Dreamboat Dad (22 page)

WE PARTED NOT EXACTLY FRIENDS.
He threatened me with violence at
my saying I didn't want to return home, be running away like a coward.
He told me I had no choice.

Through contacts he had put different licence plates on his Chevy and
he drove me to Atlanta, where we stayed a night in a modest hotel, went
to a music club; I got drunk, he got stoned.

We said our strained goodbye in the morning, nothing else to say, not
when it was all taken by the doing and Jess wanted me out of danger. I
took a taxi to the bus station, so fearful of being nabbed. Though I would
have been prepared to fight to the last alongside my father. Jail would have
been a living hell.

DOUBLE MURDER! newspaper headlines blared as I waited for my
bus. Two known members of the notorious Ku Klux Klan shot dead by unknown
assailants. Suspects believed to be driving a 1961 model Ford Chevy. The two
bodies found in mangled wreck off Highway 54 to Whitecave suffered gunshot
wounds to head and chest. Possible suspect believed by police to be involved
with civil rights protests. No person or persons has yet been named.

I waited for my bus to take me out of there, starting the long journey back
to the safety of my homeland, my tiny country with its affairs so minor
and petty as to be farcical in comparison. Yet when I got back there, was
never more pleased to be home.

I found ways to follow events back in my father's place of raising. Day
after day, for two months, I read every newspaper end to end, occasionally
finding mention of the crime and knowing they had a name: Jess Tobias
Hines.

Mrs Mac made telephone contact with a library in Jackson, Mississippi.
I didn't say I drove the vehicle the night of that double murder, though
maybe she guessed. The library in Jackson said the fugitive was still on the
run. No mention made of a New Zealander.

Things had changed at home — greatly, in my mother's case: she'd
left Henry and gone to live with a wealthy Pakeha businessman. Told me
she didn't know what living was till he opened her eyes, how it wasn't so
much the higher quality of life money brought as much as the knowledge.
Like his library, which she was coming to enjoy more and more.

I told her of my Mississippi experiences. A day later she called me to
come and look at some amazing poems written by Negroes, years back,
one by a Richard Wright about a man coming upon the remains of a
Negro who had been lynched and burnt. She read to me, sitting in her
new man's library, of a man being tarred and feathered, and
cooled mercifully
. . . by a baptism of gasoline.
Till it was set alight.

Then I got a letter from Marion Williams, giving me the bad news: my
father's capture. She enclosed pages from an American weekly magazine, a
vivid write-up by a white man who saw what happened — a colour piece,
the newsmen call it.

Murder in Mississippi

by Bradley J Heath

The word would have hummed down the telephone
wires, whizzed back and forth over his head. The
wires, the wires would have sung with directions
saying exactly where, which part of town it was and
every gory detail of what had taken place. Excitement
and gladness conveyed at near the speed of light—

As fast as a murdered man's soul departs?
Quicker than the forced, violent passing of an
innocent life?

Hanging from the cross bar of that same
telephone pole, his body would not have brought
to mind a black Jesus, nor suggest an injustice
had been done, nor a genius or good man had been
wrongly put to death. Those who gathered saw
simply a corpse with human features; killed justly,
they believed, because he took the lives of two good
citizens, two fine men with a name for caring for
their community, for looking after its morals and
its virtuous white ways. Never dare mention, in the
South, their ritual of wearing white robes and hoods
with eye slits, of chanting hate-filled mantras mixed
with God's name, like flavoring sprinkled on babyback
pork ribs.

He was just hanging there, clothes shredded
from him, blood that had run down his legs caked
by the drying wind, a prevailing wind from the south
transporting dead leaves and clinging insects and
other things powerless against its force, carrying
smells and odors along its way.

That wind swirled over his blood, blood that
used to flow into his member when he was sexually
aroused. The mob had cut off his offending manhood
with a knife, severing penis and testicles clean away.
They cut off his ears to deafen him, perhaps to his
own screams — or the sounds of their evil deed.

You'd think that 1965 should be more civilized
than 1905. Back then, after a Negro lynching, the
pastor of a church in this same town said:
The failure
of the authorities to maintain law and order made the
lynching necessary for the infliction of justice.

But a rope's a rope. This one was half-inch
hemp, looped by deft hands to form a hangman's
noose.

They broke him out of jail against the lame
protest of the sheriff they all knew, had all gone
to school with; whose children played with their
children. He sat in church the day after, no
doubt, with some of those men who had taken
the nigger's life. None would consider it murder.

Are they so different from their forefathers
fifty years ago? Words from another Southern
sermon, uttered in those early years of our
century:
Last night a sifted band of men, sober,
intelligent, of established good name and character
— good American citizens — did this hamlet a powerful
good. They did remove the life of an inferior member of
the Negro race by God-ordained means of lynching.

Today's victim swayed in keeping with a
wind that would not let up. The smallest of
movements to and fro was witnessed by the
townsfolk, by those who had rushed from
outlying hamlets and small towns, all connected
by telephone and culture and outlook. Ordinary
American citizens.

From the telephone pole where the figure
hung, the wires looped from pole to pole and
ran alongside roads, as far the eye could see,
to dwellings near and far, sending the news:
something
good
took place last night. Keen eyes
could see the dust trails of vehicles hurrying to
the town, the occasional puffs of dust kicked up
by horses carrying men of set mind and cruel
ways.

A crow landed and gazed for some time
at the shape below, or at the mass of human
shapes, more arriving like a stain spreading on
good tarred Southern ground. It dropped on to
the corpse's shoulder and started pecking at an
eye. The crowd's exclamations and glad cries
scared the crow away like a soul fleeing too late.
People wondered if the bird got an eye, strained
to see if an empty socket confirmed the theft.

But the dark gash midway down the body
took greater claim. They had shucked his
manhood like whipping the insides out of an
oyster.

Someone cracked a joke about a de-sexed
nigger being a tamer beast. Laughter like a vast
broken cask spilling every drop of goodwill to all
mankind.

They did this —

Bradley Heath wrote as though to me, Yank, personally

— to someone's father, someone's son. To a
fellow American.

He went on:

That day at the village circus, a Negro woman
dared stumble across the railway tracks,
howling, bringing gravel stones rolling down
with her as she sagged at the knees, from
imbalance or grief. She wore a dress of rough
denim and the polka-dot scarf that niggers call
a rag. Flauntin' the rag, they call it — in other
circumstances, not on arriving at the aftermath
of a murder.

By natural courtesy, before they could
consider her
only a nigger
, the crowd cleared a
path, closing up again after her like a change of
mind. A boy asked, face mischievous and foot
raised, should he trip her? No, his elders said.
No, you better not, kid
. But they could have said
yes just as easily. Besides, she'd not yet run the
gauntlet.

Maybe she was a freshly made widow, this
woman vexed amid a crowd not her color, not her
species: looking at her husband hanging up there
like a sight not even the lowest can get used to.
But already she looked too old to be his wife, or
his lover. She looked more like a mother might.
Except surely she'd be calling out,
son! Son!

Then she saw the unimaginable absence of loins. Oh, Lord,
did she see the ugly wound. And she screamed, a sound from some place deeper
than any present had ever heard.

Jess had written me.

My dear son . . . what a joy it was having you . . . what a brief time it was and
yet momentous, in a way only a Negro would understand since we live that life daily,
so many of us. Epic, even when we are most ordinary, dramatic, even in living life
most mundane. Tragic, more often than joyful. I have never succumbed to indulging
after I beat the demon drink. Yet tragedy would now appear to be happening to me.
I have another term for it, however: standing tall.

I have become infamous and yet there is no mention of you, other than I had an
overseas visitor residing with me. None at Piney Woods is talking, not to the police,
now out to take another of us down. Good old Marion, the preacher's wife, she's got
them all sworn to silence on the subject of Jess and his boy. And two dead rednecks
have no tale to tell.

Nor do I have any regret, except that you were caught up in it. But now you
are safe in a country that is blessed. Though I know the Maori people have some
problems, they are minor in comparison.

I had to threaten you to get on that bus, I'm sorry. Or you would be on the run
with me. It is the strangest feeling to be wanted for murder when you served your
country killing the enemy.

Who are my enemies? This is the question I have asked and found answer for.

An enemy is he who denies me my dignity and deprives me of my basic rights.
Just as I would deserve to be so described should I act against others in an unjust
manner. He is my enemy who judges me on the color of my skin and not, as Martin
Luther King has said, the content of my character.

The men who died that night are one and the same beast who might have killed
us at the club, when those hoodlum niggers took dislike to your pale skin. Klan
members or mixed up and fucked up niggers are one and the same. We should aim
for higher things, always.

But it is not the fight you were born to. You will have your own, more tempered
fights but struggles for good just the same.

Who knows how long before they catch up with me. I stay on the move, have
grown a beard and look disheveled like I did when I was a drunk. You would not
recognize me. No, perhaps you would. I like to think you would.

I have no money for you, only my deepest love. I thank you for coming into my
life before circumstances would have it end, possibly, in the near future. Guess they'll
string me up as an example to other niggers, another strange fruit hung from a tree.

Will write again. But, if you don't hear from me, know my love for you is three
centuries strong. Listen out for me singing for you, as if you are the baby I'm putting
to sleep with gentle Negro lullaby.

Your loving father, Pops.

Marion wrote:

Then started the sniggering, from a low note rising to a breathing and form of
giggling only they would recognize of their own kind.

I screamed:
What have you done to him! How could you DO this?

This is of your daddy hanging there, God bless his soul, God give him peace
and suffering no more. The newsprint photographs I enclose with my apologies,
Mark, but felt you must see them. Make yourself stare at them so you will know
never to be such a person who would do this to another human being of whatever
race or creed.

Then I heard — and soon saw — a man about sixty, of age to know better and
kinder, drawl in voice loud enough to gain a hundred or more in his coarse net:
He
won't be raping no white woman again.

Again? Not your father, son. He'd never do such a thing to a woman. He
respected
women.

A hundred and more chorused:
He sure as hell won't.
A murderer too. Killed
two white men he did. Know I've met many a fine white Southerner. This is just a
certain type all too prevalent down these parts.

The other hundreds took it up as a resounding echo. Which got another whipped
up, this time a woman. I spotted her on account she was tall and she stood out
because the good Lord did not exactly bless her with good looks, far from it. Made
ugly, I think, by her thoughts, her sick moral state.

She said: I'm
thinking
. . . ! Then she bellowed: I'M THINKING, folks, that
this here nigger woman would like to join him?

This is me she is referring to. As in joining your poor daddy strung up there
like curing meat.

Up dere in heben!

Using how my generation's parents used to pronounce words.
Up dere in
heben.

Oh, Mark, it was like being in a cave echoing with their howls and low moans,
those who murdered your daddy.

Out of this pack a man toting a pistol like a short spear started forcing a way
through to me the nigger woman stupid enough to turn up. They were making way
for him, parting their own seas for him to walk through clear to me.

The one with the gun got to me, ordinary Marion Williams in a state about a
murdered Negro taken like that, and he pointed the thing at my head.

Y'all wanna join him up dere in heben, nigger bitch?

He was roaring in amusement at repeating that scorn, trying to elicit another
outbreak of laughter, some kind of approval. But the mob had already tired of that
one and they just stared. They went silent in the instant that gun barrel pressed cold
upon my temple flesh.