Crucifixions among us

Reading James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a profoundly moving exercise in learning to see anew: to see in the cursed ropes and trees from which thousands of black men, women, and children were tortured, hung, and killed, the wood of the tree upon which Jesus of Nazareth was tortured, hung, and killed two thousand years ago. For Cone, discerning a parallel between these two “symbols of death” is more than a mere intellectual exercise. Rather, as Cone writes, “The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other,” meaning that Jesus’s crucifixion was truly a “first-century lynching” and that lynchings of black men, women, and children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States were—truly—contemporary crucifixions (James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 161). The God of Jesus of Nazareth, Cone helps us to see, is the God of solidarity with the lynched, the tortured, the executed—the God who was­—and is—lynched on a tree. Thus, for Cone, learning to hold together the cross and the lynching tree—to see one in the other—is the key to being authentically Christian in a country that still carries the weight of the racial injustice upon which it was built: “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy” (xv).

Images of black fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons hanging from ropes above masses of white people make my stomach hurt. The gravity that pulls her, that pulls him, earthward seems almost to pull me earthward whenever I see it. And the baffling grins on the faces of the white women and men gathered there—what the f---? It is too much for the mind to comprehend. And yet, it is so near in time and space. The second epigraph on page one of Cone's text describes a lynching that took place in Fayette County, Tennessee, which I drive along the edge of at least once a year when I go to my sister’s house outside Memphis. It’s a beautiful area: the road winds through expansive fields with enormous properties dotted with plantation-style houses hemmed in along the road by white-picket fences. The trees near the road I drive along are thick and strong, towering. It has never crossed my mind driving that road that these are the parts where black folks got killed at the end of ropes hanging from trees like these for being black, for loving themselves, for daring to be in a white world.

But Cone calls me to see the lynching tree and the cross not just in West Tennessee, or even in and around Nashville, where plenty of lynchings also took place. Cone calls us to train our eyes to see other places where people are crucified today. For instance, I have seen and stood beside the bench at 2nd and James Robertson where a homeless man was crucified by a gun, the campsite where a man was crucified by the warmth of his own fire that literally swallowed him whole, the stoops and overpasses and alleyways where women and men are crucified by a system that criminalizes them for their poverty. Even more closely to home, more recently, my stomach has been made uneasy by the crucifixions that will likely soon take place nine miles west of downtown Nashville, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Two weeks ago, I embraced Nickolus at a prayer gathering inside Unit 2, Tennessee’s death row. A few days later, the state set April 2014 as the end of his life—unless he can find alternatives before then. Others, however, are out of options. Like my friend Donnie, one of the most courageous and deeply faithful men I have ever met. His spirit guides him in confidence outside the walls of that place—even if that should happen through the little room with the gurney. But all I can do is think: The state of Tennessee wants to kill Donnie? And Nickolus?

After we learn to see anew that “the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today” (161), that the cross and the lynching tree are also the execution chamber, the streets, the places where people are dehumanized and condemned to die, what do we do? In the words of Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, who Cone quotes, we must find ways to “take the crucified down from the cross” (quoted on 161).

How, then, can we take down from the cross Nickolus and Donnie and Billy Ray and Abu and the seven others who already or will soon have execution dates? At the prayer gathering on Unit 2 two weeks ago, my friend Kurt, also facing down an eventual death sentence, squeezed my hand ‘til it turned purple as he prayed in a booming voice for God to stop the death machine. From where will the answer to that prayer come?

Our societies do, indeed, still crucify and lynch human beings—legally and extra-legally. The first step is to learn to see it in our own communities, as James Cone compels us. The next step is to take our sisters and brothers down off the cross. But the power of death is so strong that it sometimes seems impossible. And yet, Cone suggests, God transforms death into new life. My question is, can pentobarbital—the drug used to euthanize dogs that the state plans to begin using to kill human beings—be transformed into hope and new life, as Cone suggests? If so, I do not yet know how.

I intend to continue responding to Cone’s call to see crucifixion in my own communities, including that of men, women, and children who endure poverty and the burden of criminality, as well as those incarcerated and those sentenced to death. I have never stood in the place of such persons, as Cone has with those who have faced the threat of the lynching tree. But I do know many at risk of crucifixion by name, by face, by the warmth of their touch. I believe more and more—especially after finally reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree—that it is for the liberation of such women and men that theology and ethics must carry out its work.

May it be so. And may the death machines be dismantled.

[Note: The background artwork on this blog, depicting a person in solitary confinement, was created by Derrick Quintero, who is also facing a death sentence at Riverbend here in Nashville.]

Episteme #7