(The following story originally appeared on The Mercury News website on 03/04/06.)

HEALING A SON'S ANGUISH

By Sharon Noguchi
Mercury News

t the end of ``A Killing in Choctaw'' the audience doesn't applaud. It sits still and muted, in a stunned silence that's church-like in its sense of awe for the filmmaker and actor, San Jose's Carl Ray.

In his documentary and a related one-man play, the self-effacing Ray, 61, chronicles his father's 1962 murder at the hands of a white racist and his own journey through shock, denial, hate and forgiveness.

Ray will stage his play at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Cubberley Theater, 4000 Middlefield Road, in Palo Alto.

The play and film are Ray's way of vanquishing the evil, and his own nightmares, surrounding the killing.

"I must do the play," said Ray, "because I must win."

His story is, in fact, so incredible that it confounds some listeners. Last week's film screening at Palo Alto High School drew a mixed audience that illustrated the fault lines in society's consciousness about race.

"It's so awful, I didn't believe it. I thought there must be another explanation," said an older white woman who did not want to give her name for fear of how she would sound. She asked Ray whether the killer was mentally ill; Ray answered that he was a normal white man for the times.

Indeed, others in the audience said Ray's story, while extreme, was not a surprising piece of the black experience.

In 1962, then-18-year-old Ray was celebrating his sister's birthday by setting off firecrackers near their home in Butler, Ala. A white neighbor, Bill Carlisle, drove by and asked about the noise.

Ray says he answered the questions politely, with "yes" and "no." But Carlisle, incensed that Ray didn't say, "yes sir," and "no sir," pummeled Ray and held a knife to his throat.

That evening, Ray's father sent the rest of the family away and sat on the porch watching TV with his son and waiting. Carlisle drove up, railed at the elder Ray for his son's impertinence and shot the father five times in the chest.

Light sentence

Carlisle was convicted of manslaughter. According to newspaper reports, he served less than two years in prison.

After his father's funeral, the traumatized Ray was sent off to college and began a 20-year odyssey through depression, escape and avoidance. At first, he says, he barely spoke. Compassionate professors at Tuskegee Institute would nurture him through emotional breakdowns.

After graduating with an engineering degree, Ray moved to San Jose to take a job with Lockheed Missiles & Space. No one knew his secret belief: That he had brought on his father's death.

During the trial, he said, "They programmed me. It was my fault that I didn't know how to talk to white people. When I left that courtroom, I hated only one person: myself."

His wife and five children didn't know of his burden, only that at home he was quiet and withdrawn. "It was about being able to hide. I was able to keep my demons at bay," he said. "I had developed this other person so I could be normal. I was never happy. I never felt any emotion. I was really null and void."

But Ray eventually came to epiphanies. He quit Lockheed to become a stand-up comedian, and while driving a cab to pay his bills, he blurted out his story to an overly chatty fare one day in 1984. The man replied, "Forgive the guy. Just say it."

To get rid of the man, Ray complied. But as he uttered the words, something changed. "Bingo," Ray recalls. "That was the best day of my life."

Dealing with it

Forgiving the killer brought Ray some freedom, but it took more years -- and a conversation with a minister -- to lift the oppressive load of self-hate. "The day you can say the words, 'you hate yourself,' then you can begin to deal with it," he said.

In 1999, San Jose community activist Tommy Fulcher suggested Ray write a play. Fulcher says he told Ray, "The only way to get that out of you is to talk about it, all the time, until it becomes second nature." Ray was reluctant but finally agreed, and the play made its debut in 1999 at the San Jose Stage Co. His siblings flew across the country to attend.

Ray's wife, Brenda, had never heard the full story of what had happened to her husband's father until Carl Ray began writing the play. "I didn't have a clue," she said.

Then, two years ago, Ray and Stockton filmmaker Chike Nwoffiah directed a film about the play, and the filming took Ray back to Tuskegee and Choctaw County to confront more pain. He broke down when he retraced his first steps on campus, where he had been dropped off alone, a grief-stricken, frightened teenager. He lost it again standing in the empty courtroom, remembering the laughing all-white jury and the sobbing black spectators.

He also saw how little things seemed to have changed in town: Residents were reluctant to talk to him about the killing, and when he staged the play, only a couple of white people attended.

"People just would rather not drag up things that happened 40 years ago," said Tommy Campbell, editor and publisher of the Choctaw Sun. "Not that they have anything against Carl or that they're racist, but they feel that things are going to be misconstrued." He said residents feel their community has been unfairly portrayed and that the county is a different place now.

Today, Ray's story plays to broad audiences. A survivor of a Nazi death camp told him last May that his life was like hers. The Los Angeles Unified School District has incorporated his story into the curriculum for 11th-graders studying the civil rights era.

Ray hopes seeing the play or film will encourage people to talk to their families about their own histories.

"Most black people will take those stories to the grave, because we just can't talk about it."

© Mercury News, March 4, 2006