And All Our Wounds Forgiven Read Online Free Page A

i desperately sought to understand. i heard hope whispering through the needles of the southern pine trees during the late fifties and i gave it voice. that does not mean i always knew what i was saying. that does not mean i understood the depth and extent of the transformations with which everyone now wants to credit me.
    hi-story is the imperceptible accretion of private acts and silent gestures, of separate and solitary decisions to do something today that you would not have yesterday. our sense of humanity and its possibilities expands and contracts as we decide each day how much beauty we will permit to pour through our voices.

    “Blacks did not hate whites then. We were black and white together, as we sang in ‘We Shall Overcome.’ White southerners were right. The civil rights movement was about mixing the races. How could it have been otherwise? If keeping the races separate was the problem, mixing them had to be the solution.
    “But something happened and blacks became racist. I’m not supposed to say that, am I? But I can’t rationalize and call the current black antipathy to whites ‘antiracism racism,’ or some such doublespeak. Being black does not confer automatic immunity from being racist.
    “I miss the innocence of black and white together. Innocence is as much a knowledge as experience. We deride innocence as unworthy of maturity, but we need it to safeguard us. Without innocence, experience makes us cynics.
    “Until the four children were murdered in the bombing of the church in Birmingham in 1963, nobody told me I couldn’t know what it was like to be black. People were eager for me to know, eager for me to come into their homes and listen to their stories. The black experience was not an exclusive preserve like beachfront property. No one thought there was anything to gain by putting a no trespassing sign on his race.”
    But blacks no longer cared that there had also been whites in the civil rights movement who had inhaled and exhaled mortality with the monotonous regularity of their heartbeats and, three decades later, had been left alone with the pain of neglected idealism and the shame of murdered hope.
    Elizabeth did not want a parade or a plaque, but she resented the contempt and derision of a generation of blacks still in diapers when Cal was killed, a generation of African-Americans who had become mesmerized by the melodious knell of victimhood.
    “What happened? How did we get from ‘We Shall Overcome’ to ‘It’s a Black Thing’?” Elizabeth whispered earnestly.
    In those lonely last months of his life, Cal understood as little as she did now. He had become an anachronism before his very eyes, he who had single-handedly demonstrated against bus segregation in Atlanta, boarding buses and sitting alone in the white sections and being beaten by whites, arrested, beaten a second time by policemen, and the first opportunity after getting out of jail or the hospital, he was back on the buses. Rifle shots were fired into his home one night barely missing Andrea. On another, a bomb exploded at the front half of his house seconds after Andrea had walked into the back. Yet he had stood amid the smoking rubble and calmed a crowd of angry blacks aching for the catharsis of retaliatory violence. He was 31 years old, a philosophy professor at Spelman, but he articulated the black cry for freedom with the accent of the Alabama minister’s son he was and the sophistication of the philosopher-savior he was becoming. He took the suffering of years when hope lay stillborn in watery ditches and melded it with the dignity of fortitude that would not be shattered during nights when stars fell and days when the sun stood still. There had never been a figure quite like him, a black man who could quote Plato in Greek and, in the next breath, sing a country blues, who was as comfortable eating pate with President Kennedy in the White House as he was eating ham and grits with redeye gravy in a