The Unthinkable
1966
RODNEY SAID IT WAS dark when he heard the roar of engines and felt the earth shake under his bed. He thought he heard an eagle screech just before smoke filled his room and he realized a dozen hooded militants circled his family home above Bayou Barré on Marshall Drive.
He opened the window.
He said that flames, hot and wet and dancing in the air almost knocked him over. In that instant he noticed the moon drop behind sinking clouds, just before smoke enveloped his room with scalding heat. He reached behind him, yanked Jeffrey from his bed and jumped through the shattered window with his brother hanging around his burning neck. They rolled in the fresh cut, late-summer grass, hot from the day’s heat while flames leaped after them.
He said he hollered as they rolled down the hill.
“Mama!” He felt like his breath dropped into a deep well of flames. While he grabbed at his singed, smelly hair, his other arm gripped Jeffrey and they tumbled, one eight limbed body, down the steep ravine and fell into the chilly waters of the bayou. The shock of the cool, muddy lagoon brought Rodney back to reality, and he looked up the punishing steep bank at the horror that devoured his family’s home.
He propped Jeffrey against a leafless black trunk and scrambled up the chewed up mine field of sparks and burning debris, galloping on all-fours, his pajamas shredded to ribbons, soaking wet, pushing with his feet, bare and bloody, to find the rest of his family.
Rodney said he heard angry machines that competed with chafed cries and vulgar chants, an unholy verse filtered through the smoke-filled air as if from the heavens, unseen but loud in his ear.
His throat was parched but he screamed for his dad, his sisters, his mother. He didn’t have to search further than the stately live oak his dad told him had been on the property since Rodney’s great grandfather escaped a Georgia plantation and settled near the Indian reservation north of Jean Ville. He saw his dad swinging like a cochon de lait, skin crackling in front of a bonfire. This time Rodney’s screams found voice among the howling timber fells, truck engine roars, and the requiem chants of the white-sheeted cowards who hoisted his dad into the arms of the beloved oak.
“Stop! Let him down! You can’t do that to my dad!” Although he could hear himself, the creatures tying a rope around his dad’s swollen neck didn’t seem to notice. He scratched and clawed and climbed on one of the ghosts, but it was as if Rodney wasn’t there, at all.
He felt himself fly backwards and crack hard against the earth. Black, red and yellow film covered his brain and when he finally peeked through the darkness of subconsciousness, he was flat on his back, head throbbing, the ground an earthquake beneath him as he lay in a pool of his own fresh, warm blood. He watched four or five pickup trucks speed away and smelled gasoline and burning hair. While Jeffrey’s guttural sobs echoed from the deep trench, he heard his mother scream and his sisters cry.
“Get up, get up, get up,” the voices said. Rodney rolled onto his stomach and rose to his knees. He felt someone pull at what was left of his scorched hair and he raised his head to the sky filled with tongues of yellow, orange and brown flashes, that disappeared only to be replaced by more of the same.
Fourth of July fireworks in his own yard.
“Help him, Rod, help him!” They screamed. It sounded like they were in a tunnel.
Rodney said he saw his dad, hanging, like a butchered hog as if roasting for a feast. Rodney got to his swaying feet and stretched his six-foot-three frame as tall and stately as the tree, his arms like branches reaching for Spanish moss. His palms touched the bottoms of his dad’s hot bare feet. On tiptoe, he pushed with all his might against his dad’s pink soles and heard a small breath, a whisper that broke through the waning sounds of the eagle and the moon and the clouds and the tongues and the mine fields and the dead, dying house.
“Dad,” Rodney hollered. “Stand on my hands and push.” His dad stiffened his legs and pressed against Rodney’s flattened palms, held high above his head as if praising the heavens where smoke and flames and cries ascended in dream-like fashion.
He said someone held a hose on the fire under the tree and it smoldered, sending thick, wet smoke up Rodney’s nose. He coughed and gagged, but he never turned loose of his dad’s feet, pushing them higher and higher, giving his dad a platform on which to stand to relieve the tension of the rope.
“Call Bo!” Rodney screamed, but his voice was barely audible and his throat burned with the effort.
By the time his uncle Bo arrived, Rodney’s arms were jelly and his toes numb and fiery. Bo backed his pickup under the hanging tree and grabbed Ray’s legs while Bo’s brother-in-law, Sam, climbed the tree and slashed the rope. Rodney said he watched as, in slow motion, the two strong men, lay his dad in the bed of the truck, Ray’s head in Bo’s lap while Sam got behind the wheel and started out of the yard. Rodney jumped in the back of the pickup just before it took off and crawled next to his dad. He wanted to say something to his dad but his voice would not cooperate, instead, he lay his cauterized, bristled head, hair singed and smelly, on his dad’s chest and listened for a sound, any sound—or a rise and fall, any rise and fall—or a sniffle, any ... sniffle.
It was all his fault. He knew it. His dad would know it, too, if he ever woke up to his parched lungs and blistered, raw neck. Rodney touched the imprint of hemp with gentle fingers and his hand filled with blood and pus and fear and horror and castigation.
Mea Culpa, he thought. Mea Maxima Culpa—and I can almost see him in my mind as he struck his chest over and over and over.
*
As usual, no one spoke at the dinner table but Mama and Daddy.
After Daddy led us in the Catholic blessing and began to pass the bowls of food around the table, he told Mama about the Klan burning the Thibault’s home. He said the house was in bad shape—that they’d have to tear it down and rebuild.
“The worse of it is Ray. He’s in the hospital,” Daddy said. “They almost killed him. He has rope burns around his neck and he was beaten half to death. He looks terrible.”
“You went to see him in the colored ward at the hospital?”
“Yes, and his wife told me the only reason he’s still alive is because Rodney, his seventeen-year-old boy, stood on tiptoes so Ray could stand on the boy’s hands. That’s what kept him from hanging and choking to death.”
I gasped on a mouthful of rice and grabbed my milk, greedily. I began to cough and choke.
Mama started to rant and rave about how the Klan would come back and burn another cross in our yard, and that Daddy didn’t need to be associating with those people. Daddy ignored the chastisement and continued to explain how Ray Thibault’s eyes were swollen shut and he had some broken bones and was on some sort of machine to help him get oxygen in his lungs.
“Why did they pick him?” Mama asked.
“Someone told me his boy touched a white girl at the Cow Palace one night.”
My fork stopped in mid-air and shook so hard the rice fell back into my plate. I put it down with a “clink.”
“I’ll bet that white girl’s daddy set up that lynching. You would do it, too, if it was Susie,” Mama said. I held my hands in my lap so no one could see them tremble. I felt like my heart would burst open. I couldn’t breathe.
“I’m sure if one of Ray’s boys touched a white girl, it was innocent, or there was a reason.” I stared at the food in my plate. Everything seemed to run together and become psychedelic. I felt dizzy, sick at my stomach.
“You always take up for those people.” Mama sounded angry, frustrated.
My ears seemed to fill with something foamy, like dishwater that gurgled around in my head. My chest felt like I had swallowed concrete. I tried to get the rice and beans already in my mouth to slide down, but I coughed and gasped and felt the oxygen leave my body. Will reached over and slapped my back a few times and Mama yelled at me to drink some milk. In the end, Daddy sent me to my room because I caused a disturbance. It was the first time I was grateful to be sent from the table.
My heart hurt. The pain was so acute I thought my chest would crack open. I actually wished it would. Maybe if it burst, the pressure I felt inside would ease. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. I cried for Rodney and for his family, and for all the colored people in the world who were oppressed, intimidated and hated because of the color of their skin. I cried for people who were not allowed to dream, to become, to achieve or to love freely. And I cried for all the people who were unloved or who could not love and be loved because of their race.
I felt like I could handle anything. I’d already survived so much I was numb to it. But Rodney! He was so protected and loved. I tried to understand what it must be like to be Marianne or Rodney. To be colored in this whitewashed world. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t feel what they felt, but I wanted to be in their families, anyway. When I said that to Marianne, she got angry and told me I didn’t know what I was saying, that no one wanted to be colored. No One!
Maybe not—but no one wanted to be me, either—at least no one would want to be me if they knew.