At Canaan's Edge (110 page)

King came smiling to the microphones about 9:30, just as the storms crested. (Tornadoes killed five more people. One at ten o'clock demolished forty trailer homes just north of Memphis, where the only serious injury was a man struck by a flying television.) He strung together several of his speech themes aimed toward the shared moment, beginning with a poetical tour of history. “If I were standing at the beginning of time,” and could choose any lifetime, he would “take my mental flight” past the glories of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome—“But I wouldn't stop there,” he kept saying—down past scenes from the Renaissance and Martin Luther and Abraham Lincoln until he could say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” It might seem strange with the world so messed up, King said, but he chose above all to see the stirrings of a human rights revolution for freedom worldwide. “I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often scratching where they didn't itch and laughing when they were not tickled.” He smiled. “But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.”

He saluted every aspect of the Memphis movement, beginning with the families of sanitation workers. “I call upon you to be with us Monday,” King said. “We need all of you.” Overlooking the intramural controversies, he praised Lawson for his vanguard career in nonviolence, and he turned once in mid-speech to ask Jesse Jackson for a reminder about local tactics. Then he meandered into another speech theme to recap the parable of the Good Samaritan. “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers,” he concluded, “what will happen to
them.
That's the question…. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.”

Abruptly King swerved into a third oratorical run, retelling of his brush with death when a demented woman stabbed him at a Harlem bookstore in 1958—how a doctor told the
New York Times
that the blade would have severed his aorta if he so much as sneezed, and how a little girl wrote a simple letter of thanks that he did not sneeze. “I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze,” said King, “because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960 when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy….” His voice climbed again in rhythm and fervor, using survival as a melodramatic device to relive the civil rights movement. “If I had sneezed,” he cried near the end, “I wouldn't have been down in Selma.”

Experienced preachers behind him felt fleeting anxiety that King might miss his landing, because he was in full passion on a peroration unsuited to close. The “sneeze” run always came earlier in his speeches, being informal and thin. King sputtered at the podium, then slipped a gear. “And they were telling me—now it doesn't matter now,” he said. “It really doesn't matter. I left Atlanta this morning….” He told briskly of the pilot's bomb search announcement. “And then I got into Memphis.” He frowned. “And some began to say the threats—or talk about the threats—that were out, what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers. Well, I don't
know
what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now.”

King paused. “Because I've been to the mountaintop,” he declared in a trembling voice. Cheers and applause erupted. Some people jerked involuntarily to their feet, and others rose slowly like a choir. “And I don't mind,” he said, trailing off beneath the second and third waves of response. “Like anybody I would like to live—a long life—longevity has its place.” The whole building suddenly hushed, which let sounds of thunder and rain fall from the roof. “But I'm not concerned about that now,” said King. “I just want to do God's will.” There was a subdued call of “Yes!” in the crowd. “And he's allowed me to go up the mountain,” King cried, building intensity. “And I've looked over. And I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n, the promised land.” His voice searched a long peak over the word “seen,” then hesitated and landed with quick relief on “the promised land,” as though discovering a friend. He stared out over the microphones with brimming eyes and the trace of a smile. “And I may not get there with you,” he shouted, “but I want you to
know, tonight
[“Yes!”] that we as a people will get to the promised land!” He stared again over the claps and cries, while the preachers closed toward him from behind. “So I'm happy tonight!” rushed King. “I'm not worried about
any
thing! I'm not fearing
any
man! Mine eyes have seen the
glo-
ry of the coming of the Lord!” He broke off the quotation and stumbled sideways into a hug from Abernathy. The preachers helped him to a chair, some crying, and tumult washed through the Mason Temple.

King sat spent, drenched in perspiration. Friends gathered around with congratulations and wonder for his thunderclap ending of little more than one hundred words. They said he transcended death while capturing freedom, gazing forward and backward on both. They compared details from the biblical story of Moses, who was permitted to see Canaan across the Jordan River from atop Mount Nebo, but died there for transgressions before his people entered the Promised Land. King revived in preacher talk with peers, and lingered eagerly to greet the sanitation workers. Notwithstanding an endless day since the airport bomb search, in fact, he hummed with incandescent stamina and disappeared with Abernathy and Bernard Lee for a long night on the town. When they returned by taxi to the Lorraine Motel after four o'clock the next morning, King saw a car with Kentucky license plates outside a room with the lights still burning. “Where's the Senator?” he called in booming welcome for Georgia Davis, who had just completed her first legislative session as the only black or female member of the Kentucky Senate. She was vacationing with her best friend, a mistress to King's younger brother, A.D., when they persuaded A.D. King to fly down from Louisville to Florida for a drive up through the Alabama and Mississippi storms into Tennessee, arriving too late at the Mason Temple. The brothers caught up on family talk and the Memphis crisis before King followed Davis to her Room 201 for the short remainder of night. Only then, after an abbreviated morning huddle to send Andrew Young into federal court as his designated witness, did he collapse for a nap.

I
N A
jammed U.S. Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Mayor Loeb watched his attorneys defend the injunction to exclude SCLC from any march in downtown Memphis. Frank Holloman, director of the combined fire and police divisions, testified that neither the city nor King would be safe. “The white citizens of Memphis, in letters to me and telephone calls to me, are greatly agitated at the present time,” he told the court. “There was a theft from a sporting goods store last evening of guns and ammunition.” Citing numerous threats that King would not survive, Holloman also listed fourteen reasons why the march would endanger the half-million citizens in his charge. “Number one,” he testified, “I am convinced that Dr. Martin Luther King, his leaders, or others, cannot control a massive march of this kind in this city or elsewhere.” Judge Bailey Brown qualified Holloman to give expert opinion based on his distinguished career in the FBI, where he had served as chief inspector, but the judge asked pointedly for evidence that King's influence in a constitutional demonstration would be a net plus for violence. “I would rather local people lead the march,” replied one of Holloman's subordinates.

Back at the Lorraine Motel, Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge reported to Room 306 about eleven o'clock Thursday morning. “Chauncey,” said King, “drop your bags right here and get down to court.” He hurried Eskridge to fortify the ACLU lawyers on his position crafted from the Selma march, which was to assert the right of protest while accepting reasonable conditions to promote safety and nonviolence. Eskridge left before Charles Cabbage and three other Invaders intruded on King's revolving staff session to declare a more aggressive posture. They demanded specific commitments to their budget, and, in exchange for accepting tactical nonviolence along with temporary positions on his staff, they wanted equal respect for their doctrine of “tactical violence.” King rejected them firmly in his way. “I don't negotiate with brothers,” he said—brothers only look for ways to help each other in good conscience. When the Invaders stormed off, King turned on Hosea Williams for letting the Invaders hoodwink him. He had wanted Williams to seek common ground with them, he said, but never to compromise the core principle of nonviolence on the SCLC staff. Pacing the room, he worked himself into a sermon much like the scolding he had inflicted on Bill Rutherford in Washington. Williams went away fuming. He believed King had sent mixed signals. He thought Bevel and James Orange deserved King's wrath more than he did, and grumbled that they were off joyriding with other Invaders.

Abernathy sent down to the motel kitchen for two orders of fried Mississippi River catfish. King dispatched some staff members back to Atlanta, and he sent Bernard Lafayette to Washington for Friday's opening press conference at the national headquarters of the Poor People's Campaign. Instead of postponing the event because of Memphis, Lafayette would substitute for King, and they went over what he should say. King instructed Lafayette to keep his room at the Lorraine and come right back to help train marshals over the weekend. “In the next campaign,” he remarked, “we'll have to institutionalize nonviolence and take it international.” Lafayette blinked in disbelief. Before he could ask about this flash of optimism, so high above the tribulations of Memphis and Washington, King only smiled as he turned back inside, where Abernathy was having communication trouble with the motel waitress. She kept bringing two of the wrong side items but only one lunch dish. This vexed co-owner Lorene Bailey, who lionized King, long after he and Abernathy amiably decided to share catfish off the one plate.

In the afternoon court session, lawyers for Memphis grilled James Lawson about how any assurances of nonviolence could be credible in light of his failures as chief marshal to keep peace in the march a week ago. “Are you telling the Court that unless there is a march that there will be violence,” asked one, “and people will disobey the laws, have looting, fires, Molotov cocktails, et cetera?” Lawson sparred with the lawyers, arguing that the best way to avoid a riot was to have a creative protest against injustice. Another line of cross-examination asked how the sanitation workers could have any grievance to justify protest, since they could make up to $3,700 per year, or nearly twice the average family income for Negroes in Memphis. Flustered, Lawson said even that dubious comfort made sanitation workers eligible for Food Stamps. Judge Brown interceded to ask whether the defense would accept a restriction against sticks used to carry placards. “There will be no sticks in any march, or any other potential weapons or weapon,” Lawson agreed, and he confessed regret from the stand: “That, that was a major error to even have such signs.”

In Room 306, Abernathy had fallen asleep shortly after finishing his catfish, but King, still restless after a series of business calls, went downstairs to meet his brother and the two Kentucky women in Room 201. They caught up on Louisville politics and gossip. A.D. worried about where to get a pair of pants pressed. King admitted severe anxiety that he might have to defy a federal rather than a state injunction on Monday, because this would tarnish the movement's anchor hope for vindication through the national compact, and he complained intermittently about hearing nothing all day from Andrew Young about how he fared in court. For relief, he and A.D. placed a call to Mama King in Atlanta. They talked with her for nearly an hour, pretending at first to be each other and often laughing uproariously at her tales of life with Daddy King, who came on the line, too. Afterward, the two brothers merrily sifted for ways in which their father might be considered modern even though it choked him to pay his maid a measly $25 a week. King called upstairs to wake Abernathy, who soon heard a buoyant replay of the phone call home. “She's always happy when A.D.'s with me,” said King. “She doesn't often have a chance to talk to us both together.”

He reminded Abernathy that Billy Kyles expected them at five o'clock for an early supper before the mass meeting. They certainly would arrive late, with extra guests such as Eskridge and the Kentucky group, but King claimed to worry most about the menu. He wanted to make sure they would get real soul food rather than some dainty starvation of asparagus and greens. “Call her,” he prodded Abernathy with an insistent undercurrent of mirth, until the exasperated sidekick called Gwen Kyles. She said there was plenty of food and the dinner was at six o'clock, not five. (By disclosing the actual time, she inadvertently spoiled her husband's trick to combat King's chronic tardiness.) As for the puzzling question about the menu, she mentioned a few dishes hesitantly until excitement spread through her household that Abernathy was repeating each item to King—roast beef, sweetbreads, chitterlings, pork chops, neck bones, fried chicken, and ham in the meat line, plus six kinds of salad, featured turnip greens and candied sweet potatoes, a bread table of hot rolls, corn bread, corn muffins, biscuits, and corn pones, and pretty much the works for dessert. Kyles had recruited the best cooks from her church, along with many helpers, favored daughters, and hostesses in finest clothes to spread forth a feast. (“They were really laying for that dinner,” she recalled.) Her menu, greatly embellished in Abernathy's relayed account, more than satisfied King, but A.D. still preferred supper at the motel. He often shied from social events that invited comparison to his world-famous older brother, while hating also to embarrass him with his binge weakness for alcohol.