A Time to Break Literary Silence: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam in Anthony Grooms's Bombingham

Anthony Grooms's 2001 novel Bombingham opens in 1970 with eighteen-year-old Walter Burke, an African American solider serving in Vietnam, lying in a rice paddy outside the village of Thoybu. After watching his fellow soldier Haywood Jackson die by enemy fire, Walter must fulfill a promise he made to his friend: he would write a letter to Haywood's parents in the event that something happened to him. As Walter struggles to think of the appropriate words, his thoughts drift back to his childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, where, as an eleven-year-old boy, he participated in the famous civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the spring of 1963. Vietnam's weather on the day of Haywood's death triggers Walter's memories: "For a moment it seemed like a beautiful summer day. Blue sky. White billows of cloud. The rustle of a light breeze. It could have been Alabama" (7). Grooms thus links Vietnam and Birmingham in the opening pages and cues readers that Bombingham will interrogate relationships between the civil rights movement in the United States and the war in Vietnam. To tell his story, Grooms uses a frame narrative, alternating the first-person point of view of Walter the soldier in 1970 Vietnam with that of Walter the boy in 1963 Birmingham. Commenting on this frame narrative, the reviewer for Kirkus Reviews praises Bombingham for its "[p]owerfully crafted individual moments and honestly drawn emotions," yet ultimately concludes that Grooms "can't quite synthesize them into a unified whole." A close reading of Bombingham reveals, however, that beneath the seemingly disconnected episodes that jump back and forth across time and space lies a work suffused with thematic coherency.

This essay examines the ways in which the complex moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. informs and connects the events in Bombingham. Grooms thematically links the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the same way that King links the two in his historic "A Time to Break Silence" address, delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. In this landmark speech, his first public criticism of President Lyndon B. Johnson's war policy, King identifies "seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of [his] moral vision" (232). First, King sees the war as "an enemy of the poor" because, "like some demonic destructive suction tube," it drains "men and skills and money" from the federal government's antipoverty program. Next, King denounces the government's "cruel manipulation of the poor" not only by "sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population," but also by "taking the black young men who had been crippled by [their] society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem." Third, King acknowledges his own moral inconsistency in condemning the use of violence during the civil rights movement at home while silently condoning the foreign policy of the United States, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" (233). King's fourth reason for opposing American involvement in Vietnam is his determination to save "America's soul" before it "destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over" (234).

From this point forward, King's focus moves from a specifically American context to a meditation on "allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions." He proclaims that his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964 obligates him to move "beyond national allegiances" and to work for "the brotherhood of man." Furthermore, his role as a Christian minister compels him to preach peace, to proclaim that "the good news was meant for all men—for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary...