Chapter 2
To Kill a Mockingbird
Theresa loved the high open levels of the pines pointing to whence we came and would return. But the trouble was deep and hardly sounded in Alabama, where Theresa’s infancy involved sleeping on the floor beside her Earth-mother’s father’s chair, as that grandfather slept with a shotgun in his lap. Outside, white men in white sheets stormed by on horseback, on their way to hang anyone darker than they.
The grandfather was whiter than many of the people who called themselves white. Because his grandfather was white, he was so white that many white people who didn’t know him thought he was white when they saw him. So sometimes he’d behave toward white people as though he were white and as good as they. Of course he was better than most, with strength from sleeping with a shotgun. But they knew none of that.
One of the many strange things about Earth-people is that they seem to like making love to people they hate. At least they call it making love, and it involves a lot more physical contact than shaking hands, which they often wouldn’t do with the same person. Yet, most of the people who claim not to be racists would rail at the mention of the most obvious solution to the problem, love for all neighbors, whatsoever.
“Would you want one to marry your sister?” asks the typical honky, thinking the question only rhetorical, whatever his own sexual habits. If such sexual habits were fruitful lovemaking, differences of race would wash away like river-water joining the song of the sea. But, as psychologists like to say, rape isn’t a crime of love but one of anger and resentment. It’s a crime of hate, and Theresa learned the antipathy.
To fit on Earth well enough to do her job this trip, she’d have to marry an Earthman. But she was reluctant to marry a man she came to love, because he was nearly as white as the grandfather, although she also dearly loved the grandfather, especially for the courage of his anger, which she also came to feel.
“He never had to use it,” she told me of the grandfather and the shotgun, on one of our later afternoons on the levee. “But he was ready, and so was I.”
And she didn’t take much guff by herself, either. Once, in those early days there in Pine Level, as she walked to her black school through a white neighborhood, a white boy rode past her on a bicycle, punching her as he passed. She caught herself so quickly that, instead of stumbling down herself, she knocked the boy, from his bike. The boy’s mother saw it from her house. She screamed from her porch.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she shrieked, storming down the steps.
“Why do you all push us around?” answered Theresa, walking calmly on.
At home she told her Earth-mother of the encounter and learned a little more.
“What were you thinking about?” exclaimed her mother, wiping her hands on her well-washed apron and taking it off and setting her daughter down on a kitchen chair and herself on another of the same old pinewood, like it in front of her. “They might have done anything to you. They might have . . . . Oh, Theresa!”
The mother leaped from her seat and bent and squeezed her child in her arms, her face deep in the child’s neck, trying to take some comfort too, as much as she could give. Theresa felt her mother’s tears, warm on her neck.
Since her burning in Rouen, Theresa had become more Taoist than I. But she still understood the power of the sword she never used for killing. That’s also why she liked Slavey so much as you’ll see later, and yet mostly in her childhood this trip she went to church and did her schoolwork, and obeyed her elders, mostly. She’d like to have knocked more boys off their bikes, but she had another tack to take, later.
Of course her two main elders were her Earth parents. Theresa loved having parents, maybe partly because we have no parents, living eternally. We don’t have death, and we don’t have birth, and so we don’t have parents, to guide our compassion, to do our best. But Theresa loved her Earth-mother also because she was a teacher to children besides tiny Theresa. She taught in the little one-room shack that Pine Level blacks called their school. She had reached high school before being married. And that was enough to teach school. That is, in a black school.
She taught reading and writing, and more than that she taught sharing. The little building had no custodial staff, and so the children had to keep it clean and to chop and carry in wood for the stove that heated it. Theresa saw that her mother taught the children to love being in the school, learning and working together. Without such people, nothing we ever tried to do in our travels could ever succeed.
However, Theresa’s Earth father was a different story. He was a carpenter and used his carpentry to get him where he wished to go, which was anywhere he wasn’t. Slavey and Oliver and I used his skill in carpentry and his tendency toward itinerancy to bring him to New Orleans. We weren’t supposed to be able to read yet, but of course we could and so found him a job through the Picayune newspaper. He worked on some houses in Metairie, a white New Orleans suburb. Later, a KKK resident of that suburb would run for president. He would lose, of course.
And so would Theresa’s father lose that job, fortunately for us but unfortunately for Theresa’s Earth family, when it was time for us to start being conspicuous. Despair works many ways among desperate people, and that desperate father left his wife and Theresa and her little brother, in despair in a city with no other family. He traveled on with his carpentry without a word of farewell, seeking greener grass beyond any hill. He could hardly support them anyway, and that might have been his excuse, but he didn’t say so. He went off for a job, never came back, that simply.
“What will we do?” asked Theresa’s mother, one day in their dawning destitution.
She taught in New Orleans too, but for little more money than in Pine Level.
“Let’s go home,” answered Theresa, exactly at the right time.
So they returned to her mother’s family in Alabama.
But her father had stayed in the project long enough for us to grow up a little in New Orleans. Theresa, with what she had learned in her time here ahead of us, helped us in our acclimation. And the cosmopolitan Quarter helped her, as did her Catholic school.
In Louisiana, nearly all children were educated as Catholics. Huey Long built the housing projects and hospitals for the poor, but he let the education system stand as it was, and that was best in Catholic charity. The public schools were so poor that hardly anyone went to them, unless they were expelled from the parochial ones. Theresa’s mother taught in a public school, hardly trained but no one caring. The city paid Theresa’s mother for very much less than they received from her. But such was rare, and so even she sent her children to the Catholics.
And the nuns liked Theresa. We weren’t here not to know what we were doing, and knowing what we were doing required knowing with whom we were dealing. So, unlike most Earthlings, we were trying more to get along with our neighbors than to get ahead of them. That made Theresa a willing docile student, earning herself far less knuckle-rapping than her fellow students earned.
All the nuns were white, and all the students in Theresa’s school were black, but the nuns taught that all were equal under God, and Theresa didn’t ask where the white children were or why, because she knew the answer, as did all the others there. Theresa just reiterated what the nuns said truly, and kept quiet about the rest. Nevertheless, much truth was said in sidelong glances. The children here shared too.
Outside school, we did as I have said. We enjoyed being children together, with Theresa behaving as both an older sister and a close friend, and we roamed the noise of the Quarter beside the quiet of the river. We danced amid the drunks on Bourbon Street, and Theresa sometimes sang them into silence. We discussed our possibilities on the levee, and the river often sang us into silence.
One afternoon, sunny on the levee, we talked about Bob, our boss. He had come here himself, two millennia before this current trip of ours, to try to tell Earthlings himself what they most needed to understand. The trouble was all bigotry and hypocrisy.
Like Theresa’s, Bob’s Earth-father was a carpenter. Unlike Theresa’s, Bob’s Earth mother didn’t work, except to care for Bob and his Earth-brothers and Earth-sisters and their father. Bob was born that trip in Bethlehem, a few miles south of Jerusalem, in the land of Judah, in a stable. Judah was a tribe of a formerly nomadic people called Israelites, after their patriarch. The patriarch had been named Jacob at birth, but had earned the name Israel. He earned it by wrestling with God, or at least an angel.
I’m reminding you of this to be sure you know that this wrestling has been going on for a very long time, and so I’ll summarize some more. In the second millennium before Bob came to visit, all the tribes of Israel wandered into Egypt, which was a British protectorate when Oliver and Slavey and I came here this trip, and the Egyptians enslaved them. So Oliver came and got them out and delivered to them some rules from Bob. But they didn’t pay much attention to the rules.
As soon as Oliver went home, they broke two rules in one fell swoop. One of those rules was not to kill, and the other was not to covet their neighbors’ property. As soon as Oliver was out of their picture, they tried to kill all the Canaanites to take their land, and they said Bob had told them to do it. Not only that, but they said Bob told them he’d go down there first and clear the way. Well, more specifically, at least one scribe wrote that. At least Lev didn’t write anything like that.
In the first foray, the Israelites destroyed a city called Jericho, a little northeast of Jerusalem. They blew down its walls and killed most of its inhabitants and enslaved some others, as those Egyptians had enslaved them. And later, as they succeeded in their campaign, they built in Jerusalem a capitol for their new settling, and broke another of those rules Oliver had given them. Bob had asked that, if they wished to thank him for getting them out of Egypt or whatever, they should do it simply and not with a lot of grandiosity or hoo-hah. He asked that, if they’d build an alter, they shouldn’t cut anything for it, or use any tool on it, or raise it above Earth.
But, after they did worse in Jericho and in other parts of Canaan than those Egyptians had ever thought of doing to them, they built a grand elaborate temple at Jerusalem and bragged about it as though it would make Bob proud. I can understand how they might have gotten used to being in one place in Egypt and lost their tendency to wanderlust, and probably lost skills that might have made forty nomadic years in the wilderness less comfortable than it might otherwise have been. But I’ll be damned if I can understand why they did what they did to the Canaanites, or how they could claim that behavior in the name Bob, or treat him as a golden calf.
Nor, I guess, could Bob, and so he came himself next time, after the temple had fallen pretty much of its own weight, and then Romans were treating that land of little milk and honey much as the British were treating it when Theresa arrived this time. Bob came hoping that, once and for all eternity, he could make that land holy for all humanity, a place people could look to as a place of peace, an example of good. And he tried so hard, so thoroughly, so carefully. And, again, no one paid attention.
He talked a little with the Israelites as a child, getting a feeling of what he was up against in the still for him hopefully holy land, but early in that adolescence of his here he left the Holy Land, to walk about much of the rest of the civilized Earth. He thought it not only fair to Canaan but essential to his hope of exemplifying for the world, that he spend some time seeing what Earth had become beyond Canaan.
So, leaving his Earth-parents at twelve years old, he walked and sailed from Jerusalem to Djakarta, through India and China, and back. He also visited the Acropolis and Stonehenge, but he found the greatest lessons in country east of the Holy Land. I had a little to do with that, having entertained him well with my stories of having been Lao-tzu. That was my spaceship parked in the eastern sky, the day Bob was born here. I drove him here to see him off, and wish him well, the best.
He found India most fascinating. I had learned much from Bodhisattva, who had come to China after the Indians had corrupted Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings against the corruption of Hinduism that had turned Karma yoga into an excuse for slavery, proving for the first time on Earth how the best words can be used to excuse the worst behavior. Much of what Bob saw in eastern Asia was unfortunate. But what he learned was lessons nonetheless. So here’s a little lesson for you, if you please.
“Yoga” is a Sanskrit word for union, union with God. “God” is an English word for good, or “good” is an English word for God, however one looks at it. In India, Hinduism has at least 300-thousand gods, since Indians find so many things good in their simply complicated country. Hinduism also offers many ways to get to God, to find unity with the universe, Yoga. Four are much more common than the many others.
One of the four is bhakti yoga, which is becoming good through worship. Examples not called Hindu are loving Ala and loving Jawah and loving Christ. Killing people for making a choice different from one’s own in that is not bhakti yoga. Neither is it good, but a lot of people think it is, and do it. That’s corruption.
Another of the four is jnana yoga, which is becoming good through thinking. Examples not called Hindu are scholars of the Koran and the Torah and theologians like Anselm. Calling people ignorant for not studying any one book or for not studying all books is not jnana yoga. Neither is it good, but a lot of people think it is.
Another of the four is raja yoga, which is becoming good through guiding others. Examples not called Hindu are not wars, not jihads or genocide, and not crusades. Much of my little Chinese book the Tao Te Ching is about leadership for peace, for unifying one’s heart with one’s surroundings. But many Christians think it pagan.
The one of the four that inspired the caste system is karma yoga. That is, becoming good through doing the best one can do. How that became corrupted is that someone decided that a good grocer’s child must be a grocer. Grocer was the caste of Mahatma Gandhi, and he followed his karma to become a magnificent raja yogi.
You know, Gandhi was in India while we were here this trip, and he did wonderfully well without our help. While the Israelites were trying one more time to cut for themselves a piece of Canaan, while the British and other western nations successfully crusaded to help them, with no concern for the Palestinian Canaanites, Gandhi freed India, from Britain. And Excellent Oliver used Gandhi’s raja yoga in the southern United States, and proudly owned up to it.
But corruption followed Gandhi, just as it had Moses and the Buddha, and has followed Bob. The ink was hardly dry on the charter of independent India before civil war broke out, civil war between factions pretending to bhakti yoga, in the name of their names for God. And remember that this was in the last century of the second millennium after Bob himself came here and tried so hard to stop such horrors from ever happening again, the next-to-last millennium before this now.
One point Bob tried to make when he visited is widely preached but only partly understood. Since he doesn’t lie, if he had promised to help the Israelites destroy all the Canaanites, there wouldn’t be any Samaritans more than a millennium later to be either bad or good. But, by God, there were, and there still are, two more millennia later, a whole lot of them, good and bad, here and now.
So we made no new hysteria on the levee.
“I’m not sure we should call her Bob,” said Theresa.
“Yeah,” said Slavey. “Maybe we should call her Roberta.”
“I like that thought,” I said. “I liked Roberta in An American Tragedy.”
“You know,” said Oliver, “When I asked him her name, she told me not to worry about it. He said he is what she is, or she is what he is, or something like that. I don’t remember the difference. I remember what makes sense. I just remember the sense.”
“One crazy thing about Earth,” said Slavey, “is that the people here least likely to like calling her Bob are the people least likely to understand what she tried to tell them. Imagine, Theresa, how Cauchon and his Pharisees would have reacted if you had called her Bob in Rouen.”
“I wonder if she flipped a coin when he was here, to decide what gender she’d resemble,” asked Theresa. “Maybe he’ll be more like a woman next time, but he was much like a woman that time.”
“We could call her the anointed one,” offered Oliver. “You know how much he enjoys affection.”
“Yes indeed,” answered Theresa. “But I think she knows we call him Bob because we love her.”
“Yes, indeed,” we all agreed, as Earth’s sky brightened a little, just a little.
As I said, it was good times on that levee. But, as Earthlings often wrongly say, nothing lasts forever. We had to get moving, and we had pretty much figured out our main directions, each of our primary missions.
Theresa was our flagship and our scout. She came early to get the lay of the land and would jumpstart the United States civil rights movement and stay through the century, to make sure the rest of us stayed on course and had her help whenever we needed it. Bob trusts her more than the rest of us, and we see clearly why. We all care, but she is more responsible.
Slavey was going to play bad cop to Oliver’s good cop in Theresa’s movement. Oliver was going to work his way up in the nation’s mainstream institutions, although on the fringe of them where the country was keeping its people of color. Slavey was going to scream from beyond the frontier, from outside the boundaries of ordinary acceptance, but with threat from the power of unity, like a Mongol horde.
I was here to help the Russians. At least that was the only original plan for me this trip, and it was a plenty-big-enough job after Truman and Churchill gave Stalin most of Eastern Europe and about half of Germany. But, after the United States and Britain gave half of the Holy Land to the Israelites, while most of the people living there were Philistines, I gave a lot of attention to that problem, too.
I guess I should try to be clearer about Hitler. Yes, he was the most horrible person who ever walked Earth. But we didn’t come here to deal with him, because he dealt with himself inherently by being so horrible. He fell by his own weight, a little like that temple in Jerusalem, because the people couldn’t bear him. And he fell faster and harder, because his weight was so much more. The people didn’t just jump from beneath Hitler. They turned back and buried him in rage. Ordinary time buried the temple. No one ever hated it much. It didn’t cost much. Only money.
Anyway, Theresa went on ahead again. When her Earth father dumped her Earth mother to follow his lack of destination, she and her mother and her little brother went back where they’d been born, as I said. And Theresa had to get to work in more ways than one, to help fill the economic gap her father this time on Earth had left.
As Gandhi learned to like spinning, Theresa learned to like sewing, and she did that to help, in Montgomery. She and her brother and mother spent a little time on their return to Alabama in Pine Level, but Pine Level had never offered much employment. Some of the family had moved to Montgomery, and Montgomery had public schools in which Theresa’s mother could teach. Theresa found a job in a tailor-shop on the Army airbase outside the city. She took her mending to the most rending.
Later there, I would learn to fly those clumsy little Earth aircraft. But I wasn’t quite old enough for that yet, and Theresa was very nearly an adult, as she quickly proved. She was already what English-speaking Earthlings nicely call a primary breadwinner for her family, and soon it looked like she might have a family of her own.
On the airbase was a barbershop, and a barber in that shop fell in love with Theresa, the first time he saw her walking past his shop to hers. His name was Raymond, a name from French for king of the world, and he was king of spirits in the barbershop where he worked, and he wished to be a prince for Theresa.
He wooed her as well as he possibly could. He smiled through his shop-window each time she passed. Soon he was running outside to hand her flowers, and soon after that sitting out front in his shiny red Studebaker, whenever no one required his services inside. He hoped to impress her with that possession, few Alabama African Americans owning an automobile. But, of course, that didn’t impress a girl who commanded a spaceship, and she thought he was too white, as I earlier said.
But he persisted and started to stop by her house in his Studebaker and deliver flowers to her door. She wouldn’t come to the door, but her mother did and was impressed, hardly by the Studebaker but very much by the flowers and Raymond’s smile and persistence. Soon he was spending an hour or more most evenings on the porch-swing with Theresa’s mother, and so at last Theresa learned more about him than his looks and persistence. Her mother told her a thing or two.
“Mama,” said Theresa, “I don’t want to hear about him.”
“Well,” said her mother. “He’s a very nice man.”
Theresa also thought he was too old for her. I mean that she thought he was too old for her age on Earth this trip. She was still in her teens, and he had saved years to buy that car. But her mother never mentioned that.
“Mama,” said Theresa. “Don’t you think he’s too old for me?”
“Well,” said her mother. “That means he know what he wants.”
After a couple of months of that, her mother began to have doubts of the probity of her daughter marrying this experienced man, but for the same reason that made Theresa accept him. It was something he said on the porch inadvertently.
“I wish I could do more for those Scottsboro boys,” he said.
“What are you doing now?” this mother was afraid to ask.
The Scottsboro boys were nine teenage hobos jailed in Scottsboro for defending themselves against white hobos. All but the youngest of the black boys were sentenced to die of electrocution, after two white girls accused six of them of rape. White men jailed the white boys along with the black boys but quickly released the white boys. Raymond worked to fund the defense of the black boys, his righteous risk for all he loved. Twenty years later, the last of the black boys was released, on parole.
Theresa, despite Raymond’s whiteness, didn’t wait twenty years to accept his proposal, although she’d made him wait long enough to fear she might. They married and hosted meetings of his defense-funding organization, and soon thereafter he sold his Studebaker for the fund. Theresa knew it by the silence before he entered their home that evening. Not the last rev of the motor, just the screen door closing quiet.
“Oh, but you loved that car!” cried Theresa.
Then the king of the world understated the best of it all.
“I love you!” said Raymond to his space-girl.
Soon after that, Theresa learned that a friend of hers from the Catholic school in New Orleans was working with the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People. Being very colorful, Theresa liked being called colored, and she looked up her friend.
She walked in on a meeting and found her friend absent. Her friend was secretary to the chapter, and her absence gave Theresa a practical reason to be there. She sat down and took notes and became the secretary, almost as quickly as she had knocked that boy off his bike. Theresa knows timing.
Meanwhile, wimp that I was, my route to winning friends and influencing people was very different from that of my three companions. They began their part of our project in the project, developing followers among the adolescent poor.
I, instead, watched them work, learning the despair of the destitute mainly to know why I must do what I did. Then I entered the Army Air Corps for a ticket to Yale, not to develop followers but to show leaders where I, their little friend, might follow. That road was rough by not being as near to the most important people as the others’.
While they were amid people who shared our feelings, I was amid many who cared little even for the silver spoons they’d had in their mouths since birth. I needed a lot of help from Lev in making friends with them, a lot of advice from his days in those patrician drawing-rooms in the window to the west. Lev’s sophistry helped much.
Theresa also made friends for the future at her church. Many members of that African Methodist Episcopal church shared her faith in the future, and her willingness to work toward it. They, after all, also of course, had a more vested interest, than would my Skull and Bones friends. But Aquinas would never enter an A.M.E. doorway.
Oliver combined our approaches. His father, being a Baptist minister, involved him in his church, but Oliver went for other education also. Before it was over, he would become a doctor of philosophy, exemplifying further our belief in the need for knowledge, for breadth of understanding. Oliver enlisted Hegel for our side.
As for Slavey, he took all directions to extremes. He learned Nietzsche as well as Hegel, and Augustine as well as Aquinas. At home he learned protestant preacher ways from his father also, and in prison he learned the means of Islamic jihad. He lived pursuing war and died deferring to peace, either by any means necessary.
But the key phrase is breadth of understanding. Beyond Hegel and Kant, Oliver loved his Earthly family, especially his Earth-mother’s mother. He loved that grandmother, and twice in her regard he showed his affection for the honor Earthlings often show to death, although he showed it in a somewhat weird way.
The first time was when he thought the grandmother had died. She had fallen down stairs of their building in the project and knocked herself out. Oliver ran upstairs and leaped from a window of their apartment, and his father thought he had tried to kill himself. The second time was when she did die. He did it again.
He had gotten the idea for doing that from Theresa. Imprisoned in Rouen, she had leaped from a window of her high tower cell, fifty feet to the ground. Her prosecutors had held it against her at her trial, saying that she had tried to commit suicide, and that so she wasn’t Christian.
She told me she had done it out of boredom. She told me she had missed the feel of flying. She told me she had missed the truth of flying, and so did Oliver.
How better might we say?