A nail from the ashes

When terrorist attacks infect the news – the specific incidents hardly need naming, at this point – I think of the charred nail my father kept on the mantel when I was growing up.

The nail came from the ashes of the Birmingham, Alabama church fire-bombed in the early ’60’s.

Four little girls died in their own Sunday school.

My father, Robert Colby Nelson, was in Birmingham as a newspaper reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. He pocketed the long antique nail while he wrote the story.

As a reporter, he sought the heart of the event, interviewing those aggrieved and those struggling to restore order and justice. Then he wrote it down and wired it back to the paper.

His words spread understanding of the forces at work for readers whose lives were remote or unconnected. As any reporter knows, the “who, what, where, when” were easy. The “why” always takes longer. However, I always felt that the nail on the mantel was the response of a father, not a reporter, to the “why.”

My brother and I were too young to understand where Dad had been on that trip to Birmingham. We were just glad to have him home, since he usually brought us something in his suitcase. Though it was many years before the significance of the nail became apparent, I have come to see it as a previous gift. When its origin was finally told, we needed no explanation. Now that I have my own children, I see the other connection he must have made: any child snared in the hateful act of terror could have been his child.

The fact that he mounted the nail on a piece of wood and placed it prominently in our home revealed Dad’s emotional connection to a professional assignment. The bombing appalled him. Reporting the crime was a matter of balancing facts – he could partition writing about horror from the intrusion of personal feelings. But the fact of the nail taken as a souvenir meant that he needed to editorialize. Which is why that nail has had eloquence for me.

Dad also covered Northern Ireland. I was in high school during his trips to Ulster. He covered Bloody Sunday. He interviewed the rhetoricians, the protectors and enforcers from all sides. He found peacemakers on all sides: people with a simple ache for tolerance and trust in place of worn out and dangerous ancient hostilities. He mentioned 2 a.m. bomb scares at his Belfast hotel, being told he had five minutes to get out of the building. By then, I was old enough to fear for his safety amidst reckless, tangled, unfamiliar hatreds. That is, any father snared in the violence could be my father.

The Ulster hatreds were not unfamiliar to him. Dad said that the two reporting experiences, Birmingham and Belfast, separated by years and thousands of miles, felt like covering the same story. The articles he filed from Northern Ireland had different names but many of the same voices?witnesses, sufferers and aggressors?heard on the trips to the South during civil rights marches, sit-ins and strikes and the bombing of a church.

Isn’t this a universal feeling now, that any attack feels agonizingly local, as well as foreign; frighteningly immediate in psychic impact. There are no longer remote or unconnected onlookers to such stories. All fathers and all sons rehearse the feelings of loss or anger implicit in tragic events.

But if the voices of the sufferers and aggressors are similar in the stories of terror writ large, so are the voices of the peacemakers?if we have ears to hear them. Why can’t we expect to see the pride of power, of possession or privilege, of worn out tradition or anger humbled in favor of unity, equity, brotherhood? Because finally it is about little children and nails from the ashes, the voices of neighbor speaking to neighbor, and the souvenirs we choose to appropriate from the ashes for the benefit of the future.

Out of any ashes, anywhere, also comes a durable vestige of potential hope: how much more remarkable it is to realize that any father or any son can also be a peacemaker.

Todd R. Nelson of Castine is assistant editor of Hope magazine in Brooklin.