Dear Classmate: Please send me a blurb about how you are spending your time for a newsletter I am preparing for our 65th reunion.”
Easy, Goshkin thought. TV. Exercise. Café.
Cafes, in her days as a PhD student, Sarah Bakewell wrote,[1] meant reading, writing, falling in and out of love, deep discussions about life, which was exactly right, except for the “love,” which, for him, was going home to Ruth, and the discussions, which increasingly trended toward cancer (Nancy’s), dementia (Rikki’s), stroke (Vic’s), heart surgery (his own), climate catastrophe (everybody’s) – and the Warriors.
James, the psyche-medicinal distributor, slid the small, clear plastic envelope toward him. “Keep in a cool, dry, dark place.”
Goshkin scanned from espresso machine to back wall. “My sock drawer, with the Ecstasy I was given last century?”
“I learned the hard way,” James said, “X breaks down quick no matter where you put it.”
..
When Goshkin mentioned that the horrors catalogued in Eric Foner’s review[2] of Margaret Burnham’s By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, (W.W. Norton. 2022) had traveled down his arm, his spoon and re-chilled his breakfast yogurt, the editor asked if he wanted to review it himself.
Goshkin doubted he could add to the discussion. He feared his fall back attitude – “Cheeky,” a fan in Edinburgh once called it – would ill suit the conversation. “Sure,” he said.
Reading the book did not change his feelings. In fact, it affected him less than Foner. For one thing, Foner had compressed the horror into 5000 words, while Burnham, though cataloguing even more, diluted them with an additional 95,000, some – okay – placing matters in historical perspective and others – cool – offering analyses of relevance, but all seeming secondary to the horror as horror when horror was what he believed the subject called for. Her prose did not shriek or howl or walk one to the edge of the plank and prod with its saber. Worse, many of her words hazed into cliche. “All hell broke loose,” Burnham related. People went on “a fool’s errand,” lived “cheek-by-jowl,” dressed “snappily.” A crow’s flight measured miles and midnight struck.
If you had an ear, as Goshkin did, it was offended. And to be offended by mere language, under the circumstances, seemed a shande.
I.
And “circumstances” was hardly the word for the 90-years of hell displayed in Burnham’s pages.
Between America’s abandonment in the 1870s of those for whose freedom the Civil War had ostensibly been fought and the successes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, in large swatches of the country, “any Black person… could have been killed by… any white person” with impunity. This was Burnham’s message – reminder – and hammer blow upon the soul book. A retired judge, now director of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, she established that police, “jointly, often collaboratively” with the “white mob” became “the centrifugal force in the regime of racial terror.” “(T)error… (became) law” and “(p)olice killings… because they bore the endorsement of the state… more insidious than lynchings.”[3] They “were a form of marketing,” selling fear and hopelessness – and keeping, most critically, the voting booth closed. Saying a wrong word – or a correct word in an incorrect tone – could get you whipped or bludgeoned or shot.
And police (all white) would not arrest. If there was an arrest, district attorneys (all white) would not prosecute. If there was a prosecution, juries (all white) would not convict. If there was a conviction, the sentences imposed by judges (all white) would slap wrists and, if a fine was imposed, other (white) citizens would chip in to pay it. The federal government was useless. The Supreme Court had saddled federal prosecutors with having to prove the intent to violate a specific Constitutional right. (It had even held that, since a “right to life” was not mentioned in the Constitution, prosecution for homicide should be left to states. “Torture” was similarly off limits.) U.S. attorneys had to convince juries that police officers had violated a right of which they probably had never heard.
The FBI, which was responsible for investigations, did not want to offend local law enforcers, whose cooperation it needed in other cases – and whose racial sensibility its agents often shared. (The G-Men were more interested in rooting out Communists in the civil rights organizations which urged them to act than in the cases the organizations urged pursuing.) If the Bureau did investigate, what it turned up left U.S. attorneys to bring hole-riddled charges before hostile-to-the-bone juries, making prosecutions seem futile. And Democratic presidents, dependant upon southern electoral votes, weren’t going to force changes in anyone’s behavior.
..
Consider…
In August 1942, Henry Williams, a soldier stationed in Mississippi, tried to get a bus driver to speed up so he could reach his base before curfew. The driver shot Williams three times, killing him. No criminal charges were brought – but the driver was assigned to a new route. And in June 1944, Ollie Hunter, a woman in her mid-60s, was beaten to death by a 20-something grocery clerk with an axe handle after exiting his store. No charges were brought. And in July 1944, Booker Spicely, a 36-year-old soldier stationed in North Carolina, exchanged words with a bus driver after being ordered to the back to accommodate white soldiers. The driver shot him twice, killing him. The driver was charged with manslaughter. After a two-day trial and 30-minutes deliberation, he was acquitted.[4] And in October 1945, Edgar Thomas, a 63-year-old Alabaman, was shot three times with a shotgun and killed by a police officer. Within the next two months, the same officer shot out the eye of another African-American man and shot and killed another. He was never indicted by local officials, and the U.S. attorney refused to prosecute him. And in February 1950, Willie Carlisle was beaten to death in jail by two Alabama police officers. Both were prosecuted federally. One plead guilty and one was convicted at trial. The first received a six-month sentence and the second ten.
..
Of course, Goshkin had known such events occurred.
He had known it since reading “The Guilty” in Shock SuspenStories. No. 3. (June/July 1952), in which a “n —- r,” (sic) named Collins is arrested for killing a white woman. The sheriff, fearing a “sharp” lawyer “from some civil liberties organization” will free Collins, forces him to run, then shoots him. Later, it is revealed that another man has confessed to the crime. It is not suggested that anything happens to the sheriff beyond shame, but the story’s author’s final words describe his conduct as “a debasement of the constitution upon which our country is founded.”[5]
It had been out there in public where even 10-year-old could learn it.
And Goshkin had less of a problem with it than long division.
Yet here came the lesson again.
And despair at it still being required.
II.
In a way, Burnham/Foner were too sanguine.
They counted more than 1000 “racist southern homicides” between 1930 and 1970, which, Goshkin noted, was fewer homicides than Philadelphia (500) and Chicago (695) had last year. Presumably most of these 1195 victims were black, and 90-percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. In Chicago, more blacks are killed by other blacks in a weekend than police kill in a year.[6] Since one murdered person equals one murdered person, and each victim leaves as raw and permanent a hole in a family and rent in a nation’s fabric as any other, imposing a frame of racism around murders seemed to restrict the view of the horror walking among us.
It may be that something is always going to lead some of us to kill someone else, Goshkin thought. If we, by some presently unimaginable way, remove racism from the equation, the number of bullet-hole riddled bodies may well remain unchanged. It brought him back to the only scene he remembered from Gravity’s Rainbow. One of Pynchon’s characters is roaming, shell-shocked, across a devastated Europe in 1945 when someone tells him the war is over. “Really?” he asks. “How do they know?”
When you are 81 with a damaged heart, it is true that every day is a blessing. It is also true that some mornings a question arises of why leave bed.
..
“In 2008, when he was 14, my client, let’s call him Kareem, killed a guy in a gang fight.”
Bledsoe said. He and Goshkin sat at a table facing a young man with shoulder-length brown hair and trim mustache, wearing a black turtleneck and blue jeans, who was conducting, with Bernsteinian flourish, an orchestra neither of them could hear. “California was ‘tough-on-crime’ then; you could charge kids as adults; and Kareem got all day. But the law changed, and put an end to that shit, so we took the case pro bono and petitioned for a hearing to (a) see if Kareem should have been tried as an adult and (b) if he was suitable for rehabilitation. We found new evidence, put on testimony from a psychiatrist and neuro-scientist, set him up with a program that included counseling, monitoring and housing if he got out. Everything was going great. The day before the hearing ends, Kareem gets into a beef with a cracker who turns off the water while he’s showering, and now we’ve got a new hearing with four guards and a half-dozen inmates testifying and a judge looking at us fish-eyed.”
..
“You’ll forgive me,” Goshkin said, “for thinking Kareem not being dead already strikes me as progress.”
..
Notes
[1]. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails. Vintage. 2016.
[2]. “A Regional Reign of Terror” (NYRB April 6, 2023)
[3]. Of which there were 3500 in the US between 1880 and the 1950s.
[4]. Twenty-eight black soldiers were killed for breaching Jim Crow laws, between 1941 and 1946.
[5]. A subsequent Shock featured a story in which hooded, robed men whip to death a scantily clad, voluptuous brunette for ”consorting” with someone not her “own kind.” The men are not identified as KKK, as “The Guilty” is pointedly not set in the south but posited as possible “anyWHERE (sic) in the United States.”
[6]. Police killed 313 black people nationwide in 2022.