An excerpt from my memoir, From Where I Stand, a story of love across race and time.
This post follows from a previous one, “You going to that party?”
A few days before, the deacons of my father’s church threatened him that, if he allowed his children’s party to go on as planned, with both Black and white friends invited, they would ask for his resignation. He refused to cancel the party.
Saturday, December 13, 1969, was a crisp day, bright and sunny. First thing in the morning, the brown Bermuda grass was curled and covered in frost. Every exhale hung in front of my face in a small cloud.
I was up and out early, because Marjie Boal and I were going with our faculty advisor to the Beta Club Convention. Attendance at the convention was sparse. There were exhibits set up in the hallways, but few people to look at them. And I was the only person to audition for the Talent Contest, singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” unaccompanied. (I won.) We had lunch there and then headed back.
When we pulled up to the parsonage, my dad was out in the yard with a shotgun. I had never seen it before.
“Oh, this old shotgun that Dad gave me when I was 14—” he said. “Just want to be sure it will shoot.”
MaMaw and Granddaddy were visiting us over the weekend. Granddaddy was already dying with the lung cancer that would take him from us the following February. On the weekend of December 13th and 14th, he felt well enough to come for a visit, and they drove down from Princess Anne on Friday the 12th.
All day, my mother was cleaning and getting the house ready. Dad brought folding chairs over from the church. Our Christmas tree stood in the back corner of the family room, its branches strung with lights and hung with ornaments that had been in the family for years. At the top was a golden angel, lit from inside.
The stereo stood next to the tree. Sitting on top of the polished cabinet was a stack of record albums, a selection of all of my favorite groups: the Association, the Monkees, the Fifth Dimension.
I came across my mom in the living room late in the afternoon. She was moving the lamps over next to the picture window and closing the curtains.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“Oh! I’m just moving the lamps over to the curtain.”
“Yeah—but why?”
“Well,” she hesitated, “so that, if anyone walks through the living room tonight, their shadow won’t be cast on the curtain. You know, in case there’s any trouble—”
“Do you think there’s gonna be trouble?!”
“No, no….” Her voice, higher than usual, trailed off. “But just in case.”
In the early evening, Dad and I drove into town to pick up Marjorie Gill and Marjie Boal. Just down the road from the parsonage was a big white sign with bold black letters, in front of the Stony Hill Fire Department: “TURKEY SHOOT! December 13!” The parking lot out front was full, and behind the station, the yard was flooded with lights.
As we passed on the way back to the house, Marjie rolled down the window and called out, as a joke, “Hey! We’re having an integrated party! Come on down—”
“ROLL UP THAT WINDOW!” Dad snapped.
She rolled it up without another word, and we pulled into the carport in silence.
While my grandparents kept 9-year-old Bryant occupied, watching TV in our parents’ bedroom, my friends, my brother John, and I gathered in the family room.
I felt uneasy as the party began. My mother moving the lamps, my father testing his old shotgun, the way he had snapped at Marjie—all of these had shaken me, set me on edge.
But a hearty fire crackled in the fireplace. Music was playing on the stereo, and the Christmas tree lights slowly blinked on and off. We mingled. We moved about the room, talking. Joking, laughing.
After an hour, I began to relax.
About 9:00 p.m., Bryant came padding through the family room in his pajamas on his way to the kitchen. He wanted popcorn.
Popcorn sounded like a good idea to all of us! We crowded toward the kitchen—which was a lucky thing, because it moved us out of the center of the family room.
John Steely got his popcorn first. Since the door into the kitchen was too crowded to get back through, he took a detour through the dining room and living room. His path took him right past the curtained picture window.
I was standing by the kitchen door, chatting with William and Marjie. William stood to my right, and Marjie, in front of me.
The Fifth Dimension were singing, This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Age of Aquarius….
BOOM. I heard an explosion behind me, sharp and sudden like a thunderclap. I spun around to see the wood paneling splintered, pockmarked with holes. Oh no, I thought, Mom is gonna be so mad. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. Maybe someone lit a firecracker and threw it behind the couch….
My father yelled, “Hit the floor! And cut the lights!”
Seconds before the blast, Dad was fiddling with the stereo when Steely reentered the family room through the front hall. “And that’s how come me to turn,” Dad said, “because he came in the door and said something. About the time I was turning, I head a BOOM, and I saw the wall open up.”
Marjie said that she saw sparks in the wall before she heard the explosion. “Couldn’t figure out what it was….”
“I knew exactly what it was,” Dad told me later. “And I hollered, Hit the floor, because I knew somebody had fired into the house.”
At first nobody moved. We remained where we were, stunned.
My father yelled again, “HIT THE FLOOR!” That time, we dropped where we stood—all but Mike, Silas, and William.
Dad saw the three boys eyeing the sliding glass door on the back of the house. He thought they might be considering making a run for it through the woods.
I reached up to pull Mike down with my left hand and grabbed William’s hand with my right. Mike and Silas lay down pretty quickly. But William stayed standing, looking down at all of us with a blank stare.
I pulled on William’s hand as hard as I could. It took all my strength, and still I couldn’t pull him down to the floor. At last he relented and lay down right beside me.
He never let go of my hand. We clung to each other’s hands so tightly that my fingers began to go numb. A ring with my birthstone bit into my skin, but I never let go. Neither of us ever let go.
My mother’s first thought was, I can’t believe one of these stupid kids has brought a firecracker into this house. She plopped down on the corner of the fireplace.
William said, “Mrs. Shipp, you need to get down. You need to get down lower.”
She leaned forward to lower her head, but she never did get down on the floor with us.
“Well!” she said. “At least we didn’t get blood on their precious parsonage.”
Dad took off for the bedroom, grabbed the shotgun and shells, and loaded the gun. He came charging back through the family room.
He told Mom to call the police.
When the sheriff answered, she spoke quickly. “Somebody has shot through the window. We need the police to come.”
“Yeah,” he drawled, “we knew you was gonna have some trouble out there tonight….”
Stunned by his response, she said, “We need somebody to come here NOW, and help us get these children home safely.”
“Well…we’ll be out there soon as we can….”
The sheriff did not arrive for another 45 minutes. Three quarters of an hour it took him to come six miles.
By the time my dad reached the carport with his shotgun, the gunman was gone.
After a long while, we were given permission to sit up and turn the lights back on. “But stay down,” Dad said. “In case they circle back to try again.”
We sat huddled on the linoleum floor. Bowls of uneaten popcorn were scattered all around us.
Mike pointed to Silas’ bowl. “Are you gonna finish that?”
Silas shook his head and gave him a look, Are you playing with me right now?!
And Marjie laughed, incredulous, as Mike popped the popcorn into his mouth.
Deputy Sheriff Burley Munn–whose daughter was one of my white classmates–arrived almost an hour after my mom’s call.
He strolled into the house as if on a courtesy call, giving a casual glance to the shattered window, the holes in the wall above the living room couch, the perforated wood paneling in the family room. He leaned back on his heels.
“Well, ya know” —he stretched the o like taffy— “it’s kinda hard to catch ’em ’less ya catch ’em red-handed.”
He took one shotgun pellet. He and another deputy agreed to provide an escort into town.
“They didn’t look at anything,” my mother said.
My parents put Marjorie and Marjie into their car. Mom told Dad, in no uncertain terms, that she was going with him.
I have no memory of the ride into town, but Mom said that the sheriff drove so far ahead on that curvy, dark country road, you could barely see his taillights. If there had been an ambush, he wouldn’t have seen a thing. And Dad had given Granddaddy the shotgun, which left us defenseless.
When we returned to the parsonage, we started moving beds. My bedroom and my brothers’ room were on the front of the house. Dad was concerned that whoever fired the shot might come back and firebomb the front rooms.
Mom and Dad put a mattress at the foot of their bed for Bryant. MaMaw and Granddaddy had brought a roll-away bed to set up in the living room, now covered in broken glass. They moved into the family room, where John and I slept on mattresses on the floor. That way, Dad said, all of us were protected by two walls and a layer of bricks. Just in case.
“And that’s the way we slept that night,” my mother said later with a cheerless laugh. “What little bit we slept.”
As we settled down for the night, the fire, forgotten and untended, burned down to embers. The way I remember it, the lights in the family room were all on, bright. But my dad said that the room was dark.
Dad sat down on one of the folding chairs, holding 4×6 index cards in his hands. He started rewriting his sermon for the next morning.
I can still see him, cards and pen in hand, rocking slowly back and forth. He stared without seeing into the space between him and the floor, mumbling the same words over and over.
“I never thought they would try to kill children. I thought they would come for me.”
holy discomfort: Love letters from a reluctant Christian 