I should have been in my grave years ago. But, see, I’m waiting for something. I reckon that’s how I got to the orchard, that knowing
I had to. I reckon that’s why I chased them two boys and their shotguns off my property.
I don’t rightly know what passed this house. A bus. Two state police cars and a gangly mob of the worst dressed, least cared for, stringy headed human trash God ever forsook. Nadine wouldn’t watch out the window. That’s on account of Sidney was out there with them. I could stand in the high court and testify that Sidney was tossing bricks at those marchers because I saw him. Dashnell too. He’s taken off a lot of weight. But it was him.
I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep. There were footsteps and stair creaks and doors slamming shut. I caught snatches of conversation and just as I finally drifted into light sleep before dawn, I heard the ghost of a thousand horse hooves on the road.
I
t was my death dream. It was the end of my time and I surrendered to it. I was standing on the end of the pier watching the sun rise over the trees on the far side of the lake where the flat water shone black under thick gray skies. It was chilly. There was some wind. I was wearing an old green cardigan of Randy’s. Glen stormed out of the house. He was naked. He walked out onto the pier with a stupid grin on his face. “Let’s go swimming,” he said. But he didn’t mean swimming. I didn’t want to. “Well, I do,” he says. He dove into the lake and swam out about fifty yards. I said, “You better get back over here, fool. That water’s cold and you’re no swimmer.” But he stayed out there treading water a long time. Then he says, “Help me, Lil, I’m drowning.” One of his stupid jokes. I turned around and walked back up on the porch out of the wind, him screaming for help the whole time. Rosie was sitting there. “Is he serious?” she says.
“Hell if I know” was all I’d say. You know dreams. We were both eating chocolate dipped doughnuts from the bakery in Whitville, Alabama, where I finished high school. Rosie started down to the pier. I says, “Rosie you can’t swim.” She says, “Lily, we can’t let him drown.” She was fixing to jump into the water. I ran after her. Glen was bobbing up and down, gulping air and
screaming, “Help me.” Rosie and I jumped in the boat and went out there close enough to where he easily grabbed hold of the side. That’s when he stood up and showed that he’d swum to a shallows where the water was only about three deep. Rosie was at the motor. I told her to turn around and head for the pier. But Glen pulled me into the water and starting kissing me, and when I fought him, he pulled me under, letting me up for air every couple of minutes and growling, “Say you love me!” He had himself pushed up inside me and I could see Rose standing in the boat with the gun. “Shoot!” I gasped. Glen was hurting me something awful, ramming himself in and out. I could see he knew how bad it hurt me. I could see that my pain was driving him wild with happiness.
I kept begging Rosie to shoot. Instead, she pointed the barrel down her throat and fired. Glen pulled me back under, his arms and legs around me, pulling us off the shallows and into the deep where the water was colder and colder and black and my chest was breaking. I felt the bottom of the lake against my back and something cold and metal sticking out. It was the gun! The one they used to kill that man on the lake.
Somewhere above the surface of the water, I heard a voice whispering sweetly. “Lily,” it sang and I felt a flower opening in my chest. “Lily.…” In a minute I became aware of my lips pressed lightly together. They were dry. Then a swirling sky of reddish purple and shadows behind them. Rose’s face was above me in the sky. Then the purple faded and brightened into pink. Rose came closer and more real. Then I felt her sweet warm hand across my cheek. “You made it,” she said. That took a moment to comprehend. It was her. She was there and so was I in that intensive care unit bed. Every cell in my body rejoiced, but I was too weak to tell her.
She told me that God had spared me for reasons that would be revealed. Then she stroked my forehead until I fell back into sleep and dreamed about Michael’s blood. That face Glen made each time he pulled the trigger, that familiar, vacant, detached look. I dreamt and remembered. It was close to dawn. Michael was asleep.
I was almost. We’d been awake making plans. He was talking a schoolteacher’s job in Wyoming. I said I’d go anyplace with him but hell or Alabama. In my heart I already knew I had to go back to Alabama. Not to Glen or safe ground, but to see about my children. Somewhere over the last few weeks I’d gotten that clear in my mind. I was afraid of love, afraid to love or be loved, afraid it would destroy me. But it was slowly beginning to dawn on me that innocent children had no place in my fears. It didn’t matter that Michael wouldn’t lose any sleep over me. All that mattered was I had been a bad mother. I lay there beside Michael wondering how much of that I would ever be able to change.
I heard a scuffling sound from downstairs. A sleepy voice said, “Burglar.” Then the door was open and Glen was standing there. For one tenth of one second I felt glad to see him. It seemed momentarily that he was offering me a way out of my troubles, and I was going to take it. I had just realized I would never take it when he opened fire. The blood was spurting out of Michael’s neck and then everything went squashy, and I thought my body had died and my mind was hanging on a little while.
If I look back on that terrible dream of being pulled underwater, I can halfway recall the sense that Rosie was standing there over me the whole time, stroking my cheek with those tender cool hands of hers and brushing my hair with her fingertips. I will always believe that Rosie pulled me out of it. Rosie rescued me. Rosie parted some curtain of fear and climbed over a wall of all her sadness. She got on an airplane and came to Houston so that I wouldn’t have to die alone. She touched my sorrow. Life happens when one thing brushes up against another.
I don’t want to die here and now. I refuse to die. I choose life and all the terror it brings. I choose to live, to amend as much as I can the damage I’ve done. I want time for that, for whatever good I can do my children. Why does it take dying to admit that all my troubles amount to the unattempted good I should have been doing a long time ago?
Rosie’s face shifts in and out of focus and breaks into fragments,
then comes back together like a kaleidoscope over me. But her words are constant and clear and I draw them in through every pore and gather them in my heart.
“Rest easy, Lil. You made it.”
B
lacks round here know about Prince George. It’s just a common thing, like the clay in the field or some grandmother’s curse handed down. There’s an old saying “You make damn sure you don’t give out of gas in Prince George County.” Blacks just know about it. It’s almost an accepted South Africa: No blacks in Prince George. I heard about this years ago.
See, it was kind of knowledgeable, I get uptight, you know I found God in Doctor King. Doctor King was not my God, but until I met King, I was very violent. I depended on a gun for survival. I hated white people. I generally faulted them for all my conditions. But through Doctor King, I found God and stopped wearing my gun. I had been an ordained minister twenty-three years before I found God, before my hate turned into love.
I get very uptight around Doctor King’s birthday every January. I get uptight around April the Fourth, the day he was murdered in Memphis. I wasn’t more than two feet away from him on that balcony of that ugly little motel. I fell over my King and I kissed him and held his hand and promised him that as long as I lived his dream wouldn’t die.
His birthday is being prostituted like the birthday of Christ. Probably the second most prostituted birthday of any that we celebrate.
So there we were. The New Year had rolled in and Doctor King’s birthday was coming again. All the smiling prostitutes had come back out of the woodwork. By that, I mean people everywhere all over the country having fund raisers in the name of the King, raising money for poor people who would never benefit from it, when that was King’s portfolio like Gandhi’s, like Christ’s.
I didn’t see a damned thing in Jimmy Carter. Except he took care of his boys and his girls. What he did for the masses of the black people, or masses of poor people, in this country was nil. He took care of Jesse Jackson. Jesse got a four million dollar grant. He took care of Coretta Scott King, he took care of Andrew Young, a few more. He took care of his boys and his girls, but, see, Doctor King told us that the job of the Movement was to establish a minimum quality of life for every American. And to raise that minimum to its highest height.
When that young schoolmaster fellow announced he was going to have a march up there in Prince George County on Doctor King’s birthday, I said, “Great Christ, this is good.” Then I saw him on television a few days later, white as a sheet, shaking like a leaf, scared to death, this
martial arts
teacher—I said, “Well, Prince George hasn’t changed.”
I saw in the paper a few days later where Heath Lawler had come forward to lead the march. Then another couple days passed, and Lawler is all over the newspaper talking about his own daddy had turned against him. I’d sat there in my home and I watched the celebration of Doctor King’s birthday being carried on at the Marriott Marquis. They was eating caviar and drinking expensive wine, all of ‘em dressed to death. I felt so terrible. I looked at them and I felt like, gee whiz, look how they’re prostituting his life. Look how they’re spending the dream on themselves. King was not about that. It’s very difficult to identify King’s life with that. Then it came on these two white men being pressured up in Prince George County. I started thinking in every movement we ever been in at least some white folks always came to our aid. So here’s this white fellow up in Prince George in trouble, and all the black leadership is downtown eating caviar, drinking expensive wine, prostituting Martin Luther
King’s birthday. I sat there and I said to myself, “If Doctor King was living, what would he probably say about Prince George?” I thought, “You know darn good and well you would have received a call by now.
“ ‘Hez, get your bag packed. We’re going to Prince George.’ ”
I said to myself, “I’ve got to go.” So I picked up my phone and called young Mr. Lawler.
I called this man. I said, “I’m the Reverend Hezekiah Thomas. I’d like to offer my support. I’d like to help. I’d like to see that march go through.” Heath said to me, “Uh, thank you, I’m glad to hear from you.” I said, “Okay, you come on down—to the Ramada Inn Hotel—tomorrow and I’ll meet you in the lobby.” I say, if he shoot me, a damn lot of folk going to be able to see it, you know.
So he met me there. What he said to me was “Reverend Thomas, I know your reputation. I know you marched with Martin Luther King. I know you went up against Bull Connor in Birmingham and Jim Clark in Selma and lots of others. But you’ve never faced racism like it exists in Prince George. These people are taught from the cradle and they carry it to the grave. It’s like a religion. It’s like a cult. If you come to Prince George and march with me, I’m afraid you won’t leave there alive.”
To say that to me—I live out that creed that Doctor King taught us, “To fear is only human. But to allow fear to control you is inhuman.” If I’m scared to do something, I swear to God I’m going to do it. Now, if I’m not afraid, I may be nonchalant about it. But if I’m afraid, I have to do it.
Prince George is like bundling up all the fear from all the marches and protests and jail cells I’ve seen and putting it on my shoulders
. I told the young man, I said, “Well, I’ve heard that song before. But I know God. If it’s God’s will, I’ll make it through, and if it isn’t God’s will, I won’t.”
We have a little monument to Doctor King down here in Birmingham. Whenever I feel weak, whenever I feel alone and afraid, I go there. All I got to do is stand there and mean it and I gain strength. I went by the statue, and I walked away from there believing that Prince George held my destiny. It was as if the King had dropped
down and said, “Hez, what you do in Prince George will be the culmination of all that we done did before.”
I went on home and I said to myself I should give others the opportunity to make their witness with me. I shouldn’t sneak off up there and be selfish and greedy. Another thing I said—a lot of people are going to say, “I’da went with ya if I’d have known.” So the next morning, I called a press conference at Doctor King’s monument and I had Heath up there with me. I had a little statement I read, I said that at last I was going to Prince George County, after seventy-five years, I was going there to face that brutal racism. I really didn’t think nobody was going with me, except Willie O’Neill to be honest with you—knowing how black folks feel about Prince George. I got my older son and daughter to come and I really thought that would be all. We were planning to start out from the church that morning. We got there. A big old gentleman grabbed me by the hand. It felt kind of good. He said, “Hez, I’ve come to pray with you.” I said, “Pray with me? Okay, but when we get through praying, we’re going to Prince George.” He said, “Oh, no. No. I’m not going to Prince George.” I said, “Well, I don’t need your prayers. You need
my
prayers.” But then there were some others waiting for me at the monument. Downtrodden looking. One fellow in particular, he always showed up when there’s a march. Strictly a street person like a bag lady. He started smiling, showing his teeth were out, and he says, “Hez, I’m here.” A nice man. I hadn’t seen him since the garbage strike in Memphis. It was about thirty others. They all got on that bus. We took off.
I talked nonviolence all the way up there. I kept saying, “If you can’t take it, don’t get off the bus. You’ve got to be willing to take the most brutal beating. That’s how you show strength and evidence of your faith in God.”