I heard my father clomp down the stairs on the way to breakfast, and I was about to jump out of bed, as I usually did, throw on my bathrobe, and join him at the table. But at that instant my eye was caught by the copy of the New Yorker I’d bought at a downtown newsstand the night before. I had gone to sleep while just beginning to browse through the cartoons and now, plucking the magazine from the pillow next to me, I perceived something I hadn’t noticed before, something utterly remarkable. The text of the issue was unbroken from beginning to end, column after column of print weaving through the advertisements, the entire story or narrative or whatever it was marching on inexorably without interruption until it terminated on the final page just above the byline: John Hersey. It was amazing—a whole issue devoted to a single article. I turned back to the beginning and the title “Hiroshima” and began to read:
A NOISELESS FLASH
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
I kept reading. The structure of the chronicle was clearly established in the first long paragraph: A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died.
I threw off the sheet and propped the hefty magazine against my belly. I’d read Hersey before. Most literate marines who hadn’t seen action had been moved to pity and terror, or were sometimes merely worried half to death, by his reports in Life magazine about the grisly combat on Guadalcanal, and now the clear, precise, understated writing that I remembered from Into the Valley, which I’d read on Saipan, with its excruciating descriptions of young American troops in the toils of battle, was again on display. Only here the sufferers were Japanese. I was well into the narrative, five or six pages along, reading about a survivor named Mrs. Nakamura, and her remembrance of the blinding white flash that enveloped her seconds before the blast brought the house down in splinters around herself and her children. Just then from below I heard a horn toot and realized it was my father’s car pool group waiting on the street. Hersey’s account, filled with suspense and portent, had been so absorbing that I’d forgotten about breakfast. I hopped out of bed and threw on a robe, then hurried downstairs with the New Yorker in hand.
“Mornin’, son. What are you going to do today?” said my father. He was standing at the front door in his shirtsleeves, the jacket of his suit draped over one arm. It was ominously hot, hinting at one of those brutal Tidewater days just beginning to build up a head of steam. No wind stirred on the harbor. A couple of electric fans sent a tepid breeze through the hallway. The mockingbird in the locust tree commenced a spiritless chant, as if already daunted by the heat.
“I guess I’ll spend most of my time at the library,” I lied, knowing where in fact I most likely would be. “I’m making my way through Sinclair Lewis.”
“Well, I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “I reckon you’ll be having lunch downtown.” What he meant was that as usual we would not be sitting down for a midday meal together here at home. Many white-collar employees at the shipyard still observed the old-fashioned convention of shunning the few greasy-spoon establishments in town and returning to their houses for lunch. Although the trip required at least fifteen minutes in either direction, the shipyard’s liberal policy of allowing its office workers an hour-and-a-half lunch break gave my father the chance to enjoy a fairly relaxed meal with Isabel. Small-town southerners frowned on restaurants in general, and so this noontime routine (abandoned throughout most of the barbaric North, my father observed) was a way of observing a civilized amenity long taken for granted in places like France. But, as my father surmised, I would not be sharing this midday pleasure. Given our prickly relationship, it was hard enough for Isabel and me to get through breakfast and dinner without a spat; the extra meal would be more than either of us could handle. As it was, I truly dreaded breakfast alone in Isabel’s company without my father’s moderating presence.
“Have a fine day, son,” he said, and hugged me with one arm impulsively as he often did. I could almost feel his love flow into me. I often had the notion that he was still in a state of mild shock, as I was, over my return from the Pacific, not wounded or in a coffin but nimble and breathing. And this despite his abiding belief that God would watch over me. I was his “only root and offspring,” as he ceaselessly told people, echoing biblical text, and he had prayed long and hard for my survival, telling me in the many letters he wrote me while I was on Saipan that he knew I would return in good shape, thereby affirming more faith in Divine Providence than I myself even remotely possessed. It would doubtless have shattered him utterly had I been destroyed, after my mother’s death only brief years before. So when he hugged me the emotion was still intense, and I hugged him back with feeling. Then I watched as he went down the steps to join his fellow cost estimators, midlevel drones whose dogged labor with slide rules and adding machines, however boring, had been essential in producing such leviathans as the carriers Yorktown and Enterprise and thus helped in disposing of the Yellow Peril.
I had a moment’s reverie about those adding machines, and I recalled how utterly devoted he was to his job, often working on his own time and showing up at his office on Sunday afternoon with me in tow. At age ten or eleven I was fascinated by that office. It occupied a grand vaultlike space on the second floor of the shipyard’s headquarters and had a view of the acres of industrial area below. On weekdays the yard was truly a satanic mill, throbbing and smoking and aswarm with thousands of black and white workers who out of habituation or indifference seemed unfazed by the inhuman noise. A terrific clanging erupted from the machine shops and foundries, and there were flashes of fire; out of the hidden guts of huge sheds came inexplicable booming noises and the chatter of riveting hammers, while above the dry docks, where great ships loomed, there were soaring cranes that made, intermittently, a mysterious aerial screaming. Steam locomotives snaked their way through the yard hauling freight, and their whistles added to the racket. But on those afternoons of my reverie the whole operation was shut down, perfectly still, as if in the grip of an immense anesthesia, and in the Sabbath hush I listened to my father clicking away on his adding machine and felt stirrings of disquiet, the mild nausea of unfocused dread.
Why this fidget and anxiousness? No doubt the contrast between the weekday bedlam and this Sunday silence. But it was also the workplace itself, a gloomy oblong of aching uniformity, row upon row of desks, each desk with its gooseneck lamp, its ponderous black Underwood typewriter, its Burroughs adding machine. Well before my awareness of Kafka or Chaplin’s Modern Times, or Karel čapek’s surreal vision of mechanical doom, I sensed that my father’s daily habitat was oppressive and slightly inhuman. I was repelled but also fascinated by the adding machines and I would spend the time punching brainlessly at the keys while my father’s own machine kept up its clickety-clack, its monotonous computation. I’d wander around the floor, peering into other offices with more rows of identical desks, gooseneck lamps, Burroughs adding machines. In the echoing sepulchral men’s room, with a ceiling as high as a church dome, I’d stand atilt at one of the American Standard urinals, in monumental porcelain, and close my eyes, inhaling the smell from the camphoraceous block of deodorant and listening to the water trickling down. Why am I here? I’d wonder in a pre-existential existential spasm. Back at his desk my father would still be bent over his machine, which unspooled a ribbon of paper tape that reached to the floor. At the office window I’d gaze out at the shipyard’s sunlit vastness, at the massive piles of sheet metal, at the foundries and shops where nothing stirred, and, in the distance, the hulls of ships in mid-creation, where the jagged silhouettes of cranes brought to mind the shapes of prehistoric birds I’d seen in The Book
of Knowledge. The scene overwhelmed me with a sense of my own smallness, and I’d wonder one more time at my father’s connection with this majestic undertaking. I only wished, in my secret self, that his job was somehow more heroic, that he might, for example, be an operator of one of those spectacular cranes …
This month would mark my father’s thirtieth year at the shipyard, and he was proud of having contributed what he called his “mite” to the war effort. From the open windows of the car I heard his laughter, then a high-pitched No! No! as he absorbed the gentle ribbing the crew gave him each morning, and I felt another warm loving pang even as I hesitated there sweating a little, ready to face Isabel.
Out of the plastic larynx of the table-top radio, perched on a shelf in the “breakfast nook,” came the subdued squawk of the morning news program, largely items of local (or state of Virginia) interest emanating from station WGH, call letters standing for World’s Greatest Harbor—more municipal boosterism. Isabel and I exchanged exaggeratedly polite good mornings while she fussed around over the French toast, obviously poised to bring it to the table. I said it was plenty hot. Isabel replied that the weather report predicted ninety-five. I spoke of the humidity: the trouble was mainly the humidity. Isabel said, yes, in someplace like Arizona ninety-five would be bearable. It was such a dry heat there. Even a hundred, I ventured. While we chatted thus, I couldn’t help thinking of a climatological fact which my father, always preoccupied with environmental trivia, was fond of pointing out during heat waves: that this area of southeastern Virginia was really, weather-wise, part of a continuum with the Deep South. It had to do in a measure with the influence of the Gulf Stream. That was why, he explained, the region was hospitable to magnolias and cotton and even water moccasins.
“There we are,” said Isabel with what seemed genuine friendliness as she slid the French toast onto the table in front of me, simultaneously pouring a cup of coffee. I was encouraged by this touch of benignity. Maybe we could be chums, after all—at least not perpetually geared up for an enervating quarrel. Nevertheless I was a little relieved to notice that she had already had breakfast, which would eliminate the across-the-table chitchat.
While she cleaned up the other dishes, I addressed myself to the French toast (“Delicious, Isabel!” I exclaimed, adding my own cordial note) and was about to return to the New Yorker when a name uttered by the radio announcer brought me up short. Booker Mason. Last-minute appeals to the United States Supreme Court for Booker Mason, the voice said, had been turned down and the condemned man, a rapist, would die by electrocution in the state penitentiary at eleven o’clock this evening. The pen was familiarly known as The Wall throughout Virginia, and the voice called it that. I put my fork down and stared at the radio. For days I’d followed Booker Mason’s fate in the local gazette. Not that there was anything dramatically different between Mason’s story and that of the seemingly countless Negroes who had trudged that Last Mile in Richmond before the war, when (nearly always over my breakfast cornflakes, just before the high school bus) I would read with morbid attention of their demise, more often than not in a disappointingly brief paragraph or two on the paper’s inner pages. Occasionally a white man would go to his doom, but the felon was far more likely to be black, and I grew accustomed to the somber reports, always feeling a slight visceral thrill at such passing details as the last meal (usually fried chicken or spareribs or some other soul food, accompanied by RC Cola or Dr. Pepper) and the last words (“Tell Momma I’m gone to Jesus”). I had never been much bothered by the rightness or wrongness of the electric chair, and while I was not truly a death-penalty enthusiast I possessed, even as a backslid Presbyterian, enough remnant Old Testament vindictiveness to view that awful 2,000-volt launch into the great beyond as probably a just and fitting exit. I say “probably” because I was not one hundred percent certain; in the case of Booker Mason my uncertainty had been bolstered by circumstances that made me think the problem through with a new emotion—worry.
What worried me was a matter that had not previously crossed my mind: the condemned man was not a murderer. Even the Commonwealth conceded that. The reason Booker Mason was being put to death was not for causing death but for sexual violation of a woman—pretty nasty stuff, of course, a happening of profound pain and degradation, one regarded universally with outrage and surely occasioning the need for reprisal but never more urgently than in the black-belt backwater of Sussex County, where Mason committed his crime. In that part of the Old Dominion, Negroes walked lightly and talked small. There wasn’t much in mitigation of the felony since Mason, twenty-two years old and a farm worker, openly admitted his “criminal assault” (delicate newspaperese for rape) of the woman—a fortyish housewife who was also his employer—not only admitting it but, in a fashion described as “sullen and boastful,” declaring freely that it was at least in part an act of vengeance for past slights and humiliations. Save for the rape itself the victim was not physically brutalized; she told the court she had quiescently submitted out of terror, and there was no attempt on the part of the defense to suggest seduction on her part since Mason’s own defiant confession effectively ruled out such a tactic. He had simply, coolly and calculatingly, fucked her, hour after hour. So this was an instance where even a sympathetic, racially tolerant white person—one accustomed to a distinct queasiness when a black man was executed despite (as was often the case) manifest innocence, or at least unproven guilt—might compliantly accept the obvious: a bad nigger in bad trouble, richly deserving his last ride on the lightning bolt to eternity.
But I was still worried, and I said so out loud, in a spontaneous outburst. “Jesus! They’re putting him to death and he didn’t even kill anyone.”
Just as I spoke I wished I’d kept my mouth shut, for Isabel shot back from the kitchen: “He deserves worse than the electric chair for what he did. He killed her soul.”
The back of my neck prickled in warning. In our many disputes—a few of which had escalated perilously near out-and-out combat, though always falling just short of that—I had tried to assess the tonality of Isabel’s voice, learning that some subtle shift of timbre might indicate sudden antagonism toward me apart from the subject at hand. I listened for that tone now, on guard and a touch nervous, not wanting the discussion to turn nasty after our relatively cheerful détente. Her brisk retort to me seemed satisfactorily impersonal, and I might have left it there, dropping the matter. For a moment I really decided to press on, even though there was risk involved. Still, I hesitated, happily ingesting the strong good coffee, which blended in rich harmony with the taste of maple syrup. Terrific, I thought, bidding adieu once again to the Marine Corps’ glutinous powdered eggs. I had a mild surge of matutinal euphoria, a mood I would have liked to maintain. I changed my mind: no talk of Booker Mason. Over the hum of the electric fan the radio voice, a plummy drone, intoned the shipping news: arrivals and departures, traffic in and out of the World’s Greatest Harbor. S.S. General Henry McIntosh, mixed cargo, bound for Buenos Aires. S.S. Rio Douro, pottery and cork, inbound from Lisbon. S.S. Fairweather, grain and leaf tobacco, bound for Rotterdam. S.S. World Seamaster, coal, bound for Le Havre (the voice pronounced it like a guy’s name, Harve). With syrup-sticky fingers I leafed my way through the front pages of the New Yorker, found the Hersey piece, and had picked up Mrs. Nakamura’s narrative when Isabel added: “They should take a nigra like that, before they kill him, and impale him with a hot poker like he did to that poor woman.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Isabel,” I blurted, “lay off it. The nigra was a monster. He should be put away somewhere to rot forever. But there’s a simple fact here. Yeah, the woman was raped, and that’s horrible. But she’s alive!” (I said “nigra” not in mockery of Isabel but because I too, like most educated denizens of the Tidewater, and the South in general, wasn’t vocally conditioned to say “knee-grow,” and so employed such a pronunciation naturally, in an attempt at respect; Isabel was too well-reared to have said “nigger,” the language’s
most powerful secular blasphemy.) “I’m not entirely sure I don’t believe in the electric chair,” I went on. “It may be necessary. But it’s barbaric to kill a man for rape, no matter how awful the crime is!”
“You’re not a woman,” she replied bitterly. “You can have no idea of the lifelong trauma of such an act—it can destroy a woman, body and spirit.”
I refrained from responding about the obvious possibility of males being raped, a fact of life of which Isabel, as a nurse with E.R. know-how, must have been well-informed. Instead, ratcheting up the tension a bit, I found myself saying irritably: “You mean a fate worse than death?” I paused for an instant to let the old bromide sink in, meanwhile becoming aware of her tension; working away at the dishes, she had paused midway in a wipe, her fingers trembling, and a flush had spread cross her broad ill-proportioned face, coming out in blotches. It was time to cajole her gently. “Really, you’re an educated lady. It doesn’t become someone of your intelligence to hang on to such an idea.”
On the edge of a reply she stopped, cocked an ear at the radio, and we both attended to the latest Booker Mason bulletin. It was more doom. Having exhausted all appeals, the condemned man’s attorney—speaking yesterday evening from the steps of the state capitol in Richmond—had entreated the legislators to use the tragedy of Booker Mason as a symbol for the need to repeal an inhuman law which made a travesty of the principles of justice enunciated by such great Virginians as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison …