Juneteenth (6 page)

“So again, my friends, we become victims of history only if we fail to evolve ways of life that are more free, more youthful, more human. We are defeated only if we fail in the task of creating a total way of life which will allow each and every one of us to rise high above the site of his origins, and to soar released and ever reinvigorated in human space!”

The Senator smiled.

“I need not remind you that I am neither seer nor prophet,” he went on, “but history has put to us three fatal questions, has written them across our sky in accents of accusation. They are, How can the many be as one? How can the future deny the Past? And How can the light deny the dark? The answer to the first is: Through a balanced consciousness of unity in diversity and diversity in unity, through a willed and
conscious
balance—that is the key phrase, so easy to say yet so difficult to maintain.

“For the second, the answer lies in remembering that, given the nature of our vision, of our covenant, to remember is to forget and to forget is to remember selectively, creatively! Yes, and let us remember that in this land to create is to destroy, and to destroy—if
we will it so and
make
it so, if we pay our proper respect to remembered but rejected things—is to make manifest our lovely dream of progressive idealism.

“And how can the light deny the dark? Why, by seeking ever the darkness in lightness and the lightness in darkness. As we incorporate and humanize nature we filter and blend the spectrum, we exalt and we anguish, we order the world.

The land was ours before we were the land’s
.

So saith the poet. And so it is as it was in Eden. In darkness and in lightness it is ours to name and ours to shape and ours to love and die for. So let us not falter before our complexity. Nor become confused by the mighty, reciprocal, enginelike stroking of our national ambiguities. We are by no means a perfect people—nor do we desire to be so. For great nations reach perfection, that final static state, only when they pass their peak-promise and exhaust their grandest potentialities. We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum. Ours is a youthful nation; the perfection we seek is futuristic and to be made manifest in creative action. A marvel of purposeful political action, it was designed to solve those vast problems before which all other nations have been proved wanting. Born in diversity and fired by determination, our society was endowed with a flexibility designed to contain the most fractious contentions of an ambitious, individualistic and adventurous breed. Therefore, as we go about confronting our national ambiguities, let us remember the purposes of our built-in checks and balances, those constitutional provisions which serve like subtle hormones to regulate the ingenious metabolism of our body politic. Yes, and as we check our checks and balance our balances, let us in all good humor balance our checks and check our
balances, keeping each in proper order, issuing credit to the creditable, minus to plus, and plus to minus.

“E pluribus unum!” the Senator shouted, pointing toward the Great Seal attached to the wall of the gallery. “Observe there the message borne in the beak of the noble bird under whose aegis our nation thrives! Note the olive branch and arrows! Contemplate its prayer and promise—E PLURIBUS UNUM. Regard the barred shield that protects us, the stars of state leaping high in the sunburst of national promise. Mark the olive branch extending peace and prosperity to all. Consider the historically established fact that its ready arrows are no mere boast of martial preparedness. They are symbolic of our aggressive determination to fulfill our obligations to humankind in whatever form they take or wherever they might arise. So let us take wing with our emblem. Let us flesh out its ideals. Let us unite like the flexing feathers that lift it aloft. Let us forge ahead in faith and in confidence—E PLURIBUS UNUM!”

In the hushed silence the Senator stared out across the chamber as though taken with a sudden insight. Then, leaning forward with a look of amazement, he stroked his chin and waved his hands in a gesture of impatience.

“Recently,” he continued in a quietly confidential tone, “our national self-confidence has come under attack from within. It is said that too many of our national projects have gone astray; that problems of long existence are proving to be unresolvable; that our processes of governance have broken down; and that we are become a distraught and weary people. And I would agree that something of a darkness, an overcast has come upon us. There are seasons in the affairs of nations, and this is to be expected. But I disagree that the momentary disruptions which rack our society are anything new or sufficient reason for despair.

“My friends, in such a nation as ours, in a nation blessed with so
much good fortune, with so much brightness, it is sometimes instructive when we are so compelled, to look on the
dark
side. It is a corrective to the bedazzlement fostered by the brightness of our ideals and our history. The gentlemen from Pennsylvania will recall that the dark and viscous substance which once fouled the water of their fair state gave way under scientific scrutiny and soon gave radiance to their gloom. It made bright their homes and cities, became a new source of wealth. The gentlemen from Alabama and Georgia will recall the life-giving resuscitation of the old legend of sailing ship days, in which sailors dying of thirst took what appeared to be black-humored advice from a passing ship’s captain and, plunging their buckets into what appeared to be pure brine, drew sweet spring water from the depths of the sea. They’ll recall too that during a dark time in a dark section of the South a miracle was discovered beneath the hull of the humble peanut which proved similar to that of the loaves and the fishes. Yes, and this to the well-being of their state and nation.

“So in dark days look steadily on the darker side, for there is where brightness sometimes hides itself.

“Therefore let us have faith, hope and daring. And who can doubt our future when even the wildest black man behind the wheel of a Cadillac knows—Please, please!” the Senator pleaded, his face a mask before the rising ripple of laughter, the clatter of applause, “Hear me out: I say that even the wildest black man rampaging the streets of our cities in a Fleetwood knows that it is not our fate to be mere victims of history but to be courageous and insightful before its assaults and riddles.”

And then, with a face most serious in its composure, he went on: “We have reached a sad state of affairs, gentlemen, wherein this fine product of American skill and initiative has become so common in Harlem that much of its initial value has been sorely compromised.
Indeed, I am led to suggest, and quite seriously, that legislation be drawn up to rename it the ‘Coon Cage Eight.’ And not at all because of its eight superefficient cylinders, nor because of the lean, springing strength and beauty of its general outlines. Not at all, but because it has now become such a common sight to see eight or more of our darker brethren crowded together enjoying its power, its beauty, its neo-pagan comfort, while weaving recklessly through the streets of our great cities and along our superhighways. In fact, gentlemen, I was run off the road, forced into a ditch by such a power-drunk group just the other day.

“Let us keep an eye on the outrages committed by the citizens whom I’ve just described, for perhaps therein lies a secret brightness, a clue. Perhaps the essence of their untamed and assertive willfulness, their crass and jazzy defiance of good taste and the harsh, immutable laws of economics, lies in their faith in the flexible soundness of the nation.

“Yes”—the Senator smiled, nodding his head with mock Elizabethan swagger—“methinks there is much mystery here. But one mystery at a time, I say. In the meantime, let us seek brightness in darkness and hope in despair. Let us remind ourselves that we were not designated the supine role of passive slave to the past. Ours is the freedom and obligation to be ever the fearless creators of ourselves, the reconstructors of the world. We were created to be Adamic definers, namers and shapers of yet undiscovered secrets of the universe!

“Therefore let the doubters doubt, let the faint of heart turn pale. We move toward the fulfillment of our nation’s demand for citizen-individualists possessing the courage to forge a multiplicity of creative selves and styles. We shall supply its need for individuals, men and women, who possess the highest quality of stamina, daring, and grace—

Ho, Build thee more stately mansions
,
Oh, my soul—Yes!

“For we”—the Senator paused, his arms reaching out with palms turned upward in all-embracing gesture—“by the grace of Almighty God, are A-MERI-CANS!”

And it was now, listening to his voice becoming lost in an explosion of applause, accented here and there by enthusiastic rebel yells, that the Senator became aware of the rising man.

Up in the front row center of the Visitors’ Gallery the man was pointing out across the guardrail as though about to hurl down a vehement denunciation.
For Christ sake
, the Senator thought,
why don’t you sit down or simply leave? Only spare us futile theatrical gestures. I always lose a few—the old; the short-of-attention-spanned; the mama’s boys answering Mother Nature’s call—but use your ears. Most I’m holding hard, so what can you hope to do?
But just as he lowered his eyes to the faces of his colleagues applauding on the floor below, the Senator became aware of the abrupt rise and fall of the man’s still-pointing arm. Then a sound of ringing that was erupting above seemed to trigger a prismatic turbulence of the light through which, now, fragments of crystal, fine and fleeting as the first cool-touching flakes of a fall of snow, had begun to shower down upon him, striking sleet-sharp upon the still-upturned palms of his gesturing hands.

My God
, the Senator thought,
it’s the chandelier! Could it be I’ve shattered the chandelier?
Whereupon something smashed into the lectern, driving it against him; and now, hearing a dry popping sound above, he felt a vicious stinging in his right shoulder, and as he stared through the chaotic refraction of the light toward the gallery he could see the sharp kick of the man’s gesturing arm and felt a
second flare of pain, in his left thigh this time, and was thrown into a state of dreamlike lucidity.

Realizing quite clearly that the man was firing toward the podium, he tried desperately to move out of range, asking himself as he attempted to keep the lectern before him,
Is it me? Am I his target?
Then something struck his hip with the force of a well-aimed club and he felt the lectern toppling forward and he was spun forcefully around to face the gallery. Coughing and staggering backwards now, he felt himself striking against a chair and lurching forward as he marked the sinister
pzap! pzap! pzap!
of the weapon.

I’m going … I’m going …
he told himself, knowing lucidly that it was most important to fall backwards if possible, out of the line of fire; but as he struggled to go down it was as though he were being held erect by an invisible cable attached somehow to the gallery, from where the man, raising and lowering his arm in measured calm, continued to fire.

The effort to fall brought a burst of moisture streaming from his pores but even now his legs refused to obey, would not collapse. And yet, through the muffled sound of the weapon and the strange ringing of bells, his eyes were recording details of the wildly tossing scene with the impassive and precise inclusiveness of a motion-picture camera that was toppling slowly from its tripod and falling through an unfolding action with the lazy motion of a feather loosed from a bird in soaring flight; panning from the image of the remote gunman in the gallery down to those moving dreamlike on the floor before him, then back to those shooting up behind the man above; all caught in attitudes of surprise, disbelief, horror; some turning slowly with puppet gestures, some still seated, some rising, some looking wildly at their neighbors, some losing control of their flailing arms, their erupting faces, some falling floorward—And up in the balcony now, an erupting of women’s frantic forms.

Things had accelerated but, oddly, even now, no one was moving toward the gunman—who seemed as detached from the swiftly accelerating action as a marksman popping clay birds on a remote shooting range.

Then it was as though someone had dragged a poker at white heat straight down the center of his scalp and followed it with a hammering blow; and at last he felt himself going over backwards, crashing against a chair now and hearing it skitter away, as, thinking mechanically,
Down, down …
he felt the jolt of his head and elbows striking the floor. Something seared through the sole of his right foot then, and sharply aware of losing control he struggled to contain himself even as his throat gave cry to words which he knew, whatever the cost of containment, should not be uttered in this place.

“Lord, LAWD,” he heard, “WHY HAST THOU …” smelling the hot presence of blood as the question took off with the hysterical timbre of a Negro preacher who in his disciplined fervor sounded somehow like an accomplished actor shouting his lines.
“Forsaken … forsaken … forsaken …”
The words went forth, becoming lost in the shattering of glass, the ringing of bells.

Writhing on the floor as he struggled to move out of range, the Senator was taken by a profound sense of self-betrayal, as though he had stripped himself naked in the Senate. And now with the full piercing force of a suddenly activated sprinkler, streams of moisture seemed to burst from his face
and somehow he was no longer in that place, but kneeling on the earth by a familiar clearing within a grove of pines, trying desperately to enfold a huge white circus tent into a packet. Here the light was wan and eerie, and as he struggled, trying to force the cloth beneath chest and knee, a damp wind blew down from the tops of the trees, causing the canvas to toss and billow like a live thing beneath him. The wind blew strong and damp through the clearing, causing the tent to flap and billow, and now he felt himself being dragged on his belly steadily toward the edge of the clearing where the light filtered with an unnatural
brilliance through the high-flung branches of the pines. And as he struggled to break the forward motion of the tent a cloud of birds took flight, spinning on the wind and into the trees, revealing the low shapes of a group of weed-grown burial mounds arranged beneath the pines. Clusters of tinted bottles had been hung from wooden stakes to mark the row of crude country graves, and as the tent dragged him steadily closer he could see the glint and sparkle of the glass as the bottles, tossing in the wind, began to ring like a series of crystal bells. He did not like this place and he knew, struggling to brake the tent’s forward motion by digging his toes into the earth, that somewhere beyond the graves and the wall of trees his voice was struggling to return to him
.