And All Our Wounds Forgiven Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jubilee Hall, boys I sat beside in class, and I realized that I did not know them. The hope and longing and pain in their applause frightened me. The blue of my eyes, the yellow of my hair, the roseate paleness of my skin insulated me from danger and placed me outside the suffering and therefore outside the need for deliverance. Yet, being outside did not mean I was alienated. Because I did not share the particularity of that moment did not mean I could not care.
    “Cal stood at the podium, his hands grasping its sides. He was dressed in a dark suit cut narrowly to emphasize his slim frame. He was the medium-brown color of oak leaves in November, and looked just as ordinary, neither especially handsome or repugnant, without mustache or goatee. Nothing about him indicated he was the man inspiring a generation of black, and soon, white youth to live as if ideals were as tangible as money and infinitely more important.
    “Expressionless, his body still, he seemed annoyed by the applause and his eyes flitted around the chapel like a bird in a room unable to distinguish solid wall from open window. But when his eyes darted quickly up to the balcony, mine were waiting and for an instant, long enough for me to notice, he rested.
    “When the applause stopped and we sat down, he began to speak. His voice was soft and deep, the tone almost lazy as if he had learned that a spoken lullaby could be more musical than one sung. In the years to come, I would hear countless speeches begin with the painfully slow cadences that caused some to wonder if he was on medication. ‘Ladies and gentle-men. ———It is — ———with ——— great ——— plea———sure ——— that I come to tell you———the Negro———will no longer be ———a slave———to any white man.’ He said it calmly, matter-of-factly, lazily, and the very disinterestedness of the tone made the applause and stomping of feet and cheering even more raucous and prolonged. Others thought the lethargy of his beginning was a way of measuring the temperature of the audience, but I recognized those long silences as spaces in which the man I would come to love as Cal receded and John Calvin Marshall came to the fore. As his cadence became more regular, an ordinary man became the apotheosis of four centuries of history written in red tears and salty blood. Imperceptibly, the cadence quickened and the timbre of his voice echoed back to stubbled fields where Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey sang fired songs of burning freedom, back to the lap-slap of ocean against the hulls of white-masted slave ships cleaving the waves with cargos of soul and flesh, back to muffled sobs and deafening screams, the rhythms of broken hearts beating in whole bodies.
    “’Our struggle,’ he shouted at the end, his voice rising with the majesty and power of a wave, ‘is for the redemption of the unquiet soul of the slave and the unquiet soul of the slaveowner because black man and white man are the front and back of the same soul, two halves, which together make a harmonious whole but apart can only create dissonance, discord and dissension. Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary. There’s a great camp meeting in the promised land.’
    “Applause rained down on him like rice on a bride. As if being awakened, his eyes blinked and the terror and loneliness returned, only this time with a desperation that had not been there before. He looked as if he did not know who was being applauded, or why. Then he raised his head, his eyes deliberately seeking mine this time. Instinctively I knew he would need me, and when our eyes met, I saw his relief and saw his body relax as he returned to himself. He looked away as the college president came up to shake his hand. But I held him in my eyes for a moment longer.
    “Having sat at the front row of the balcony, Bobby and I were practically the last to leave. As we came down the steps into the foyer, Cal was entering it from the