BLACK PRESIDENT, Chapter 18. Sarah's twins are getting more white-skinned every day, while horrible racism prevails in the South––Byron de la Beckwith commits a terrible crime...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_De_La_Beckwith

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

With each additional day that passed it seemed to Sarah that the twin’s skin tones got lighter and whiter. She had heard before about how babies skin pigment was less pronounced at birth, but that still hadn’t prepared her for the transformation of Jackson and John into what looked like two little white boys living in a small apartment with Black folks. But no matter how bright the twin’s skin got, friends of the Littles just passed the compliments on to Sarah.

“Got your beautiful glow...no doubt ’bout it,” she heard from Edward, a third floor friend who worked in janitorial services. She was relieved that he didn’t just come out and say, The only way you could get that pair o’ white a babies is to have had sex with a white man, and I see the face of President John F. Kennedy repeated twice in my field of vision, so it musta been him you’all did the dirty with.

No, everyone acted proud of her, maybe even a tad happier because the newborns looked so light. Since most Black people needed some “white folk help” to get through the day, maybe they figured these fine, young, white Negro man-babies could be their go-betweens to the white world that surrounded them. And yet, now, with her boys barely a year old and so defenseless, she had to worry about the kind of world into which they’d been delivered. If your skin was black and you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time you were beaten with lead pipes, shot at, maybe even killed when you tried to claim your rights. The white racists were working double-time to surpress integration, and brave Black men and women were taking busses down to Alabama and Georgia every day to protest. News of marches and violence was printed almost every day in the papers. Sarah prayed that by the time her boys were of school age and leaving home the trouble would have passed. If only John and Jackson could just lead decent, productive lives, whether their skin was white or black or something in between.

***

May 10, 1963

It was one of the loveliest May days anyone had ever seen on the Cape, and Rose Kennedy wheeled her husbands’ chair around to aim his gaze at the puffy white clouds that appeared along the shore and beyond.

“Looky, dear. The wind is picking up those clouds and moving them along...and the sun is shining for our party. The boys, their wives and children are all here,” Rose told him, doing her best, as she always did since his debilitating stroke, to involve him in the family’s activities

Jackie sat happily on the porch in half-shade, enjoying the fact that her third pregnancy was going well, and particularly pleased that after five months she hadn’t gained the excessive weight she had with Caroline. President Kennedy and his brother Bobby, seated across from him, were all too aware that they had yet to deliver on Jack’s promise to his wife to safeguard the South from race riots. Here it was, two years since he’d promised to clear the mess up and it was getting worse! Governor Wallace of Alabama had called for local Whites to oppose integration, and that was like granting his supporters full license to plant bombs, shoot Black people, unlawfully arrest protesters and generally show off to the entire world just how ugly Americans could be.

Just in the last week, the TV had run news shots of Blacks being sprayed by high-powered water hoses – men, women, and children swept off their feet by the heavy stream, slammed against brick buildings, knocked to the ground unconscious. It may have looked comical to some, to see pratfalls caused by water spraying, but the force of the blast was powerful enough to peel bark off of trees. Other footage showed fierce police dogs attacking helpless Black citizens by order of Police Chief Bull Connor, only three blocks away from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the place where Martin Luther King and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth organized their peace marches and rallies.

“You know, Bobby,” President Kennedy had told his brother at the yearly Hyannis Port Mother’s Day gathering. “We look about as backward as any African nation under apartheid. This has got to stop...by law it does...but it’s getting worse!”

“We’ll get through this, but a lot more people are going to get hurt, maybe more deaths...that’s my prediction,” Bobby said, stone-faced. “I believe, just as I’m sure you do, that some of our government officials are doing their best to impede the process of integration. The local governments employ police simply to harass, intimidate, and arrest Blacks. These cops are little more than thugs on payroll. And Wallace continues to incite the White citizenry down there. I’m worried that we’ll be faced with some violent, city- wide confrontations up the road.”

“Well, just stick close to me and we’ll ride this thing out,” the President said, excusing himself for a trip to the bathroom before the dessert course began.

***

Hoover reviewed the footage of police brutality and smiled. He saw poetry in the rush of water washing the Black scum off White men’s sidewalks, spraying the niggers clean and shooing them back into the gutter. And the dogs. Teeth bared and ready to bite off somebody’s nuts. It was all there. The pictures printed in big splashes over two pages in Life magazine should make the spades think twice before showing up at the next “Peace” march, he mused. Yes. We’re teaching the Birmingham locals that King could get them hurt. That was the way to undermine his leadership. And sending the “fuck-tape” blackmail letter to King’s wife had been inspired as well. King had thirty-five days to commit suicide before the full audiotape of him fucking another woman would be sent to Coretta King. Keep the jungle bunnies off kilter. That was the name of the game.

The KKK had done their part, the usual maiming and killing. And the FBI had done their’s, which was mainly to provide a cushion of time. If “locals” attacked the marches, and police were “late,” then perhaps some people would learn some lessons about being uppity. Rowe had done good work for him during the first Freedom Rides of 1961, giving advance notice about the arrival of the buses, getting the word to the Birmingham policemen who were members of the KKK, so they’d know to expect a window of opportunity. He’d coordinated that 15 minutes of unrestrained KKK rage, giving those activists a taste of it before the cops had moved in.

With Rowe in KKK as undercover in Birmingham, Hoover knew each and every step ahead of time and could prepare himself for the next move, expecting a call from one of those fucking Kennedys almost down to the minute. Well, they could order him around all they wanted, till they were blue in the face, but by the end of the day it would be his party, his way. There would be no win for civil rights in Birmingham, thought Hoover, even if it took blowing up every church with the congregations locked inside.

***

June 12, 1963

Byron de la Beckwith crouched among the weeds of a vacant lot across from the home of Medgar Evers and waited for the NAACP executive to arrive. His hands gripped a 30.06 rifle. It was uncomfortable hunkering down, so de la Beckwith tried to distract himself by using his scope to check out Ever’s wife and kids through the picture window of their small house. He saw children running around, their mother, a slim one, wandering back and forth, sometimes putting her face right up to the small window in the front door to look out. De la Beckwith felt no remorse that they would soon experience the death of their father and husband. They shudda known better than to try and mess with White folks, he thought to himself.

He could see them watching TV, and for the moments that he could stabilize the rifle he watched the grainy image of President Kennedy. Nothing good about that fucker, thought de la Beckwith. Turning the niggers loose to bother decent folk.

De la Beckwith tried not to feel sorry for picking the short straw that night. His KKK buddies had made a game of which one would pop Evers. It was customary to pick straws, mainly cause there was so much work to be done. There was destroying property with dynamite, there was terrorizing and setting fires, there was just plain shooting folks, with plenty of lynchings thrown in. De la Beckwith remembered Rowe making a joke of his job that night. Something about no need for a white robe. That was so. He was just sitting there in a makeshift duck blind, waiting for the big bird to fly in.

After about three quarters of an hour, around 11:30PM, De la Beckwith had to shift the position of his legs, which were now beginning to cramp. He sat flat down in the weeds and massaged both his upper thighs. The night was muggy, so his skin felt moist and sticky. He could feel his hot flesh sticking to his pant legs as he kneaded the muscles, pushing his hand down hard and moving it along the leg bone. And the insects had found him, so there was the usual hand waving and slapping at mosquitos. He had applied B-12 bug repellent, but a few got through to feed on him. As he uncramped his legs, de la Beckwith remembered what his daddy had always said about blacks.

“They different than us, yuh know,” the old Mr. de la Beckwith would say as he cut his son’s hair in his barber shop. “Thar blood is black, not red like ours. Black. Am I right or wrong? Tell me. Am I right or wrong?”

If Byron de la Beckwith didn’t immediately respond, Yessir, right!, he got his head whacked right then and there, right in the middle of the cutting. Sometimes he was hit with the hand that held the sissors and that hurt even more.

Old de la Beckwith would keep talking about the “nigra black blood” and how if you cut one of them then you’d see fo yourself, all that dark fluid dripping out, staining everything black, just like India ink does (“Am I right or wrong?” would end every insane and vividly illustrated pronouncement).

Byron de la Beckwith learned early on from his father that Black people were something less than human. He was taught that they were liars, thieves, adulterers, lazy, shifty, and dangerous...would murder you in your sleep. Whenever his father said goodnight to him he’d reinforce the fear and bigotry.

“And keep yo windows locked, so none ah them niggers can stick a knife in yuh gut while yuh sleep,” Byron’s father would say. And if little Byron made any mistake his mother always had the ready comparison: “Now clean up those dirty clothes. It looks like a nigger shack in here!”

Around midnight Medgar Evers drove up in his 1958 Impala, parked and walked briskly toward the front door. He’d been heartened by the news in Kennedy’s broadcast, that integration in the South would be fully backed and implemented by the United States government. It was a huge victory, what they had worked for all those painful and confusing years. JFK was backing them up, standing with them in their long-fought struggle. Some good men and women, even children had died, but now their deaths would have some meaning. He was bone tired, but relieved to be back home in victory. Soon to sleep...

De la Beckwith raised his rifle, peered into the scope and caught a fluttery glimpse of faces through the front window before lining the sight up with Ever’s white shirt, the brightest thing around. Just as Evers was turning the door knob, de la Beckwith fired a single steel-jacket round, which tore through the Black man’s back and exited his sternum, slamming him against the door where he crumpled down. De la Beckwith hurried back to his pickup truck amid the screams and wails from across the way.———-

(Chapter 19 next)