Written in the Sky

Patricia Foster

Photo by Martha Highers

Letter to my Great Niece after Visiting
the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
in Montgomery, Alabama

Dear Addie,

I’ve tried to write this letter several times, first to my sister, your grandmother – you called her Beanie – but the words shimmered, then vanished. I wanted to talk to the dead about the dead, to tell my sister how the shadows of our Southern past have always haunted me, but it seems I can only talk to the living. And so, I’m writing this letter to you, but also to me, or me meeting me as you, a truthful thought experiment as real as Einstein’s curvature of space or why the sky is blue.
          You’re five (going on six) and have all the awe and swagger of our family, an ambitious, fierce, and sometimes troubled people. They will most likely think I’m crazy to write to you about such a hard subject: racial violence; lynching; segregation; hate; the meanness that bites into our country. But then again, how can we teach you to love our country if we don’t also explain our country’s oppressive history, its duplicity and sin, its guilt and blood? How else can we encourage you to hold us to a higher standard, consistent with the rules you wrote to me in the LOVE BOOK: How to Love Peppol? 1) You have to lern how to be kind (decorated with red hearts). 2) You have to get frens (two girls with defiant hair holding hands). 3) You have to see yourslf (two big eyes). And then you will no how to love peppol.
          As I sit at my desk in Iowa, I worry about what I can say. Because it’s late at night and there’s so much silence around me, I stare into the edge of my feelings, dark roads that meander into darker alleys, a thicket of melancholy trees. On the simplest level, what happened is this: I went on a trip to Montgomery. I came back to Iowa. And in between is a story of what I experienced, what I saw and didn’t see, what I thought and couldn’t say. Maybe this isn’t a letter to you at all, but a letter to history in the only way it can be written, with the tears and sorrow that should belong to us all, using the instructions of a child.

The air in Montgomery is hot, suffocating, any breeze a prayer. My fair skin pinks and sweat bubbles above my lip as I stand in line with my ticket, listening to a drawl of voices, slow and deliberate, both familiar and foreign. “Ya’ll get over here,” a mother orders her daughters, fussing with them. “No need all that bickering. Hush now.” Then, “God bless you,” an old man, white-haired and bent, nods to a woman who’s stepped aside to give him a little shade.
          The line snakes forward to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a six-acre site that pays tribute to 4,400 black victims of lynching by white mobs in the U.S. from 1877 to 1950. I think its subtitle might be: How We Learned to Hate People.
          Once inside I stare at the first row of 800 oxidized steel columns suspended by long dark rods as thick as rope, each representing a particular county in the Deep South and the Midwest, each bearing the names of the men, women, and children who were lynched in that county. I move to the next row, then the next, a seemingly endless number of columns the color of a wound. Will I be able to look at all these columns? Will I be able to read all these names? A few days ago the simple steps of How to Love Peppol seemed clear and obvious, but now I’m engulfed in an epithet of currency that is anything but.
          Instead of kindness, my mind confronts sadism, a laundry list of atrocities black men and women, but particularly black men, suffered: not only were they hanged, but they were also burned at the stake (“barbecued”), maimed, disfigured, castrated, blinded, ears and tongues sliced, skin blow-torched, fingers and toes cut off, their knuckles for sale as souvenirs in the town square the next day. Unfortunately, I can imagine a young white boy, seven or eight years old, mesmerized by the gore, the slime and thready goop of knuckles crammed together like pickles in a jar, and begging his father for a few pennies. “Please. Just so I can get one! So I can show Bobby.” Sometimes the corpses, charred and mutilated, were dragged through the streets as a gratuitous thrill for onlookers. Sometimes church services were interrupted, Christian worshipers hurrying from their pews, unfinished hymns still vibrant on their tongues as they rushed to get a good “spot” for the lynching spectacle. Sometimes newspapers wrote hysterical, sensational editorials based on hearsay and innuendo, trumping up charges against black citizens, whipping up the ire of the white populace.
          I move on through a geography of terror.

          Jefferson County, Alabama

          Fulton County, Georgia

          Webster Parish, Louisiana

          Hernando County, Florida

          Florence County, South Carolina

          Dallas County, Alabama

          McLean County, Kentucky

          Column after column, I read the names: Lewis Scott, Sam Townes, Jennie Collins, Dave Harris, Frazier Baker, Julia Baker, Sam Howard, Cairo Williams, Arthur Davis, Red Haynie, Mrs. Martin, James Sweat, George Burden, William, Fambro, Marcus Westmoreland, Penny Westmoreland, Essex Harrison, Jeff Darling, Oliver Wideman, Bennie Thompson, Robert Davis, my eyes tracking the list, first and last names sliding through my brain like silk, soft and slippery and then unrecoverable unless I write them down. Many, I imagine, were sharecroppers, trapped in the tenant-system that kept both blacks and poor whites in debt, dependent and easily controlled in a bleak, agrarian life. Perhaps some drudged in coal mines or on chain gangs, and maybe a few had more prosperous jobs in barber shops or mortuaries or as local professionals. After all, Thurgood Marshall, after trying a case for the NAACP in rural Tennessee in 1946, was almost lynched on his drive back to his Nashville hotel. That night he, the other trial lawyers, and a reporter were stopped by three highway patrol cars, the officers edgy, their hands twitchy on their guns. In minutes, Thurgood Marshall was arrested for drunken driving (he had not been drinking), put in the back of one of the cop cars and driven away. The other three passengers were waved off, warned to drive “right on to Nashville,” though luckily they ignored this directive and followed the cop car down a deserted road to the deserted bank of the Duck River where, in unending darkness, a group of white men waited.¹Dray, Phillip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, New York: Modern Library, 2003, p 373-74.
          It’s possible the very presence of Marshall’s companions saved the life of a future (and first African-American) Supreme Court Justice. Who can know how such a perilous experience sharpened the private instincts and legal clarity of Thurgood Marshall himself, what improvisations of self-making it triggered.
          At the very least, his system of reality would have been burdened by an instant, anguished upgrade.

          Baldwin County, Alabama

          Colquitt County, Georgia

          Callaway County, Missouri

          Hernando County, Florida

          Shelby County, Tennessee

          Lamar County, Texas

          Alexander County, Illinois

The night before I drove to Montgomery I stayed with my 95-year-old mother, your great grandmother and namesake, a woman who, as you well know, makes the best red velvet cake in southern Alabama. Unsullied by age, her lipstick bright and blotted, her voice as strong and clear as if she were in her 60s, she’s still “running the roads” to doctors’ appointments, weddings and funerals, and caretaking the family tribe. After dinner, she and I talked late into the night about ordinary things: a new leak in her roof, the delight of her great-grandson’s graduation, our mutual fatigue (we were both yawning and apologizing), and only as we were agreeing “that yes, it’s time to get our beauty sleep,” did she mention my upcoming trip to the Memorial. “I can see you’re interested in these things,” she said, “and that’s good. That’s never been my interest but I know you need to go.” I nodded, pleased that in the last few years we’d been able to speak about our differences. We hugged, then parted to get ready for bed.
          And yet, as I lay in bed that night, a thought vibrated like a telephone wire in my brain: maybe you either have the gene for fighting racial injustice or you don’t. Of course, I knew this was absurd. I’d be the first to admit that the aches and sorrows of daily life are exhausting and need tending, and yet a part of me worried that ignoring our oppressive history could allow a tacit avoidance, a kind of hallucination of innocence, maybe even a preference not to see. And doesn’t “not seeing” cast the other into oblivion, allowing for illusions and delusions when the story is right before your eyes?
          “The record is there for all to read,” James Baldwin wrote about racial injustice in America. “It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky.”
          In the sky. Yes, I thought as I shifted and settled in my old girlhood bed, trying to get comfortable in a place I’d left fifty years ago. I couldn’t help wondering if not feeling deeply about how discrimination affected both the black and white psyche (to say nothing of the black body) was. . .well, a failure of the imagination. You have to lern how to be kind, you wrote in the LOVE BOOK. Certainly, kindness is a willingness to risk something of the self for the other, and thus, an act of the imagination. And certainly, discomfort and anxiety are necessary to the very idea of risk.
          I want to think so.
          As these thoughts swarmed my brain, the clock on the bedside table ticked toward midnight. I heard the lonely hoot of an owl hidden somewhere in the nearby trees, the skittering of insects against the screen. I should sleep. My three-hour drive to Montgomery would come too soon and I’d wake, yawning and groggy and be tempted to re-set the alarm. I turned out the light. But I’d barely adjusted to the darkness when I felt the hard pinch of reality: You’re not risking anything. You’re just going to the Memorial. Don’t get on your high horse.

When I visited you in North Carolina, you were all charged curiosity and eager intention. You read, you sang, you wrote about ghosts, about love, about Jesus. You rode your bike, racing ahead, wild hair flying in the wind beneath your helmet. You made rules about what your younger brother could and could not do, snatched cookies, decorated your face with stickers, teased and laughed. And of course you pouted, wanting your way. “But I want to,” you huffed with each demand, eyes impatient, pupils darkening, at first charming, then defensive. When denied, you stomped off, yelling, “It’s not FAIR,” your bottom lip stuck out, your whole body sulking.
          Assertion. Insistence. I think about how fiercely you resent being subordinated, a trait I hope you retain, as I walk deeper into the Memorial, the floor sloping gradually downward, the columns now higher, like motionless bodies dangling above me. Inevitably, I stop, breath held, staring at the endless forms as symbol and reality intertwine. I can’t move. Other people stop here too, the air cooler, the light dimmer, the columns eloquent and sad and oddly intimate. It’s not fair.
          “Disempowerment is the very premise of segregation,” I whisper as if you’re beside me. “Lynching was the de facto corrective and fear the conduit. Fear as big and ugly as an unpredictable beast. A cold breath of hate.”
          I can’t yet expect you to understand either the words or the premise, you who live in a family and a culture that loves you, where you thrive in a white, privileged life of tenderness and attention, enhanced by healthy food, good schools, private lessons, and family support, a life you don’t recognize as privileged, only normal. And like all the people who love you, I’ll fight hard and long to keep you from experiencing hostility and abuse and hate, but I also want you to know that it exists. Everywhere.

          Miller County, Arkansas

          Franklin County, North Carolina

          Tulsa County, Oklahoma

          Grant County, Indiana

          Warren County, Mississippi

          Wythe County, Virginia

          Logan County, West Virginia

As I descend into the last section of the Memorial, I have a queer, dizzying moment. I’m tired and suddenly hungry. I chew on a ragged fingernail, slightly bored, shifting my purse to ease its weight. A headache threatens, and I want to flee. I’ve been here for less than two hours, but already the hyper-focus and heat have depleted me. I don’t bother reading the names on the columns anymore, the words and dates a blur, my attention dispersed. Instead, I stare at a woman’s gold lamé high-top tennis shoes and the paw print tattoos that accessorize her calves. I stare at a young girl with delicate pink rosebuds attached to her flip-flops and a beautiful woman absently twirling her blue and green striped umbrella as she lags in front of me. There is a mix of white, black, and brown people here, of young and old, of hair woven, ponytailed, bunched, and bald. Teenagers wear cut-offs and tank tops and chew gum just as they do at the mall. Elderly men hunch and stop to rest. When I gaze out at the hot, humid day, the grass looks absurdly green, the clouds drifting lazily in a white sky, and I want suddenly to be where people are chatting and casually drinking water from paper cups. That’s what I want. Get me outta here.
          And yet I don’t leave. When I see a raised platform of concrete steps where other people sit, I plop down beside them; a few minutes later I note the reason for the steps: a high granite wall shimmers with a cascade of water endlessly baptizing words carved in stone: unknown victims of racial terror lynching.
          Because there were so many more. Unreported. Unnamed. Undocumented. Unknown to history. Lives destroyed though (I want to think) still mourned.

          Looking around me, I’m relieved that others look as bruised by the heat and the experience as I am. They fan themselves, slouching, shirts pulled out of pants, shoes slipped discreetly off, purses open to glance at phones. Some close their eyes, resting. Others gaze vaguely at the wall. I yawn and rest my head in my hands, wanting to sleep — I should have gone to bed earlier last night — and when I look up, I see a little girl in a green sundress, about your age, snatch her father’s iPhone and dash toward that wall of water. As nimble as a dancer, she zigzags between people, moving in close to click her picture, then turning back to us with a bold, capricious smile.
          We all laugh.
          “Lord, we needed that!” A woman sitting below me, glances up, her smile wide beneath her colorful sunhat.
          “Absolutely,” I grin.
          “Praise God,” someone else sings out.
          A five-year-old brown girl. The future. A little splash of hope.
          If you were here, I know you’d grab my phone and rush off to play with her. You have to get frens. You’d want to show her what you could do and see what she could do, the two of you comparing and testing and sharing and showing off. And you’d have no sense of restraint, a reassuring thought to someone who grew up, as I did, in the formalized separation of the segregated South.

Exhausted by the Memorial, I walk back to my hotel in the thick June heat, getting lost, then finding my way past an abandoned lot and onto the main drag. Once in my room, I slump on the clean, white bed, feeling a vague disquiet. Through the walls I hear the drunken sounds of a wedding party I saw in the lobby, the trills of laughter, the ding of the elevator, whoops of celebration. Joy. I wish I had a reason to dress up in fancy clothes, to leap up and dance.
          Instead, I go to the desk, open my laptop and wait for my thoughts to emerge. But nothing comes. No images flash across my retina. No stories ricochet in my brain. My mind feels dull and flat, as pale and thin as a piece of old cardboard. I can’t think of one thing that hasn’t been said. So, I eat two cookies, lick my fingers, and drink the last of my Diet Coke.
          I wait.
          Nothing.
          Why did I come here? I ask myself as if I can ambush my thinking even as I slump in my chair. I wanted to tell you a story. I wanted to tell myself a story. But what I haven’t dared admit is that I might return from the Memorial, my mind numb, emptied, my imagination depleted. A dry husk. With no stories. Do I even have a right to a story? I slip deeper into the chair. What does it matter what I think about kindness or bigotry or the horror of the past if I can’t feel?
          I stare at the blank screen.
          Then I close my laptop.

When night descends I turn out all the lights and stand at the window, looking out at Montgomery. Set your watch back 100 years, my friends used to say about this city. I always laughed. But now I don’t. From here, the city looks dark and empty and unknowable, a deserted shell. Only the lights of the capital – once the capital city of the Confederacy – glimmer in the night, small sparkles of brightness. I lean into the window, feeling the cold rush of air from the air conditioning, letting it flutter my shirt as if I’m a tree with drooping leaves.
          Why did I come here?
          I think about James Baldwin’s enduring voice, his anger, his persistence, his ability to discover hidden meanings, to unravel contradictions, to speak a personal truth. And yes, I know the record of injustice may be written in the sky, but it’s not only the record that matters, but also the sensibilities of the person reading that record, the mind attuned to both the bitter and the sweet.
          The bitter and the sweet.
          Maybe I just need to sleep. Maybe. . . I reach up to draw the curtains, to get ready for bed. Somewhere in the distance a security light blinks, and for a brief moment I’m surprised by a palimpsest of another self, the faintest shadow.
          A girl. An early morning. A memory.

I was eight years old, small and fair and thrilled to be on vacation with my family in the mountains of North Carolina. Huge trees sprang up, green-bright and thick as we lurched around mountain curves. The sky was a fairytale blue, the air so cool chill bumps pimpled my arms. We were sequestered in a tiny town, a secret nowhere, my sister and I whispered, with other white families who’d driven to this secluded place for a southern medical convention. It was the summer of 1956, Eisenhower was president, the cost of gas was 22 cents a gallon, and all was right with the world. This was what we knew.
          I’d never been to North Carolina and the thought of hiking in real mountains, riding horses, and learning to clog shattered all pretense of sleep that first night. My sister and I (the girls) had twin single beds in the back room of a three-bedroom cabin painted white with dark shutters and a wide front porch dotted with rocking chairs where our parents would entertain at night, visiting with other doctors and their wives, talking about anesthesiology, the flu vaccine, about china patterns and shopping excursions, things that didn’t interest us in the least. Awake that first night, I pretended I was walking alone up the wide front steps to the porch, barely touching the white wooden banister, and then I was through the door, proclaiming everything as my territory: my table, my chair, my knotty-pine wall, my picture of a bucolic landscape, my bed, my bureau, my closet, my window. Out the window, there was even more to claim – honeysuckle, oaks, sycamores, the odor of horses, the sweet smell of grass, the chatter of crickets. Our cabin was perched on a hillside with a second story basement tucked neatly underneath.
          “This is the best place I’ve ever been,” my brother insisted the next day.
          “Yes!” my sister and I yelled.
          It was on the second night that everything changed.
          As we were returning to our cabin from dinner at the lodge – where everyone was served family style – we were surprised to see a light on outside the basement door. We were dawdling, my father and mother talking, my sister and brother and I picking up pebbles and tossing them behind us, listening to them snap and ping on the path, each trying to outdo the other, bragging and egging each other on. That is, until my mother stopped. “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice quiet, but tense, and it was her muted apprehension that made us turn. In the distance, we saw a black man in the white shirt and tie worn by the kitchen help open the door to the basement of our cottage. Except for his white shirt, he was a mere shadow. He slipped inside. The outside light went off, and an inside light flared, soft yellow warming the space.
          That was how we learned that two of the kitchen employees lived in the basement beneath our cabin.
          “Don’t worry,” my father said. “I’m sure it’s a mistake. I’ll ask for a new cabin tomorrow.”
          Once in the cozy realm of our cabin, I didn’t think any more about it. I slept.
          But the next morning, as I was sneaking around the side of the house, hoping to find a dead beetle or something to scare my sister, I was surprised when the basement door opened and a young black woman, small and neat and dressed in a starched white uniform, emerged. When she saw me, she smiled, an easy smile of friendly acknowledgement. And yet for me, time became suspended. I didn’t move. I barely breathed. Instead of returning her smile, I froze, staring, my gaze locked to her gaze. As if reacting to my silence, her face went still, then blank, her mouth pressed closed, her eyes averted. She turned quickly, locked the door and walked away from me toward the lodge. And yet it was as if everything had altered, everything changed. The man last night had seemed mythical, unreal, barely there. But this woman was real. She was pretty. She was young. She had paused, smiling, and for the first time I was aware that she slept in a bed in a room beneath my room, that she put on her nightgown and brushed her teeth and combed her hair no more than twenty feet away. I could imagine her drinking a cup of coffee, just as my mother did, and looking out the small basement window, listening to doves, hidden and cooing in the trees. I could imagine her laughing, her body loose and uninhibited, surprised at something the man said, then saying, “Oh, hush, you,” and washing out her coffee cup and setting it on the rack to dry. I could imagine her hanging up her clothes, tossing off her shoes, eating raisins from a tiny red carton, then turning on the radio and humming.
          But was that right? Was it right that she lived so near?
          What I felt was a tangle of feelings: curiosity, surprise, sadness, confusion, but also the insecurity of my family, the belief that we must never be different from the other white middle-class families who were here. I knew that being different was a danger, that it could mark you, blur you into invisibility. Difference was a stain, a slippery path, a mouth twisting in disgust. But there was something else, something new and unpleasant and suspicious idling below my consciousness. Did I want the black woman to envy me, to want what I had, to turn back, her eyes hooded, slightly afraid, while I stood in the yard, my eight-year-old white self already enhanced by the vulgar pleasure of power? Was I drawing strength from that old cliché of superiority? Or did I simply want the black woman to go away so I could make this cabin imaginatively all mine again?
          I turned sharply and ran back into the cottage, forgetting all about scaring my sister.

I’m still at the window. My hand still holds the curtain. I’d like to think I was merely a confused southern child enmeshed in the mores of my culture. Better yet, I’d like to imagine that all my conditioning about race vanished the moment the young woman smiled, the gap between us eclipsed by surprise. But it’s not true. It’s never been true. Power is presumptuous. Some part of me thought I had a right to judge her, to make her turn away and feel distress. Even at eight, I was no innocent. I’d been trained in the psychology of prejudice and power, and now this memory hangs suspended, raw and burning, in my consciousness.
          Maybe I came here to remember.
          To remember and call out the beast in me.

“Do you ever meet yourself?” you whispered as we drove to a farm in North Carolina where you’d picked strawberries last summer. You looked solemn, serious. You held my hand, waiting.
          At first, I was surprised by your question, but you’ve always been quick and intuitive, curious about what’s hidden. You have to see yourself. I gazed into your dark brown eyes, then looked away. I wanted to tell you that meeting yourself can change you forever. Or simply be an elbow in your side. I wanted to say that it’s like tearing yourself apart, but so is not meeting yourself and wanting to. In the moment of seeing, you may have a secret desire to think, wow, that’s me, but the instant such a thought snags your consciousness the meeting’s over, the self as opaque and elusive as ever. Maybe that’s why meeting yourself, actually seeing yourself, is often accidental, your ego pushed slightly askew, your lipstick smudged, your breath thick with onions.
          I wished I knew how to tell you, Addie, that the self is slippery and unstable and that these moments of seeing can disturb the peace, can shatter the status quo. Isn’t that what the Memorial is meant to do: to act as a wake-up call, a timely alarm to our national consciousness, reminding us that the legacy of terror – and the tolerance of that terror – must be exposed if the LOVE BOOK is to rule? And yes, talking about racial violence is hard, but ignoring it is craven, an ignoble kind of hiding.
          “Well?” You shook my knee, your brow furrowed. You were afraid I’d drifted off.
          When I gazed at your face – your eyes could slip from earnest to dismissive in a split second — I smiled. “Yes,” I said, “sometimes I do. And it usually surprises me. Because it reveals something I didn’t know I knew about myself, something that makes me wonder, who am I?”
          You nodded, eyes grave, studying me. And then, as if you wanted to contemplate this on your own or maybe just watch the sky, you turned abruptly and fluttered your hand out the window, feeling the soft rush of air.

Photo by David Wilder