![]()
1
Imagination
Cecil
IMAGINATION IS ONE of the most penetrating and incendiary forces Iâve ever experienced. Itâs plagued me and itâs freed me.
I grew up imagining what the world could be like in our segregated town of San Angelo in west Texas during the 1930s. The African American section was cut off from the white section by railroad tracks that ran near my familyâs house. My sister, five brothers, and I went to an African American school, attended an African American church, and shopped at African American stores. My father was a janitor for the white church in town, and we lived in a ghetto, so our future was limited.
Crossing the railroad tracks in San Angelo could be dangerous. The risk was worth it if my mother saved enough money to walk a half mile to the white grocery store that stocked better food and had a wider selection. One day, when I was eight years old, my sister, brothers, and I went with her. The presence of a black family was allowed in the white part of town as long as we kept our heads down and understood the unwritten rules. There were no formal laws stating that blacks had to get off the sidewalk to make way for whites, but enough white people got angry if you didnât defer to them that we learned to move aside. We always pretended that we didnât notice the difference.
My mother, a very attractive, light-skinned woman, carried my baby brother Reedy, who had bright blue eyes and a fair complexion. Just seeing this âhigh yellowâ mother and child angered some white customers. One woman walked up to Mother in the store and hissed, âWho you been foolinâ with, nigger?â
Later in life I would realize that light-skinned African Americans caused many white people to question the sexual practices of white men. The woman who spoke so hatefully wasnât so concerned that my mother was âfoolinâ aroundââshe worried that somebody white had been âfoolinâ aroundâ with somebody black. My mother said nothing. She knew that to answer back would invite trouble, just as her children knew they had to stand aside at the cash register counter until all the white customers were served.
On the way out of the store, we were surprised to find two white police officers waiting for us in the street. They told my mother to open her grocery bags and take out all the purchases, which they checked against the store receipt to make sure we werenât stealing. A crowd gathered around. Soon people were laughing at the âlittle nigger childrenâ on their knees trying to stop the groceries from rolling all over the street. When Mother told one of the cops that none of us would ever steal, he called her a ânigger bitchâ with such loathing that I looked at the gun in his holster and suddenly wanted a .45 of my own more than anything. It was the only time in my life I wanted to shoot a white person.
That day, I learned that imagination comes not when youâre happiest but when youâre floundering. It starts deep inside the cracks of lifeâthe places that pull you apart, that make you feel like a failure, that tell you over and over that somethingâs wrong. Often without knowing it, you look for a better way, and thatâs where imagination starts to grow. I had known something wasnât right about segregation as long as I could remember, but until those cops tried to humiliate my mother, I didnât think I could do anything about it. Now, here, suddenly, was the power of that gun. Imagining it in my hands and thinking about revenge took me out of myself, if only for that moment. I knew that violence only made things worse, but the next thought, though just a glimmer, was inescapable. Somehow, some day, I would imagine our way out of this kind of injustice.
What I remember most about that episode is my motherâs dignity in the face of police intimidation. She was angry and dared to speak sharply to the cops, and they indeed lashed out, but she demonstrated to her children that if you know who you are inside, nothing can break you on the outside. I vividly remember Motherâs square shoulders and straight back as she calmly led us away.
Later, my parents would use this incident as an example of racial conflict that we children would have to face in life. We could end segregation, even change the nature of racism, but only if we were informed and had the credentials to show it. âGet that diploma,â my mother said. âThatâs what the people in power will want to see.â No door would open for us without that piece of paper. For me, having simple goalsâget good grades, finish school, go on to collegeâhelped me survive a system that felt oppressive and smothering in small, day-by-day incidents such as trying to shop at a white grocery store.
In our community, the reverend who spoke at services on Sunday was more important than any political leader, just as the black church was the center of activity in most African American communities. Many black families as large as ours hoped the oldest boy would go into the ministry, and most parents waited to see if the calling âtookâ on the first son. Not my mother. Of all the kids in my family, I had been nicknamed âRevâ by Mother from birth, despite the fact that I was the fourth of five boys.
âSomeoneâs going to be the reverend in this family, and youâre it,â sheâd say with a knowing smile. My fate might have been sealed at birth, but there was no doubt that I grew up wanting it and picturing myself in front of a congregation too. Perhaps I inherited the imagination gene from her.
Our church, Wesley Methodist, was a classic black churchâa place of safety and comfort, very much like an extended family, where inspiring sermons and soaring choral voices nearly blew the roof off every Sunday. We attended services and events there almost every other day of the week and regarded the pastor as our direct connection to God.
There was only one problem, as far as I was concerned. The black church offered an environment of love and peace, but it could never grant us redemption on earth. We were told to avoid temptation and live a moral life because this was the way to earn our way to heaven. When we died, Jesus would grant us salvation. Only then would we be free.
These promises sounded okay, I guessed, but each Sunday I gazed out the window knowing that across the railroad tracks, white people were having their freedom right now. They had the power to run things during their lifetime here on earth, and they seemed to be getting Jesusâs salvation in the bargain. This reality felt as out of sync as when I watched Negro adults crossing the tracks to go to work every morning as janitors, stewards, domestics, and cooks. Those were the jobs all of us were destined to have. But our real role in life, I knew, was to appear grateful to whites for giving us any paid work at all. Any hint that we didnât feel that wayâthat we were, in fact, angry at the injustice of it allâput our jobs at risk.
So like many African Americans, I grew up in a sea of contradictions. Whites ran everything, so I wanted to be white, but I hated white people and everything they did to keep us down. As I got older, I felt that being black was bad. With my kinky hair and big lips, Iâd never be accepted in white society, which meant that my whole appearance was one giant negative, and every time I thought that, I couldnât accept myself. I was proud of my strong and loving African American family, but I was ashamed that we lived on the âwrongâ side of the tracks.
Soon the nickname Rev became a source of anxiety as well as pride. What happened, I asked myself, when leaders led? Abraham Lincoln might have freed the slavesâmy grandfather, Papa Jack, had been one of themâbut here in San Angelo, âWeâre still oppressed as a people,â my parents said, so we had to be patient. âItâs going to take time, but things will get better,â theyâd say and, as always, remind us how important it was to get that diploma. Papa Jack himself encouraged us to make a better life. âIâm an ex-slave,â he would say. âNow all of you be ex-slaves.â That sounded good, but none of us could imagine how we were going to do it.
Then at the age of twelve, I was struck by what felt like a bolt of lightning. It was as though all the pressures in the world punched a hole in my mind, and I was left with nothing but terror. It happened one moonlit night when I sat on the porch with my family. Suddenly everything seemed to turn pitch-black except for the moon, which appeared to melt into itself with fat drops of hot lava falling on my skin. Then I heard a roaring engine and looked up to see a giant train barreling right at us. The smell of hot metal and the sensation of scalding wax from the moon made me scream. Snarling voices came out of the darkness, which overcame light. I felt this darkness sucking out my life. Nobody saw or heard any of this but me. My screaming caused the family to leap up and try to help, but my body jerked and bucked as if some kind of monster were pulling me away. Nobody could do anything but hold me tight. My mother was sure I was having a seizure.
Word spread quickly of my attack, if thatâs what it was. Within minutes, neighbors arrived, doctors visited (we had two on our side of the tracks), our minister came, and relatives raced over to the house offering help. I couldnât hear or see them, but I did hear alien voices screaming at me. We will kill you, they yelled. There is no escape.
I thought the only way to fight the voices off was to walk around, and I did, yelling. My parents must have thought I had turned into a madman, but they spoke to me soothingly through the night until I fell into a fitful sleep. By morning, I was calmer, but I knew that melting moon, that big train, and those terrifying voices were just waiting for the sun to go away. I was right. That night the aliensâ message was even worseâWe are coming to kill you, they saidâand from then on, night after night for many months, the horror returned. My imagination seemed to be strangling me.
Our family doctor diagnosed my problem as a ânervous breakdown,â a nice way of describing a madness that nobody could do anything about. Youâd think these ugly, wild fits would have made me a pariah, the kind of crazy person children run away from and adults pity, but not in our section of town. Throughout my time in hell, no one ever judged me, stigmatized me, or shied away. Instead, coming through the house was a steady flow of folks who didnât let up. They comforted me, cooked meals for our family, took turns walking all night with me, sang with me, prayed for me, and waited for some kind of healing to take effect.
Yet as the months went by, the voices only got scarier. They hissed and snapped and growled as though they lived in my ear. I missed school, stayed in bed, feared the darkness, exhausted my parents, and drove everyone to distraction.
No one knew why it was happening, but there was much conjecture. Our beloved but tormented neighbor, JB, had committed suicide a month before, and we all heard him screaming as he slit his own throat. Grief consumed me over the death of my grandfather Papa Jack, the ex-slave who refused to buckle under white control and waved his cane whenever white bill collectors came around (âAinât we give you enough?â he would yell), but after his death, I seemed to recover along with the rest of the family. The birth of my youngest brother, Reedy, took the family spotlight away from me, but could that have triggered my fall into this living hell?
I believed there was a different reason. The contrast between my family telling me I was the Revâthe future minister who was going to âmake it for this familyâ and pave the way for desegregationâhad clashed in my mind with incident after incident in the white world that confirmed I was powerless. All I had to do was look in the mirror when the madness and the voices overtook me: that face, that blackness that the white power structure dismissed as nothing, looked back at me as a nobody who deserved to die.
As I stayed home from school day after day, my parents knew only that I couldnât shake this thing and wasnât growing out of it. In fact, the voices grew worse. They told me that my mother and father were out to murder me, not out of hatred but simply because they had to. Hearing that, I started to scream and yell even more than before. âDonât kill me!â I shouted to my mother. âDonât kill me!â
Everyone in the community prayed for God to help me. Folks were certain that our pastor with his direct line to heaven would surely get the channels open. But there would be no divine intervention for me. Every night, my parents, my brothers, and my sister took turns walking, talking, even joking with me in that way family has, conveying by their presence, Itâs all right, Cecil. Hang in there, Revâweâre not giving up on you. Friends in the community continued to stay all night with me too. Then I started thinking about what this meant. Here were my family and neighbors sticking by me no matter what, yet God was nowhere to be found.
Perhaps that did it. âIâm turning you loose, Lord,â I said one night. âYou keep gettinâ in the way.â At this point I had nothing to lose. Maybe that actânot defiance but an insistence that I had to go my own wayâjarred something loose, because soon, out of the cracks where it had been simmering, my imagination started to boil.
I pictured myself as the Rev I could be, wanted to beâsomeone more loving and strong, even ferocious, than anything these voices could harm. Instead of trying to run from the aliens, I turned toward them. If there was no escape, then I wanted to face them. âI know you,â I said when they visited me that night, astounded that this was true. âI can hear you.â I was more curious than afraid. âI ainât goinâ with you tonight,â I said, actually sounding steady and firm. Soon it hit me; these voices were not the enemy. Whatever their threats, they could not really bring me harm. In fact, they had something to give me. It was a message. Youâre more powerful than youâve ever imagined.
This release of fear came over me gradually, but I began to fall into the soundest sleep I had experienced in a year. Eventually I woke up to a sunlight so sweet and the sound of birds so loving that I felt my life had started again. My mother was sitting on the edge of the bed.
âIs it over?â she asked with a smile.
I nodded. âItâs over.â
âWell, you look like a new person.â
Thatâs the way I felt. My terror was over. My hell was over. I was ready for whatever life would bring.
The voices never went away entirel...
