Passive Fist: Part I

The summer before my life disintegrated was lovely. There are Knoxville summers where the heat oppresses a person like a tyrant, but not that summer. Not the summer of 1997. Highs barely reached to 80 and the humidity must’ve pushed its way around us and into Georgia. I remember being happy, but only as though seeing it through a fog. I can just make out the outline of it.

A half dozen of us white guys were gathered on an easy August evening on our patio. I liked convening the men from church for fellowship and robust discussion. Four of us were lighting up pipes and two were puffing on cigars but all of us were sipping cheap gin and drinking good beer. Smoking and drinking was a blessed indulgence to most of us. We had grown up in conservative church cultures that had taught us to frown upon such debauched practices. Then there was the advent of the hipster pastor; some young punk wearing an untucked shirt and skinny jeans preaching mostly about grace and throwing in a few swear words to prove he’d achieved a kind of grace-induced nirvana. Me and my buddies enjoyed breaking free of our hypocritical piety on the patio in this way.

“Think of me as the ‘weaker brother,’” I would tell friends who hadn’t experienced the smoking and drinking revolution in the church. “If you don’t drink and smoke with me you’re going to cause me to stumble into the sin of legalism.”

We were like giddy schoolboys hanging out in that “one friend’s” basement. The friend whose parents were cool because they let their thirteen-year-old and his buddies watch R-rated movies. Being naughty somehow helped us to speak deeply of the stuff that mattered. We learned to love each other under the spell tobacco and alcohol, and to move past the growing divisions over various issues that had been creeping their way into Evangelical churches.

“Really, Jeff? Really?” I said. Alcohol had a way of lowering our filters. “You think someone is more prone to crime just because of their race?”

Jeff was lighting his pipe for the third time (we were all novices). I figured this was just a tactic to give him a chance to reconsider his stupid remark.

“Now Martin.” He said at last, through his southern drawl while his teeth were clamped down around his pipe. “I’m just a good ‘ol boy from Tennessee giving y’all the particulars of the crime. You Yankees like to make everything about race.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re the one making this about race, brother” I said, leaning back in my chair to give the appearance of being at ease even if my hackles were up. “You just said the kids who stole the mower from your garage were black, am I right? Now I’d bet anything you would not have mentioned their race if the kids were white.”

“Admit it, Martin.” Jeff replied. “Black neighborhoods have more crime than this one here. I’m not saying it’s in the DNA of Black folk or nothing. It’s just part of the culture in those neighborhoods.”

“You don’t think it might have something to do with poverty rather than race?” I said. “I suppose poor white neighborhoods don’t deal with crime.”

“I gotta go with Martin on this one, Jeff.” Bo was probably my closest friend of those who’d gathered. He and I found more common ground on divisive issues. He was an adjunct professor at the local community college. “I’ve seen the studies that show drug use is about 10 percent among all races, whether White, Black, Asian, Hispanic; whatever. Poverty is the real crime, not the color of a neighborhood.”

“Besides,” Bo added. “Martin can’t help that he was born in Pennsylvania. We just gotta accept he’s still learning the higher ways.”

At this they all laughed. Even I couldn’t help but smile.

“Hey, listen here Bo! Mattie and I have been in Knoxville for eight years.” I said, being sure to pronounce it “Knox-vull.” “When do we finally get citizenship in the south?”

“Never!” Was the universal exclamation round the table.

“You ain’t never, never going to be a southerner.” Jeff said. “Now, I’ll tell you what. That little baby Mattie’s carrying in her belly; they might have a fightin’ chance at being a southerner … so long as you don’t teach them any of your Yankee ways.”

Another outburst of laughter.

Mattie and I had been trying for two years to have a baby and she was seven months pregnant and looked every bit of it. We were so excited that we had a nursery set up and a minivan before her second trimester.

“You’re not going to raise no pacifist are you, Martin?” Asked another friend, leaning in.

“I’m certainly not going to raise my kid to be a gun-toting heathen like the rest of y’all.” I said. And this elicited not only laughter but a few oooh’s from the guys. Smack talk was our love language. “Our baby will be raised a Christian, and everyone knows to be a Christian is to be a pacifist.”

“We’re gonna need a whole lot more beer before we can educate you on this one, Martin.” Jeff said, reaching across the table and picking up a double IPA that boasted 7.5% ABV.

The spirited debate that followed tripped along until well after dark. On the issue of non-violence, not even Bo would back me up. But I didn’t mind. My convictions ran deep. Mattie and I loved the south, but the obsession with handguns among our Christian friends mystified us. How they could endorse owning a weapon whose exclusive purpose was to blow the life out of another human being, made in the image of God, was beyond us.

I’d heard all their arguments dozens of times.

“Guns allow you to protect the vulnerable.”

“We’d only use it as a last resort. Self-defense.”

“Violence is required to restrain evil. And we live in an evil world.”

“The Law of Israel had capital punishment.”

I’d opened myself up to the possibility that I might be wrong. But as a follower of the Prince of Peace, I just couldn’t see my way clear to using lethal violence for any reason. Better to be killed than to take the life of another.

That was, at least, until Frederick Johnson came into my life.

About a month later, I was awakened from a deep sleep, the prospect of fatherhood chasing the sleep out of me. I lie there unable to step back into whatever dream I had been pulled from, so I got up to use the bathroom.

As I approached the bathroom door I saw Frederick there, going through our medicine cabinet. There had been a series of break-ins that year, addicts on the hunt for prescription drugs. I was working on a leaky sink trap earlier that evening, so an iron pipe wrench was sitting on the countertop just within reach. Frederick was in such a craze rifling through the vanity, that he didn’t even turn my way when I picked it up slowly.

There is something about a hand clenched around a weapon during a moment of terror that reveals what’s in a man. I stood there feeling the weight of that wrench in my hand, watching Frederick raid our cabinet. Regardless of the possible threat Frederick presented, I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even threaten him with it. The wrench lay stiff at my side when Mattie stepped behind me.

“Martin, what are you …”

Time was obsolete in that instant when Frederick disintegrated my life. I mean that literally. Disintegrated. When that bullet whistled past my ear my life was integrated. The next second it lay in shards like my wife’s skull. There’s my Christian piece, and over there is a bit of my life called husband, and its lying next to a fragment called fatherhood. And there, splattered against the hallway wall, is the part of me called pacifist.

Bits of my life, my faith, my convictions were shattered at my feet, as my hand dropped the pipe wrench.