Heading Out

My road trip plan, such that it was, was completed.  

1.       Get to Alabama

2.       Visit Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma

3.       Take notes

The rest of the trip was free form.  The atlas was telling me the best road straight south was 41.  To get to it I had to backtrack a little east on U.S. 80.   I was anxious to drive a road I’d never been on before.  Sort of fly the coop to use a fowl metaphor.  When I turned right on 41, I knew it was good, a paved road with a center line and side markings.  State road probably.  No towns till Shepardville and then it met up with 89, which went more directly south.  I’d go there and see how it looked. When you are out there on your own you have all the options you want.

It can get lonely if you are alone with your thoughts too long.  I slipped a Dylan CD into the Buick’s dash to keep me company.  When I feel wistful like I was feeling that afternoon I play Dylan’s newer stuff.  There’s joy in some of it but I find lots of melancholy.  I was thinking of that first song in Together Through Life.  I don’t know when he wrote the song, but the album was released in 2009.  It’s a sad love song.  The music feels like the lyrics.  Slow and heavy drum line, accordion in the background, good guitar.   It’s a simple song with four six-line stanzas.  Every fifth line repeats the title “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’“.  My favorite stanzas are the middle two.    

Well, I'm moving after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don't know what I do without it
Without this love that we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothing but the moon and stars

Down every street there's a window

And every window made of glass
We'll keep on loving pretty baby
For as long as love will last
Beyond here lies nothin'
But the mountains of the past

This Buick has a digital compass.  41 was going a little west.  When I got to Ala 89, I decided to take it south instead. 

If I’d had it in the Buick, I would have played “The Death of Emmett Till.”  Dylan recorded it in 1962, at the start of his career.  Powerful lyrics.  Dylan wrote important songs about injustice happening in the South early on and his songs helped raise awareness nationwide.  Historians think the publicity around Emmitt Till, a 14 year old Chicago boy who was sent by his parents to stay with relatives in Money, Mississippi during the summer of 1955 then beaten, murdered, and thrown in a swamp by white men for whistling at a white woman as the story goes “marked a turn” in America’s attitude towards civil rights.  Emmett’s mother, horrified at what had been done to her son, at the horrible beating he took at the hands of his white assailants, insisted the funeral service feature an open casket, so all of America could see what they had done to her son.  A picture of the boy in his coffin made its way to the newspapers.  It’s a gruesome sight, but she and others believed it was time for America to see the truth about the South.

How many times do you suppose that statement “marked a turn” was hopefully announced before change began to happen? How many families, how many communities living through tragedy after tragedy each believed that surely their experience would be the one to cause the  people in our country to say “ENOUGH”?  How many Americans were convinced their situation was too awful to continue.  That good people around them would stand up for what is right, pass new laws, educate each other, and change behavior by working together to end the worst tendencies that exist among us.  Surely this time.  How many times do you suppose that was believed over 300 years of history?  Emmitt Till’s death came 10 years before significant change occurred in the form of the Civil Rights Act in 1963 and the Voting Rights act of 1965.

And then I had an awful thought.  What if there is a formula, a quota, a number that floats out there that must be reached before public opinion tips?  How many deaths, black and white, did it take before the country rose up, followed Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, and supported his cause?  What would be included in that formula?   It might go something like this. 

a) slave deaths during passage to America +b) slaves worked to death on plantations +
c) runaway slaves beaten and killed as examples to others + d) Civil War casualties +
e) blacks attacked and killed during Reconstruction + f) 4,000 lynchings (with many more unknown) during the Jim Crow era + g) four black girls killed by a bomb in a Birmingham church + h) black protestors killed throughout the South during the civil rights era + i) whites sympathetic to the movement who were killed (those would be squared at least, possibly cubed, perhaps taken to the 10^th power) = CHANGE

And then an even greater horror came to mind.  What if some version of that same formula were applied to the current rash of people killed in mass shootings in America?  What would that formula look like, and which variable will be the last added before we see an end to that God awful experience in America?  What if we’re only halfway there?  What if we are doomed to live that collective hell for another 260 years?

Our country’s current, ongoing, senseless murderous violence is mass public shootings.  Unlike past historical tragedies where information is sketchy today’s acts are immediately filmed, written about,   quantifiable, fully documented and searchable online.  Mother Jones magazine keeps a database on mass shootings in our country since 1982.  It was the most comprehensive and direct list I could find.  It’s simply an Excel spreadsheet of date and place kept in the rows, and ghastly factors recordings kept in the columns A through X.  Documented briefly are number of deaths, number of injuries, type of weapon used, basic details of the shooters.  It contains more than anyone wants to know or can stand to read.  But we need to know.  We need to know so we can stop it. 

The Mother Jones data begins with an August 20, 1982 shooting that I don’t recall by a lone gunman in a welding shop in Miami, Florida where 8 were killed, and goes through the recent Virginia Beach shooting on May 31st of this year which took the lives of 12 innocent victims.   37 years of horrible murders with these parameters: at least three persons killed by gun violence, the crime committed by a lone shooter, in a public place.  Here’s the totals. 111 shootings, 111 shooters (of which 110 were male), 111 separate stories, 111 guesses as to why, and 1,139 Americans killed for little or no apparent reason.  Let me make that number of total deaths a tad more emphatic.

1,139

Compared to what black people endured in the South, if some calculus exists for modern mass shootings in America, some number we must ultimately reach before real action is taken which impacts the problem, we are not even close to reaching half the deaths required before this fresh new American hell is over.   What if the horrendous number above is just a drop in the bucket of the number we will rack up before mass shootings begin to ebb, then become a relic of the past?  We don’t know.  That part of our American history continues to be written.  It’s been written over most of my adult life. 

When I cruise that list of 111 shootings over 37 years, I only remember some.  I don’t think, as much as we are concerned, any of us can recall all 111.  It happens too frequently now.  It’s part of our collective American life, as the killing of black people in the south at the hands of white supremacists was for a hundred years after the Civil War.    

While we think we put our problems behind us, they go on despite our perceived progress.  On June 16, 2016, a 21 year-old white man is welcomed, as a stranger, into a Bible study at an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.  Before the group adjourns, he pulls a .45 Glock handgun from his bag and shoots and kill those same black men and women with whom he had conversed, good people who shared their thoughts with him, listened as he talked, and most likely feared him not at all.  Nine dead.  One injured and able to tell the tale.  I felt that one that one personally.  I sometimes go to bible studies.  For a while after that, while sitting in my church with my friends, I imagined someone coming in for the first time, us welcoming him, and then seeing the gun emerge.  But over time I stopped thinking like that.   

In addition to that event, I remember these.  There is just as much pain in the ones I don’t remember.  Here’s the mass gun murders that resonated most with me.

Date                    Community                      #killed/setting                               

7/18/84              San Ysidro Ca.                  22 killed in a McDonalds              

8/20/86              Edmond, OK.                    15 killed in a post office               
4/20/99              Littleton, Co.                    13 students killed in Columbine H.S.       
10/2/06              Lancaster, Pa.                  6 killed in an Amish School                        
4/16/07              Blacksburg, Va.                32 killed at Virginia Tech Univ.
2/14/08              DeKalb, IL                         5 killed in an NIU classroom        
11/5/09              Fort Hood Texas              13 killed on an army base            
7/20/12              Aurora Colorado             12 killed in a movie theater         
8/5/12                Oak Creek, Wis.               7 killed in a Sikh temple               
12/14/12            Newtown, Ct.                   23 children killed in Sandy Hook school   
12/2/15              San Bernardino, CA.       14 killed at a city Christmas Party              
8/12/16              Orlando, Fl.                      49 killed at Pulse Nightclub, LGBT community targeted
10/1/17              Las Vegas, Nv.                  58 killed at outdoor concert from nearby hotel 
11/5/17               Sutherland Springs, Tx.  26 worshipers killed in a Baptist church  
2/14/18              Parkland Fl.                      17 students killed in Marjorie Stoneman H.S.
4/22/18              Nashville, Tn.                   4 killed in a Waffle House
6/28/18              Annapolis, Md.                5 journalists killed at a newspaper
10/27/18            Pittsburgh, Pa.                 11 Jewish worshippers killed in their synagogue
2/15/19              Aurora, IL                          5 killed in a warehouse (1 from Sheridan, IL.)
11/19/18            Chicago, IL                        3 killed inside Mercy Hospital
5/31/19              Virginia Beach, Va.          12 killed in city offices

That’s 22 incidents.  There are 89 more.  Of course, there are big differences between the killing of African Americans after the Civil War through the 1960s and the deaths experienced from the 1980’s and continuing now in communities across the country at the hands of primarily lone gunmen.  Many of the shooters today are mentally ill, some are involved in workplace conflict, some target minority or religious groups, but other motives are totally unexplained.  Some seem to randomly target strangers. Why they kill strangers only God knows, but I have a feeling (s)he may be perplexed too.  As Americans we don’t understand why there is so much hate and why it manifests itself this way, at least this American doesn’t.  Do you?
In the days of reconstruction up through the 1960’s, the dynamic of killing black people outside the law in the South was very different.  Those killers were understood by others around them, their neighbors, their friends, and their actions were supported by many if not most white people.  They were following a common belief, enforcing an unwritten code.  I imagine everyone in the South, and in the nation for matter, whether they agreed with the murderers or not, knew why they were taking those actions.  I don’t think there was much ambiguity.

They were ensuring, with their violent acts, that white people in America maintained dominance over black people.  They believed the white “race” was supreme and that in the absence of federal and state laws supporting that belief they were obligated, for the sake of their white neighbors, their children, the people with whom they shared pews at church, to maintain supremacy by whatever means necessary.  All this despite the teachings of their Christian churches.  They believed by instilling terror they were defending something more important, and they used any means necessary, including murder, to do so.

What whites strived to uphold was strict segregation of the perceived races, negro from white.  Some, perhaps more pragmatically, may have been working to keep their workforce intact, beaten down, unable and ill equipped to move North.  Whatever the motive, the rationale and widely held belief was that black people were inferior.  The need to subjugate them played on the ultimate fear that familiarity that social contact on an equal level would result in miscegenation, the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types.

Although interestingly that “interbreeding” focused on enforcing a taboo enforced solely on black men fathering children with white women.  The reverse, white men having sexual relations with black women occurred regularly during slavery and beyond.  White men fathered children and denied paternity over and over.   There was a huge paternalistic double standard at play in the supposedly strict guidelines of behavior between white and black men and women during that time in America.  But let’s talk more about the white killers of black people.

As I drove out of Alabama, I tried to imagine the white people who committed those murders that happened all along the route I was driving.  The killings in the 50’s and 60’s could have been carried out by men the same age as my older brothers, or my uncles, even my father.  I had never thought of my white American peers so specifically or pictured them as clearly as after visiting the civil rights museums. 

I was thinking all that as I turned southeast onto Route 10 at Oak Hill towards Pine Apple and Awin.  Those are tiny rural towns, like the one close to the farm grew up on, and I was lost in thought.  I paid them little attention.  It was a wonder I didn’t get lost.  I was thinking of the people that lived there, especially the white people, and their families before them, as well as mine.

My Dad, who would be turn 110 this December if he had somehow managed to stay alive, was a Free Mason, and went to meetings at the Scottish Rite temple in Bloomington.  He achieved his 32^nd degree, whatever that is, and when he did, he bought himself a fancy Masonic ring.  It’s damned hard for secret societies to market themselves, or even explain what they’re about. When I was a teenager, Dad wanted me to attend meetings of something associated with the Masonic Lodge called DeMolay but I steadfastly refused.  I think the Masonic Society is the Protestant version of the Knights of Columbus.  I truly don’t know what it is and I’m not going to look it up.  But in the South, there was another secret society which became much more famous.  Infamous is probably a better word.

That organization was the Ku Klux Klan.  This post is getting long.  I’ll talk about the Klan next time, along with an interesting dinner conversation.