“You understand why I don’t want to testify?”
“You’re trying to avoid a hassle.”
“So it’s the right decision?” I said.
“I didn’t say that. You decided, and it’s your decision.”
I looked over toward Eden Rise, hazy in the fall warmth. “What’s the reason to do it? You understand that these trials are just a quick fix for liberal guilt?”
The idea, of course, was not original with Russell. In the last few years, several far more notorious civil rights murder cases—Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the four girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham—had been reopened and old racists dragged into court before juries now including blacks. I had followed those proceedings with a distant skepticism, born partly of the assumption that whites didn’t ever get convicted of such crimes and partly from my lawyerly doubts about the efficacy of old evidence—dead witnesses, lost documents, and such. But those killers did at last get convicted, which made people believe they could shut the door once and for all on the past.
I had shoved into the shadows of the past the face of my friend Jackie Herndon, dead now for twenty-eight years. There too were the angry eyes of my father, the lazy face of the prosecutor, the sneers of the attorney defending Jackie’s killer, the contempt of townspeople who thought I had betrayed my birthright. The last thing I needed was to parade ghosts into a federal courtroom. The post-civil-rights-white-punishment-and-redemption trials became major media events. There wasn’t enough whisky in Birmingham to get me through that.
I suspected the insincerity of people using the past for today’s therapeutic needs. These trials were a way for blacks and whites to avoid dealing with the serious human relations problems we faced in the 1990s—failing schools and the indifference to them, drugs and crime, black kids growing up virtually without parenting, smug whites insulated in suburbs like mine. You had the conservatives who now used Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society as their authority for denouncing affirmative action and minority set-asides when they had not agreed with anything King said when he was alive. There were the neo-Confederates who insisted that the Civil War hadn’t been about slavery so they could feel good about being Southern and create cover for their persistent white-supremacist instincts. And all the folks doing backflips to forgive George Wallace for fomenting hatred in the 1960s because later, when blacks had won the vote, he asked to be forgiven. I would never forgive George Wallace for how he tried to ruin my father in the summer of 1965.
The ones most willing to confuse forgiving with forgetting were black. All right, forgive him if you want, but that doesn’t undo what he did in the 1960s. We’re still paying for that, with a lot of the payback going to blacks who remain so outraged at what happened back then that they refuse to acknowledge that history has moved on and some things have gotten better. Just a few months ago, I heard a black preacher declare to a big group that we still had slavery in Birmingham, and he got a rousing response.
People lie about the past so they can lie about the present. They become so selective about what they remember the truth gets lost. For me, the past just meant regret.
All this tumbled out as we communed with the catfish. Cathy nodded solemnly. “I see what you mean about the insincerity.” She studied her Coke can. “But in the world of PR, you tell clients to figure the price of doing nothing. What’s it cost you not to testify?”
I shrugged.
“Oh, come on, Tommy. You risk seeing yourself as a coward, somebody who lost the guts you showed as a nineteen-year-old.”
“Courage is overrated.”
“Bullshit. You don’t believe that.” She shook her head. “The guy subpoenas you, you’ll tell the story like it happened. You’re incapable of lying in court.”
She picked up a rock and threw it far into the pond, setting off a frenzy just beneath the surface. She looked back at me. “Plus you might get something good out of testifying.”
“Like what?”
“On Oprah they call it closure.” Cathy has this way of arching one eyebrow when she is about to nail your dumb ass to the wall. “You’ve been beating yourself up your whole adult life over what happened.”
She and I knew well the side effects of my lifelong recrimination. We called them the three Ds—divorce, drinking, depression.
“Who knows. In a new trial, you might find out you’re not guilty after all.” She flung another rock into the pond and picked a stem of scarlet lantana. “Let’s go look around town.”
We drove around the square. Everything looked a lot different. In 1965 it had bustled and shone, clean and bright. Now the Farmers and Merchants Bank bore the name and logo of a big Birmingham holding company. The windows of the barbershop, shoe store, and hardware store on the south side were boarded up with sheets of plywood. Pasted on them were posters for a rap concert in Selma that was now two months in the past. The grass on the square hadn’t been mowed in a month, nor had the dead leaves under the magnolia been swept up. No flowers bloomed.
The Confederate statue had a six-pointed star spray-painted on its base. “Somebody in town embracing Judaism?” I wondered aloud.
“Gang symbol. See the pitchforks above it?” Cathy’s teenagers kept her well informed.
We drove past the sprawling ranch house we had grown up in—where in the summer of 1965 I argued with my father and where, after Jackie’s death, I was a virtual prisoner. The house now sported purple shutters. Cathy clucked her tongue. “At least they’re painted.” The shutters on the neighboring house were peeling and hanging askew.
We proceeded to the curved, tree-lined drive that rose to a columned mansion from the 1850s. Cathy knocked on the back door and told the live-in caretaker we were going to look around for a few minutes but wouldn’t be coming inside. After a slow stroll around, I said it looked pretty good.
“Needs painting.” She pointed to the upstairs windows.
We sat on the front porch in the ancient glider, once a bright aqua but now a dull, pale blue. It squeaked loudly; we couldn’t glide.
“The Rose of Sharon still blooms.” Just as I pointed that way, a sparrow chirped. “Here-kitty-kitty-kitty,” my grandmother Bebe used to sing in mimicry of the songbird. As a three-year-old, Cathy had changed it to “Loove, Bebe, Bebe, Bebe.”
When I began to hum an old hymn, Cathy cast a sweet smile my way. “I know you don’t want to sell it. I don’t really, either.” She paused to let the sparrow have his say.
“You can’t have it both ways, Tommy. You want to hold on to our past when it’s the memory of Bebe, but then you repress the hard stuff.”
On the way back to the car, she slipped her arm around my waist and leaned into me. “You know your decision is going to be the right one as far as I’m concerned. I’m just pointing out a couple of things to think about.”
We stopped at Dreamland in Tuscaloosa and ate some ribs and watched the Crimson Tide play Mississippi State on television. On Monday I called Randy Russell. Late that afternoon I began to tell him what happened on the highway to Eden Rise on May 24, 1965.
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