The fourth in a series of chapters from my memoir, The Edge of All the Light You Have (formerly, From Where I Stand).
This post follows “This is our fight, too.”
Two days after the shooting, it was Monday morning and back to school. After they dropped us off, Mom and Dad went with MaMaw and Granddaddy for breakfast in a little restaurant just north of the Fords’ house, where North Main connected with the highway out of town.
The owner came to their table and said in a low voice, “You’re welcome here any time. I want you to know that.” Mom said later, “That meant so much to us.”
My grandparents were returning that morning to Virginia. As breakfast ended, Granddaddy reached into his pocket and pulled out all the cash he had on him, about $50.
He told my father, “You need to get your stuff moved. Soon as you can. Get out of there.”
MaMaw and Granddaddy left for Virginia, and Dad got on the phone, thinking that lining up somebody to move us might take a couple of weeks. “And I called this moving company, the first one I called, and I said to him, ‘I need to move,’ and he said, ‘When?’ And I said, ‘Well, as soon as possible…. I’d like to move today—’”
The man on the phone said that, as a matter of fact, he had a crew assembled for a move that morning, but the people had canceled at the last minute. “If you want ’em, we can send ’em on out.”
Mom and Dad drove out to the parsonage to meet the crew. The three Black men looked first at the picture window scarred with jagged holes, then back to my dad. Shotgun in hand, Dad explained to them what had happened two nights before. Around the house, the sound of random gunshots filled the woods.
“They got us packed and moved out of there in no time,” Dad said.
After school, John and I rode with our parents to gather the last of our things. We moved back and forth against the continual background of scattered gun fire.
When a car with three white men pulled into the yard, Dad stepped within reach of his loaded shotgun.
One man got out. “We didn’t hear until this afternoon about the shooting,” he apologized.
The men were reporters from the two main Raleigh newspapers, The News and Observer and The Raleigh Times. They explained that they were late coming to the story, because no official police report had been filed.
My father led them into the parsonage. He took them through the living room and family room. He showed them the walls and shared the story. They may have asked me a few questions, I don’t remember. The photographer snapped a photo of my father standing beside the living room window, pointing to large holes in the glass.
Then they asked my parents for a photo of me.
The photographer had me stand in front of the window. He asked me to angle my body so that he could get a shot of my profile against the jagged edges of what remained of the windowpanes. He snapped several photos in rapid succession. In the one the paper published, my eyes are dazed, unfocused. I can see out of the corner of my eye the living room wall scarred by black holes.
I don’t remember ever looking closely at that wall. I wish I had.
But maybe it’s just as well I didn’t.
I am so far removed from the idealistic 16-year-old white girl I see in the photo. The shotgun blast had severed my past from my future. Any innocence I possessed lay shattered on the living room floor as surely as the glass of a picture window that showed me only what whiteness wanted me to see.
My father looked anxiously at the sun sinking to the horizon. “We’ve got to go. I want to be out of this neck of the woods by sundown,” he said to the reporters.
On Tuesday afternoon, John and I sang again with the youth chamber choir, this time for a school assembly at Wake Forest High School.We stood on the basketball court, looking up into the bleachers. The gym was packed with students and their parents, eyes fixed on us. I stepped forward to sing my solo:
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die
For poor o’nery people….
Mom was rushing from the elementary school to get there before we sang. She had signed up to be room mother for Bryant’s class for their Christmas party. Irritated that she was late, she parked the car. As she moved toward the gym, we were already singing.
“I listened to you singing all the way across from the car,” she said. “It was the most beautiful sound coming out through those big exhaust fans. It filled the parking lot—”
When Mary birthed Jesus, ’twas in a cow’s stall
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all…
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall
And the promise of ages it then did recall.
Mom paused. “I don’t remember anything after that. I don’t remember getting together with you, I don’t remember going back to get Bryant. That’s all I remember.”
If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
A star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
Or all of God’s angels in heav’n for to sing,
He surely could have it, ’cause he was the King.
The melody of the carol is mournful and never arrives at a final cadence. The end leaves the listener hanging.
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die
For poor o’nery people like you and like I
I wonder as I wander
Out under the sky.
One of the teachers took my mom’s arm at the end of the assembly. As the tears rolled down her face, she said that, when she heard “that young girl” singing those words and thought about what had happened to us—
She stopped, unable to continue.
The day before, the reporters had snapped one last photo of us as a family, all of us except Bryant. We are standing in the front yard, the broken window behind us. Dad is unshaven and wears a plaid work shirt. He tilts his head like he has a question. Dressed in our school clothes, John and I look stunned. Mom pulls a large black overcoat tightly around her. She ducks her chin and looks straight into the camera lens, her eyes brimming with distrust and underscored by dark circles.
She always hated that photo. “We look like refugees from a war zone.”
holy discomfort: Love letters from a reluctant Christian 