The Laws of our Fathers (84 page)

    And I talked to Bernhard about this. We walked. We went out there, not far away, and inched along the Midway, that beautiful tree-lined esplanade, with its benches, on the west side of U. Park. It was one of those mysterious late autumn days in the Midwest, the pewter sky losing the hope of light, the big trees stretching black and stark, the walks slick with moldering yellow leaves. Bernhard listened to me as I confided my anguish, and he confronted me with an odd question.

    'Do you know, Hopie,' he asked, 'vere zis Mid-vay comes from?'

    I didn't of course. So he told me the story. During the Civil War, after the Yanks had freed the Mississippi River, they used to freight Confederate prisoners up here, far from the front lines. These rebs - 20,000 of them - ended up imprisoned here on the land that now stands beneath the Midway. The city was pretty much a wreck by then. There were no provisions. Everything was being commandeered for the front. There wasn't food to spare, nor coats nor blankets. And in the dead of winter, these prisoners, Southern boys, some who'd barely seen a frost, just basically stood out here on the Midway and died. Froze to death. More than 12,000 of them. They buried those Confederate soldiers right there. And after Dixie was subdued, the city fathers, embittered by war and eager to forget its horrors, plowed the ground over and planted grass and trees, rather than raise gravestones.

    You think about that, though. Those lovely stone mansions, up on Grand Boulevard, they were there by the 1850s. It was a fashionable street. Ladies in their hoop skirts went perambulating up and down every day. They walked their babies. And yonder, behind a mess of wire and fences, stood the rebs, huddling under the trees for cover in the snow, freezing and screaming and carrying on, crying out for mercy, and dying. Every day a couple got shot trying to escape.

    It was something for me to think about, of course, because it called up all of an African-American's complicated feelings about the Civil War. I still cleave to a schoolboy's understanding of those events, because I think it is fundamentally correct. In the minds of many of those fighting - probably most - it was the War to Free the Slaves. Oh sure, it had a thousand other motives, too, Genovese and them-all, I've read the books. But for the most part there were Americans who, no matter how they varnished it over with talk of states' rights or the cotton economy, were willing to die for the right to own a nigger, and other Americans, hundreds of thousands of them, white Americans, prepared to lay down their lives because God wanted all his children, including the black ones, to be free. I often think we'd do well in this country to bear both facts in mind. Surely I had them in mind at that moment. And although a part of me listened to Bernhard's story in shock, to think that I had walked a thousand times across the unmarked graves of young soldiers who died so pitifully in their own country, another part of me - the greater part, I confess - heard this with the parched thirst of a people who have never had a full measure of revenge. For it occurred to me at once that those men, cruelly imprisoned, were slaveholders and their supporters. And I thought to myself, Good, this was good, this was as it had to be. Well, there was a look we shared then, Bernhard and me, he the survivor of a similar captivity and I the great-grandson of slaves. He read the thought passing behind my eyes as surely as if I had spoken it, and I do not believe we exchanged another word as we walked slowly home.

    Bernhard made his mistakes. But we cannot lay him to rest without admiring his strength of character. He had the courage to tell me what he meant to out on the Midway, which was that this would never end. He could hardly be faulted for that view, not only because of his own experience, but given what has gone on since, dozens of hideous episodes that seem to show that humankind has not learned a damn thing from all that suffering. Pol Pot's killing fields. Idi Amin. The Chinese slaughters in Tibet. The Ayatollah's annihilation of the Baha'i. The Hutus' dismemberment of the Tutsis. The disappeared in Argentina. The carnage in Bangladesh. In Biafra. In Bosnia. We may only pray it does not happen here.

    We cannot blame Bernhard for his pessimism. There are days - many, many days - when I know in my bones he was right. But perhaps there is another way to accept his legacy. Perhaps there is meaning in these millions of seemingly meaningless deaths. Perhaps Darwin - or God - is sending the species signs so large we cannot fail to heed them. Perhaps our survival depends on recognizing that we can be monsters, so that self-awareness reinforces our commitment to what is more noble in us. For in his lifetime, Bernhard also saw freedom in South Africa, the enfranchisement of women in the West, the withering of colonialism, the blooming of democracy in nation after nation, and the growth of a million varieties of the fruit of human cunning which have immeasurably advanced knowledge and well-being across the planet. Perhaps that was what Bernhard meant to tell me, after all: we are both. We are the tyrant
and
the democrat, the captor
and
the survivor, the slaveholder
and
the slave. We are blood heirs to each heritage. On the best days - his and mine -that is what I hope Bernhard would admonish all of us never to forget.

    

    
Sonny