Sept. 8 to 15, 1969, Decatur, Georgia By Linda Gray

It was a hot, muggy evening on September 14, 1969. I had just finished washing the dinner dishes and was sitting down on the porch to watch my kids play when the phone rang.

My aunt’s voice on the end of the line brought news that changed my family and me forever.

“I thought you ought to know: Stan has been seriously burned in an incident at work,” she reported grimly. “They don’t expect him to make it, Linda.”

I couldn’t speak. I didn’t even hear the click as she hung up the phone.

I sat stoic on the passenger side of the car as my husband wove in and out of the heavy Atlanta traffic. I had no idea what awaited me at Grady Memorial Hospital only a few miles away. I never could have prepared myself for the ordeal my family and I would face the next two days.

Stan and I had always been very close. I was about 10 years old when he was born. I was like a second mother to him, since he was only nine months old at the birth of my premature younger sister.

He had graduated high school that past June, but there was animosity between he and our father because of his “Beatles style” haircut. His long hair suggested defiance to my father; he was told to either cut his hair or move out of the house. Stan moved in with our eldest brother in Atlanta and found a job at a chemical plant.

Every moment was surreal after we reached the waiting room of the intensive-care unit. My sister and three of my five brothers sat motionless beside one another.

There were no tears. How could tears shed out of anger, sadness, or sometimes even happiness, represent how any of us were feeling? A dreadful, numbing cloud of doom permeated the waiting room. We were all depleted of the strength it took to even lean on one another.

Without acknowledging me or my family, Mama stood staring straight ahead in an incoherent trance. Slightly bent over with her arms across her midsection, she gripped her elbows as if she was trying to hold in all the grief and sorrows of the world, trying to keep the pain from spilling out.

Dale joined us in the waiting room. He had just returned from seeing to it that everything that could be done was being done for Stan. The strain of so much grief and responsibility showed on his face as he began giving me the details of the tragedy that began the previous day at the chemical plant where Stan had worked for only two months.

“Stan’s supervisor is a black man, and he just got a promotion. The whites that work there didn’t like it, so they decided to get even. They mixed up a solution that would explode when the supervisor poured it into a vat in the area where he and Stan worked,” he said. “The supervisor was busy with something and asked Stan to pour the solution instead. When the vat exploded, Stan was consumed with flames.”

Dale fought to stop tears as he continued. “Thinking the whole building was on fire, Stan ran out the exit door. His supervisor ran after him, he caught him, he threw him to the ground, and put out the fire with his hands.”

“This will probably be the last day we will see him alive,” Dale said gravely, as we walked down the long corridor toward the burn unit at Grady Memorial Hospital.

My husband grabbed my arm as my knees started to buckle. Stan had second- and third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body, and his supervisor had second-degree burns on his hand and arms. My mind reached for a flicker of hope as it battled with the crippling despair of reality.

I had to focus on my feet to be able to put one in front of the other as Dale led my family toward Stan’s room. I caught a glimpse of him through a small square window on the door. As two nurses standing on either side of him were helping him lay down, he tried to smile at me. The only recognizable thing on his charred body was that shy, sweet smile that was his personality.

He raised his arm to try and wave; I smiled and waved back. I knew that I had to be strong so he wouldn’t be able to see the devastation I was feeling. It was an out-of-body experience for me to separate myself from all the grief and pain I was feeling.

His right arm and leg were bandaged so heavily, they looked like casts. The greenish-pink plasma had saturated through the bandages. I never could have imagined an ordeal like this in my life.

I put on a protective coat and mask, and steeled myself as I pushed open the door, entering the worst nightmare of my life. “Bad Moon Rising” by Credence Clearwater Revival was playing on the radio sitting in the windowsill.

All of Stan’s hair was burned off, and one of his ears was completely gone. Although his eyelashes and lids were gone, his eyes lit up as he gestured toward the radio. “That’s my favorite song,” he said, “Do you like it?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I like everything they sing.”

We chatted about small, insignificant things, avoiding the words that might make it all true. A nurse came in and told me that they needed to prepare him to change his bandages. Changing the bandages meant that he would have to be put to sleep. I said good-bye and that I would see him when he woke up, knowing all the time that he would never wake up.

As I walked out of the room, I turned to look at him for the last time. My thoughts raced wildly to refocus before I lost my composure.

I looked up as we passed a black man in the hall, with both hands bandaged, walking quickly toward Stan’s room. I realized very soon that he was the supervisor that had put out the fire.

For the next hour and a half, on the drive back from the heart of Atlanta to our house in northwest Georgia, memories of my family’s racist background flooded into my consciousness. Almost everything in my life, in our family, was dictated according to my father’s animosity and views.

I grew up in a small, all-white Southern town where racism was deeply embedded. From an early age, I heard stories about the atrocities that were committed against blacks. One story, in particular, still haunts me: a group of white men boarded a train one night and dragged off the few blacks on board, beat them severely and warned them never to pass through our town again.

Even then, I wondered what it could hurt for them just to pass through. I felt profound sadness and sick in the pit of my stomach at such cruelty.

Growing up in that atmosphere, it was difficult for me not to be influenced by racism and prejudice, especially when my peers, who also knew little else of the world, either, called me names when I voiced any sort of sympathy over how blacks were treated.

The phone rang once, an eerie, hollow ring, piercing the silence. I knew what it was. I heard the low mumbling of my husband’s voice, then the sound of the phone being placed back on the base. Suddenly, he was standing over me, looking down.

They say your life flashes before your eyes right before you die, but his life flashed before my eyes. I remembered how sensitive he was. How he befriended a boy who was shunned at school for being a disfigured dwarf. Memories of him rushed in to fill the void in the months ahead.

Mama blamed Daddy for it all. She viewed all white racists through the eyes of the black race and became an advocate for their cause. The next spring, my younger sister graduated high school. Mama moved to Atlanta, into an all-black neighborhood, and lived there until she died in 1991.

Daddy remained in our home town and died several years later. He never changed.

My siblings and I were mutated to our very core, reincarnated by tragedy. We were a former racist white Southern family that finally truly understood the devastation of racism. We stood with the countless others, mostly black, who had had faced the all-consuming, life-altering fires of racism.

Linda Gray is a member of the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild. She has no formal education, except for the School of Hard Knocks. She writes by osmosis.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, August 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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