(The following story originally appeared in the 8/8/99 issue of The Mobile Register. It has been reprinted, with permission, here, and has not been altered in any way.)

A Killing in Choctaw

By CASANDRA ANDREWS
Staff Reporter
The Mobile Register
Sunday, August 8, 1999

AN JOSE, Calif. - Carl Ray, celebrated comedian and first-time playwright, sits in his Spanish-style house cut into a California hillside and talks - his words as fierce as pistol fire - about his father's death, like it happened yesterday.

But the shooting was nearly 37 years ago and thousands of miles away. It happened near Butler, a town of about 2,000 in the backwater of southwest Alabama, on a warm September day.

``Bam!'' Ray booms, wide-eyed, as he tells about the moment that the white man's .45- caliber handgun sounded and his father, a black man, fell.

``Bam! Bam! Bam!''

``All because I didn't say `sir' to a white man.''

Last weekend, Ray, an engineer-turned-comedian-turned-motivational speaker-turned-actor, depicted the shooting and the hatred that almost consumed him in the premiere of his one-man, two-act play here, ``A Killing in Choctaw.''

Many in the audience wept. They applauded long. The director beamed.

It's a play that Carl Ray says comes right out of his heart and memory, and he knows that if he's lucky, theater stages around the world will beckon.

It was the waning days of the summer of 1962 in Alabama. George Wallace was girding to run for governor. Birmingham was about to become a battleground. The term ``separate but equal'' meant that blacks didn't eat in the same restaurant dining rooms as whites, use the same toilets or share the same schools.

The town of Butler was close to nowhere in particular, about 120 miles north of Mobile, 60 south of Tuscaloosa and 40 east of Meridian, Miss. An American flag and a chiseled Civil War monument decorated the lawn of the tan three-story brick courthouse - then, as now, the most distinguishing feature in a county seat where timber was king. Fate had divided the population about evenly between black and white, and the state of Alabama, by custom and law, had guaranteed privilege for only one side.

On Sept. 6 that year, 18-year-old Carl Ray, who lived on a dirt road just outside Butler, was packing his bags for Tuskegee Institute, about 150 miles to the east in Tuskegee. It was in a footlocker that he found some old fireworks as he rummaged around.

Here is what Ray says happened next:

His packing done, the fireworks and a box of matches in hand, Ray and his younger cousin, Moses Charles Tanks, went out to the dirt road. The popping fireworks didn't last long; nor did Ray and his cousin lack for company long.

A white man drove up quickly in a pickup and asked them whether there had been gunfire. The man was William ``Bill'' Carlisle, who lived in the vicinity.

Ray said he explained that the crackling noise was just fireworks, answering the man's questions with ``yes'' and ``no.''

``He asked, `Don't you know you're supposed to say `Yes sir' and `No sir' to a white man?''' Ray says. ``When I said `No,' that's when he started beating me.''

The man let him go after about a dozen licks with his fists, climbed back into the truck and roared away. Ray, bruised and dirty, went home and told his family.

``I think my daddy knew something was going to happen,'' he says.

``He set himself out there so he would be the only one hurt.''

About an hour later, Ray and his parents went down the road to friend Virginia DuBose's house to watch the evening news. Ray's cousin, Tanks, was already planted by the set.

Ray and his father, George, were out on the porch when the pickup truck returned. Carlisle, angry and edgy, emerged from the cab and approached.

``I knew something bad was going to happen,'' Ray says. ``I knew he was coming to do something.''

Carlisle, speaking to George Ray, a 62-year-old farmer, demanded in no uncertain terms that Carl get out of town.

Tanks, who says he heard the exchange, picks up the story from the home in Mobile where he lives now. ``He said, `You need to teach your son how to respect white folks,''' Tanks recalls.

The elder Ray apologized for his son and told the white man he was leaving for college in just a few days, Tanks says. ``He said he was sorry and said he would talk to him.''

Carlisle, says Tanks, simply exploded and ``hit him on top of the head with a gun... The blood just went all over the place.''

Tanks says that Carl Ray, scrambling wildly for a weapon, found only an empty glass Purex bottle, which he swung and shattered against the white man's head.

Carlisle then shot George Ray five times with the .45. The dying man, ``fell in the flower bed and started going 'round and 'round,'' Tanks says.

Clad in tailored trousers and a crisp white shirt, the Carl Ray of 1999 is the picture of California style at his hillside home in the city of computer chips and coffee houses.

The 54-year-old gestures often, snapping his fingers to punctuate the high points in the stories he spins. He makes strangers feel welcome, cracking jokes, offering his guests the best seats in his den, the ones that look out over the Santa Clara Valley. He has not lost his Southern accent.

A different Carl Ray prowls the makeshift stage at the rehearsal for ``A Killing in Choctaw'' six days before its premiere.

In his play, Ray is the narrator, the shooter, the victim and the son. He delivers his lines with ease. He rolls his eyes. He pauses dramatically. His smooth face clouds as he slips into the role of a somber teen.

The play's two acts last for two hours.

``It was like watching a movie,'' Ray says, speaking of himself.

``Daddy began to fall forward in slow motion. I was screaming, `Oh God no! No! Why? God no! Oh God, why?''

Ray drops to his knees, emotion overtaking his slender frame. His eyes fill with tears, his face becomes a fusion of fear and fury.

He isn't alone in his grief. Tears stream down the faces of some of those who are watching the rehearsal.

``It seemed like my insides were coming out,'' Ray says, continuing his monologue. ``I kept telling myself, `This is a game. This is a nightmare. When I wake up everything is going to be fine.'''

But ``they took his body and put it in the ground.''

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.

Carl Ray thinks that the case marked the first time that a white man was sent to jail for killing a black man in Choctaw County. Ray also thinks Carlisle got off easy.

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

Carlisle's son, Steve, who was 2 when George Ray was slain, lives still in Choctaw County. Contacted by a reporter, he did not have much to say.

``If they hadn't done him like that maybe he wouldn't have shot him,'' Steve said of Ray striking his father. ``You wouldn't like for someone to hit you with a bottle.''

Steve Carlisle said he and his two brothers, Shelby, and Merril, had no other comment about the slaying: ``We just want to let the past be the past.''

According to a Choctaw Advocate story published the week after the shooting, all of the bullets had struck George Ray from above, an indication that he was not standing upright when the gunman fired. The same story mentions that a sheriff's deputy, J.F. Littlepage, investigated the scene and saw cuts on the dead man's forehead and left cheek.

Littlepage, reached at his home in Choctaw County in recent weeks, said he could not recollect the events of the distant day. ``You need to talk to someone else, I've lost my remembrance of that,'' he said.

Carl Ray and his cousin say they ran more than a mile through the woods to get help after the shooting, finally finding someone who could call the sheriff's deputies. Ray's mother and Mrs. DuBose, who are now deceased, remained at the house with George Ray.

As for Carlisle, he went back to his truck, wiping blood and sweat from his head, and drove away, according to available accounts.

Lindsey Ray, brother of Carl Ray, lived out of state when his father was shot. He insists that Carlisle should have been convicted of murder; that the white jurors, who deliberated for 10 hours after testimony lasting less than a day, ``tried like heck to keep him from serving any time.''

Lindsey Ray, a retired teacher, said he sent letters of protest when he got word that Carlisle was back in Butler less than two years after his sentencing.

``I wrote to George Wallace and the attorney general,'' he said.

``They never responded to my letters. I was sort of naive and didn't know who to talk to. I thought somebody might have said something'' to explain the release to the dead man's family.

Tanks, the cousin, said he too had difficulty looking past the killing. ``Over the years it took an affect on me,'' he said. ``I have bad flashbacks ... I wish it would get out of my mind.''

Tanks, who is mentioned in the play, said he has lost touch with Carl Ray, but watches him when he makes appearances on Black Entertainment Television's Comic View. It's been more than 12 years since they have talked or seen each other, Tanks said. He had not heard about the new play until a reporter called his house.

``A Killing in Choctaw'' opens with Ray describing his past in a short dialogue. The youngest of five children, he was born two months premature. A family member accidentally dropped him on the floor before he was a year old, breaking his collarbone. He contracted polio at age 4.

Ray, who still grapples with disability in his right hand, said he was known as ``that `flicted boy'' throughout his elementary years. Comedy was his escape from taunting, he says: ``I kept kids laughing all the way through high school.''

The play jumps around in the chronology of events, fast-forwarding from his high school days to the day his father was shot, then to the trial where Ray says he was labeled by Carlisle's lawyer as the ``uppity nigra'' who triggered the tragic events.

Black onlookers sat in the third-story balcony of the Choctaw County Courthouse. Whites filled the wooden benches downstairs. ``The trial was nothing more than a comedy show for white people,'' Ray says in the play. ``Black people were crying, wringing their hands, praying.''

As the play progresses, it becomes Carl Ray's story of coming to terms with the killing that he saw and the guilt that he felt.

One scene depicts Ray's early days at Tuskegee, where after flunking his freshman year, he says college officials enlisted an ``army of old people'' to keep him on the right track.

Along the way, he began to have blackouts, he attacked a college counselor and he tried to run away, he says. (He says in the den of his California home that he went through 17 roommates in three years. )

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 to make extra cash. One day he picked up a man in Hollywood and dropped him 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 cabby and his paying rider were amazed at the coincidences.

As they talked on this third meeting, a news item on the radio sparked a solemn turn in their conversation. Out of the blue, Ray says, the songwriter started talking about forgiveness.

Ray offered his life story, explaining his lingering anger and pain.

```All you have to do is forgive that guy for killing your daddy,''' he says Hinkson told him. ```If you can say the words, it may come to you.'''

It was then, Ray says, that he said the words, if for no other reason that to shut Hinkson up.

``After I said the words,'' says Ray in his play, ``it was as if I had been instantly moved from one planet to another planet.'' He says that the anger and pain had vanished.

Hinkson, reached recently by telephone, remembered the moment in the cab: ``It was as though something had changed inside him. It was clear that he had been affected.''

Comedy success came Ray's way eventually, with television appearances, national tours, motivational speaking engagements and rising renown. Last May, he was invited to talk about his Alabama upbringing for a civil rights exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Ray told his audience about the killing in Choctaw. Tom Fulcher Jr., president of a community action agency in San Jose, approached him afterward, suggesting that Ray bring his past to life in the form of a play. Fulcher believed that the play might provoke a wider discussion about race relations.

Ray sat down to write in November, and teamed up with director Ann Johnson and began serious rehearsals in January. ``The first time I heard it I was in tears,'' Ms. Johnson said of Ray's story.

The premiere drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 at the San Jose Stage Theater in the city's downtown July 31. Ray's relatives and friends from Montgomery, Atlanta and North Carolina attended.

Fulcher, who suggested the play and funded the first performance, hopes to take it on the road. He said that the word about the play's power had spread even before the premiere, to theater groups as far away as Texas.

``It was really touching,'' he said of the first performance. ``I started crying, and I'm a big guy, too.''

Carl Ray says he would love to bring his play to the state where he grew up. He's even considered returning to Alabama for good. The past, he suggests, is present only on the stage.

© Mobile Register, Page 1A, August 8, 1999