PrettyFakes

Fourteen thousand, nine hundred and sixty-five days.

That’s how long it took to put somebody in jail for the murder of three boys.

I say boys, although Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner are often called “men” in the newspaper articles. They weren’t. They were doing the work of men, but Schwerner was the oldest at 24, Chaney being 21, and Goodman only twenty.

When I was twenty-one, I was drunk on warm canned beer and listening to Sleater-Kinney and kissing girls and I was not in the middle of a civil war, fighting to make true the abstract ideals of a nation not even two hundred years old.

When I was twenty-one, I never went to check in on a church that had been burned down to the ground because I had gone there to help the folks learn and live and grow. And I never got arrested by cops, just for being around there, and then set free to be chased down by the Klan, murdered and dumped in the dirt.

This is what happened fourteen thousand, nine hundred and sixty-five days ago—exactly forty one years, if you want to count that way. Three boys, doing the work of men—of soldiers—were murdered in the place that I call home.

Byron de la Beckwith. Bobby Frank Cherry. Thomas Blanton. And now: Edgar Ray Killen. Some of the old bastards are not dead, yet. Too many of them got away—allowed to breathe and smile and laugh while the bones of the children they murdered sat cold.

We are not a whole people yet, but I do believe that we are knitting together, lumpy scar tissue over a deep cut. I am reminded of the words of a man who has been dead himself for year upon year, when he was told that we did not need to revist the agony of the past, all those many terrors we inflicted upon ourself. What he asked for all those years ago still applies to our Mississippi today. He believed “that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

We are not there yet. We are not quite there yet. That ideal is the Mississippi I believe in, that I am in love with, that I want to live in. We are not quite there yet. But let us pray to whatever we hold dear that today we have learned, in our city that means the love of a brother, that we will get there one day, that we can and we will.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Gorjus, In Mississippi, In the South, Law & Jurisprudence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.