And All Our Wounds Forgiven Read Online Free PDF Page B

Negro school in the South.
    “It was Daddy’s suggestion. With a name like Phelps Adams, it’s safe to assume he had roots in New England, Vermont to be exact. Some great grandmother or great aunt had been one of the New England school marms who went South after the Civil War to teach the freed slaves and had ended up at what was then called Fisk Normal School. When Daddy saw Fisk’s name on the list of exchange schools, he wanted me to go. So, I did.
    “I told Daddy about getting off the train in Nashville after the three-day ride and seeing a sign that said W HITE E NTRANCE and another that said C OLORED E NTRANCE . I had no idea what was going on. Then I had trouble getting a cab because the white cab drivers wouldn’t take me to Fisk, and there were no Negro cabs around. Finally, someone from Fisk arrived.
    “During my first week I saw signs whenever I went downtown. C OLORED R ESTROOM . C OLORED W ATER . N O C OLORED A LLOWED . W HITE O NLY . I asked my roommate to go downtown on the bus with me and she refused and I couldn’t understand why until she said we couldn’t sit together because we would be arrested. Why? I asked. That’s just how it is, I was told.
    “As I told all this to Daddy, it became clear why I went on the sit-ins and got arrested. I didn’t like the law telling me where I had to sit on a bus and that I couldn’t eat in a restaurant with whomever I wanted to. There was nothing political about it. Segregation put limits on my life. Gregory says I take things too personally. But how else can I take them? I exist in the world as a person.”
    History is subjective experience, she had told him when they met that summer of 1969, that summer she spent wondering how she could live and why she should, now that Cal was dead.
    She remembered driving alone from Atlanta to Nashville after they took his body from her arms, remembered making a statement to the police, and then, what? She was supposed to just get in the truck and go? But how? It would have helped if there had been someone to say “I’m sorry,” someone to ask, “Is there anything I can do for you?” But those words were reserved for Andrea, the titular wife. So, she eventually turned the key in the truck’s ignition, Cal’s blood still damp on her blouse, and drove out of the hotel parking lot.
    When she reached her house in Nashville, she went to bed and slept for most of three days, getting up only to go to the bathroom and drink water or orange juice and watch the news on TV. She remembered seeing Cal’s funeral and the procession of mourners walking from the church to the cemetery behind Cal’s plain wooden coffin carried on the shoulders of six black men. Andrea was in the center of the picture, her face covered by a veil. Lisa wondered if Cal’s spirit wondered where she was, needed her to be there even now.
    But she was white and there was no place for her anymore in the civil rights movement, what little of it remained in the tide of blackness washing ashore as if the souls of the African dead thrown overboard from slave ships now sought succor. She would not stay and become the object of a scorn she had not earned. But where to go and what to do? After TV coverage of the funeral ended, she went back to bed and was still trapped in sleep the next morning when a loud knocking awakened her.
    She opened the door and there he was, tall and proper, the hair more gray than black now. What did he think of his daughter and her picture on the front of every newspaper and magazine in the world holding the dying body of John Calvin Marshall? Had he been suspicious? He never said. He never asked. He opened his arms and she fell against him and he folded her into himself and she cried for the first time.
    Later, that morning, after he shopped and came back and cooked for her, he asked if she wanted to come home. She cried again because home was Cal and Cal was now memory of heartbeat.
    She had looked around at her little house hidden