Say Nothing is the story of the murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, by the IRA in 1972. She was accused of being an informer to the British Army. The accusation was false.
The book is also the best history of The Troubles yet written, Jean McConville’s murder being described within the larger context of that many-sided civil war.
The Barn is the story of the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 by a gang of white men. He was accused of whistling at a white woman in a country grocery store.
The book is also the best history of Mississippi I have ever read; Emmett Till’s killing being described within the larger context of the State and the Delta’s founding and evolution.
Both McConville and Till were murdered by people born and raised within Belfast and the Delta. One murder was justified as necessary in a time of war. Informants could not be tolerated. That victim was a woman, aged 38. One murder was justified by the racial codes of the time. No black man could be allowed to be familiar with a white woman. That victim was a child, aged 14.
And I wonder now, at 72, humbled by time, youthful righteousness squeezed out of me, and with a better perspective on my upbringing and the intensity of my passionate youth, whether I might have been like those killers if the context of my life had been like theirs.
I have written often about how important it is to hold to a fundamental moral code – to be kind in opposition to cruelty, to adopt a skeptical open mindedness in opposition to fanaticism, to reject lies and propaganda and to commit to discovering the truth, and to act with honor.
But if I had been that young Catholic man in Belfast in 1969, Bloody Sunday the rawest of wounds, British troops sweeping men away to detention, if I had seen the doors of homes smashed down and women and children rousted into the street while their belongings were torn to shreds in a search for guns, what would my code have become? If everyone around me either kept silent or vigorously supported “the armed struggle,” what might I have done? Believe in Up the Provos no matter the means? Blow up pubs where those troops went after hours? Shoot an 18-year-old in the head? Publicly tar and feather Irish women accused of being friendly with soldiers? Keep quiet about the disappearance and murder of a 38-year-old widow who left behind 10 children? Refuse to perform even the smallest act of decency for those 10 orphaned children?
And if I had been a young white man in 1955, Mississippian born and raised within the odious mythology of the Lost Cause, such a deep believer in the supremacy of the white race as if that belief had its own strand of DNA, a young man thin skinned and an adherent of southern honor, and one quick to believe any ugly story about black men and boys and knowing that the law never applied to black people and that all power lay with my people, what might have I been capable of doing?
Looking at those 2 places during those years, while I want to believe that I would know where all the red lines were located and what it would mean to step across them, my whole idea of what “the red” would be would have been shaped by so many currents of family and community and intimate experiences with violence and unsheathed power.
We are not creatures who stand alone. My moral center now feels strong and certain, but at 16, 17, 18? We are enmeshed in forces of which we may only be dimly aware. The ghosts of history are all around us. Their power is subtle, encompassing, persuasive. Honestly, I do not know what I might have done or who I might have been.
