Chapter 3
On the Beach
Mostly, at home and in his father’s church, Oliver behaved as a Baptist preacher might expect his son to behave. He joined the church just as he was beginning school, and he suffered so well through the lack of system in the Louisiana public school he attended because his father would have nothing to do with Catholics, that he won a full scholarship to Boston University.
It was important to our mission to have him be a symbol of the cradle of liberty Boston called itself, before he returned south and settled near us in Montgomery, where he became a preacher himself, for a Baptist church there. For his father, his undergraduate major was in divinity, but his doctorate study in philosophy gave him much necessary broader understanding.
In Boston, Oliver also fell in love with an Earthling. Her name was Rachel, and he met her by telephone, and they fell in love before they saw each other. Like Theresa, he had decided to marry, for his position in his church as well as for his credibility in our movement, and he asked an Earth friend to recommend a woman. But he didn’t expect the process to go so much more quickly than it had for Theresa, or so well.
Immediately on hearing Rachel’s name, he thought of Rachel at the well, in the Old Testament. For those of you who haven’t read it, I’ll tell a little of that lesson in patience also, that wait for grace. The Jacob who later became Israel by wrestling with the angel met Rachel at a well as she watered her father’s sheep.
He, also, fell in love immediately, but his Rachel’s father had other ideas and tricked Jacob into marrying Rachel’s older sister, to keep a custom of the time. But Jacob didn’t give up, and he accepted a promise from the father that he might marry Rachel also, after some trials and tribulation, but mostly a lot of longing. This, of course, was many generations before Bob’s commandment against adultery. And, anyway, eventually, Israel did marry Rachel, also.
First, however, nevertheless, Rachel’s sister bore Jacob many children, and Rachel was baron through many years after her marriage to Jacob. But, at last, she bore Jacob a son, who became Jacob’s favorite as the son of his old age. They named that child Joseph, and he’s the Joseph of the coat of many colors. But I won’t trouble you with that part of the story right now.
The point I’m trying to make is that Oliver loved Rachel, and the more because he loved the Bible, and a diversity of colors. He was happy he didn’t have to wait as long to marry his Rachel as Jacob had to marry the other Rachel, or as long as Raymond had to wait to marry Theresa. And he was glad she gave birth to more children more quickly, through the worst of their part of our battle.
Slavey’s father this trip was also a protestant minister, not as formally as was Oliver’s but formally enough to send Slavey also to the public school. Slavey’s father was a spirited man, involved more than any of our Earth families in the fight for African American rights, and his mother was at least equally spirited, and was her husband’s second wife, like Israel’s Rachel. Slavey’s father was involved in Marcus Garvey’s movement to take African Americans back to Africa, and Slavey’s mother loved his father, and they did all hand-in-hand.
At about the time Theresa returned to Alabama, Slavey’s father showed his spirit for a better place by taking his wife and Slavey to Michigan, to a tiny town named Albion. Albion, Michigan, had been a stop on the antebellum Underground Railroad, and so Slavey’s father expected it to be a better place than New Orleans for his family. Although he knew that the name of the town meant white, he bought a house there through hope and help from his church. However, on arrival, he discovered that the deed proscribed the house from being owned by non-Caucasians.
So Slavey’s family sold back the house and bought one in nearby Lansing. And, in that city, the capital of that northern state where slavery had never been legal, Slavey’s father found still less welcome for his freedom movement. First, an unwelcoming committee burned that second house, and then a committee still less welcoming murdered Slavey’s father, on his way home from his church.
They pushed him beneath a trolley he was trying to board to get home, and the trolley ran over him. No one convicted anyone for the murder, and his family’s insurance company said he had probably thrown himself beneath the train on purpose. So Slavey and his mother and his little Earth-brothers and Earth-sisters were left more destitute than Theresa had been in New Orleans when her father left of his own discord. Slavey’s father’s congregation was mostly poorer than he.
Slavey’s mother did what she could to support her family, taking any odd job she could find. But it wasn’t enough, at least not for the state government family-welfare workers, although Slavey’s family did have food and clothing and a clean little apartment. The rules didn’t recognize the possibility that a one-parent home of pecuniary poverty could be healthy. The rules did not recognize Slavey’s mother’s spirit. And functionaries followed the rules. They had a checklist.
“But you have no husband.”
“We do what we can.”
“You have no steady job.”
“I do what I can.”
“It isn’t enough.”
But all she could was all she could do, and that troubled her terribly. Her spirit broken, she was confined to a mental-hospital, after the functionaries placed Slavey and his brothers in separate foster-homes, for their welfare. The foster-homes were scattered across East Lansing, and the insane-asylum was on a hill in Kalamazoo, sixty-some miles west. In southern Michigan, the institution was a joke among children.
“You’d better watch out,” Michigan children would say to their peers, when they exhibited some of the silliness to which most people are prone. “They’ll send you to Kalamazoo. They’ll put you on the hill.”
Slavey stayed in East Lansing just long enough to make a record for himself, to show that he could do more than those albion people there would permit from him. The functionaries couldn’t deny that he did his homework and scored high on his tests, and the other children admired him for it, or at least welcomed his help with their efforts.
“What do you think you’ll do with your life?” asked his most conscientious teacher, when his academic and social performance took him to presidency of his eighth-grade class. “You show a lot of potential.”
“Maybe a lawyer,” answered Slavey, as obsequiously as he could manage.
“Oh, well,” said the teacher. “A nigger can’t be a lawyer. Setting your goals too high will lead to disappointment. How about something with your hands. Jesus’ father was a carpenter. How about a carpenter.”
That left Slavey pretty much on his own, to shape his life here however he wished, to try to make our point. So, after he finished the eighth grade, he went to Boston to live with a stepsister, a daughter of his father’s from the marriage less happy than with the wife who gave birth to Slavey.
Boston calls itself the cradle of liberty, and it was another stop on the Underground Railroad, but it remains largely segregated. Slavey’s sister lived in Roxbury, an African American ghetto of Boston, mostly a slum. Slavey found it an easy place to offer his point. And Oliver was now in Boston also.
Oliver and Slavey met often in that city. They discussed possibilities, steps in our movement. They met away from their Earth-friends, because our plan was for them to take different paths to the mountaintop. But they gelled their feelings through long conversations, in open public places, out of doors.
They gelled their feelings trying to meld their speech with yours, your vibrations of wind in your land of the free. They tried to see and feel how you fit in your union of states. They somewhat failed, succinctly.
“What do you think about that statue,” asked Slavey, nodding his head to his left, as they sat on the steps in front of the statehouse, the Massachusetts capitol across Beacon Street from the monument to the black Boston regiment whose white leadership sacrificed it and themselves for the Civil War, a big black bronze relief beside steps down to Boston Common, facing the statehouse brazenly, but darkly.
“Fighting Joe Hooker?” asked Oliver.
“No,” answered Slavey. “Mary Dyer.”
“The statue is beautiful,” answered Oliver. “But I don’t know anything about the woman. Yes, please tell me, her story.”
“Yes she’s what we’re here for,” answered Slavey “To my mind, that’s the greatest monument in this cradle of liberty.”
Oliver looked at Slavey. Then he looked across the street to the war monument, and then back to the statue of the woman sitting apparently peacefully on a high seat beneath a shading tree before the eastern wing of the statehouse. That black bronze was not warlike at all. He asked Slavey to keep telling.
“You know, my traveling friend,” replied Slavey, “that the Puritans traveled here across an ocean, for freedom from oppression of their religious expression. You know as well that the separation of church and state in this nation’s constitution is for that purpose, to protect religious expression from oppression by the state. And you know the Puritans didn’t give a damn for the expression of the natives here, because those natives didn’t call themselves Christians. Then came Mary Dyer.
“Well, that beautiful peaceful woman called herself a Christian, but she also called herself a Quaker and refused to quake from the particularly peaceful form of religious expression that came with that denomination. So, less than a generation after the Puritans sailed here for their religious expression, they hanged Mary for hers. They hanged her on the Common, on gallows they built, right over there.”
He pointed to the grassy park where people sunned themselves after lunch in this commercial capital, or played or slept homeless, nights on the benches.
“Do you know that Boston Common was originally reserved as a training-ground to learn to kill the natives if they tried to reclaim some of their native land?”
“I knew that,” said Oliver. “Thanks for reminding me so well. Yes, it’s what we’re here for, Mary Dyer and the Indians. Speaking of Indians, I wonder how Gandhi’s doing. A lawyer from a caste of grocers. It isn’t hopeless here.”
They rose and walked across the street, so Oliver could see the statue from its front. They noted that her statue was of black bronze like that of the monument to the black regiment, although Mary had been white. They walked down Park Street to Brimstone Corner, where Puritan ministers had preached hellfire from the balcony of the church now named for the street named for the park the Common has become.
They crossed the street and wandered back into the Common, to the black bronze of the fountain there, its water flowing narrow and shallow.
“What do you think about Palestine now?” asked Oliver as they sat on one of the benches around the fountain there in sight of the church.
“I still call it Canaan,” offered Slavey. “It’s horrible what Hitler is doing, horrible not only for the Jews but also for the Palestinians.”
“I wonder,” offered Oliver, “why the Puritans didn’t go to Palestine. They wouldn’t have had to travel so far, and the land was nearly as much of a wilderness then as this land here was then.”
“Good question,” agreed Slavey. “And the land is holy for everyone. But the Canaanites might have put up more of a fight than the native Americans, as the Zionists are finding there now.”
“Legalities and politics,” scowled Oliver. “Confusion on the earth.”
“That’s why we’re here,” smiled Slavey. “To make things plain.”
By now, I had joined the Army Air Corps and was at that air base outside Montgomery, where Theresa was working as a seamstress. And we had our long conversations as well, though segregation made that difficult.
“How’s it going with the NAACP?” I asked her, sitting on the bench at the bus-stop in front of the Empire Theatre, where Hank Williams was about to become famous, a white man who learned from a black one, maybe too much.
“Legalities and politics,” she scowled. “Confusion on the earth.”
“That’s why we’re here,” I smiled. “To make things plain.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s crazy. How can it not be plain that people are being slaughtered for nothing? Yet the legalities here hardly permit mention of the slaughter. These Earthlings call it violation of civil rights. Civil rights are nothing, abstraction. Slaughter is something. It’s bloody death.
“We have a flag we put up outside our office almost every day. It doesn’t have stars or stripes or anything symbolic on it. It has plain English words and not many and but one with more than one syllable: ‘A man was lynched today.’
“’Today.’ That’s the one word with two syllables! Do you think the problem might be that two syllables is too many, not plain enough?
“Today! Not before the Civil War. Not before the American Revolution. Not before Moses led his people out of Egypt. Today is when a man was lynched, here and now and leaving a family with no brother or no father, with one fewer person to love them and feed them, today and tomorrow and year after year, as long as they may live, beyond today, every day. How, in this hell, don’t they understand?
“How’s it going at the NAACP? Civil rights is how it's going, legalities. It’s strategies and precedents, trying to use previous insufficiencies as an excuse to be not quite as insufficient now. You know I’ve lived forever, but here in this grotesque mess I’ve learned to be impatient. Why can’t we just be plain today?"
“I’m sorry, Theresa,” I said. “I wish it were as simple as the Gordian knot.”
She bowed her Earthly head. She raised it again, but not apparently happily.
“It’s simpler,” she answered. “But we don’t have an Alexander great enough.”
I didn’t try to answer. She was working at answers far beyond my forte.
“That’s my point,” she went on. “It’s as plain to me as the blue of that sky we flew through to get here. But I don’t know how to explain it through the superficialities and subterfuge, the legalities of lunacy. All one should need to say is that it’s bad to cause suffering. But Earthlings say that themselves, and do it nonetheless.”
I still had a lot to learn, from Theresa and from the Earthlings of this time. I had joined the Air Corps both for the fun of flying and to go to school on the G. I. Bill, not only to make powerful friends but also to learn their points of view and the points of view that had become academic around Earth and in this nation. My parents here weren’t nearly as colorful or inspiring as those of my companions, the parents of my cohorts in this project to try again to save this world. And there was no way my Earth-parents could pay for me to go to Yale and meet the people and learn the secrets of Skull and Bones.
But let me be more specific. I guess it’s time to tell you more about my Earth upbringing now, how I decided to go to Yale and how I knew about Skull and Bones, and about Beatrice. This was all key to my mission’s success.
First, my Earth-parents pretty much ignored me, both being alcoholics. My father was promising when young but had drunk his way out of a career in accounting, and my mother had dropped out of school after three efforts to pass the ninth grade, because of what was then called a nervous breakdown.
“You graduate from high school,” said my father, when I told him I was thinking of going to Yale, “and, after that, I don’t give a damn what you do.”
“You’re not so muckin’ fuch,” said my mother, when I told her I was accepted, and I thought of Slavey’s mother being committed for her care.
I didn’t then bother to analyze the relationship of that attitude and my parents’ alcoholism with the fact that a brother of my father’s was a United States Senator from Connecticut who was graduated from Yale. But, although the senator never visited our home, he helped me some. And Lev advised me well, both early and late.
My academic performance in the New Orleans Catholic school system might have gotten me admitted to Yale, and the G. I. Bill paid most of my expenses. But my uncle got me into Skull and Bones because what I learned from Lev impressed him, and so did the rich boys I met in flight school. And, also, of course, my war record helped. But Beatrice would help me most of all. As she did in everything, in every way.
“You know the physical differences between men and women,” said Lev on the levee on an afternoon of my Earthling adolescence, maybe incorrectly assuming that my otherwise preoccupied parents had told me such facts of life.
“Do you know why rape is impossible?” my father had asked me, on a rare occasion of his talking while walking with me on Earth.
“No,” I answered, knowing this was one of what my father thought were jokes.
“Because,” he said without a hint of a smile, maybe or maybe not because he had well learned the common policy of never laughing at one’s own jokes, “a woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down.”
I didn’t laugh at my father, and I didn’t speak in response to Lev. My father didn’t seem to notice that I didn’t laugh, and Lev didn’t expect me to answer. My father went on with his thoughts of himself, and Lev went on talking to me.
“But, also,” Lev spoke on, “there are important differences in character.
“Women are more steadfast and admire others especially for that, while men are less predictable and admire others especially for that. That difference is the usual cause for failure of marriage, divorce of love, divorce.
“Most women wish to stand by their man, but most men would like to lie by any woman, however much they love their wives. Women value family and home more than men do, and men use that as an excuse to stick their wives at home while they go off gallivanting. Men are by far the weaker sex.
“I put some of that in War and Peace,” he said. “But I didn’t understand it much myself yet then. Prince Andre and his father understand each other, feeling that leaving the little pregnant princess to go to war was both most honorable and most burdensome from having to care about the princess and the child. The burden the little princess most felt was having her husband go into harm’s way. At least I showed him sorry in the end.
“Men rake in more money and think they rule the world, but women rule the world because they spend most of the money. They don’t always sign the checks or swipe the credit-cards or push the computer-buttons, but they make the main decisions for the most important purchases for their family. Men mostly do that for their toys or for means to rake in more money for women to spend, and war despite all offering of peace.
“And, deep in their hearts, all rational people know that. Both men and women know in their hearts that women care more about the most important things than men do. So it’s a rotten shame that no woman has ever been president of the United States, and it’s a rottener shame that a woman would have to be as trivial as a man to change that. The president’s job is to rake in wealth for the homeland, by any means necessary.
“Well, anyway,” offered Lev, “My prince was right about one thing. He shouldn’t have married the little princess before he’d gone to war, and that’s my advice to you. I know how you feel about that little girl you’re taking to your school dances, and I know you know the hard rain that is coming. Go to your flight school, and fly your machines of destruction, and win your war. Do that before you marry that little girl and start a family. Do that for sure before you marry her. What’s her name? Beatrice?”
“Yes,” I said, “Beatrice.”
Beatrice was better than I was. She wasn’t beautiful by the 1950’s standards of the United States. She’d never have made the center of Playboy magazine, as did her friend Norma Jean. But an aura of peace and grace pervaded her presence, maybe partly from her being the oldest of three children with an overweening but seldom present father, and a mother who died when her children were young, after loving them well.
All that would serve our mission well, partly because the Constitution of the United States wouldn’t permit my being at the top of its overt power-hierarchy long enough to do all I had to do there. So Beatrice was going to have to be not only the wife of a president of the United States but also one’s mother.
Her family also was better than mine economically. She didn’t live in the project, but in a Victorian house on Esplanade Avenue. My dad had drunk himself to death by the time I met Beatrice, and our only family income was a pension from his having spent six months in the United States navy in the Spanish American war before being discharged for arthritis from shoveling coal on a ship. And Beatrice’s brother and sister thought they were better than I was in other ways also.
“I had no idea you were so intelligent,” said her sister to me when I was graduated valedictorian from my Catholic high school and let them know I was on my way to Yale. “We thought you were stupid. You never talk to us.”
“Yeah,” said her brother. “And you listen to classical music.”
And my mother was afraid Beatrice might be better than I was.
“She’s not so muckin’ fuch,” she said as soon as she’d met her.
But my mother wished the best for me, and Beatrice’s siblings knew Beatrice loved me, and they wished for her whatever she wished for herself, and her father didn’t much care. At least he didn’t care beyond his grasp.
“I’m the father of this house,” he said, to pretend to power and care when she introduced me to him, as he read pulp fiction in his bed of an evening, when she was too young to be going out at night, “and what I say goes.”
My mother said what she had to say to clear her conscience of whatever might happen, and Beatrice’s father said what he had to say to clear his conscience of whatever might happen, and Beatrice and I went our way very well.
Lev, hearing me repeat her name, smiled but looked down again into the river. A freighter’s foghorn sounded as the freighter passed us, its waterline well into the river.
“Tell me again,” I asked, “Why you renounced your books.”
“I didn’t appreciate women enough,” he answered, and I took his advice.
I hoped he’d meet my parents, when at last we helped him get to Heaven.
My Earth brother liked nothing better than killing deer and smaller animals and fishing in the bayous. As soon as he was graduated from high school, he moved across Lake Pontchartrain to Hammond. The town had played as a perfect backdrop for the film In the Heat of the Night, and he fit perfectly in the town as a worker in a small wood-products factory, peeling veneer from trees harvested there and anywhere else. Eventually, he became a buyer for the company, traveling across the United States finding wood for their products, and he learned to play golf. But he still preferred hunting and fishing. So we could never talk together much.
Lev, in War and Peace, shows the horror of what humans call hunting. He tells of dozens of humans on horses with hundreds of hounds, chasing a wolf. After the humans drive the wolf into the track of the pack of dogs, the dogs disable the wolf until she’s weak enough for a human to dismount from his horse and cut her throat. After that triumph, which the humans call the thrill of the chase, they turn their strongest and fastest dogs to do the same to a hare. Then they hang the wolf and cut off the feet of the hare, as trophies. Lev met Dylan Thomas in his ghostly travels, in New York City at the White Horse Tavern. Passing out in the gutter in front of the bar, Dylan died drunk.
My drunken Earth-father fished but never hunted. He fished all day long sometimes, from a rowboat with nothing but a cane pole with line and bobber and sinker and hook and some bait, most often a worm. He was raised in Michigan near Albion, and he told me once nostalgically that there in winter he’d fished with a short steel pole through a hole in the ice and stood there all day long, not for the thrill of each little catch, but for the peace. Wherever or whyever, what he caught was supper for our family, never a trophy. I guess my Earth brother would think that weak of him. I don’t know if that father of ours is in Heaven. But I know he sought plainness.
I know my Earth mother is in Heaven, for her plainness.
My Earth sister married someone like my Earth brother and also moved to Hammond, where they bought a Victorian house and decorated it with blue and pink knick-knacks and family photographs, and not one single work of art. My sister said she liked Barbra Streisand, but she owned none of her recordings, nor a stereo system. She worked as a receptionist for some psychotherapists and learned some of their vocabulary. She talked about relationships and closure, medication and manic depression. I couldn’t listen to her talk about Beatrice. Beatrice was lovely.
Beatrice’s siblings spent no time with mine, although mine would have welcomed that. To them, Beatrice was upper class, and therefore desirable for the status of the relationship, while not for the actuality. So my siblings expressed forgiveness of Beatrice’s siblings, while Beatrice’s hardly spoke of mine.
The last time I saw Beatrice’s brother he had founded his own church and was trying to promote it with a CD of himself performing what he called gospel rock. He asked me whether I still listened to AM radio music. His e-mail address was pastorpete@aol.com. What was his rationale? His motive?
The last time I saw Beatrice’s sister, she had dropped out of college and married an automobile mechanic who said he was into Zen. She reminded me that her IQ had been in the top ten-percent of all the citizens of Louisiana. She said that e-mail was too inorganic. If so, from or for what?
Anyway, for all my sympathy, I needed plainer friends. Beatrice visited her siblings from time to time, because Beatrice is a lovely woman, besides being their sister. But I curbed that unfamilial influence from my Earth family.
Except a leak I’ll mention later.
In despair.