Over the course of the film, the 42
year old central character, Tom Cherry, tries to come
to terms with the ghosts of his past. These ghosts
include the deaths of four young African American girls
who were murdered in the bombing of the
Birmingham, Alabama church in 1963 as they
attended Sunday school.
Tom’s father, Bobby Frank Cherry, then a member
of the Ku Klux Klan and a munitions expert when in the
Marines, was a prime suspect in the bombings. Tom,
then 11 years old, was his father’s chief alibi.
As the film begins Tom returns to his father’s
home because he “had nowhere else to go.” His wife
has divorced him and he is estranged from his only
daughter. On the radio he hears that the FBI has
reopened the investigation of his father; Tom naively
thinks he can be there to support his father.
But living with his father has unexpected
consequences. Tom starts to suffer from painful
memories of his childhood past. He remembers
witnessing his father’s brutal beating of a black
teenager. He has flashbacks of his father’s ferocious
attacks on his mother, beating her until she was
nearly senseless even when she was dying of
cancer.
Tom became a victim of his father’s violence as
he got older and tried to intercede to protect his
mother. He also has flashback memories of watching
the civil rights marches in Birmingham as the police
spray innocent marchers with high pressure hoses
and randomly beat marchers as they arrested them.
Finally, Tom is embittered when he recalls that his
father, upon his mother’s death when Tom was 15,
left him and his six younger brothers and sisters in
foster care rather than taking care of his family
himself. Yet, in spite of his father’s history of
incredible brutality, abuse, racism and neglect, Tom
still longs for his father’s love and admiration.
Tom hopes to earn this by building his father a
new home. To help him in this project, he hires a
local carpenter, Garrick, an African American who
becomes a good friend. Garrick, around the same
age as Tom, is single and has also suffered a series
of failed relationships with women.
As Tom experiences the support and kindness of
Garrick, it stands in sharp contrast to his father’s
selfish indifference towards him. In the meantime, the
same FBI agent, Dalton Strong, who dogged Tom
during the sixties to get him to tell the truth about his
father, is following him again and urging him to testify
against his father. This agent did not give up through
three failed investigations to bring the men who were
involved in the bombing to justice.
It was finally the release of Spike Lee’s film, “Four
Little Girls” in the mid-nineties that provided sufficient
momentum for the FBI to reopen the case that ended
in convictions after 37 years. At first Tom insists he
has nothing new to add but as he remembers more
about that 1963 time period, he realizes that he wasn’t
with his father the night before the bombings.
Tom is also haunted by his mother’s dying words
as she admonishes him to not turn out like his dad.
He remembers her telling him that his father is a bad
man,” the very worst kind of man”, and that the only
time he loves Tom is when he is “whipping on
someone.” Finally, when his younger brother is killed
in a prison fight a few months after Tom comes to stay
with his father, Tom is enraged as his father shows
no emotion or sense of sadness at this brother’s
death.
Ironically it is the FBI agent Dalton who offers his
condolences to Tom over the loss of his brother. It is
at this point that Tom goes to Birmingham to look up
the FBI evidence against his father. In this process
Tom realizes how much his father has lied about the
extent of his involvement in acts of violence against
blacks.
At the same time, Garrick learns of the
investigation against Tom’s father and confronts Tom
about his role in providing an alibi for his father in the
bombing and murders.
Tom finally realizes that he has to testify against
his father as he cannot deny the truth any longer. It is
his testimony that provides the necessary evidence for
his father to finally get indicted in 2000 and convicted
in 2002.
The film itself is based on a screenplay that was
written from extensive interviews that Tom did with a
reporter, Pamela Coloff of the Texas Monthly in 1998.
Some aspects of Tom’s story that were not mentioned
in the film included the fact that Tom’s only daughter
was molested at 12 by her grandfather who was
subsequently convicted of the molest. Tom
steadfastly stood by his daughter as she brought
charges against her grandfather.
When in 1998 Tom and his daughter were
subpoenaed by the grand jury to testify in the case of
the 1963 bombing, all of his brothers and sisters
urged him to refuse to testify against the father and to
go to jail for contempt of court. But, Tom and his
daughter testified despite thow urgings.
In the discussion that followed the film we felt that
Tom Cherry’s struggle could be viewed through a
Control Mastery lens in a number of ways. First, Tom
had an unconscious plan to not grow up like his
father. He was both horrified by his father’s violence
and cruelty and wanted to honor his mother’s vision of
him. He strived to work hard to “do the right thing,”
and to be a person with integrity.
He tried to be someone who was kind, not sexist
and racist, and one who stood up to take care of his
family and loved ones. These longings created
enormous stress in Tom as they came in direct
conflict with the kind of person his father was. To be
close to his father, Tom had to live with a paranoid
fear and mistrust of others, to be callous toward
others, to be a racist and sexist bully and to be mean
spirited.
While therapy was not part of Tom's experience,
we felt there were a number of factors that helped him
to come to terms with his father’s brutality.
One was the lingering impact of his mother’s
dying words to him even though she herself could
never protect her son and other children from their
father.
Another influence was the generosity and
kindness that was offered to him in his friendship with
Garrick. We talked about how the power of the civil
rights movement in the second half of the 20th century
changed how Tom viewed his father and the world he
grew up in. The movement embodied fearlessness in
the face of terror and it was this that generated hope
and momentum for change in terms of race relations
in this country.
This freed Tom and Garrick to open up to one
another and become friends. We also speculated that
the incredible perseverance of the FBI agent, Dalton
Strong who refused to give up his efforts to find and
convict those responsible for the murders of the four
young girls had a positive impact on Tom.
Finally, we suspected that the process of Tom
sharing his story with the reporter and then with the
television viewing audience in the movie was very
important in helping him come to terms with his past
and his relationship with his father. This was the case
in spite of the fact that in deciding to testify against his
father, Tom had to be very different from his siblings
who viewed him as a traitor for testifying.
As an aside, we wondered if the film might not
have disconfirmed some pathogenic beliefs of family
members at large as they saw their story on the
screen unfold through Tom’s eyes.
On the eve of the indictment of his father, Tom
Cherry was interviewed on NPR by Scott Simon. In his
last question to Tom, Scott Simon asked if he still
loved his father. Choking back tears Tom replied that
he used to worship his father when growing up but
now, while he still loved him, he was also hopeful that
the families of the four young girls who were
murdered that day in 1963 could finally have the
ghosts of their daughters put to rest.
