Me and Mary
- PREVIEW -
INTRODUCTION
Though it’s been years since my grandmother died, for me, it still feels recent, or, even like she’s still here. Mary was, and is, my greatest teacher, the person I’ve tried most to emulate, and the North Star in my constellation. She was the first “mother” I knew, the one person to whom I could tell anything, and she and I had a bond so unique, I couldn’t begin to do it justice.
Throughout my adult life, people have said to me, “You ought to write about your life.” But it is not my story that I feel motivated to tell. It is hers. But the only way to explain why she is so significant to me is to not only tell parts of her story, but to intertwine it with parts of my own.
My name is Rodney David Moore. This is my story, as well as that of Mary Charles Moore’s, whose fingerprints are all over my life; probably in more ways than I even know.
This is our story - the story of me and Mary.
SPIRITUAL LESSONS
Part One
1. Getting Here - Destiny
2. Dock of the Bay - Family
3. Martin and Bobby - Resolve
4. Trains – Faith
5. Stormy Weather - Wonder
6. Big Kids School – Gentleness
7. Aunt Wing – Honor
8. Mary's Boys – Heritage
9. Your Mama's Coming to Get You – Selflessness
Part Two
10. The Heart of Resilience – Will
11. Crucibles – Humanity
12. The Man Without Fear – Courage
13. Make Me Wanna Holler – Forgiveness
14. EZ Supermarket – Conscience
15. Stanley – Diligence
16. Things We Have To Do – Dignity
17. Can't Smile Without You – Justice
18. Somebody's Angel – Gratitude
19. Little Joe – Blessing
20. Cleaning Bricks – Prudence
21. Seeing Around Corners – Forbearance
22. Don't Come Back – Hope
Part Three
23. Norman, Oklahoma – Goodness
24. My First Week – Kindness
25. Don't Make Me Come Out There – Fortitude
26. Writing Letters – Acceptance
27. Christmas – Clarity
28. Tim and Samir – Benevolence
29. Three Remarkable Women – Power
30. Leader of the Band – Love
31. My Girls – Assurance
32. Beneath a Western Sky – Celebration
Part Four
33. Dock of the Bay, Revisited – Empathy
34. Our Great Work – Calling
35. He Already Knew – Bravery
36. The City of Brotherly Love – Compassion
37. What We Leave Behind – Legacy
38. When the Good Lord Says It's Time – Valor
39. The Big Visit – Virtue
40. Epilogue – Presence
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Getting Here
1. Destiny
Though many people in my adult life would know me as “Rod Washington”, my birth name was Rodney Moore. As I understand it, I was named after “Rodney Harrington,” the TV character played by Ryan O’Neal on the show Peyton Place; named by my mother before she left. Ryan was apparently the heartthrob of all the girls at that time.
My mother was 14 when she got pregnant, a fact she hid from her family as long as she could. One day, when she was already five months along, her mother noticed her standing in the kitchen in the afternoon light and exclaimed, “Bernice! Are you pregnant?!” “No ma’am,” she said, denying it. To this day, we don’t know the particulars, but apparently, that’s when she panicked and sought out an abortion. What we do know is that the process, done in someone’s bathtub, was far more dangerous then, than it is now, and my grandmother nearly lost both of us.
Whether Bernice changed her mind or something went wrong, we’re not sure. But the result was severe hemorrhaging that sent her into pre-term labor. The next call my grandmother received was from the hospital. “Your daughter’s alive,” they said, “And so is your grandson.” That’s how Mary, my grandmother, found out about me. No one knew who my father was, so I received Mary’s last name – Moore.
What I find amazing are the parallels to her life, or at least, what little we know of it. Mary was a storyteller. And I never grew tired of hearing them. I remember spending time with her in the kitchen, her cooking and me helping. We’d be shelling peas, seasoning greens or stirring cornbread batter, and she’d tell me stories. She’d talk about my birth, and bringing me home from the hospital, and the civil rights movement.
She’d talk about her kids, her relatives and other important people in her life. She’d talk about the tragic deaths of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, who for her, were a trinity of sorts. And on occasion, if you caught her in the right mood, she’d talk about herself and her childhood – her “coming up,” as she called it.
We don’t know my grandmother’s birth year. Nor did she. Mary was born in a time when Negroes were denied birth certificates. All she knew was that it was shortly before or after 1920, just after the Great War, and during a time when people were flocking to theaters to see the film, The Clansman, which had changed its name to Birth of a Nation. She was born into a world where women themselves had neither voice nor vote, and that was before accounting for what it meant to be colored, poor and southern. Her parents were, according to what she was told about them, sharecroppers, and subject to the post-Emancipation laws ratified in the South.
Those “black codes” created an indentured servitude for Negroes that endured long after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment. Section 3, of the Louisiana Black Codes; which became the template for such laws throughout the entire South, stated, “No negro shall be permitted to rent or keep a house within said parish.” Section 9 of the Codes said, “No negro shall sell, barter, or exchange any articles of merchandise or traffic within said parish.” And section 4 stated: “Every negro is required to be in the regular service of some white person, or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conductor of said Negro.”
Add on to this the lynchings rampant throughout the South, the wrath of the Great Depression, and the rise of Jim Crow, and you have at least a sense of what her world was like. She would have been in her late teens or early twenties in 1939 when both Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, which told of the horrors of lynchings, and the film Gone with the Wind, which romanticized southern life during slavery, were released; not to mention the onset of WWII.
Mary also never knew her birth day. She chose April 11th at random because her kids kept asking her when her birthday was. Her mother died during childbirth and her father, not long after. April 11th gave her kids something to celebrate; a day to bake her birthday cake and make her gifts. She didn’t even know who it was that named her. “Whoever it was,” I remember saying to myself as a boy, “They weren’t very creative.” They’d named her Mary Smith. “Mary” and “Smith” – the two absolute most common names in the entire English language.
She had one older brother, who was taken in by an aunt, but the aunt couldn’t handle both him and a newborn. So, she was passed around from relative to relative, until she got out on her own. In that environment, she still managed to get a sixth-grade education; the equivalent of a college degree today, and far more than the average Alabama man, whether white or colored. My grandmother was an orphan essentially from the day she was born. I think that’s why she was so fixated on that blanket.
A few hours after my birth, Bernice, full of remorse, secreted out of the hospital and disappeared before her mother got there. I was in an incubator, where I would spend the first several months of my life. It was Mary who came to see me every day; often with one of my aunts or uncles in tow. She told me that when she looked through the glass and saw me – her firstborn grandson – she cried. They told her to prepare herself to lose me; that it would take a miracle for an infant that sick, and that early, to survive. But she said with absolute certainty, “You’re wrong. He’s coming home. One day, he’s gonna come home.”
From then on, she showed up every single day to talk to me through that glass, telling me that I’d be coming home soon. Sweet Honey in the Rock describes what was welling up within Mary this way: “For each child that’s born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are. We are our grandmother’s prayers, we are our grandfather’s dreamings, we are the breath of our ancestors, we are the spirit of God.”
She was working as a housekeeper for a nice family that lived “over the mountain” – a euphemism for wealthy and white. She quit riding the bus and started saving her bus fare, along with S&H Green Stamps, to buy me a blanket. She said, when I came home, it was going to be in one of those nice blankets like the wealthy kids get – not some flimsy disposable version.
This was her own way of affirming a set of truths that she’d come to know in her bones – that I was loved, that I was valuable, that I was as good as any other kid coming out of that hospital, and that I would come out. Each morning that she opted to walk to work, rather than take the bus, and each evening that she spent talking with me through the glass, she was making her faith manifest; grounding me, by sheer force of will, in this place, and in her heart. I’m amazed and saddened that she was able to give me these gifts, but that they were ones she was never given.
Mary would tell me that story, I think, to assure me that I belonged. And from both her words and her every action, I understood that. I remember once, when I was older, asking her what would’ve happened if I hadn’t made it. “You mean, if you hadn’t been born?” she asked, and I nodded my head. “Well,” she said, “I believe you were meant to be here, so God would have gotten you here some other way, except it would’ve been another family that got to have you.”
“That got to have you.” Even then, she was telling me something important about who I was, and at the same time, affirming my worth, both to her and to the world. But hearing that story over and again would teach me an equally important spiritual lesson; that each of us, through our thoughts and imaginings, prayers and actions, can change the course of rivers and shape fate, we can call heaven down and perform miracles. We can rewrite destiny.
As a result, Mary would prove the best doctors in Birmingham wrong – after 6 months, 12 days, she would, just as she’d predicted, bring me home, wrapped in a new, fancy blanket.
Dock of the Bay
2. Family
They say that the first few years of a child’s life are critical, as they lay the foundation for how they will develop in years to come. If that’s the case, then I could not have been more fortunate. The house I came home to; the dynamic, chaotic, laughter-and-love-filled environment I experienced during those early years, could not have been more beneficial. I don’t believe any child, wealthy or not, was better cared for than I was. My grandmother saw to that.
But it wasn’t just her. Mary, who never experienced what it was like to be surrounded by loving family, had created just that. She had nine kids – 6 boys and 3 girls – with my mother being right in the middle. When I was born, Mary’s youngest were twin boys, Ron and Don, who were 8 years old at the time. In many ways, they and my Aunt Pat, my grandmother’s youngest daughter, were my older siblings. Her elder children were wonderful caregivers in my early life, and they went to great lengths to ensure that I was loved and well cared for.
My earliest memory is from when I was just shy of 3 years old. I was playing in the upper tier of the front yard when I saw my Uncle Sid (Aunt Naomi’s husband), walking up the stairs smiling, with something amazing in his hand. It was a big group of floating, intensely colorful globes; all tied to strings and suspended in the air above his head. Though this was long before I understood anything about helium or concepts such as, “lighter than air,” I was an intensely curious child who spent time trying to grasp exactly how many tiny people lived inside that television box, and what their lives were like when they weren’t on stage. The balloons had me completely and utterly mesmerized.
My Uncle Sid, who everyone called Pee Wee, was anything but. He was six-foot-six, thin as a rail, and quite handsome, with a yellowish complexion and facial hair just on his chin. He and my Aunt Naomi were quite the striking couple, opposites in so many ways. She was a healthy woman, big, black and beautiful. She had a legendary voice – the range of a soprano with the strength of a contralto – and she was constantly singing. And laughing. In many ways, her personality was captured by Oprah Winfrey’s character in The Color Purple – Ms. Sofia. She and my Uncle Sid were perfect for each other.
Whenever I saw him, he had a smile on his face and always, some kind of gift or treat in his hand. He crouched down, ruffled my hair, and gave me the balloons. I stood there for what seemed like forever with my arm extended and my neck crooked, spellbound. They tell me that everyone gathered on the porch; amused at how stock-still I stood and how awestruck I appeared. At some point, someone made a noise, and I turned around. And I opened my hand. I remember seeing my bouquet of color float up into the sky, and I doubt I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. It wasn’t until they were completely out of sight that I realized that they weren’t coming back.
And that’s when I cried. I ran to Uncle Sid, who picked me up and held me. “Tell you what,” he said, “How about I bring you more balloons next time? Would you like that?” I nodded my head, tears still flowing. “Ok,” he said tenderly, “But you’ve got to stop crying, alright?” All the while rubbing my back. I remember, years later, asking my grandmother about the balloon incident. “Oh yeah,” she said, remembering it right away, and chuckling with amusement. “We thought you were going to have a fit,” she said, “But you didn’t. You were always such a quiet child.”
From the beginning, I was well loved. It apparently took my grandmother and grandfather, my Uncle Robert, and my Aunt Naomi years to pay off my initial hospital bill. And it didn’t stop there. I started racking up more medical bills right away. Being such a preemie, I was always a sickly child. I had arrhythmia, epilepsy, tuberculosis, anemia, GI complications and suffered from pleural effusions, requiring me to have an intercostal drain installed.
I had pneumonia a couple of times a year, had asthma, allergies, and was severely visually impaired with glasses strapped to my face by one of those behind-the-head elastic bands. All told, early on, I spent upward of a hundred days-per-year in hospital beds. I doubt if I would have survived in many other households.
My Aunt Naomi, a famed wedding cake maker, also worked in a high school cafeteria part-time, and one of my best memories from early childhood is waking up from my nap every day, which was between 1:00 and 2:00. Usually, one of the soap operas (which Mary called, her “stories”, as in, “Don’t be making all that racket while my story’s on”), All My Children or One Life to Live, (I can’t remember which) was just coming on. One of my twin uncles – Don or Ron – would put me down and sit with me until I fell asleep.
Both my small front bedroom and the twins’ larger one in the back were in the attic; on either side of the staircase. The space had been converted by my granddad Olden, and I loved it – especially the slanted walls that met at the peak and the dormered windows, which felt like a lookout. I’d always wake up to the sound of my Aunt Naomi’s big, booming voice coming from downstairs, the sound of the General Hospital opening in the background. And always, she brought me a little square piece of cafeteria cake and a small carton of milk, like the big kids drank at school.
My grandma’s living room had one of those large record players. I don’t even know what they were officially called, but it was about the size of a small living room sofa. Polished wood, finished legs and large, encased speakers, they were designed to look like fine pieces of furniture, which they were. Hers had a lid that opened up on the right side, and where one would place the records on the turntable. It played both albums and 45 singles, but the 45s required a little red or yellow disc in the middle. I’ve always had a propensity for music, and at three years of age, I knew how to operate this machine. My Uncle Ron taught me. And for some reason, I loved the song, Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, by Otis Redding. Something about the music and melancholy vocals spoke to me, and still do.
Though I couldn’t yet read “big words”, I could recognize this single by the symbol and (carefully!) put it on. I’d then pull up my stool next to the stereo and listen. When it reached the end, I’d start it over. I remember sitting there, trying to understand with my 3-year-old mind what a “docadabay” was; this thing that he was sitting on. “I wonder if it’s like my stool,” I pondered.
I would often go in and grab my grandmother by the hand and silently pull her into the living room, with her asking, “What is it, Baby?” I’d have her sit down on the couch and I’d lay next to her with my head in her lap, and we’d listen. Sometimes, tired after a long day of work, she’d fall asleep, and I’d stay there, knowing that if I did, she’d get a bit of rest.
Looking back, I can still feel the complete and utter sense of assurance I had, seeking the comfort of my grandmother’s lap. Somehow, despite all she had going on, she’d so constantly dropped everything to attend to my needs that I never doubted she would. And that never changed. Mary would, by her actions, teach the little boy I was, everything I needed to know about what being on the receiving end of genuine love feels like, and by extension, what it means to give it to others.
Those stolen moments where we sat together listening to a simple song, just me and Mary, was a rare and precious gift; one I’ve come to realize that so few of my adult friends received when they were young. So, while I had no real understanding of the greater workings of the world, even back then, I knew two things; that I was a lucky little boy, and that I loved this woman with all my heart.
Dock of the Bay would be the first and only song I’d remember from my very early childhood. Who knew that some day, I’d end up calling the same bay that inspired that song, my home.
Martin and Bobby
3. Resolve
I was born sandwiched between the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; after the assassination of Medgar Evers and before that of Malcolm X, after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and before the equally historic Poor People’s Campaign; which included a march of thousands of women, led by Coretta Scott King on Mother’s Day, and the construction of Resurrection City – a temporary settlement of tents and shacks built on the capitol Mall – a precursor to the Occupy movement that would emerge forty years later.
There, in the home of my childhood, less than a mile away from the infamous Birmingham Jail, on the living room wall, above the mantle, hang a clock. Behind the hands were three individual photos – John F. Kennedy on the left, Martin Luther King in the middle, and Robert F. Kennedy on the right. This commemorative edition was released shortly after Robert’s death. Mary loved that clock, and she loved those men.
I’ll never forget the day Martin died. I didn’t understand what was going on, but there was a profound sense of sorrow everywhere. I’ve never in my life seen so many adults crying. Men and women, in my household and on the streets, everyone was weeping. I remember one man, hunched over on the curb, head in hands and shoulders shaking as he silently sobbed.
I was three years old at the time, not long after the balloon incident. It seemed to hit the younger people – my grandmother’s kids and their classmates – the hardest. Perhaps because, just a few years prior, they were out marching with him. They’d been part of the sit-ins at the downtown Woolworth’s department store lunch counter, the kneel-ins at segregated churches across town, and the marches that filled the Birmingham jail to overflowing. They’d seen dramatic and unprecedented change in an incredibly short period of time, but at the same time, having never lived through the atrocities their parents had, they were wholly unprepared for the backlash.
Birmingham, nicknamed “Bombingham” because of the number of bombs, cross burnings and lynchings that occurred with regularity, was the largest industrial city in the South. Dr. King agreed that the campaign, taking place in the spring of 1963, could not have been staged in a more appropriate place, than in the “belly of the beast.” Along with the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, it was the Birmingham Campaign that created the national urgency that prompted the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, introduced by President John F. Kennedy, and passed posthumously. In one of the most tragic events in our country’s history, he was assassinated the year prior – November 22, 1963.
The Birmingham Campaign’s strategy was to put economic pressure on the city’s merchants, so organizers scheduled the protests to begin around the Easter season; at that time, the second biggest shopping period of the year. Birmingham officials, however, saw in this, opportunity; a chance to break the back of the movement. Word went out that any Negro arrested for marching, or even seen anywhere within the vicinity of the march, would never work in Birmingham again. This led to the riskiest decision of the entire campaign – to use children. Parents who were willing to put themselves at risk by marching were now called upon to exhibit a whole new kind of courage – stay at home, keep their jobs, and let their children take the lead; knowing full well that some of them might not come back alive. That’s resolve.
Birmingham held its mayoral elections on March 5th. While all the leading candidates were segregationists, none of them held a candle to candidate Eugene “Bull” Connor; also Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety. Concerned that the protests would be used as a political tool to drive white-identifying voters to Connor, they postponed the campaign until two weeks after the election. The close election resulted in a runoff on April 2nd in which Albert Boutwell (after whom the Boutwell auditorium, where my uncles Don and Robert went to see professional wrestling shows) defeated Connor. Despite their defeat, the city commissioners, including Connor, refused to vacate their city hall offices; arguing that they could not be legally removed from office until 1965. When the civil rights campaign finally launched in early April, Birmingham was operating under two governments.
Martin was arrested on April 12th; charged with violating the state circuit court injunction against protests. He was kept in solitary confinement and was allowed minimal direct contact. It was at this time that he penned his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, on scraps of paper clandestinely passed on to him by a friendly Negro trusty (a fellow inmate assigned certain supervisory duties by guards), and on the margins of the Birmingham News, in direct response to an open letter posted there.
That letter, titled “A Call for Unity,” and signed by eight white-identifying Birmingham and Montgomery clergy, stated that while they sympathized with the cause, that these were matters that should be settled in the courts rather than in the streets, and that the “good” people of Birmingham should not allow themselves to be incited by “outsiders”. Given that a similar open letter – “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense” – had been written just three months prior, Martin knew that this narrative had to be countered, and countered immediately. By summer, Letter from a Birmingham Jail was everywhere. In the meantime, United Auto Workers president, Walter Reuther, secured $160,000 to cover bail for Martin and other protestors, and on April 20th, they were released.
On May 2nd, more than a thousand Negro youth would descend on downtown Birmingham; marching down Eighth Avenue to City Hall. My grandmother’s kids and their classmates were among them. That day, close to 900 students were arrested, but an even greater surge – nearly 2,500 demonstrators – arrived the following day to take their place, then more after that, in successive waves. Three of Mary’s children would join the marches, and two of them, Willie James and Bernice, would be arrested, and Pat was beaten. The jails packed, city officials directed the overflow to be kept at Alabama State Fairgrounds in Birmingham’s Five Points West, and in open air stockades. They weren’t being fed, so my grandmother and other mothers arranged food and took it to them.
Bull Connor, who, early on, had refrained from using violence against citizens, did what we often do in situations where we believe we have superior power; he escalated. He brought out the city’s firemen and ordered them to turn their lifesaving tools into weapons. They trained their hoses on both protesters and onlookers. You’ve seen the footage – kids hit with hoses so powerful that they’re sent flying into the air; students knocked down and literally washed away; broken limbs, concussions and a wide range of other injuries.
As some of the youth fled from the power of the hoses, Connor loosed the dogs to pursue and maul them. And thanks to a new invention called “live television”, every bit of this carnage was beamed straight into homes across America. Civil Rights leader, Congressman John Lewis, noted the power of this incident: “We didn’t fully comprehend at first what was happening. We were witnessing police violence and brutality Birmingham-style: Unfortunately for Bull Connor, so was the rest of the world.”
As the clashes between nonviolent protesters and police made national headlines; with pictures of officers of the law bending over women with raised clubs, children mere inches away from snarling and drooling police dogs, and pressure hoses smashing bodies into one another and sweeping them into the streets, the movement reached a new level of visibility; and the world took notice.
These were my relatives, my neighbors. They were there, at the epicenter of this pivotal point in history. And after a century of struggle, one dating back to the abolition of slavery, the world would, in what felt like the blink of an eye, change.
In 1964, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the future for African Americans had never looked brighter. Four years later, on April 4, 1968, the night Martin was killed, it had never looked bleaker. Amid the tragedy of Martin’s assassination, an extraordinary moment in U.S. political history occurred as Senator Robert F. Kennedy broke the news of Martin’s death to a large gathering of African American supporters in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy in his bid to secure the 1968 Democratic nomination for President. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Bobby was informed of Martin’s death, and was advised against making the campaign stop; which was in a part of the city described as a “dangerous ghetto.” But the senator insisted on going.
His team expected an angry mob or bereaved group of mourners. But when he arrived to find everyone in an upbeat mood, anticipating the excitement of a Kennedy appearance, it was apparent that they had not heard the news. A 42-year-old Robert climbed onto the platform, and delivered the news to this group of African Americans, in what must be one of the greatest extemporaneous speeches in American history:
Ladies and Gentlemen – I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because... I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
The crowd breaks into frantic gasps and murmuring before gradually settling into stunned silence. He continues:
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black – considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
African Americans in this country truly loved his brother, and still grieved his death, so they knew exactly to what he was referring.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
Robert and his team were surprised by the spontaneous outbreak of applause that interrupted his speech. He then continued:
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country.
We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
He was interrupted by applause a second time, before concluding:
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.
And amid thunderous and emotional applause, he exited.
It’s easy to see why my grandmother loved him, and why every time Dion’s Abraham, Martin and John came on the radio, she would, as if uttering a prayer, pause and solemnly listen.
Just two months after Martin, Bobby was also gone.
But Mary would double down on the same courage that had seen her through so much, everything from defying Black Codes to allowing her children to march. And she, like so many others, would keep these men alive in her heart. She’d spend the rest of her life making real the things they’d dreamed of. Martin and Bobby had used ordinary things, such as speeches and sermons, for extraordinary purposes.
Mary and others of her generation, with everything from marches to boycotts, from the songs they wrote to the unity they forged, would teach those of us who’d come after them the same lesson: how to both embrace our own very ordinary gifts and hone our resolve into armor, then use them, as Bobby said, “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world”. In doing so, we change not only the world, but ourselves.
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INTRODUCTION
Though it’s been years since my grandmother died, for me, it still feels recent, or, even like she’s still here. Mary was, and is, my greatest teacher, the person I’ve tried most to emulate, and the North Star in my constellation. She was the first “mother” I knew, the one person to whom I could tell anything, and she and I had a bond so unique, I couldn’t begin to do it justice.
Throughout my adult life, people have said to me, “You ought to write about your life.” But it is not my story that I feel motivated to tell. It is hers. But the only way to explain why she is so significant to me is to not only tell parts of her story, but to intertwine it with parts of my own.
My name is Rodney David Moore. This is my story, as well as that of Mary Charles Moore’s, whose fingerprints are all over my life; probably in more ways than I even know.
This is our story - the story of me and Mary.
SPIRITUAL LESSONS
Part One
1. Getting Here - Destiny
2. Dock of the Bay - Family
3. Martin and Bobby - Resolve
4. Trains – Faith
5. Stormy Weather - Wonder
6. Big Kids School – Gentleness
7. Aunt Wing – Honor
8. Mary's Boys – Heritage
9. Your Mama's Coming to Get You – Selflessness
Part Two
10. The Heart of Resilience – Will
11. Crucibles – Humanity
12. The Man Without Fear – Courage
13. Make Me Wanna Holler – Forgiveness
14. EZ Supermarket – Conscience
15. Stanley – Diligence
16. Things We Have To Do – Dignity
17. Can't Smile Without You – Justice
18. Somebody's Angel – Gratitude
19. Little Joe – Blessing
20. Cleaning Bricks – Prudence
21. Seeing Around Corners – Forbearance
22. Don't Come Back – Hope
Part Three
23. Norman, Oklahoma – Goodness
24. My First Week – Kindness
25. Don't Make Me Come Out There – Fortitude
26. Writing Letters – Acceptance
27. Christmas – Clarity
28. Tim and Samir – Benevolence
29. Three Remarkable Women – Power
30. Leader of the Band – Love
31. My Girls – Assurance
32. Beneath a Western Sky – Celebration
Part Four
33. Dock of the Bay, Revisited – Empathy
34. Our Great Work – Calling
35. He Already Knew – Bravery
36. The City of Brotherly Love – Compassion
37. What We Leave Behind – Legacy
38. When the Good Lord Says It's Time – Valor
39. The Big Visit – Virtue
40. Epilogue – Presence
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Getting Here
1. Destiny
Though many people in my adult life would know me as “Rod Washington”, my birth name was Rodney Moore. As I understand it, I was named after “Rodney Harrington,” the TV character played by Ryan O’Neal on the show Peyton Place; named by my mother before she left. Ryan was apparently the heartthrob of all the girls at that time.
My mother was 14 when she got pregnant, a fact she hid from her family as long as she could. One day, when she was already five months along, her mother noticed her standing in the kitchen in the afternoon light and exclaimed, “Bernice! Are you pregnant?!” “No ma’am,” she said, denying it. To this day, we don’t know the particulars, but apparently, that’s when she panicked and sought out an abortion. What we do know is that the process, done in someone’s bathtub, was far more dangerous then, than it is now, and my grandmother nearly lost both of us.
Whether Bernice changed her mind or something went wrong, we’re not sure. But the result was severe hemorrhaging that sent her into pre-term labor. The next call my grandmother received was from the hospital. “Your daughter’s alive,” they said, “And so is your grandson.” That’s how Mary, my grandmother, found out about me. No one knew who my father was, so I received Mary’s last name – Moore.
What I find amazing are the parallels to her life, or at least, what little we know of it. Mary was a storyteller. And I never grew tired of hearing them. I remember spending time with her in the kitchen, her cooking and me helping. We’d be shelling peas, seasoning greens or stirring cornbread batter, and she’d tell me stories. She’d talk about my birth, and bringing me home from the hospital, and the civil rights movement.
She’d talk about her kids, her relatives and other important people in her life. She’d talk about the tragic deaths of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, who for her, were a trinity of sorts. And on occasion, if you caught her in the right mood, she’d talk about herself and her childhood – her “coming up,” as she called it.
We don’t know my grandmother’s birth year. Nor did she. Mary was born in a time when Negroes were denied birth certificates. All she knew was that it was shortly before or after 1920, just after the Great War, and during a time when people were flocking to theaters to see the film, The Clansman, which had changed its name to Birth of a Nation. She was born into a world where women themselves had neither voice nor vote, and that was before accounting for what it meant to be colored, poor and southern. Her parents were, according to what she was told about them, sharecroppers, and subject to the post-Emancipation laws ratified in the South.
Those “black codes” created an indentured servitude for Negroes that endured long after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment. Section 3, of the Louisiana Black Codes; which became the template for such laws throughout the entire South, stated, “No negro shall be permitted to rent or keep a house within said parish.” Section 9 of the Codes said, “No negro shall sell, barter, or exchange any articles of merchandise or traffic within said parish.” And section 4 stated: “Every negro is required to be in the regular service of some white person, or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conductor of said Negro.”
Add on to this the lynchings rampant throughout the South, the wrath of the Great Depression, and the rise of Jim Crow, and you have at least a sense of what her world was like. She would have been in her late teens or early twenties in 1939 when both Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, which told of the horrors of lynchings, and the film Gone with the Wind, which romanticized southern life during slavery, were released; not to mention the onset of WWII.
Mary also never knew her birth day. She chose April 11th at random because her kids kept asking her when her birthday was. Her mother died during childbirth and her father, not long after. April 11th gave her kids something to celebrate; a day to bake her birthday cake and make her gifts. She didn’t even know who it was that named her. “Whoever it was,” I remember saying to myself as a boy, “They weren’t very creative.” They’d named her Mary Smith. “Mary” and “Smith” – the two absolute most common names in the entire English language.
She had one older brother, who was taken in by an aunt, but the aunt couldn’t handle both him and a newborn. So, she was passed around from relative to relative, until she got out on her own. In that environment, she still managed to get a sixth-grade education; the equivalent of a college degree today, and far more than the average Alabama man, whether white or colored. My grandmother was an orphan essentially from the day she was born. I think that’s why she was so fixated on that blanket.
A few hours after my birth, Bernice, full of remorse, secreted out of the hospital and disappeared before her mother got there. I was in an incubator, where I would spend the first several months of my life. It was Mary who came to see me every day; often with one of my aunts or uncles in tow. She told me that when she looked through the glass and saw me – her firstborn grandson – she cried. They told her to prepare herself to lose me; that it would take a miracle for an infant that sick, and that early, to survive. But she said with absolute certainty, “You’re wrong. He’s coming home. One day, he’s gonna come home.”
From then on, she showed up every single day to talk to me through that glass, telling me that I’d be coming home soon. Sweet Honey in the Rock describes what was welling up within Mary this way: “For each child that’s born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are. We are our grandmother’s prayers, we are our grandfather’s dreamings, we are the breath of our ancestors, we are the spirit of God.”
She was working as a housekeeper for a nice family that lived “over the mountain” – a euphemism for wealthy and white. She quit riding the bus and started saving her bus fare, along with S&H Green Stamps, to buy me a blanket. She said, when I came home, it was going to be in one of those nice blankets like the wealthy kids get – not some flimsy disposable version.
This was her own way of affirming a set of truths that she’d come to know in her bones – that I was loved, that I was valuable, that I was as good as any other kid coming out of that hospital, and that I would come out. Each morning that she opted to walk to work, rather than take the bus, and each evening that she spent talking with me through the glass, she was making her faith manifest; grounding me, by sheer force of will, in this place, and in her heart. I’m amazed and saddened that she was able to give me these gifts, but that they were ones she was never given.
Mary would tell me that story, I think, to assure me that I belonged. And from both her words and her every action, I understood that. I remember once, when I was older, asking her what would’ve happened if I hadn’t made it. “You mean, if you hadn’t been born?” she asked, and I nodded my head. “Well,” she said, “I believe you were meant to be here, so God would have gotten you here some other way, except it would’ve been another family that got to have you.”
“That got to have you.” Even then, she was telling me something important about who I was, and at the same time, affirming my worth, both to her and to the world. But hearing that story over and again would teach me an equally important spiritual lesson; that each of us, through our thoughts and imaginings, prayers and actions, can change the course of rivers and shape fate, we can call heaven down and perform miracles. We can rewrite destiny.
As a result, Mary would prove the best doctors in Birmingham wrong – after 6 months, 12 days, she would, just as she’d predicted, bring me home, wrapped in a new, fancy blanket.
Dock of the Bay
2. Family
They say that the first few years of a child’s life are critical, as they lay the foundation for how they will develop in years to come. If that’s the case, then I could not have been more fortunate. The house I came home to; the dynamic, chaotic, laughter-and-love-filled environment I experienced during those early years, could not have been more beneficial. I don’t believe any child, wealthy or not, was better cared for than I was. My grandmother saw to that.
But it wasn’t just her. Mary, who never experienced what it was like to be surrounded by loving family, had created just that. She had nine kids – 6 boys and 3 girls – with my mother being right in the middle. When I was born, Mary’s youngest were twin boys, Ron and Don, who were 8 years old at the time. In many ways, they and my Aunt Pat, my grandmother’s youngest daughter, were my older siblings. Her elder children were wonderful caregivers in my early life, and they went to great lengths to ensure that I was loved and well cared for.
My earliest memory is from when I was just shy of 3 years old. I was playing in the upper tier of the front yard when I saw my Uncle Sid (Aunt Naomi’s husband), walking up the stairs smiling, with something amazing in his hand. It was a big group of floating, intensely colorful globes; all tied to strings and suspended in the air above his head. Though this was long before I understood anything about helium or concepts such as, “lighter than air,” I was an intensely curious child who spent time trying to grasp exactly how many tiny people lived inside that television box, and what their lives were like when they weren’t on stage. The balloons had me completely and utterly mesmerized.
My Uncle Sid, who everyone called Pee Wee, was anything but. He was six-foot-six, thin as a rail, and quite handsome, with a yellowish complexion and facial hair just on his chin. He and my Aunt Naomi were quite the striking couple, opposites in so many ways. She was a healthy woman, big, black and beautiful. She had a legendary voice – the range of a soprano with the strength of a contralto – and she was constantly singing. And laughing. In many ways, her personality was captured by Oprah Winfrey’s character in The Color Purple – Ms. Sofia. She and my Uncle Sid were perfect for each other.
Whenever I saw him, he had a smile on his face and always, some kind of gift or treat in his hand. He crouched down, ruffled my hair, and gave me the balloons. I stood there for what seemed like forever with my arm extended and my neck crooked, spellbound. They tell me that everyone gathered on the porch; amused at how stock-still I stood and how awestruck I appeared. At some point, someone made a noise, and I turned around. And I opened my hand. I remember seeing my bouquet of color float up into the sky, and I doubt I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. It wasn’t until they were completely out of sight that I realized that they weren’t coming back.
And that’s when I cried. I ran to Uncle Sid, who picked me up and held me. “Tell you what,” he said, “How about I bring you more balloons next time? Would you like that?” I nodded my head, tears still flowing. “Ok,” he said tenderly, “But you’ve got to stop crying, alright?” All the while rubbing my back. I remember, years later, asking my grandmother about the balloon incident. “Oh yeah,” she said, remembering it right away, and chuckling with amusement. “We thought you were going to have a fit,” she said, “But you didn’t. You were always such a quiet child.”
From the beginning, I was well loved. It apparently took my grandmother and grandfather, my Uncle Robert, and my Aunt Naomi years to pay off my initial hospital bill. And it didn’t stop there. I started racking up more medical bills right away. Being such a preemie, I was always a sickly child. I had arrhythmia, epilepsy, tuberculosis, anemia, GI complications and suffered from pleural effusions, requiring me to have an intercostal drain installed.
I had pneumonia a couple of times a year, had asthma, allergies, and was severely visually impaired with glasses strapped to my face by one of those behind-the-head elastic bands. All told, early on, I spent upward of a hundred days-per-year in hospital beds. I doubt if I would have survived in many other households.
My Aunt Naomi, a famed wedding cake maker, also worked in a high school cafeteria part-time, and one of my best memories from early childhood is waking up from my nap every day, which was between 1:00 and 2:00. Usually, one of the soap operas (which Mary called, her “stories”, as in, “Don’t be making all that racket while my story’s on”), All My Children or One Life to Live, (I can’t remember which) was just coming on. One of my twin uncles – Don or Ron – would put me down and sit with me until I fell asleep.
Both my small front bedroom and the twins’ larger one in the back were in the attic; on either side of the staircase. The space had been converted by my granddad Olden, and I loved it – especially the slanted walls that met at the peak and the dormered windows, which felt like a lookout. I’d always wake up to the sound of my Aunt Naomi’s big, booming voice coming from downstairs, the sound of the General Hospital opening in the background. And always, she brought me a little square piece of cafeteria cake and a small carton of milk, like the big kids drank at school.
My grandma’s living room had one of those large record players. I don’t even know what they were officially called, but it was about the size of a small living room sofa. Polished wood, finished legs and large, encased speakers, they were designed to look like fine pieces of furniture, which they were. Hers had a lid that opened up on the right side, and where one would place the records on the turntable. It played both albums and 45 singles, but the 45s required a little red or yellow disc in the middle. I’ve always had a propensity for music, and at three years of age, I knew how to operate this machine. My Uncle Ron taught me. And for some reason, I loved the song, Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, by Otis Redding. Something about the music and melancholy vocals spoke to me, and still do.
Though I couldn’t yet read “big words”, I could recognize this single by the symbol and (carefully!) put it on. I’d then pull up my stool next to the stereo and listen. When it reached the end, I’d start it over. I remember sitting there, trying to understand with my 3-year-old mind what a “docadabay” was; this thing that he was sitting on. “I wonder if it’s like my stool,” I pondered.
I would often go in and grab my grandmother by the hand and silently pull her into the living room, with her asking, “What is it, Baby?” I’d have her sit down on the couch and I’d lay next to her with my head in her lap, and we’d listen. Sometimes, tired after a long day of work, she’d fall asleep, and I’d stay there, knowing that if I did, she’d get a bit of rest.
Looking back, I can still feel the complete and utter sense of assurance I had, seeking the comfort of my grandmother’s lap. Somehow, despite all she had going on, she’d so constantly dropped everything to attend to my needs that I never doubted she would. And that never changed. Mary would, by her actions, teach the little boy I was, everything I needed to know about what being on the receiving end of genuine love feels like, and by extension, what it means to give it to others.
Those stolen moments where we sat together listening to a simple song, just me and Mary, was a rare and precious gift; one I’ve come to realize that so few of my adult friends received when they were young. So, while I had no real understanding of the greater workings of the world, even back then, I knew two things; that I was a lucky little boy, and that I loved this woman with all my heart.
Dock of the Bay would be the first and only song I’d remember from my very early childhood. Who knew that some day, I’d end up calling the same bay that inspired that song, my home.
Martin and Bobby
3. Resolve
I was born sandwiched between the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; after the assassination of Medgar Evers and before that of Malcolm X, after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and before the equally historic Poor People’s Campaign; which included a march of thousands of women, led by Coretta Scott King on Mother’s Day, and the construction of Resurrection City – a temporary settlement of tents and shacks built on the capitol Mall – a precursor to the Occupy movement that would emerge forty years later.
There, in the home of my childhood, less than a mile away from the infamous Birmingham Jail, on the living room wall, above the mantle, hang a clock. Behind the hands were three individual photos – John F. Kennedy on the left, Martin Luther King in the middle, and Robert F. Kennedy on the right. This commemorative edition was released shortly after Robert’s death. Mary loved that clock, and she loved those men.
I’ll never forget the day Martin died. I didn’t understand what was going on, but there was a profound sense of sorrow everywhere. I’ve never in my life seen so many adults crying. Men and women, in my household and on the streets, everyone was weeping. I remember one man, hunched over on the curb, head in hands and shoulders shaking as he silently sobbed.
I was three years old at the time, not long after the balloon incident. It seemed to hit the younger people – my grandmother’s kids and their classmates – the hardest. Perhaps because, just a few years prior, they were out marching with him. They’d been part of the sit-ins at the downtown Woolworth’s department store lunch counter, the kneel-ins at segregated churches across town, and the marches that filled the Birmingham jail to overflowing. They’d seen dramatic and unprecedented change in an incredibly short period of time, but at the same time, having never lived through the atrocities their parents had, they were wholly unprepared for the backlash.
Birmingham, nicknamed “Bombingham” because of the number of bombs, cross burnings and lynchings that occurred with regularity, was the largest industrial city in the South. Dr. King agreed that the campaign, taking place in the spring of 1963, could not have been staged in a more appropriate place, than in the “belly of the beast.” Along with the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, it was the Birmingham Campaign that created the national urgency that prompted the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, introduced by President John F. Kennedy, and passed posthumously. In one of the most tragic events in our country’s history, he was assassinated the year prior – November 22, 1963.
The Birmingham Campaign’s strategy was to put economic pressure on the city’s merchants, so organizers scheduled the protests to begin around the Easter season; at that time, the second biggest shopping period of the year. Birmingham officials, however, saw in this, opportunity; a chance to break the back of the movement. Word went out that any Negro arrested for marching, or even seen anywhere within the vicinity of the march, would never work in Birmingham again. This led to the riskiest decision of the entire campaign – to use children. Parents who were willing to put themselves at risk by marching were now called upon to exhibit a whole new kind of courage – stay at home, keep their jobs, and let their children take the lead; knowing full well that some of them might not come back alive. That’s resolve.
Birmingham held its mayoral elections on March 5th. While all the leading candidates were segregationists, none of them held a candle to candidate Eugene “Bull” Connor; also Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety. Concerned that the protests would be used as a political tool to drive white-identifying voters to Connor, they postponed the campaign until two weeks after the election. The close election resulted in a runoff on April 2nd in which Albert Boutwell (after whom the Boutwell auditorium, where my uncles Don and Robert went to see professional wrestling shows) defeated Connor. Despite their defeat, the city commissioners, including Connor, refused to vacate their city hall offices; arguing that they could not be legally removed from office until 1965. When the civil rights campaign finally launched in early April, Birmingham was operating under two governments.
Martin was arrested on April 12th; charged with violating the state circuit court injunction against protests. He was kept in solitary confinement and was allowed minimal direct contact. It was at this time that he penned his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, on scraps of paper clandestinely passed on to him by a friendly Negro trusty (a fellow inmate assigned certain supervisory duties by guards), and on the margins of the Birmingham News, in direct response to an open letter posted there.
That letter, titled “A Call for Unity,” and signed by eight white-identifying Birmingham and Montgomery clergy, stated that while they sympathized with the cause, that these were matters that should be settled in the courts rather than in the streets, and that the “good” people of Birmingham should not allow themselves to be incited by “outsiders”. Given that a similar open letter – “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense” – had been written just three months prior, Martin knew that this narrative had to be countered, and countered immediately. By summer, Letter from a Birmingham Jail was everywhere. In the meantime, United Auto Workers president, Walter Reuther, secured $160,000 to cover bail for Martin and other protestors, and on April 20th, they were released.
On May 2nd, more than a thousand Negro youth would descend on downtown Birmingham; marching down Eighth Avenue to City Hall. My grandmother’s kids and their classmates were among them. That day, close to 900 students were arrested, but an even greater surge – nearly 2,500 demonstrators – arrived the following day to take their place, then more after that, in successive waves. Three of Mary’s children would join the marches, and two of them, Willie James and Bernice, would be arrested, and Pat was beaten. The jails packed, city officials directed the overflow to be kept at Alabama State Fairgrounds in Birmingham’s Five Points West, and in open air stockades. They weren’t being fed, so my grandmother and other mothers arranged food and took it to them.
Bull Connor, who, early on, had refrained from using violence against citizens, did what we often do in situations where we believe we have superior power; he escalated. He brought out the city’s firemen and ordered them to turn their lifesaving tools into weapons. They trained their hoses on both protesters and onlookers. You’ve seen the footage – kids hit with hoses so powerful that they’re sent flying into the air; students knocked down and literally washed away; broken limbs, concussions and a wide range of other injuries.
As some of the youth fled from the power of the hoses, Connor loosed the dogs to pursue and maul them. And thanks to a new invention called “live television”, every bit of this carnage was beamed straight into homes across America. Civil Rights leader, Congressman John Lewis, noted the power of this incident: “We didn’t fully comprehend at first what was happening. We were witnessing police violence and brutality Birmingham-style: Unfortunately for Bull Connor, so was the rest of the world.”
As the clashes between nonviolent protesters and police made national headlines; with pictures of officers of the law bending over women with raised clubs, children mere inches away from snarling and drooling police dogs, and pressure hoses smashing bodies into one another and sweeping them into the streets, the movement reached a new level of visibility; and the world took notice.
These were my relatives, my neighbors. They were there, at the epicenter of this pivotal point in history. And after a century of struggle, one dating back to the abolition of slavery, the world would, in what felt like the blink of an eye, change.
In 1964, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the future for African Americans had never looked brighter. Four years later, on April 4, 1968, the night Martin was killed, it had never looked bleaker. Amid the tragedy of Martin’s assassination, an extraordinary moment in U.S. political history occurred as Senator Robert F. Kennedy broke the news of Martin’s death to a large gathering of African American supporters in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy in his bid to secure the 1968 Democratic nomination for President. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Bobby was informed of Martin’s death, and was advised against making the campaign stop; which was in a part of the city described as a “dangerous ghetto.” But the senator insisted on going.
His team expected an angry mob or bereaved group of mourners. But when he arrived to find everyone in an upbeat mood, anticipating the excitement of a Kennedy appearance, it was apparent that they had not heard the news. A 42-year-old Robert climbed onto the platform, and delivered the news to this group of African Americans, in what must be one of the greatest extemporaneous speeches in American history:
Ladies and Gentlemen – I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because... I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
The crowd breaks into frantic gasps and murmuring before gradually settling into stunned silence. He continues:
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black – considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
African Americans in this country truly loved his brother, and still grieved his death, so they knew exactly to what he was referring.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
Robert and his team were surprised by the spontaneous outbreak of applause that interrupted his speech. He then continued:
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country.
We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
He was interrupted by applause a second time, before concluding:
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.
And amid thunderous and emotional applause, he exited.
It’s easy to see why my grandmother loved him, and why every time Dion’s Abraham, Martin and John came on the radio, she would, as if uttering a prayer, pause and solemnly listen.
Just two months after Martin, Bobby was also gone.
But Mary would double down on the same courage that had seen her through so much, everything from defying Black Codes to allowing her children to march. And she, like so many others, would keep these men alive in her heart. She’d spend the rest of her life making real the things they’d dreamed of. Martin and Bobby had used ordinary things, such as speeches and sermons, for extraordinary purposes.
Mary and others of her generation, with everything from marches to boycotts, from the songs they wrote to the unity they forged, would teach those of us who’d come after them the same lesson: how to both embrace our own very ordinary gifts and hone our resolve into armor, then use them, as Bobby said, “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world”. In doing so, we change not only the world, but ourselves.
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