White Tears by Hari Kunzru

Author:Hari Kunzru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE NEWSROOM, I was taking a break, smoking a cigarette and listening to some sportswriters argue over who was the better pitcher, Lefty Gomez or Whitey Ford, when Bly appeared, looming over me, his eyeshade like a great green beak. There was something violent about his sudden arrival. The sportswriters could feel it; they turned away and continued their conversation elsewhere. Without hello or any other preamble Bly asked if I knew how to drive. I said yes. He said he too knew how to drive but did not care for it. He found driving stressful. It was good that I could drive. I agreed that it was. He looked at his hands for a moment, examining the nails. So did I think I could get hold of a car?

I asked him where he wanted to go.

—Mississippi.

I suppose I ought to have known something like that was coming. It was the next step. I could hear the roar, the power coming down. You have to understand, it was July and hot and they were talking, we were all talking, in the coffee bars in the Village, in church halls, in the (inside) pages of our own paper, about The Problem of the South. They were killing Negro boys down there. Still killing Negro boys, despite all the so-called advances. Reckless eyeballing was the name of the crime, and it could get you hung or burned alive or tied to an engine block and thrown in the river. The NAACP were saying something had to be done. The White Citizens Councils were threatening blood and fire. And Chester was proposing to go into Negro neighborhoods in the Delta and knock on doors to ask if they had old records. It did not seem wise.

I was not what you would call a political person. There were plenty around, the earnest folk fans, the gloomy girls with the turtlenecks and the French books, but I wasn’t part of all that. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, let alone speak at a public meeting. Don’t get me wrong, I believed in civil rights. I thought every man ought to be able to live his life. But handing out flyers and signing petitions didn’t seem to make much difference. Sure, I spent all my time listening to the blues, but one of the reasons I liked those old songs, those disembodied voices rising up out of the past, was because they were a refuge from the world. I didn’t want them contaminated by current affairs. I had no idea what Chester thought about it. He never passed comment on the condition of the American Negro.

But I also knew I had to say yes. Some things are just fate; you can’t step out of their path. I told my boss I was taking a week’s vacation and borrowed a car from an aunt on Long Island. It was an old wood-paneled Ford wagon, the kind everyone called a “woody.” It looked like a tool shed on wheels, but it ran OK and the old lady didn’t mind me borrowing it.

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