Let It Bang Page 5

  I was just old enough to know that Velcro shoes meant I wouldn’t have to tell myself the story about the goddamn bunny running around a tree when Grandmomme told me her story about Lawrence Guyot and Fannie Lou Hamer.

  Understand, now, that Guyot is a major figure in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. One of the defining moments of his life was his trip to Winona, Mississippi, to bail out Fannie Lou Hamer and two others who had been arrested for standing in a bus-stop area reserved for white people. (Hamer, a contemporary of Grandmomme and Guyot, had also endured an involuntary hysterectomy at the hands of a white doctor while having surgery to remove a tumor. Why? The state of Mississippi—a bona fide motherfucker—wanted to reduce its number of poor black people.)

  Once Guyot made his intentions known in Winona, local police forced him to strip naked. Then nine of them beat him bloody for four hours, even threatening to set his penis and testicles aflame. This is the kind of story I heard as a child. Grandmomme’s stories. I was sitting on her porch steps while she talked and watered plants, which did nothing but annoy me when I’d lose a baseball in their thickets. “Lawrence lived through it,” Grandmomme said. “Me too.” She spritzed an azalea with a spray bottle, and paused. “We didn’t always feel like we would live to see the next morning.”

  Just as she was about to bend over and spray some more, I asked, “What else? About Mr. Guyot? Y’all were friends?”

  Grandmomme smiled, put down the spray bottle, and took a seat next to me. “Let me tell you about Lawrence—and a bit about your Grandmomme—back when your daddy was still squeezing you into a napkin.”

  “How could I be squeezed into a—”

  “Hush,” she said.

  GUYOT SERVED AS chairman and director of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Grandmomme, Peggy Jean Connor, was its executive secretary. One year before he died, in November 2012, Guyot recorded an oral history, and he mentioned Grandmomme in it.

  One story in particular gets to the heart of Grandmomme as seen through the eyes of her peers and historians—how the world views her and how she viewed the world. Grandmomme and other delegates chosen from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party crashed the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. They challenged the all-white delegation for excluding blacks from the political process. She was alongside Fannie Lou Hamer when Hamer gave her famous “I question America” speech about voter suppression and law enforcement’s racist violence. This remains one of the crucibles of Grandmomme’s life. But Guyot’s oral history adds a dramatic coda.

  “Peggy Jean Connor was the little, sweet, nice lady who,” Guyot said, “when the bus was coming back from Atlantic City, some whites [was] trying to stop it. So she got up to the bus driver and took a long knife. She said, Now, if this bus stops, your head comes off.” Story is, the bus driver kept driving.

  It wasn’t until I was in grade school that I began to understand, in the smallest sense, Grandmomme’s stature according to historians, journalists, politicians, and fellow civil rights activists like Guyot.

  GRANDMOMME WAS BORN on October 29, 1932, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She began working in her aunt Hattie’s beauty parlor as a shampoo girl when she was eleven years old and graduated from Garrett’s Beauty School in 1946. At fourteen, she became a licensed beautician. The state’s minimum age requirement for work was sixteen. She lied on the application. Grandmomme graduated from Eureka High School at eighteen and did a year of college work at Royal Street Extension in Hattiesburg. Two years later, she met Dennie Frank Connor, an army man, and on April 14, 1952, she married him. Their marriage is recorded in the colored-marriage-license record book in the same Forrest County Courthouse Grandmomme would later picket so my mother could attend the same school as a white child.

  When Grandmomme’s aunt Hattie decided to leave for New Jersey, she left her salon to Grandmomme, who became responsible for paying the store rent and paying employees. Her father, John Henry, built a sign for her. It read JEAN’S BEAUTY SHOP and was erected above the salon at 510 Mobile Street—just four blocks from where she lived then and until recently. She had barely reached legal drinking age when she became one of just a handful of female sole proprietors in Hattiesburg. In those years, she paid her poll tax, a registration fee the state charged all those who wanted to vote. First instituted in Georgia in 1871, the poll tax was one in a series of insidious ventures through which the segregated South disenfranchised black voters during the broken promise of Reconstruction. While the tax was small—in many cases it was just one or two dollars—any amount was large for the mostly poor rural population of blacks. In 1937, Breedlove v. Suttles challenged the legality of the poll tax, but not until Harman v. Forssenius in 1965 would the court strike down the racist poll-tax laws, under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

  As a young woman in the 1950s, Grandmomme volunteered to bring money for the poll tax, hers and others’, to the courthouse. Many blacks in Hattiesburg feared the circuit court clerk and registrar—a big white man named Theron Lynd who was so racist, he’d likely bring extra tiki torches to a parade. Lynd, and Lynd alone, had the power to say who could and could not vote in Forrest County, Mississippi. Folks dropped off their money at Grandmomme’s shop, and then she faithfully walked to the courthouse, paid for those who were too afraid to pay for themselves, and collected their receipts. “He treated me like the dirtiest mangiest dog you ever saw,” Grandmomme said. And every time she went, she took the venom Lynd spat at her, and walked out proudly.

  WHILE MY GLOCK was still new, I called Grandmomme to ask whether Guyot’s story was really true. Had she been willing to cut off a man’s head with a knife? “This is what Mr. Guyot said, Grandmomme,” I said.

  “Lawrence,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “He might be dead, but he’d prefer to be called Lawrence.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I waited, thinking she might have more to say on the subject.

  I waited some more. “Grandmomme?”

  “I’m thinking.” Her tone of voice lay somewhere between annoyed and downright pissed.

  “Never happened,” Grandmomme said eventually.

  “Huh?”

  “His story about me. It never happened.”

  “Wait—really?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard it before,” she said. “Folks just want to believe it’s true—mythologizing. Nobody ever bothered to check with me, though. I tell you this. I’ve never got anything done with guns and knives. But just because I was nonviolent doesn’t mean I wasn’t angry. Just like you, Sugar.”

  6

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  There is No Try

  A WEEK OR so after Charles had escorted me to the gun show, I was at his house again, after carrying my unloaded firearm in the back of my truck. From my apartment in Norman, I’d traveled more than a hundred miles.

  The feeling of traveling with a firearm, even an unloaded one in a plastic carrying case, didn’t sit well with me. Not because I was afraid of an unloaded gun, but because I feared what might happen if an Oklahoma highway patrolman pulled me over and spotted it on the bench seat in the back. From that day on, when I traveled with my gun, I kept it unloaded, in its box, beneath the driver’s seat, where prying eyes were not likely to see it when looking in through the window.

  There are no felonies on my record. I am, in the eyes of my government, an upstanding citizen. Yet I felt it necessary to take the same precautions as a wanted criminal because my skin is brown and my hair is curly. And yes, I realize that those who believe black men have something to hide could take this quite literally as an example of a black man doing just that.

&nbs
p; JIMMY HADN’T BLINKED when I’d asked him earlier that week to go with me to Frank’s Gun & Repair to get the ammunition I’d need. He even drove. I’d already asked Charles to take me.

  “Ask Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy knows Frank too.”

  Maybe Jimmy sensed my apprehension about walking into a gun store alone. Even beside him, I didn’t feel the least bit capable of asking Frank for what I needed. I felt closed in and frozen. But Jimmy began to chat up Frank, and Frank showed his affinity for Jimmy, and by extension Charles, and he had no problem retrieving the nine-millimeter shells for my gun and the .22-caliber shells for the pistol Lizzie would be using. She’d shoot with us because it was a chance for her to be with her men. Jimmy paid for the shells, another act of kindness. Frank put them in a plastic bag and presented the straps to Jimmy.

  “Y’all go shoot ’em up now.”

  It’s not every day that I’m expressly told to go shoot anything, and I couldn’t think of a time when it had been said to me with a smile.

  AT THE HOUSE, Charles showed me how to load the magazine for my Glock 26. The magazine is miniature for this model, by Glock standards, with just room enough for seven rounds, but that is also the same number of rounds provided by the full-size Colt 1911. The small magazine is part of the genius of the “Baby Glock.” The gun can be holstered almost anywhere on your person without bulge or discomfort. Some folks even carry it in the front pocket of their pants. The former NFL star Plaxico Burress rather famously carried his gun, sans holster, at a New York City night club in 2008 and managed not only to shoot himself in the leg, but also got sentenced to time for criminal possession of a firearm. He spent nearly two years behind bars. Plus, he shot himself in the leg. So I don’t need to try front-of-the-pants.

  I was surprised at how tough it was to load my gun’s magazine. As I popped each additional bullet into the magazine, the spring beneath it became harder to depress. After I’d loaded five rounds, I was having a hard time loading the sixth. Charles had to do it for me. But not without chiding me to “use those muscles of yours.” I saw this man, whose hands ached sometimes with arthritis, load the last two bullets without incident. The way Charles inserted those shells into the magazine had little to do with hand strength and everything to do with technique. His thumb and index finger were set against the magazine. His thumb pressed on top of the round, so the bullet wouldn’t slip. He depressed the bullet and slid it back into the magazine. He made it look easy.

  I noticed he didn’t immediately snap the magazine into the pistol, not at his kitchen table. He simply laid it into the box beside the pistol and closed the box. A pistol can do you no harm, even if the magazine is loaded, if the magazine is not inside the pistol. I would later learn how many people insert a full magazine into a pistol just because they’d gone through the trouble of filling the magazine with bullets, and then leave it that way. Charles never did this, and I knew he’d lived his entire life around guns with nary a bad incident. To say I watched him is to say I mimicked him in every way I could.

  My trying so hard is likely what set me up to have my feelings hurt once Charles, Jimmy, Lizzie, and I got to target practice. We were about one hundred yards from the house, in front of a tree line. Livestock was cordoned from the site. We used Charles’s truck as a staging area. This is where targets, bullets, gun boxes, earmuffs, and guns were put when not in use.

  I was to learn later that some folks wear a hat for protection from spent casings, which can burn your neck. Most folks wear eye protection for the same reason, unless, like me, you walk around four-eyed all the time. And everybody needs to wear ear protection because the sound of a gun firing repeatedly can have the same effect on your hearing as Nickelback blared at the volume of an air-raid siren. Your eardrums tend to want to bleed out and die.

  Jimmy handed out the ear protection, and Charles let me step up first. In truth, I didn’t want to go first. I really would rather have watched someone else. But Charles loved to put people on the spot to see how they react to pressure or to find out whether they were as skilled as they claimed to be. I’d first learned this when Charles found out that I worked as a mechanic. Minutes into one visit, he took me to one of the trucks he was having a problem with, which was most of them, and asked me what I thought. I gave him my two cents on the matter, and he casually mentioned that the mechanic he’d asked to look at the truck had said the same.

  On this day, I took a few steps forward to the spot he’d pointed to and tried to think about what it might take to hit the target Jimmy had mounted in front of the tree line. I waited an instant. Then I asked Charles what I should do.

  “Line up the sights with the target,” he said, “and pull the trigger.” I figured I would have to settle for that. Then he spoke again. “Now don’t hold it like this.”

  Holding it like this was demonstrated as holding the gun sideways—my wrist had turned ninety degrees counter-clockwise.

  Like I bang.

  Like a criminal.

  I did my best to shrug off Charles’s criticism, even laughed it off. I tried to put the gun sights on the target’s bull’s-eye. When I fired, I missed. I missed terribly. And I continued to miss terribly with the next six rounds. When my Glock locked up, with the slide no longer in the ready-to-fire position, I knew it was spent. But I wasn’t done. I walked back to the truck, took the magazine out of the gun, and went about the business of trying to reload it. I managed to load only five shells. The sixth seemed impossible to maneuver, and I was perfectly frustrated. So I slid the magazine back into the gun and waited my turn. When I was up again, I tried to will the gun on target, which is all I could think to do. I held the gun tight. I closed one eye, and tried to stop my hands from shaking. Then I squeezed the trigger. But nothing happened.

  I held the gun straight out in front of me because I didn’t want to point it at Charles, and I turned around to look back at him. He’d seen it happen, or, more precisely, had seen nothing happen. He walked over to me and calmly took the gun from my hand, then stepped between me and the target, so I was out of harm’s way. He looked the gun over for just a few seconds. Then he smashed his palm into the magazine, snapping it into place, pulled back on the slide, ejecting a round, and then fired the gun three times. He handed it back to me, with the barrel facing away from us, and told me to shoot. I fired the last two rounds, hitting nothing but the white of the paper, nowhere near the bull’s-eye.

  “Those Glocks, they don’t like cheap ammunition,” he said.

  I had dreaded this excursion precisely because I didn’t want to embarrass myself, or worse, hurt myself. That sense of caution just makes me an adult. But I didn’t expect the embarrassment to cut so hard. I didn’t expect to feel physically inadequate when loading a gun, firing a gun, and then not just missing the target, but woefully missing it.

  I was pouty and angry for the rest of the day. Lizzie knew enough to leave me alone with that. But that was also the day I decided it was not enough to be proficient with a firearm. I needed to be better with one than the vast majority of gun enthusiasts who might see my inadequacy and turn the knife with a quip about how I held my gun sideways. Yes, I needed to become a better shot than Charles.

  Also, I was certainly interested to find out if the self-appointed guardians of the Second Amendment would learn to tolerate my quest. I was a good guy. And now I had a gun. Would I be seen as a good guy with a gun?

  But first I needed to get to be an expert with one. And I wouldn’t enlist Charles’s help. I was on a mission to become a Jedi Master with a gun, and I needed to do this my way, and there would be no more trying. As Master Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

  WHEN I ARRIVED home that day, I found myself replaying the scene in Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon, as the working-class Southie savant Will Hunting, trash-talks a Harvard boy at a bar: “You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on fuckin’ education you could’ve got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” You can also get
an education in target shooting, defensive shooting, cleaning guns, the history of guns, and the disassembly and reassembly of guns for free on YouTube. That’s where I chose to start the hands-on portion of my gun education.

  I first wanted to find the proper way to clean and maintain my gun. So I went to Academy Sports and found a handgun-cleaning kit I thought would do the job. Then I searched YouTube for cleaning tutorials. I found a middle-aged white dude who went by the alias hickok45 who was using a Glock 27 to demonstrate his cleaning technique. The first thing he did, the first thing that even I knew already we should all do, was demonstrate that the magazine was empty. Then he racked the slide back multiple times to show there were no rounds in the chamber. Finally, he pulled the trigger, dry-firing the weapon to further illustrate the point that this gun was safe and a danger only if you threw it. It was, essentially, a $500 paperweight.

  He told viewers that the trigger needed to be depressed “before you break it down.” I noticed how he wrapped his right hand around the back of the pistol, pulled back slightly on the slide, and depressed a couple of small levers on each side of the slide to release it. The slide houses the firing pin, or striker, and the extractor on a semiautomatic pistol. It took me several minutes to figure out the correct combination of finesse and strength needed to get my slide off. Once I did, I felt a sense of accomplishment. I’d essentially just made my gun two halves of a whole.