(The following story originally appeared in the 10/03/04 issue of The Mobile Register. It has been reprinted, with permission, here, and has not been altered in any way.)

Alabamian spreads message of forgiveness with documentary

By CASANDRA ANDREWS
Staff Reporter
The Mobile Register
Sunday, October 3, 2004

AN JOSE, Calif. - Even before Carl Ray appeared on screen, his voice reverberated through the Montgomery Theater here, mimicking the sounds of gun fire that repeatedly pierced his father's chest.

"Pop! Pop! Pop!" he shouted as some in the audience gasped, then grimaced at the cruel image his words conjured. "Pop! Pop! Pop!"

Then silence.

Forty-two years ago, an 18-year-old Ray watched as his father's body was riddled with bullets in Choctaw County because the youth hadn't addressed a white neighbor as "sir."

After the shots rang out, witnesses said the shooter, William "Bill" Carlisle, lowered his .45-caliber handgun, stumbled to his truck, then drove away. George Ray, a 62-year-old farmer, lay dying in the yard of a friend's home near Butler.

That moment, and much of Ray's life since, has become the subject of a documentary that premiered here in late September, thousands of miles from the spot where the engineer-turned-comedi an-turned-actor-turned-activist grew up.

Despite rain and unseasonably cool conditions, several hundred people packed into the theater in Silicon Valley to see the film chronicling Ray's pain, plight and path to forgiveness.

Speckled with comedic as well as somber moments, the autobiographical documentary, "A Killing in Choctaw, the Power of Forgiveness," follows Ray's life through a series of interviews with friends, family and journalists. It also includes clips from the one-man play, "A Killing in Choctaw," that Ray began performing five years ago.

Now 60, he's presented the play nearly 100 times at community theaters and college campuses across the country. The production chronicles his life growing up in a racially divided Alabama, including his father's 1962 death and the years he spent blaming himself for the slaying.

The play, as well as the film adaptation, details the strange set of circumstances that led Ray to forgive the man who killed his father. The documentary digs deeper and brings viewers into Ray's struggle for peace.

"As I was watching, I was thinking it was a personal story, but it really does reach out to other people," said Orpheus Crutchfield, 37, from Hercules, Calif. "It's a horrible story, but it's a universal story."

Crutchfield, who literally sat on the edge of his seat through most of the film, met Ray a few years back at a conference on race relations.

"I think it's going to Sundance," he said, referring to the independent film festival in Utah started by actor Robert Redford. For Crutchfield, the film's message was clear: "We all think we have problems, but they can be overcome."

Ray is living proof of that, he said.

The film opens with Ray describing his past in a monologue interspersed with photos from his childhood.

The youngest of five children, he was born two months premature. He contracted polio at age 4. Ray said he was known as "that 'flicted boy" throughout his elementary school years.

Ray grew up just outside the tiny town of Butler, Ala., a spot close to nowhere in particular, about 120 miles north of Mobile.

Fate had divided the population about evenly between black and white there, and the state of Alabama, by custom and law, had guaranteed privilege for only one side.

Ray's parents, who never made it much past sixth grade, saw to it that their children all went to col lege. It wasn't a subject for debate in the Ray household.

As the youngest, Ray was the last to leave home.

On Sept. 6, 1962, a teenage Ray was packing his bags for Tuskegee Institute, about 150 miles east in Tuskegee. He found some old fireworks in a footlocker as he rummaged around, he said.

In his documentary, Ray describes what happened next:

Done with his packing, Ray and a younger cousin went out to a nearby dirt road to light the fireworks. They weren't long without company.

Carlisle rambled up in his truck and asked them about what he thought was gunfire. Ray explained that the loud noise was just fireworks, answering the man's questions with "yes" and "no."

Because Ray didn't respond with "yes, sir" and "no, sir," as was the custom then in much of the rural South, Carlisle violently beat him, stopping just short of cutting his throat, Ray said.

For reasons Ray still doesn't understand, the man spared his life, climbed back in his pickup and roared away. Ray, bruised and bleeding, went home and told his family what happened.

About an hour later, Ray and his parents went down the road to a friend's home to watch the evening news. Instead of staying inside, George Ray placed the television in the doorway and sat outside to watch.

It wasn't long before Carlisle came calling.

The white man told George Ray his son needed to leave town, explaining that he needed to be taught how to talk to white folks. The elder Ray said his son was leaving for college in just a few days.

George Ray's words only seemed to enrage Carlisle.

The white man slammed his pistol into George Ray's head more than once. Bleeding, the black man fell into a flower bed.

Trying to protect his father, Ray picked up an empty glass bottle and shattered it against Carlisle's head. That's when the white man began firing his weapon at George Ray.

Originally charged with the murder of George Ray, Carlisle was convicted of manslaughter in 1963 in circuit court in Butler, and sentenced to nine years. All of the jurors were white. Ray thinks the case marked the first time a white man was sent to jail for killing a black man in Choctaw County.

Nine years later, Carlisle, who by then was out of jail, was shot in the chest and killed by his father-in-law in during an argument in 1973, according to a news story in the Choctaw Advocate, a weekly newspaper.

Two years ago, while filming the movie about his life, Ray walked up the worn steps inside the Choctaw County Courthouse, then took a seat in the wooden witness box where he'd been questioned some 40 years earlier.

It wasn't long before the past became the present.

"I'm sitting here and he's ripping me apart," Ray recalled in the film of the day he testified in Carlisle's trial. As the camera moved in closer, Ray looked down, then wiped at his cheeks.

Many in the audience at the film premiere did the same.

"I'd never seen so much hatred," Ray said, looking into the camera again after a few moments, then gesturing to where the all-white spectators sat on the first floor of the courtroom. "It was like, how could somebody hate like that? I'll never understand. It was just a sea of hate."

His older brother, Lindsey, who lives in Montgomery, said the treatment Ray received at the trial was "a lynching without a rope" in the documentary.

Ray said Carlisle's attorney, who is now deceased, blamed him for his father's death. "In my mind I had subconsciously accepted that fact," he said of the way he held himself responsible for the killing.

Bracing for Carlisle's trial and staying in school proved difficult. After dropping out of Tuskegee, Ray eventually went back to college. Before leaving Alabama in 1967, he had a bachelor's degree from Tuskegee and a job in engineering in San Jose.

But comedy tugged at him, even with a wife and five children to support. He broke into the comedy scene at northern California clubs in the late 1970s. By 1984, he was in Los Angeles, working comedy stints and driving a cab for the money and because he liked being around people.

One day he picked up a man in Hollywood and dropped him off at the airport. About a week later, he got a call to pick up someone at a hotel. It was the same man, country songwriter Wil Hinkson. Within weeks, he found himself driving Hinkson for a third time. The cabbie and his paying rider were amazed at the coincidences.

As they talked during their third meeting, a news item on the radio sparked a solemn turn in their conversation. Out of the blue, Ray said, the songwriter started talking about forgiveness. Ray offered bits of his own life story, explaining his lingering anger.

The white man told Ray to simply forgive Carlisle.

It was then, Ray said, that he stated he forgave Carlisle, if for no other reason than to silence Hinkson. "After I said the words," Ray says in the film, "it was as if I had been instantly moved from one planet to another planet."

While much of the anger and pain had vanished, Ray says in the film he was still left with emotional scars: "There's no such thing as closure. You get to different levels of peace."

After more than two years of performing the story of his life for audiences around the country, the play's subject matter was taking its toll.

Ray said that 2001 was one of the toughest years he's ever endured, comparing the time period to when he first started college just after his father's death.

Things got so bad that his wife, Brenda, tried to make him stop performing the one-man show. "I felt like if I didn't do the play, Bill would win," Ray said. "I'd been in a battle with him all my life."

Eventually, he sought help from a psychologist.

"The forgiveness part freed me," Ray said, "but it didn't get rid of my depression. I forgave Bill for killing my father but I still had my own guilt and I was trapped. The hardest part to do was to forgive myself."

A few years back, looking to elevate his play to another level, Ray went in search of a director. After attending a film festival in California, he met filmmaker Chike Nowffiah, who had recently completed a documentary about the closure of black hospitals in America.

The two hit it off.

As producer of the documentary, Ray spent more than two years working with Nowffiah to make the 90-minute adaptation.

Ray accompanied the director and a film crew to Alabama several times, interviewing those who lent perspective to the production, including Choctaw County residents, his guidance counselor at Tuskegee and some of his siblings. Ray sold shares in the production as a way to maintain control over the finished product.

Another Alabama resident who took part in the film was Hollis Curl, a former newspaper reporter in Choctaw County who arrived on the scene of the shooting shortly after it happened. Curl, who is white, was interviewed at length in the film about what he saw that day and his feelings about segregation.

"I thought the races were getting along pretty good," Curl says in the film. "I thought that separate but equal worked for me."

The term "separate but equal" meant that blacks didn't eat in the same restaurant dining rooms as whites, didn't use the same bathrooms, didn't share the same schools.

Ray's plan is to enter the project at various film festivals across the country. He also is working to market a shorter version of the documentary to cable television companies and universities. Ray said he would like to tour with the film, much like he has done with the play, introducing audiences to his life story and path to forgiveness.

Mike Dale, a former Choctaw County resident who went to high school in Butler during the turbulent 1960s, knew one of Carlisle's sons.

"I think it's good to remember all this stuff," said Dale, who now lives in Michigan and attended the film premiere. "The world's a better place than it was in Choctaw County in 1964. It's a better place and people are better than they were."

In the Montgomery Theater's lobby in San Jose, famous black-and-white images from the South's segregated past sat on large easels for the premiere. News photographs of Ku Klux Klansmen, a burning cross and a group crossing a bridge in Selma set the scene for Ray's documentary.

Inside the 500-seat arena, blacks and whites sat side by side to see the film.

Rick Callender, president of the San JosSilicon Valley branch of the NAACP, addressed the audience before the presentation. "It's not only the story of one man," Callender said. "It is our collective story. It's the story of our strength."

After a standing ovation at the end of the film, a beaming Ray took the stage, chest out and thumbs through his belt loops.

He was ready to answer questions.

There were many.

People who traveled from as far away as Michigan and Mississippi wanted to know more about the man who shot his father. They wanted to know what became of the lawyer who blamed Ray for his father's death. They also wanted to reassure him that the shooting wasn't his fault.

"If white America could change places with you, what do you think they would have learned?" someone eventually asked.

Ray's answer was immediate.

"It's hell being a black man in America," he said.

"Should we forget?" a man from the balcony wondered aloud.

Ray, along with others in the audience, responded almost in unison: "We should forgive but we should never forget."

It's the kind of dialogue Ray hopes to spark in communities across the country.

"We have to share our problems," he said. "We have to talk to each other."

© Mobile Register, October 3, 2004