A Brush with the Past

Yesterday as a part of the Welty Conference, we went to the Medgar Evers house museum, maintained by Tougaloo College. Even though we were there less than an hour, I cannot get the place out of my mind. The image of the little house in its small lot persists with a tenacity that will not let go.

To get there, one turns off a four-lane strip of badly-kept highway labeled with black and silver signs that proclaim that particular stretch of road to be Medgar Evers Boulevard. It's down an unassuming side street in a neighborhood of modest, fading ranch homes. The lot seems too small to hold so much history or sadness, and even now, so many years later, there is an emptiness to this place that cannot be explained by the fact the mere absence of constant habitation.

The house itself has been restored to its original cheerful 60's aqua paint, something that clashes sharply with the huge historical society dominating the space between the living room and bedroom windows. The black and bronze surface reminds even the most casual eye that this is a place where history turned, where blood was shed, and where a life was taken in hatred.

Our guide for the tour, the archivist at Tougaloo, took us through those last troubled days of Evers' life as we stood crowded together in what had been his living room. Our feet shuffled across the wooden floors he'd been so proud to provide for his family; light filtered weakly through the windows set just a little higher than normal in the safehaven he'd tried to make. We heard the story of how he'd come home from a war to fight others here, a war to make a home for his family in this middle-class black subdivision nestled among the white ones, a war to bring an end to the artificial divisions in his home state based on the color of skin, a war to be accepted when even those he was trying to help saw him as a threat to safety and security.

When the archivist related to us Mrs. Evers' remembrances of the night her husband was assassinated, standing there inside that small room with the 1960's furniture and the piano in the corner, a feeling I cannot describe came over me. The story, so well-known, of the shot from the dark, the bullet that ended a man's life, came into the house, tore through the kitchen, and ultimately landed in the sink, was no abstract history lesson. It was no dusty fact to be cataloged or checked off. It was the stuff of real people's real lives, and I was standing there on the parlor rug, looking at the knickknacks on the shelves and the china breakfront, inserted into those lives, at least in some way. It was all too horrible to tell, too horrible to hear, too horrible to stand in that place, crowded as we were, and not be able to run away from. In that place, not ten feet even from where I stood, a man whose only "crime" had been to try to destroy evil had been slain in the most craven of ways right on his very doorstep with his wife and his children in the back of the house.

We toured through the rooms, looking into the reconstructed image of the Evers family's life. In the tiny kitchen, aqua blue appliances sit quietly, the refrigerator with the hole in the door from the shooting long since gone. In Mr. and Mrs. Evers' room, a cheerful pink chenille spread covers the bed, and a wedding photo sits on top of the dresser. In the children's room, the curtains were a bright colorful 60's animal print, dolls and sock monkeys sat in small rocking chairs, and the mattresses of the beds were on the floor to prevent a stray bullet from killing the occupants of that room in their innocent slumber.

When I got back on the bus, as others were finishing up their tours and comments, I spent time just staring at the outside of the little turquoise dwelling there hidden in the middle of Jackson. It seemed as if were too fragile, somehow, to bear up under the weight of that much sadness. I think a fortress of solid steel would have been more appropriate than plastered interior walls and a black shingled-roof. Those two small steps, one slightly larger than the other, that lead into the entrance from the carport were also much too small a stage for such a momentous event to have occurred upon them. Then again, history rarely happens in places where the setting is suitably grandiose.

I came away from the Evers House Museum with a new sense of urgency about knowing about my state's and my nation's troubled past. I have lived here, barring trips away, all my life, and until yesterday, I had never seen that place. It is a chunk of history as profound in its way as Plymouth Rock, yet it sits hidden, quiet, unassuming in the soft shadows of Mississippi's capital city. What else am I missing? I think I'd better find out, even though it may not be comfortable to know.