Lars Åkerson lives in Durham, North Carolina and is the co-founder of Life Lines, a podcast featuring writers on death row. He is a part of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship. 

Among the many deaths of 2016 was Ann Atwater, a long-time North Carolina civil rights leader. Ann was eighty. She organized in Durham for decades, but as a strong black woman with a fierce will and a booming voice, she’s not the person one would have expected to eulogize a former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). That man was C.P. Ellis, and the pair shared a relationship of biblical proportions.

Osha Gray Davidson tells the story in his book, The Best of Enemies.[1] The year was 1971. Durham roiled with racial tension. Two branches of the federal government – the Supreme Court (1954) and Congress (1964) – mandated school integration, but the city had stalled until 1970, when district court ordered Durham’s schools to desegregate. After months of negotiations, the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare offered the city funding for a series of community meetings to smooth the path toward integration.

As outspoken civic leaders, C.P. and Ann were invited to help plan these meetings. At first, C.P. balked; the people at those meetings weren’t his kind. Only the chair of the Citizens’ Council – the Klan for genteel, law-abiding folk – could convince him to represent white folks’ interests in the process. When Ann heard, she committed to show up and to muster black leaders.

The gathering was explosive, but as the smoke cleared, plans emerged for a series of public meetings, 10 back-to-back sixteen-hour sessions for the community to chart the integration of Durham’s public schools. Ann and C.P. would chair the process.

They were not friends. They could hardly agree on the venue, each concerned about the safety of those they hoped would attend. When the morning of the first meeting arrived, C.P. showed Ann the revolver in his trunk, in case things got out of hand. “C.P., that’s your god,” Ann replied. Holding her Bible, she said, “This is mine. We’ll see which is stronger.”

It wasn’t on that first day, but as the sessions progressed, C.P. surprised himself to hear his concerns voiced by black parents. He’d never listened to black people. As a working-class white man, never quite able to provide his family the life he hoped, he resonated with fears that the new plan wouldn’t offer their children the newest textbooks or attentive teachers – that they would still lose, even after desegregation.

During one afternoon break, he collapsed into a seat beside Ann. They chatted about nothing, each savoring a rest from intense, marathon meetings. At some point, the conversation turned personal.

“How’re your kids?” C.P. asked. “Two, right?”

Ann sized him up, unsure how much she could trust him. Then she risked telling C.P. how her daughter was coming home from school crying. Her teacher and classmates were harassing her. They thought her mother was a fool for working with a Klansman.

C.P. froze. His kids were getting that, too, he confessed. He’d received death threats. Their conversation tumbled into all the hardships they experienced for their work, all the hardships of growing up and parenting in poverty, all the hardships they shared. “Suddenly,” Davidson writes, “he was crying. The tears came without warning, and once started, he was unable to stop them. Ann was dumbfounded, but she reacted instinctively by reaching out and taking his hand in her own. She tried to comfort him as he sobbed. Then she, too, began to cry.”[2]

But there’s no happy ending here. By the end of the ten days of meetings, the 160 hours of sessions, C.P. realized he had done something he couldn’t undo. His eyes had changed. He saw his and others’ skin differently now, more tenderly. He wasn’t at all sure he liked it, but his own people – the people who sent him there – were certain they did not. He’d set fire to bridges he thought were made of stone. He had nowhere to go. He felt out of place among the middle-class liberal white folk who supported integration, couldn’t get comfortable in Ann’s black church, and was iced out of the Klavern he once led. They’d kill him if he got too close. But they didn’t have to: death was at his side; dispairing of his own transformation, he made unsuccessful attempts at his life.

~

The story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5 is a story of God’s miraculous healing. It’s a story of the healing of an outsider, an enemy of Israel. It’s a story Jesus tells in his first sermon (Luke 4). The story is familiar. Naaman is cured of his leprosy and his skin is made soft, like a boy’s. The story of Namaan feels good.

Namaan’s familiar story is good and true, but it overlooks the precariousness of his situation. He’s an Aramean general. In the next chapter of 2 Kings, Aram is again at war with Israel. The tension crackles in the king’s voice as Naaman arrives. “See how he’s trying to pick a quarrel with me,” he cries.

Namaan carries a royal letter, but his request sounds treasonous. It sounds like betrayal. Weren’t there any healers in his land? Maybe the king of Israel was right; maybe Naaman was throwing a gauntlet. Maybe the general expected to return home unhealed, exposing either YHWH’s impotence or the Israelites’ lack of charity. Maybe his pilgrimage was a sly war overture, a tactic in an intractable conflict.

So when Elisha instructs him to wash in the Jordan, perhaps Naaman finds himself reluctantly committed to the charade. He hates himself for the indignity of the situation. Healed, the foreign general babbles praise, undone by the restoration of his body. Elisha, the man of God, sends him away with a blessing.

We don’t know what happened to Naaman back in Aram, or what it’s like to be a military man with a boy’s soft skin. Maybe the king of Aram threw him a banquet with his friends and colleagues. One wonders.

Maybe Naaman was like C.P. Maybe he realized once he returned to Aram that he could never really go home. His mission had been too risky. He had been successful in all the wrong ways, and his success would be reckoned to him as betrayal.

Or maybe he was welcomed cautiously, as someone who went too far, now unreliable to those he once trusted. Maybe he was wracked with doubts sown by receiving his life back from his enemy.

We don’t know how Naaman’s story ends. His history is opaque to us.

We do know that his transformation, like C.P.’s, was not instantaneous. Naaman’s anger shows he did not get what he wanted. It was no magical invocation, no miraculous waving of hands. It was seven humiliating baths in the Jordan; ten tiring, demeaning meetings. It was unseemly candor with the unlikeliest people. It was moments and days and years left unrecorded, slowly adjusting his unfamiliar body to his unchosen life.

~

C.P.’s betrayal of his klan, fraternal and biological, was unforgivable. Those familiar spaces were closed to him. As a white working-class race traitor in the late-twentieth-century American South, he was shunned from family reunions and never again found a church where he belonged. But as a tradesman at Duke University, he joined an integrated labor union. Elected to union leadership, he served its majority black membership for the final decades of his career.

At his funeral, Ann arrived early and sat in front. The funeral home director approached her and asked her to move. She was in the section reserved for family.

“I’m his sister,” she replied.

~

During the First World War, a French soldier wrote a letter to his cousin. “Above all, trust in the slow work of God,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote.

“We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability – and that may take a very long time.[3]”

The ironies of his statement, of course, lie between its context, the fundamental impatience of war, and its illusion of future security. The “stages of instability” he concedes are not the stepping stones he imagines but rather the character of life’s terrain. Yet perhaps in the context of Naaman’s, C.P.’s, and our lives, we can find some truth and gain consolation and courage here.

We live our lives in a slow unfolding, within neverending ecologies of relationships, fidelities and betrayals unknown and unforeseen. Perhaps these are excruciating because they are our horizons; because they extend beyond our capacity to know or imagine; because this is the topography of life, and we need each other to be our Elisha, to listen to us with compassion, heal us, and tell us, “Go in peace.”

Notes:

[1] Osha Gray Davidson, The Best of Enemies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

[2] Ibid., 276.

[3] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919, tr. René Hauge (London: Collins, 1965), 57.