joined us in what we have been forced to learn about life and about being truly human in the face of life. Because one thing we have been forced to learn is that man at his best, when he’s set in all the muck and confusion of life and continues to struggle for his ideals, is near sublime. So yes, he’s one of us, not only because he freed us to the extent that he could, but because he freed himself of that awful inherited pride they deny to us, and in doing so he became a man and he pointed the way for all of us who would be free—yes!

Staring upward into the great brooding eyes he felt a strong impulse to turn and seek to share their distant vision but was held, the eyes holding him quiet and still, and he stared upward, seeking their secret, their mysterious life, in the stone; aware of the stone and yet feeling their more-than-stoniness as he probed the secret of the emotion which held him with a gentle but all-compelling power. And the stone seemed to live and breathe then, its great chest appearing to heave as though, stirred by their approach, it had decided to sigh in silent recognition of who and what they were and had chosen to reveal its secret life for all who cared to see and share and remember its vision. And he was searching the stony visage, its brooding eyes, as though waiting to hear it resound with the old familiar eloquence which he knew only from the sound of the printed page—when a sister’s voice came to him as from a distance, crying, “Oh, my Lord! Look, y’all, it’s him! It’s HIM!,” her voice breaking in a quavering rush of tears.

And he was addressing himself now, crying in upon his own spellbound ears, as the sister’s anguished “Ain’t that him, Revern’? Ain’t that Father Abraham?” came to him like the cry of an old slave holler called across a moonlit field.

And too full to speak, he smiled; and in silent confirmation he was nodding his head, thinking, Yes, with all I know about him and his contradictions, yes. And with all I know about men and the world, yes. And with all I know about white men and politicians of all colors and guises and intentions, yes. And with all I know about the things you had to do to be you and stay yourself—yes! She’s right, she’s cut through the knot and said it plain; you are and you’re one of the few who ever earned the right to be called “Father.” George didn’t do it, though he had the chance, but you did. So yes, it’s all right with me; yes. Yes, and though I’m a man who despises all foolish pomp and circumstance and all the bending of the knee that some still try to force upon us before false values, yes, and yes again. And though I’m against all the unearned tribute which the weak and lowly are forced to pay to a power based on force and false differences and false values, yes, for you “Father” is all right with me. Yes …

And he could feel the cloth of the sister’s dress as he gently touched her arm and gazed into the great face; thinking, There you sit after all this unhappy time, just looking down out of those sad old eyes, just looking way deep out of that beautiful old ugly wind-swept and storm-struck face. Yes, she’s right, it’s you all right; stretching out those long old weary legs like you’ve just been resting awhile before pulling yourself together again to go and try to bind up all these wounds that have festered and run and stunk in this land ever since they turned you back into stone. Yes, that’s right, it’s you just sitting and waiting and taking your well-earned ease, getting your second wind before getting up to do all over again what has been undone throughout all the betrayed years. Yes, it’s you all right, just sitting and resting while you think out the mystery of how all this could be. Just puzzling out how all this could happen to a man after he had done all one man could possibly do and then take the consequences for having done his all. Yes, it’s you—Sometimes, I guess … Sometimes …

And then he was saying it aloud, his eyes held by the air of peace and perception born of suffering which emanated from the great face, replying to the sister now in a voice so low and husky that it sounded hardly like his own:

“Sometimes, yes … sometimes the good Lord … I say sometimes the good Lord accepts His own perfection and closes His eyes and goes ahead and takes His own good time and He makes Himself a man. Yes, and sometimes that man gets hold of the idea of what he’s supposed to do in this world and he gets an idea of what it is possible for him to do, and that man lets that idea guide him as he grows and struggles and stumbles and sorrows until finally he comes into his own God-given shape and achieves his own individual and lonely place in this world. It don’t happen often, oh no; but when it does, then even the stones will cry out in witness to his vision and the hills and towers shall echo his words and deeds and his example will live in the hearts of men forever—

“So there sits one right there. The Master doesn’t make many like that because that kind of man is dangerous to the sloppy way the world moves. That kind of man loves the truth even more than he loves his life, or his wife, or his children, because he’s been designated and set aside to do the hard tasks that have to be done. That kind of man will do what he sees as justice even if the earth yawns and swallows him down, and even then his deeds will survive and persist in the land forever. So you look at him awhile and be thankful that the Lord allowed such a man to touch our lives, even if it was only for a little while, then let us bow our heads and pray. Oh, no, not for him, because he did his part a long time ago. By word and by deed and by pen on paper he did the Lord’s work and transformed the ground on which we stand. And in the words my slavery-born granddaddy taught me when I was a child:

So let us pray, not for him but for ourselves and for all those whose job it is to wear those great big shoes he left this nation to fill …”

And there in the sonorous shadows beneath his outspread arms they bowed their heads and prayed.

And to think, Hickman thought, stirring suddenly in his chair, we had hoped to raise ourselves that kind of man …

Opening his eyes in the semidarkness now, Hickman looked about him. While he had dozed, the nurse and security man had gone, leaving him alone with the man sleeping before him and now, still possessed by the experience at the Memorial, he looked upon the sleeping face before him and felt an anguished loss of empathy. He looked at the Senator’s face half in shadow, half illuminated by a dim bed lamp as from a great distance, mist-hung and beclouded, thinking, This is crazy; weird. All of it is. A crazy happening in a crazy place and I am the craziest of all. His being here is crazy, my being here is crazy, the reasons that brought us here are crazy as any coke-fiend’s dream—and yet part of that craziness contains the hope that has sustained us for all these many years.… We just couldn’t get around the hard fact that for a hope or an idea to become real it has to be embodied in a man, and men change and have wills and wear masks. So there he lies, wounded and brought low but still he’s hiding from me, even in this condition he’s still running, still hiding just as he did long ago—Only now I’ll have to stay close and seek him out. For me it’s Ho-ho, this a-way, woe-woe, that-a-way and the game is lost in the winning. Besides, they wouldn’t let me leave here even if I told them that I only wanted to go back down home and forget all the things I’ve been forced by hope and faith to remember for all these years. What’s worse, they won’t want to hear the truth even if somebody could tell it. They’re keeping me here for the wrong reasons and probably trying to keep him alive just because it seems the thing to do after they learned that someone faceless and out of nowhere could have the nerve and determination to do what that boy did in the place that he did it. So now they’re shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth. They really don’t want to know the reason why or even the part of it I think I know because knowing will mean recognizing that they slipped up in places where they’d rather die than be caught slipping. A tint of skin—ha! They’d have to recognize that in this land there’s a wild truth that they didn’t blunt and couldn’t bring to heel.… It’s like a tamed river that rises suddenly in the night and washes away factories, houses, cities and all. Why can’t they face the simple fact that you simply can’t give one bunch of men the license to kill another bunch without punishment, without opening themselves up to being victims? The high as well as the low? Why can’t they realize that when they dull their senses to the killing of one group of men they dull themselves to the preciousness of all human life? Yes, and why can’t they realize that when they allow one group of men the freedom to kill us as evidence of their own superiority they’re only setting the stage so that these killers will have to widen the game, since if anyone can kill niggers the only way left to prove themselves superior is by killing some white man high in the public eye? Attack the head since the feet are too easy a target? We have suffered, trained ourselves against their provocations, have taken low and rejected their easy invitations to die, have kept to our own vision and for the most part put down the need for bloody retaliation as foolishness. But instead of being satisfied, they’ve sensed the life-preserving power of our humility and gone stark crazy to destroy even that! Hickman, how can you help despising these people? How can you resist praying for the day when they shall turn upon one another as they did once before and purge this land with blood? How can you resist praying for the day when the sacrificer will be sacrificed, when the many-headed beast will rend itself, tooth, nail and fiery tail, and die?… How resist, Hickman? Why not pray for that?

Why not? Don’t play me for a fool—Why not? Because this American cloth, the human cloth, is woven too fine for that, that’s why. Because you are one of the few who knows where the cry of pain and anguish is still echoing and sounding over all that bloodletting and killing that set you free to set yourself free, that’s why again. Because you know that we were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real. So you’re in it, Hickman, and have been in it and there’s no turning back. Besides, there’s no single living man calling the tune to this crazy dance. Talking about playing it by ear, this is one time when everybody is playing it by ear because everybody in the band and out on the dance floor is as blind as a mole in a hole.

But why couldn’t he have seen us, if only for a minute? Why? If he had, then all of this might not have happened. Oh, but it’s the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us. Well, there’s nothing to do but wait and see. He’s holding on even though Death is around somewhere close by—as he always is. I’ll just have to try once more to outwait him, to outface him, even though I’ve seen enough even for an old preacher like me.…