The Loveliest Lynchee Series

The dateline was to be Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1957. The story was to be about the vicious hatred of a city whose people were resisting justice and terrifying school children. Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus had become the symbol of massive resistance, and where an indecisive president, Eisenhower, had finally taken action to protect children and enforce justice. Little Rock, where the plan to desegregate schools had been watered down to nothing more than nine young people – nine out of thousands – six girls and three boys, to carry the banner. The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, sent its reporter to cover the story. It expected to print an account of atrocities. It expected to describe monstrous people who lived only to devour young children and to ravage the dreams of hard-working families. The Chicago Defender expected from its reporter a sensational story.

But let Gwendolyn Brooks tell us what actually happened, in her poem, “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”:

In Little Rock the people bear

Babes, and comb and part their hair

And watch the want ads, put repair

To roof and latch. While wheat toast burns

A woman waters multiferns.

Time upholds, or overturns,

The many, tight, and small concerns.

In Little Rock the people sing

Sunday hymns like anything,

Through Sunday pomp and polishing.

And after testament and tunes,

Some soften Sunday afternoons

With lemon tea and Lorna Doones.

I forecast

And I believe

Come Christmas Little Rock will cleave

To Christmas tree and trifle, weave,

From laugh and tinsel, texture fast.

In Little Rock is baseball; Barcarolle.

That hotness in July … the uniformed figures raw and implacable

And not intellectual,

Batting the hotness or clawing the suffering dust.

…

There is love, too, in Little Rock. Soft women softly

Opening themselves in kindness,

Or, pitying one’s blindness,

Awaiting one’s pleasure

In azure

…

In Little Rock they know

Not answering the telephone is a way of rejecting life,

That it is our business to be bothered, is our business

To cherish bores or boredom, be polite

To lies and love and many-faceted fuzziness.

I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had.

I blink across my prim and pencilled pad.

The saga I was sent for is not down.

Because there is a puzzle in this town.

The biggest News I do not dare

Telegraph to the Editor’s chair:

“They are like people everywhere.”

The angry Editor would reply

In hundred harryings of Why.

And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,

Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.

And I saw coiling storm a-writhe

On bright madonnas. And a scythe

Of men harassing brownish girls.

(The bows and barrettes in the curls

And braids declined away from joy.)

I saw a bleeding brownish boy …

The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.

The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.

Monsters? The reporter for The Chicago Defender couldn’t find monsters. What he found was that the people of Little Rock, “They are like people everywhere.” The utter ordinariness of sin, the sheer everydayness of hate. Harsh oppression in a land of freedom. Death in the midst of life. The impulse to lynch, to lash out. The animal instinct for wild hatred, even where people sing hymns and hear of Jesus and sip gentle refreshment. These evildoers – they look very ordinary. They are like people everywhere. Ready to hate, ready to lynch.

But what do you make of Brooks’ closing line, “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”?

I

Jesus arrived at death’s dark door one day. It seemed to be too late. His friend Lazarus had been sick for quite a while, but Jesus was in no apparent hurry. It puzzled His disciples; it made His friends Mary and Martha anxious. But Jesus operated on His own timetable. He came in His own sweet time, and then was bold enough to announce, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory”.

When Jesus arrived at death’s dark door, He began by speaking of hope. When things looked bleak, and it felt like the battle was over and lost, Jesus insisted that the first weapon you have is hope. "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory.” That’s hope.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes of a little girl who, despite her health challenge, kept hope alive. Her poem is called “From A Street in Bronzeville; hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven”. Imagine as you hear it a child, seriously deformed, struggling with a severe distortion in her body. When she thinks of heaven, what does this child see?

My Father, it is surely a blue place

And straight. Right. Regular. Where I shall find

No need for scholarly nonchalance or looks

A little to the left or guards upon the