The ones most willing to confuse forgiving with forgetting were black. All right, forgive him if you want, but that doesn’t undo what he did in the 1960s. We’re still paying for that, with a lot of the payback going to blacks who remain so outraged at what happened back then that they refuse to acknowledge that history has moved on and some things have gotten better. Just a few months ago, I heard a black preacher declare to a big group that we still had slavery in Birmingham, and he got a rousing response.
People lie about the past so they can lie about the present. They become so selective about what they remember the truth gets lost. For me, the past just meant regret.
All this tumbled out as we communed with the catfish. Cathy nodded solemnly. “I see what you mean about the insincerity.” She studied her Coke can. “But in the world of PR, you tell clients to figure the price of doing nothing. What’s it cost you not to testify?”
I shrugged.
“Oh, come on, Tommy. You risk seeing yourself as a coward, somebody who lost the guts you showed as a nineteen-year-old.”
“Courage is overrated.”
“Bullshit. You don’t believe that.” She shook her head. “The guy subpoenas you, you’ll tell the story like it happened. You’re incapable of lying in court.”
She picked up a rock and threw it far into the pond, setting off a frenzy just beneath the surface. She looked back at me. “Plus you might get something good out of testifying.”
“Like what?”
“On Oprah they call it closure.” Cathy has this way of arching one eyebrow when she is about to nail your dumb ass to the wall. “You’ve been beating yourself up your whole adult life over what happened.”
She and I knew well the side effects of my lifelong recrimination. We called them the three Ds—divorce, drinking, depression.
“Who knows. In a new trial, you might find out you’re not guilty after all.” She flung another rock into the pond and picked a stem of scarlet lantana. “Let’s go look around town.”
We drove around the square. Everything looked a lot different. In 1965 it had bustled and shone, clean and bright. Now the Farmers and Merchants Bank bore the name and logo of a big Birmingham holding company. The windows of the barbershop, shoe store, and hardware store on the south side were boarded up with sheets of plywood. Pasted on them were posters for a rap concert in Selma that was now two months in the past. The grass on the square hadn’t been mowed in a month, nor had the dead leaves under the magnolia been swept up. No flowers bloomed.
The Confederate statue had a six-pointed star spray-painted on its base. “Somebody in town embracing Judaism?” I wondered aloud.
“Gang symbol. See the pitchforks above it?” Cathy’s teenagers kept her well informed.
We drove past the sprawling ranch house we had grown up in—where in the summer of 1965 I argued with my father and where, after Jackie’s death, I was a virtual prisoner. The house now sported purple shutters. Cathy clucked her tongue. “At least they’re painted.” The shutters on the neighboring house were peeling and hanging askew.
We proceeded to the curved, tree-lined drive that rose to a columned mansion from the 1850s. Cathy knocked on the back door and told the live-in caretaker we were going to look around for a few minutes but wouldn’t be coming inside. After a slow stroll around, I said it looked pretty good.
“Needs painting.” She pointed to the upstairs windows.
We sat on the front porch in the ancient glider, once a bright aqua but now a dull, pale blue. It squeaked loudly; we couldn’t glide.
“The Rose of Sharon still blooms.” Just as I pointed that way, a sparrow chirped. “Here-kitty-kitty-kitty,” my grandmother Bebe used to sing in mimicry of the songbird. As a three-year-old, Cathy had changed it to “Loove, Bebe, Bebe, Bebe.”
When I began to hum an old hymn, Cathy cast a sweet smile my way. “I know you don’t want to sell it. I don’t really, either.” She paused to let the sparrow have his say.
“You can’t have it both ways, Tommy. You want to hold on to our past when it’s the memory of Bebe, but then you repress the hard stuff.”
On the way back to the car, she slipped her arm around my waist and leaned into me. “You know your decision is going to be the right one as far as I’m concerned. I’m just pointing out a couple of things to think about.”
We stopped at Dreamland in Tuscaloosa and ate some ribs and watched the Crimson Tide play Mississippi State on television. On Monday I called Randy Russell. Late that afternoon I began to tell him what happened on the highway to Eden Rise on May 24, 1965.
1
1965
Our freshman year at Duke University completed, Jackie Herndon and I met outside my dorm at 6 a.m. and loaded our stuff into the trunk of my Ford, a cherry-red 1963 Galaxie hardtop I’d inherited from my grandfather. We drove to the dorm where Alma Jones lived. We were picking her up and driving to Alabama to begin our summer break.
Alma’s dorm door was locked. We tried all the doors, and all were locked. “You told her six o’clock, right?” I said.
Jackie shrugged. “Yeah, I told her twice to be packed and ready to go.”
At 6:30, a girl came out the door dragging a big suitcase. I offered to carry her suitcase to her car if she would go tell Alma that her ride was waiting. She agreed. In a few minutes Alma appeared at the door.
“What’s the damn hurry?” she grumbled.
“It’s a long way to Alabama, at least twelve hours,” I said.
She scowled. “All right, all right, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
A grimace flashed across Jackie’s face. “I’m sorry, man.”
Jackie grabbed his basketball and began twirling it on his finger. He raised the ball high above his lean, six-foot-seven-inch frame. His unlined, mocha-colored face studied the spinning orb intently. I noticed again what I had observed when the two of us were studying in the cafeteria—Jackie’s hands. His very long fingers wrapped effortlessly around a basketball. He had long, perfect fingernails and unblemished brown skin on the backs of his hands, but nearly white palms.
The fact that Negroes had white palms had fascinated me since I first noticed it as a five-year-old and had asked my grandmother’s cook about it. “Orene, why your hands two colors? You wash ’em hard?”
She had smiled. “They just that way, Tommy.” The mystery of Negro hands.
We waited an entire hour before Alma came down bearing two big suitcases. She looked over at Jackie. “Put those in the car.” No “please,” just a command. Not a word of apology about making us almost two hours late leaving.
Even angry at her, I was awed by Alma’s presence. At six feet, she came closer to looking me in the eye than any girl I had ever known. Tight jeans accentuated her endless legs and the round butt perched atop them. Her skin