“oh God! please stop!!”
from the back of the class, his cry careens
over the heads of the rest—their stricken faces, jaws slack
or furiously clenched, eyes dewy or attempting to shut out
the assailant in my words—but I refuse. continue explaining
the lynching by car of James Byrd Jr., briefly mentioned
in Rankine’s The White Card, open on their desks. the event
is presented as a turning point, character development for ‘Charles,’
a billionaire with Basquiat’s Defacement on his wall. a news story
whose horror shook him into seeing that racism still existed
in the enlightened, heady days of 1998. a details-oriented educator,
I clarify why ‘Charles’ was so troubled.
Byrd—49, disabled, Black—was walking home
when three white men—one he thought a friend,
had known his whole life—offered him a ride
in a grey Ford pickup. crushed between them,
they forced him to remote woods, kicked and punched
and baseball batted him in and out of consciousness,
spray painted his face blacker, pissed and shat on him,
retrieved a 24-foot-long chain from the truckbed,
noosed it about his ankles, and dragged him for 1.5 miles.
the FBI’s autopsy determined he was conscious―
trying to keep his upper-body off the road-rashing concrete―
until their carefree swerving swung him into a culvert,
which severed his right arm and head. undaunted,
they continued to drag his remainder for another 1.5 miles
to the cemetery of a Black church, where they mutilated
and distributed his corpse to be found in time
for the following morning’s Sunday service.
I tell my class this did not happen in a grainy, black and white photo
of the past. 81 pieces of Byrd were jigsaw-scattered through Jasper, Texas
on June 7th in 1998, two weeks before I graduated from high school,
that I was only two years older than they are now. I remind my stunned―
sobbing, silent—students that I am younger than their parents,
who may send me emails asking why I would subject their children
to these horrors from another time, who may—echoing ‘Charles,’
echoing their children, echoing James Byrd Jr—ask me to please stop.
but the truck didn’t, so I can’t.
