BROTHERS by Susan A.H. Grace

Henry Noble’s nine-year-old self wears a bright green canvas cap with a half-moon bill that shadows his eyes. His brother Jesse’s eleven-year-old self has a hat made of straw with a rolled-up brim that circles his head like a halo. Long-sleeved shirts and overalls, bare feet, young hands as big and worked and callused as men’s. Till soil. Plant seeds. Harvest crops. At dusk, run wild in the woods – a forbidden still and sips of shine; sickle moon and pinprick stars; wade in the river but race away home when the fingerless ghost comes humming his mournful dirge.
Henry Noble dreams. On the monitor above his head, lurid green numbers flicker – a hundred ten, a hundred thirty-two, a hundred fifty-three and climbing. Down the dimly lit hallway, orthopedic shoes whisk over cracked linoleum. The night attendant braces herself, eases through the door, notes the time: 4:29 a.m. She is young and new and not eager to encounter her first dead body. Luck is with her. The heart rate has already begun to drop. Tubes snake into the old man’s nostrils, delivering oxygen in mechanical, measured streams; a needle taped into his vein doles out peace. This is what it looks like, thinks the girl, if they suck everything out and the bones and skin are left behind. He is hardly bigger than a child. Beyond the window a net of thin clouds captures the setting moon. Her shift, thankfully, is nearly done. Stable at seventy-one, she notes. Then: blood pressure, oximeter, temperature, time. On the cramped nightstand, between lamp and bible, a small easel-backed picture frame catches her eye. In the glow of the nightlight, she sees two young Black men in military dress, no older than she is now but from decades ago. Their uniforms are different but the men are similar. Brothers. Which one, she wonders, lies here?
Jesse, the old man whispers. What was that, Mr. Noble? she says. Mr. Noble? Tenderly she touches his shoulder – it is like holding a door knob. She glances at his numbers one last time before she decides he must be wrapped in a dream.
A thousand coins swirl in the sky. One falls through the clouds. It lands on edge in autumn rain spatter, rolls through winter freeze, turns lazy circles around spring dew, settles on a rising, summer sun. Reba Sue Pretlow. Henry can see Reba Sue’s ten-year-old self – pink as a new rabbit, teeth like little pearls, sun-freckled, sun-dappled – lobbing dirt clods at red-winged blackbirds and hitting not a one. You see that, Jesse Noble? she hollers. I almost got him. Jesse shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Henry grins, utterly distracted – patchwork dress, errant hem, knobby, coltish legs. Jesse calls, Swing it high! Henry responds, Swing it low! Their axes graze the Virginia sky. Split wood, stack wood, fill the stove. Butcher a hog. Pick some greens. On Sunday put on your shoes – clap your hands; stomp your feet. Sing your praises to God.
The night shift clocks out; the day shift clocks in. On a stained Formica counter in the basement kitchen, a cook in a hairnet scoops oats from a vat and brown sugar from a tub. In no time at all oatmeal is ladled and juice is poured. Carts wheel away one two three four into the elevator, down the halls.
In a field of brown grass, Henry’s thirteen-year-old self pries rocks from the body of the earth. Jesse’s fifteen-year-old self gives each rock a name and returns it to its grave. This one’s Levi Harrington. This one’s Sam Hose. This one’s July Perry. On and on. Seven in all today. They cut em off, says Jesse, and passed em out as souvenirs. That’s why he’s fingerless – that ghost. Same with the toes. Henry shudders and averts his eyes. It’s a retold story as monstrous as the lynching itself. For a while they sit in solemn silence. A chevron of geese glides high overhead. From her father’s collard field, Reba Sue Pretlow calls out to Jesse and waves. Henry sees her drop everything and bound their way; and her sunhat, snatched by the wind, cart-wheels across the sky; and her hair made of buttermilk ripples past her waist. Jesse smiles broadly and waves. A shot rings out. The chevron shatters and a single goose falls from heaven. Jesse leans toward Henry, a hand cupped at his mouth, a secret ready to spill. But in that watery interlude when sleep begins to melt and the mind to stir, the dreamscape falters. Wind-shaped words from his brother’s lips sift past his ear like feathers decoupled from a wing.
Morning. Alone. A rented bed, a shoebox room. A window no bigger than an open bible. The eve of his one hundred and fifth birthday – a detail he will not remember until the White woman who changes his sheets reminds him, and the doctor who boomerangs through salutes and tosses out, Well done, Henry, good for you, as the door swings wide and whispers shut. Through the window he can see a granite sky and a faraway hawk riding thermals. Wind bellows. The building creaks. Henry Noble laughs. He pictures a train barreling down the walkway, come to take him home. The clatter-clack of wind-whipped branches could be metal wheels on loose rails. The swoosh of runaway leaves could be plumes of smoke billowing from the stack. Rain, his bones shriek. Gonna spill buckets of rain today. The kind that falls sideways and drags rivers over their banks. Good, thinks Henry and he laughs again.
His fingers find the small box at his side and feel for the center button. He presses it with his thumb and the bullfrog in the bed motor croaks. Used to be when he was young, sleep was the disruption. Couldn’t wait for the day. Soon as he got old, soon as his world got smaller, soon as he wound up here, that truth spun on its heel. When the bed gets to the sitting angle he favors, his thumb relaxes. Silence ensues. Even the wind that could be a train holds its ferocious breath.
On his bedtable he sees a bowl of oatmeal and he laughs. Oatmeal because he’s got no teeth. Oatmeal to keep him regular. What a hoot they’re worried about his bowels. Once when he was in his thirties, at a meeting meant to make great progress in the world, surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and unknowns, someone – he can’t remember who now – asked him why he laughed so much. Don’t know, he’d said. Must be I get it. The man he can no longer recall said, Get what? And that made Henry howl.
The hawk is gone. A passing shadow. The drone of traffic, the purr of oxygen – sounds that soothe. That shutter his eyes. That send faces flashing across the in-between on the way to the gallery of dreams. Room by room, like a hawk riding a thermal. Forms, figures, scenes: some he knows; others, a mystery. In time he lands: Summer of 1932. Still images stir and ripple to life. Here, the Depression rages. Here, despair ravages souls. From the back platform of a special train fitted with microphones and speakers, a candidate called Franklin Delano Roosevelt belts out hope to a bedraggled crowd: I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. The men murmur. They kick the dirt and rub their chins. Listless applause. The wheels begin to turn, the train rolls out, on to the next town, the next weary throng.
Henry is fourteen when his father sends Jesse and the cousins down to the Grange to pick up their allotment of seeds. There is no telling how long they’ll be gone. They will line up behind the building with other Negroes and wait until the White farmers out front have received theirs. It could be an hour; it could be three. While they wait for Jesse, Henry’s father points out the cylinder head on the old Wallis Cub tractor and applies a wrench to the nuts. The tractor barn smells of oil and metal and the ghost of livestock long since sold or eaten. On a pegboard fixed to the back wall are too many tools for Henry to count. Most homemade. Who can afford new?
Henry leans against the drive wheel and watches his father – a lean man with strong hands, muscled forearms, and skin marbled with dozens of scars. Each scar, his father has told him, contains a bitter chapter in a brutish story. Ordinarily, silence runs through his veins. But in his weaker moments, when his tongue will not be corralled, the elder Noble laments out loud. A juggler, he tells Henry, a genius at straddling the line. With a waggle of his fingers he motions Henry over and drops nuts and bolts into his cupped hands. Believe it or not, he says, the Northern Negroes turned out for him. The progressive Republicans, the Jews, the Catholics – they marked his box too. Not us, Henry – we Southern Negroes still got no vote. Off comes the cylinder head. At the work bench, Henry’s father begins to grind the valves. We’ll see, he shouts over the noise, which promises get kept and which’ll be forgotten. Tell you this, if we get anything it’ll be crumbs. They’ll sweep us their crumbs and call it progress. You watch. When he finishes the valves, he goes to the pegboard and selects another tool. Set those nuts and bolts over there, Henry. Let me show you how to get the carbon off the pistons, then you try it.
Federal prohibition ends; Virginia drags her feet. She’s still working out how to regulate, oversee, and supervise the sale and consumption of alcohol. No matter. The still in the woods cooks like a dream and there’s always a jug kept behind. Henry is fifteen, Jesse, seventeen, and they don’t need much to get woozy, to stretch out on the duff after a grueling day, to watch treetops spin riotously. Suddenly, venomously, Jesse shouts: We got to change the world, Henry. Henry laughs. He is nearly cross-eyed looking at two moons shimmyshuffle over a patch of black sky. I mean it. I truly do. Okay, says Henry. Okay. The brothers sober up a little under the weight of that pledge. Harlem, Henry. There’s a place in New York called Harlem. That’s where we should be. Henry spools Harlem through his tipsy brain and says, Just us? Jesse rolls over, a hand cupped at his mouth, and leans in to deliver a secret to his brother’s ear.
Henry, you awake? Henry? The White woman who changes his sheets sits in a chair wedged in the space between his bed and the wall, a mound of clean bedclothes in her lap. Henry drags a hand across the corner of his mouth where gummy spittle has gathered. Oh, hell, he mumbles. Help me up then. How about, she says, we go outside for some air and maybe you could finish your story from Monday. Henry Noble laughs. He has no idea what story he started Monday that needs finishing. He has no idea when Monday was or what today is. What he knows is that it’s going to rain. The woman follows his gaze to the blackening sky and tells him that on second thought it might be too cold. She says, Right here will have to do. Then she says, But first. With a flourish, her hand disappears into the folded linens and out comes a small, cardboard box tied with a yellow silk ribbon. Henry’s eyes brim with confusion. Her laugh is just like Jesse’s, joyful as a sparrow; not at all complicated like Henry’s. It’s a gift, Henry. I can’t come by tomorrow, so I brought it today. She leans over and places the box on his lap. Happy day before your one hundred and fifth birthday.
For a moment they are quiet. The wind in the eaves, the hum of oxygen; and an old woman’s wail far down the hall: Take me home, oh please take me home.
Henry raises his bed another notch and chuckles: A hundred and five? Time’s fun when you’re having flies. She says, Did you just quote Kermit the Frog? She has such a fine laugh, this woman. Nope, he says. Greenie cribbed it from me. He cannot remember the last time anyone gave him a gift. He cannot think what this White woman who showed up one day out of thin air to change his sour sheets could have brought him that he might need. Or want. The touch of her hand at the back of his elbow coaxes his arm; his big hand floats forward; crooked fingers pull the ribbon’s end.
It falls away like petals on a primrose.
In the early morning hours of his seventeenth birthday, Henry Noble wakes with a sensation of doom. He jerks up in the bed he shares with Jesse, but where Jesse should be is cool as glass. The squeal of the woodstove door, the whump of wood shoved in, the clang of the iron poker – and voices: Anger? Agony? He sprints lightfooted to the end of the hall and peers through the dim living room to the lamp-lighted kitchen. A half-dozen Nobles surround his brother who is naked but for his flour-sack undershorts. His left eye is swollen, nearly shut; a gash on his forehead pulses blood down the length of his cheek, his chest, leg, floor. Nothing makes sense. A low keening rises from Jesse’s throat and his body quakes and his head jerks each time Henry’s grandmother dabs at the wound with a rag gone red. Oh Lord Jesus God in heaven, she moans, while Henry’s mother laces her fingers and weeps. Their uncle Jasper, a victim of lightning, cries to the ceiling: L-l-l-lynch us all, b-b-b-burn the place down and l-l-l-lynch us all. And Jasper’s boys, Henry’s cousins, both in their early twenties, curse Jesse, curse Reba Sue, curse their Maker and shake their heads in growing alarm.
Amid this nightmarish spectacle, Henry’s father says nothing. Feet and back bare; yesterday’s workpants thrown on in haste. In the lamplight, his shoulder blades shine with sweat. The stoker of woodstove flames. A twist of the poker, a quick jab. The last remnants of bloody overalls vanish in the belly of fire. The eyes in the back of his head find Henry: Get your brother some clothes. He’s got a train to catch before sunrise.
From the cardboard box, Henry gently extracts his gift – an old photograph peeling around the edges, as though it has never found a home in the sleeve of an album, as though it has been passed, hand to hand, down through the years, cherished. On the bottom right corner, the photographer’s stamp: L&M Studio, Tuskegee, AL – 1942. Henry sees none of this without his glasses. But even without his glasses, he knows the man in the picture.
Jesse’s good eye goes wide. Train? What train? Where am I going? To the cousins, Henry’s father says, Go find that Pretlow boy’s body, haul it as far into the hills as you can, bury it so deep it’ll never be found. To Jesse he says, Alabama. He says, They got a New Deal program. He says, You’ll go plant trees till your arms fall off. After that enlist. Silence gathers and falls like ashes. Then: Be best if you don’t find your way back here.
The gift rests in Henry’s palm. It’s Jesse all right. And it strikes Henry just then that his brother seems to be dressed in the same service uniform as the picture on his nightstand, the picture from Italy, 1944, the Negro section on the American base.
Jesse? Henry? Oh Lord, look at you. Got myself into the Tuskegee Army Air Corps, Jesse says, the 332nd Fighter Group. Henry laughs and claps his brother on the back. A pilot? Since when do they let the Negroes fly the planes? Says he’s proud of him, admits he’s support staff with the 370th, just a driver running a deuce-and-a-half loaded with supplies to the front lines or wherever they’re needed. That sounds about right, brother – you save lives, I end them. Smile, flash, click. They hug fiercely. They promise to keep in touch, to reunite after all these years. Not now, though. Back home. After the war. Salute. Salute.
Outside the clouds split open and spill rain. Thunder cracks like artillery. The woman retrieves Henry’s glasses and places them on his face. Now he can see clearly – Jesse’s crooked grin, dark eyes filled with promise, mottled scar across his forehead like a retold story. And someone else? Henry draws the photograph closer. He examines it with parted lips and creased brow. A young White woman. Pink as a new rabbit, sun-freckled, sun-dappled. And in her arms is a blanket. And in the blanket, a tiny baby. Henry can hardly breathe.
All week he has been bump bump bumping along on the old Wallis Cub tractor, acres yet to go. They cannot afford the new FergusonBrown, one with hydraulics and a three-point hitch. Instead, at the end of each row, it is up to Henry to get off the Cub, raise up his three-furrow plow, climb back on, make the turn, get off again, drop the plow back in the soil and proceed down the next row. The year his father sent Jesse away, he fashioned a hoisting contraption to make the job easier; it is still tedious. The engine growls; the blades rattle. Bump bump bump. Abutting this field is another – a sea of cornstalks ready for harvest. He reaches the end of his row. The pale green light of the cornfield shimmers. Stalks sway; leaves rustle. As though two young brothers hide, chase, eat raw corn until their bellies groan. An echo of laughter light as mist. In his chest an ember smolders and the searing pain of Jesse’s absence flares. He gets off the tractor, lifts the plow, and like a wraith Reba Sue Pretlow steps out of the corn. A stopped heart; a seized breath. It is her and not her. This version is taller. Thinner. Childhood features all but gone. In her hair, flutter strands of corn silk.
You’re all grown up, Henry. Somewhere, I suppose Jesse is too.
At the sound of her voice the years turn to quicksand.
Do you think of him?
All the time, he whispers.
Do you miss him?
All the time.
They fall quiet. Rooted to the ground. No wind. No crows. Only a single white butterfly swims wide circles in the morning light between them. He wants to tell her of the hole in his soul, that it will never heal, that she is to blame. He is glad just then that he says none of this.
They believe, she confides, that my brother ran away with an Indian woman. They say Jesse’s somewhere planting trees. They never put the two together. Where is he, Henry? Not here in Virginia.
It’s been such a while. I don’t. I mean I doubt –
Please. Oh please tell me.
It is as though every molecule of oxygen has left the world. Never breathe a word, Henry, not a word. The pooling in her eyes; her quivering lip. His gaze falls to his feet, to the freshly cut clumps with upended green grass now dying by the blade of his plow.
Alabama, he breathes.
The rattling stalks. The gentle ticking of the leaves. Only corn now. Corn and the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains quiet as a graveyard.
Jagged light scorches the sky. The lamp on his nightstand flickers, dims, restores. Words fall from his lips like stones: This baby? The White woman who changes his sheets and pries stories from his lips takes his hand. Jesse’s daughter, she smiles. My grandmother.
Hours later Henry lies awake on clean sheets. He has refused dinner, swallowed his pills, assured the young attendant he does not want his bed lowered just yet – there are things to think about. How long has it been since he has had such a bone as this to chew on? Years? Decades? Never? The wall clock insists it is minutes before midnight. On the television a man in a yellow rain slicker stands in front of the Food Lion and reports on the storm. Henry laughs. Outside his window the storm reports on itself. You left off, she’d said, with a flood that almost cost the farm. Their hands still clasped and him nodding, I remember now, I remember. Everything aches. He can feel the rumble of an eighteen-wheeler trudge past on the highway; then it is gone. Rain clatters. Wind gusts. Relentless.
When the Rapidan River climbs her banks and sweeps over farms along the old state route, Henry is in his seventh year. He stands on a berm and watches his father survey the destruction. Tin-colored air smells of sour soil and reeks of dead fish stranded in barns, on roads, under porches. Up ahead Jesse is transfixed by a rope of flesh dangling from the beak of a turkey vulture. In the middle of the field, his father paces, mud to his calves, arms limp. Lost, he cries, and waves of fear roll off him, crippling, caustic. In Henry’s young heart, a dark glee coils: Maybe now we can move to town. Just then he spies movement, a glancing prism. He crouches. In a puddle no bigger than a dinner plate, a young trout looks at him through its startled, glassy eye. Its gills open and close in desperate pulses. Minutes later it is still.
Wednesday mornings they lug baskets to town. Get off the walkway, their mother scolds, and they leap into the street until the White folks pass. A rap at the back door of a lovely brick home. The next back door. The next. Fresh laundry exchanged for soiled. Their mother takes what’s offered. If not money – a bag of buttons, a glass bird, a piece of chocolate cake. By the time they finish supper, the cake is a sticky mess. Henry’s grandmother goes first. When it gets to Jesse, he drops his fork and runs. Henry’s mouth waters; tears cloud his eyes. All day he has dreamt of this cake. He sets his fork with Jesse’s and follows his brother out to the woods, the still, the pledge. We got to change the world, Henry
In soft lamplight, at the kitchen table, each evening before bed, they learn to read. Their mother waves a wooden spoon and whaps them on the shoulder if they bungle a word. Henry traces his finger along a verse in Isaiah and labors, But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. Now Jesse, says their mother, spoon hovering and ready. But Jesse’s voice is sure and steady, resonant, musical in Psalms. They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.
Humid nights they sleep on the porch. They drowse on cots and listen to a ruffed grouse drum his wings five miles deep in the woods. Insects chirr. The moon winks between passing clouds. Henry stirs from a dim sleep to the sound of feathery footfalls and the tender laugh of a girl. From the edge of the porch, he tracks their silhouettes until they are swallowed by shadows. Hours past midnight: a whiff of river grass and sweat, the whisper of a rustling cot. It feels as though a roving devil has slowed and turned its face in their direction.
That was a couple years before Alabama, he had told her. And my remembrance after Alabama is like broken glass. But then the war arrived. If we could prove our worth overseas, wouldn’t things change for us here? I knew Jesse would sign on. For me it was as much to escape the farm as anything else.
I forbid it, says his father. But Henry is twenty-three and has lied to the White recruiter. No he is not the last of his line. Yes he has six younger brothers at home right now. They examine his eyes, his teeth, his feet. They draw blood. Can he read? Write? Yes, yes. Exams are taken and graded. Papers stamped – Colored. Twenty hours later he boards a Jim Crow rail car with a hundred other Negroes and watches the Blue Ridge Mountains shrink to nothing.
The horror. White, Black, Brown. When covered with blood, men are men. Limbs with no bodies, bodies with no heads, faces erased, burned, unrecognizable. Henry drives his truck from the base to the front lines to the base to the front lines, and each morning at reveille, this is in his mouth: Lord, bring me back alive, dead if I’m maimed.
May 1945. Henry comes home on a Liberty ship and boards a Jim Crow rail car with ninety-one other Negroes. Nothing has changed. Don’t wear your uniform, someone says, they’ll tear it off you. And don’t dare swim in the public pool, says someone else. Don’t drink from the White only fountain or try to eat in restaurants or sit anywhere but the balcony or in the back or outside in the alley. Vote? snarls the conductor. Who do you think you are? The victory overseas does not equate to a victory at home. Nothing has changed. Not a goddamn thing has changed.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Seasons progress in a ceaseless spectacle of color and weather and memory. Sixteen hours a day, sometimes eighteen – the farm is a kind of hell. On her deathbed, his grandmother says, Don’t cry, Henry. Living is the hard part. Death is easy: Claim your sins, forget your sorrows, count your blessings. Welcome to the hereafter.
He is angry at Jesse. Jesse the pilot. The maker of pledges. Jesse who has not contacted him. Who has not reunited with him. Who is probably in Harlem or Chicago or DC doing important things with important people – We got to change the world, Henry – while Henry is left behind, laboring miserably in his father’s fields. After months of writing the wrong letter to the wrong people, asking about Jesse Isaiah Noble of the Tuskegee Air Corps, 332nd Fighter Group, USAAF, and receiving not a word, Henry, at last, mails the right letter to the right person and two weeks later his world goes dark.
With the heels of his hands he wrings tears from his eyes. He slips on his glasses to find hardly any time has passed. Three minutes to midnight. He’d love to press the button, ask the young attendant to up the morphine. But as it is he is having trouble breathing and he knows she’ll make a fuss. He clicks off the TV. The night pours in through the window. Sins, sorrows, blessings. Fallen leaves scattered across the floor.
Years pass. A thousand times he has read the Missing Aircrew Report and the We regret to inform you letter until two words swim off the pages and lodge themselves onto the underside of his eyelids: REMAINS UNRECOVERED. On a Sunday afternoon, in his thirtyfourth year, he sits in a field of brown grass. He sets the report and the letter on fire and waits for the ashes to settle. He pries a rock from the body of the earth, gives it a name, returns it to its grave. This one’s Jesse Noble.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Sometimes a jook in the back of nowhere, Delta Blues, a hand of cards. Sometimes a lover. Sometimes two. An able-bodied man, a crippled soul. Plow, sow, harvest, church. Plow, sow, harvest, church.
The storm surged and lulled. The afternoon stretched. At some point she had moved to the edge of his bed and reclaimed his hand. All those years, he had said. Fallow. I don’t know why I stayed. Guilt? Fear? A thousand times I packed a bag and a thousand times I emptied it. Jesse had been dead about ten years. I hadn’t hit forty yet, but I could smell it coming. And then in 1955 a terrible thing happened. It was August . . .
A fourteen-year-old boy leaves Chicago for Money, Mississippi, and comes home to his mother in a pine box. The world rocks on its axis. Henry feels as if someone has dropped a live grenade in his lap. No bag, no goodbye, he shakes the dust off his feet. In Chicago he weeps over the open casket, the brutalized lamb, a sight more horrific than any in the war. At the funeral he bows his head. At the gate he remembers a forgotten pledge.
In Ohio every odd job means money for food; money to send home to his father. In New York writers, singers, painters, philosophers, great and powerful activists – Muslim and Christian, Marxist and Progressive, militant and peaceful – baptize him into the struggle. In DC, his first demonstration, The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, he learns of a ruling called Brown v. Board of Education. He is one of thirty thousand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. One of a million to hear the first national address by Martin Luther King, Jr.
It takes him four tries to get into law school. He is the oldest student they have. Are you saying, he had challenged the Admissions Committee, I’m too old to change the world?
Work, school, protest, church. He volunteers with others to sit at lunch counters and wait respectfully to be harassed, beaten, jailed or all three. In time they are served.
In Alabama a bus is burned. Henry cries Count me in. When the jails are near bursting, Parchman makes room to Break their spirits, not their bones. But the Freedom Riders do not break, and at last the Interstate Commerce Commission does. Every hateful sign comes down. Yet hate stubbornly persists. In a cell on death row, next to a “convicted murderer,” something akin to a crisis in faith pierces Henry’s soul: no march, no sit-in, no demonstration, will ever change the heart of a racist. No sir, says the “murderer,” heart-changing is for God and time. Laws, justice, equality – do that. And when you get to lawyering, think of the fair trial I never got. The one that a million others won’t get. In forty-one days Henry is released. In seven months the “murderer” suicides. Upon his grave Henry lays seashells, and around the shells he plants rows of periwinkle. I will. I will.
And I did, he whispers. Trials – more won than lost. Overturned death row convictions – more than expected but never enough. A thousand Black faces whorl through his mind. A thousand mothers. Alone, pain migrating through his bones, a frenzied storm, and a clock that says a minute to midnight, Henry Jeremiah Nobel sighs.
At an NAACP convention, his law professor makes introductions. 93 Merle McCurdy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy. A pleasure. A pleasure. Later a man called Robert L. Carter drops a warm hand on Henry’s shoulder. When you graduate, get in touch, hear?
In Birmingham he attends sit-ins and meetings and boycotts designed to undermine Jim Crow. He is slammed with a high-pressure fire hose and attacked by police dogs. Like everyone else, weeks later – King in a cell penning Letter from Birmingham Jail – Henry goes back for more. The world looks on. In sorrow. In outrage. That’s me, he tells his current lover. That leg with the dog hanging off it. The effect of images broadcast nationwide galvanizes the world.
The Lincoln Memorial – two hundred fifty thousand souls March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and listen with ardent hope to the noble, heartfelt I Have a Dream. Tears stream. The applause is deafening. Oh Jesse.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed, he is eating pie where he once held a sit-in.
One Bloody Sunday, Henry is not in church. He is on a fifty-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the gunning down of Jimmie Lee Jackson, ongoing police brutality, and the outrageous violations of civil rights. Mere blocks from the start, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they are gassed, trampled by horses, beaten unconscious, whipped, hospitalized. The courts, the National Guard, the President get involved. Two weeks later they march unmolested those fifty miles, twenty-five thousand strong. On the steps of the capital Dr. King calls out, How Long, Not Long.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: What is he doing? Studying the 15th Amendment for class.
It takes seven years to graduate. Cap and gown. Magna Cum Laude. The woman he lives with is already a lawyer. She helps him study for the bar. She is on a first-name basis with Stokely, Bobby, Huey – and Malcolm before he was assassinated. It is a Long Hot Summer. Race riots erupt all across America. Break time, she says and they head for Detroit. Tear gas, bullets, bombs in bottles. She is armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic. He is armed with a pledge. In the war zone they get separated; tanks roll in. He prays she is not among the dead. Weeks later a letter arrives: Dear Henry, ship my things to this address. It is an apartment in Los Angeles. I’m glad you are alive, he pens. On a cold Tuesday in September he passes the bar. I will, he assures his mother and father, never give up.
In a crowded bar, under a veil of smoke, he drops change in a jar on the piano; his eyes meet hers as her fingers walk the keys and she cries, Strange Fruit, blood on the leaves in a voice that drips with blood. He walks out into the night and sees the road is paved with bodies. Centuries of lynchings, decades of executions. Stolen treasure. Funerals, flowers, tears.
Another surge. Another lull. She had kissed his hand and then his cheek. The photograph, she left on his lap.
Outside his window no bigger than a bible, silence has fallen. Sins claimed, sorrows forgotten, blessings counted. He can hear the hiss of oxygen, the drip of the IV. Somewhere far away, church bells ring midnight and all three hands on his clock point up. Clouds part for a sliver of moonlight and shadows crowd the room. I kept the pledge, he murmurs. Jesse smiles. Did you know you have a greatgranddaughter? And I have a great-grandniece? From miles away, he can hear orthopedic shoes on cracked linoleum racing down the hall. Jesse, he whispers.

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Susan A.H. Grace’s work has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Fiction International, and Orca Literary Journal.