Candlemoth Read Online Free PDF Page B

swelled up as she almost inhaled the thing complete.
        That
was the way we saw it, and so that was the way it was.
        
        
        Those
years, as we approached our teens, were years that warned of things to come,
like premonitions, portents, readings in sand.
        Eisenhower
became President in 1953, though Rocky Marciano's retained heavyweight title
after he K.O.'d Jersey Joe Walcott seemed far more real and relevant and
necessary to know. Jackie married JFK in the same year, and near Christmas
something happened that only later, much later, would we even begin to
comprehend. December of that year the U.S. Supreme Court took the banning of
school segregation under advisement, and though another three years would pass
before Nat King Cole was dragged off stage by a white mob in Birmingham, those
mutterings of discontent and disaffection were so much the sign of Old
America's death throes. Though folks seemed more occupied with Marilyn Monroe
and Joe DiMaggio, Elvis Presley singing 'That's Alright Mama', James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and someplace called Disneyland in Anaheim, Cal.,
there were things running their own agenda behind the scenes that carried so
much more significance.
        In
March of '54 Eisenhower committed the U.S. to united action to prevent any
communist takeover of South-East Asia. Seven months later Viet Minh troops
began to occupy Hanoi. Tension was building. Out there in some unheard-of
jungle a war was being born, a war that would take the minds and hearts of this
nation and grind them together into one unholy regret for a million mothers and
fathers.
        Nathan
Verney and I were children. We did not understand. We didn't want to
understand.
        In
Montgomery, Alabama, the City Bus Lines ordered an end to segregated seating.
Eisenhower told the schools down there to end their discrimination, and the
Supreme Court ruled the segregation law invalid.
        I was
a white kid from North Carolina. Nathan was black. It was not until '57 and
'58, when the Federal District Court ordered Little Rock, Arkansas to treat us
all the same, when
        Martin
Luther King was arrested for loitering and cited police brutality and was fined
$14 for refusing to obey a police officer, that the pains this country was
experiencing started to creep into our lives in a way that actually touched us.
February of 1960, Nathan and I were nearly fourteen years old, and someone put
a bomb in someone's house. That house belonged to one of the first black
students to enroll at Little Rock Central High. We heard about that, heard
about it from Nathan's daddy, and he went down to Montgomery and marched with
those thousand black students in March of the same year.
        Martin
Luther King spoke with Eisenhower, urged him to intervene to defuse the
tension, but Eisenhower was a politician not a negotiator. Ten blacks were shot
in Mississippi in April. They called it the worst ever race riot. They called
it many things. Me and Nathan called it madness.
        I
recall Nathan's daddy back then, and twenty years later I would still remember
the passion, the fury, the anger he lived inside for all those years. Religion, he said, was unimportant. Didn't matter what we called
ourselves. Didn't matter what church we attended. Didn't matter what hymns we
sang. And sure as hell, our color didn't matter. A man was a man, all men made
in God's image, and all men equal at birth and equal in death. All men called
to account for the same sins, no matter their race or belief.
        Nathan's
daddy came home one day with a bleeding head. Didn't want no bandage or dressing,
and though Mrs. Verney fussed and clucked and hovered he sent her away while he
talked to us. Said he would scar, and scar gladly. This was something he would
wear for the rest of his life. He was a man of God. He was a minister of the
faith. Yet to the police officer that hit him in Montgomery, Alabama he was
another poor dumb