[Dialogue] Keeping the Faith

[David Walters]

Keeping the Faith
by Jim McCulloch 


 The acid greens of spring were washed in a thin rain beyond the window, the new leaves luminous above the insinuating grackles, who, winding up and then exploding with sex, lurched and shuddered and hulked and flexed. "I," they danced, "am biggest, shiniest, loudest, oiliest," and they cranked their rough steel cries, shagged their up-poked necks and peeked, their peeled eyes the color of the leaves, at the dowdy indifferent rusty objects of their lust, who flew away into the rain, leaving behind the deflating strutters in the violent colors of the grass. 

My window looked out on the park I played in 40 years previously. There were no grackles then. The great-tailed grackle had come from who-knows-where in the years between my childhood and this spring day to colonize great roosts which smelled like open sewers and sounded like foundries in the evenings when the birds came raucousing in by the thousands, their wingbeat decibels thickening in the ear like squadrons of helicopters. 

Everything had gotten different without my noticing, while I was away somewhere. 

At the time of the grackles my wife and I had a sudden, unexpected houseguest, an Englishman, one of those old acquaintances who pop up out of nowhere years after you have forgotten about them. I knew him from a time in my life when I would spend long and self-satisfied hours arguing with other student visionaries about how to best rearrange the world, politically, to end oppression and help the downtrodden. 

He called from the airport. "I'm having a bit of hard luck..." he non-explained, drifting off into silence. So of course we invited him to stay at our house. 

He brought us up-to-date. His wife had run off with his best friend three years before. She was a Czech and originally a communist, but over the years she had acquired a hankering for a style of life he could not provide. He was more puzzled by the infidelity of her drift to capitalism than by any other. "The chap was a Fabian," he said, of his rival. "That was quite distressing." 

Our guest himself remained a very devout Marxist-Leninist-something-or-other, I could never remember beyond the second hyphen. He was plump and knock-kneed and recited all his problems in a sorrowful pouter-pigeon voice. He no longer got along with his grown children. He had lost a whole series of jobs, and had become an academic nomad going from one-year appointment to one-year appointment. Now he did not have any job at all. A couple of months before he turned up at my house he had been promised a slot as a sociological consultant by the UNESCO Sub-Commission for the International-Programme-on-Desalination-of-Tropical- Irrigated-Soils, or some such agency, on a water project in Africa, but the starting date of the job had been delayed, so in the meantime spent all his cash on a ticket to El Salvador, which he had once written a book about. He asked his academic communist friends there to help him get a teaching post at the National University. He got an interview. They were full of promises. 

"Of course we'd like to hire you. But how could you survive here, an Englishman, on our local pay scale? Why don't you go back to England or the U.S. and see if you can get a grant to fund the post--or even partially fund it? Then it, uh, might be possible." 

He believed this, and dutifully enough he had come to Austin to talk to his old professors about funding possibilities for his dream. His ticket back to England had to be used within a couple of days or he had to pay an extra hundred or so dollars. He forgot about that. 

He stayed a week in Austin so he could be on a local public radio talk show, where after preliminary sectarian apologetics for various totalitarian Left regimes, he proposed his own theoretical addition to Marxism-Leninism, which he called "intermediate technology." Intermediate technology, it turned out, would consist of the revolutionary regime forbidding the import of computers and cars, and instead manufacturing pencils and bicycles. "You know" I said, "intermediate technology sounds a lot like poverty," but he dismissed this as another of my fascist outbursts. 

I remembered a time, many years before, when he said plaintively, with real disappointment in his voice, in some discussion whose details I have now otherwise forgotten, "I don't understand it. I don't understand why there is no genuine Left in America. You American student radicals," he said, accusingly, and correctly, "just play at being revolutionaries." I was outraged. 

Only when he called to confirm his reservation did he find out he needed more money to get home. This was a very low point for him, but the lowest was when he called back to London--which he had not bothered to do for two months--and discovered that his promised consultantship had vanished, because he himself had vanished, as far as his agency could tell. He had forgotten to tell them where he had gone. He was crushed and speechless after the trans-Atlantic call, and finally told us that he had already spent the money he was to make in Africa 

"You see, I arranged to have my house in Lewes remodeled while I was away." He was now unemployed and 5000 pounds in debt. We had to lend him the bus fare to get to the Dallas airport. 

For all of this I didn't dislike him. But there was something about him. It was not his politics, nor was it his incompetence. Maybe it was his plummy, patient public-school diction, slightly tainted, under stress, with his origins in the lower reaches of the middle class (I churlishly imagined it the voice of a shabby career civil-servant explaining the rules, in the anteroom of some remote consulate, to a bunch of emotional dark foreigners who push and shove and don't form a line). I wanted to grab him, take him by the throat and shout "you gobbling, stuffed-shirt clown, once those sons-of-bitches come to power they are going to shoot you first, and for the same reason I would, because of your Goddamn voice." Is it to my credit that I did not do this? I don't know. 

When our houseguest left for DFW on the bus, I remember thinking he was a strangely distorted living image of the person he was 30 years before, though he imagined himself unchanged because he still professed the creed of his youth. Perhaps my appearance troubled him to some similar shudder of incomplete recognition. Having no aptitude for literature, I had not realized that Rip Van Winkle was an allegory of the soul. 

It occurred to me I still thought I was the same person I was in the early 60's. 

My own political activism had begun in 1960 and 1961 in Austin. At that time the local forces of desegregation met several nights a week at the University YMCA, an old yellow brick building on the corner of 22nd and Guadalupe, across from the University of Texas campus. These forces consisted almost entirely of white college students who would hold a brief meeting, and then march out single file and conduct a quiet and orderly demonstration next door at the Texas Theater, which was racially segregated. The demonstrators would stand in line and each person would ask in turn if the Texas Theater would admit Negroes (Negro, of course, was the polite and accepted word at that time). Usually the long-suffering lady who worked in the ticket booth ignored them and would say nothing at all, so one by one the demonstrators would come up to the booth and ask the question and wait for a minute or so and then return to the end of the line, being careful not to harass real customers. The portly manager of the theater had an additional job as an announcer for Austin's only classical music radio station. When he came out the demonstrators would sing what they called freedom songs, with verses like 



  Black and white together, we shall not be moved
  Black and white together, we shall not be moved
  just like a tree that's standin' by the water, 
  (fortissimo) we shall not be moved 

accompanied by spastic hand-clapping, and he would watch impassively, arms folded. This singing must have deeply pained him--he was known to have very refined musical tastes. They would also sing "We Shall Overcome," 30 or 40 white kids droning in a sort of low tuneless wail, off-key and without rhythm. 

I was one of these idealistic young people. My southern white childhood background had fallen away like some sort of husk when I went to college in 1959, revealing beneath it a completely formed and fearfully righteous modern person who lost no time in joining the battle against racial injustice. 

Recalling the more famous lunch counter sit-ins, we called these demonstrations "the Stand-ins." A lot of the participants in the Stand-ins were members of the Christian Faith and Life Community, a vaguely existentialist, loosely Christian cooperative that was thriving at the time in Austin. The Christian Faith and Lifers lent a certain gravitas to the whole thing. The Community disappeared in the cruder world of the late 60's, partly because the members were expected to read Kierkegaard and participate in agonic discussions of obscure and unhappy Christian theologians with German and Russian names, and partly because of the director's complicated financial maneuverings using the organization's funds. The central tenet of their ideology so far as I could tell was that the best kind of beliefs were those arrived at through a heroic defiance of reason, which they called a "leap of faith." I liked them because I had those kinds of beliefs, and still do. 

The leader of the Stand-ins was a student named Chandler Davidson, the chairman of the ad hoc steering committee which met Sunday afternoons in the "Y" to discuss strategy. The most forceful personality on that committee was a graduate student named Houston Wade, whose suggestions were always delivered in a quiet and amiable voice and were almost always adopted. Neither was a Christian Faith and Lifer. Chandler and Houston pretty much ran the show. The show ran a long time, which I think pleased most of the participants, because the Stand-ins became a kind of social club for many of us, and moreover allowed us all to enjoy the secret and not inconsiderable pleasure of sanctimony. But one Sunday, after many months of demonstrating, and segregation nevertheless firmly in place at the theaters, someone on the steering committee suggested that we step up the pressure and form two silent and disapproving lines on the sidewalk which the real moviegoers would have to pass between to buy tickets. We would shame them. 

We tried this at the Varsity Theater, the other segregated movie house near the University. Unhappily, the moviegoers did not react with shame, but with anger, regarding our tactic as menacing. There were confrontations on the sidewalk, shouts and angry words, some pushing and shoves. 

Now you have to remember that in those days our belief in non-violence had the force of a religious creed. What would Martin Luther King think? What would Gandhi think, or Tolstoy? After that evening's demonstration an anguished Christian Faith and Lifer stood in general assembly when we had returned to the "Y" and declared, haltingly, his voice trembling, "I have seen a mask torn away and beneath it is the ugly face of violence." He went on to say he felt shocked and devastated by our tactic, having thought, until that evening, that the demonstrations were a "Christ-event." He was shattered, he said. When he was through speaking, there was a momentary silence, and then the auditorium exploded in opinions, acrimonious ones, pro and con, and finally a vote was held and the tactic of shaming was abandoned. The Christian Faith and Lifers had won out. 

At the time I thought the dissenter was totally overreacting. But now, years later, I have a different opinion, and I think that he had indeed seen the ugly face of violence; the line we formed on the sidewalk stretching eventually to Belfast, Beirut, and Sarajevo. 

One of the few Black students at the University had a dormitory room a couple of doors away from mine. His name was Huey McNeely. We became friends. He was the first Negro I had ever known. (We always enunciated this word slowly and clearly because our ignorant white dialect mouths would say nigrah automatically unless we took great pains in forming the word.) Huey was a pleasant short kid who later became a doctor. Every once in a while he would attend the Stand-ins. 

I was not on the Stand-ins' steering committee, but I was one of several people who encouraged Huey to apply for membership in it. They took a vote on his application in the only closed meeting I think they ever had. I remember standing with Huey for half an hour outside the door of the room with the long table where these dozen or so white kids debated his petition to be elevated to the directorate. Finally the doors opened and someone, I think it was Houston, announced that Huey had been turned down, because he was "not serious enough" about desegregation. 

I think it was in the fall of 1961 that the theaters capitulated. When the time came for a ceremonial last triumphant gathering in front of the Texas theater when we would all go in to the theater, black and white together, we had a hard time finding any black students to go to the movies with us. 

What a fiasco, I thought, briefly. 

This fiasco did not deter me, nor dozens of its later variants as the 60's played out into the 70's, as street radicalism grew and then slowly disappeared, from a complacency I kept in good order--until my houseguest, with a complacency as remarkable as my own, disturbed it. 

 Some time after he left, maybe a month or so later, I drove to a Black graveyard in South Austin on Little Texas Road, to finish taking some photographs. It was once secluded and hidden, out in the country south of town, but the city has swallowed it up, and a big new thoroughfare now passes a few yards from the burial ground. Little Texas Road itself has become a major illegal trash dump. 

When I first came to this graveyard there was a tombstone which marked the resting place of a slave who died in his bondage before the Civil War. It has since been stolen. The oldest of the remaining monuments look like they might have come from Africa, tall stones unvisited by the living, except for an occasional white tourist like me, and the vandals who in recent years have come in the night, smashing some of the stones and overturning others. 

The tombstones have stood like deeply buried memories, a vision of big West African shields stuck upright in the ground, native limestone rocks carved by black stonecutters whose hands were guided by some remote legacy or resonance of that other continent. 

The oldest graves are close to the road, and thus are most accessible to destruction. 

Many of the people buried in the old section of the cemetery were born in servitude and died with their memories of slavery. Flinders of rock, broken pieces with painstaking hand-carved letters lying among the running wild gourds and dry weeds that rustle in the sun, testify that even though many of these dead have been buried in the ground now for more than a century, there are white people who won't let them alone. Perhaps including myself. 

My visit is on a blazing summer day. In the silent heat I find myself noticing my own heartbeat, the scribble beneath my ribs, the living unnoticed count that has tallied all my time on earth against some unknown total. It beats time, unseen within this abandoned sky, whose burning light pours down blind skulled vaults into the overheated mind. In the seething air I feel blown wisps of hair nudging at my neck, unsettling touch like a prickle of anger, a threading hiss in the capillaries. The day's wind crackles dry stalks and blighted husks. 

OUR BABIE says the hand carved scrawl of life on rock. It was engraved on a sort of wing projecting from a tall thin partially sculpted field stone. The wing lies in the dirt, cracked off by a hammerblow in some recent night, and I stare at it blankly, lost in a realm where the death of babies fills reality. Time never heals, I am thinking--instead the wound becomes a constant presence noticed less and less until it disappears beyond the event-horizon of memory's own frailing end. At the end we are buried under stone-cut words, under thoughts that weather with the rock. They erect a stone to our future and ancient tears locked within old forgotten throats; chokes and blocks of grief are stood on end and buried in the field. 

My startled pulse resumes in the smoldering afternoon. Slavery still whispers from the earth as I read and utter long forgotten words on the broken runes of the wild thornbush field troubled by vandals and the homeless spirits of Africa; the slave Diaspora haunting us even now, driving brainless white boys mad in the night. 

----- 

So I looked around me, and remembered where I was and what I was doing--that I, with my camera, painstakingly documenting the vandalism, remained one of the Faithful. 

----- 

A few months after he left, our houseguest sent us the money we had lent him.http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~ifza600/grackles.html
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