At Canaan's Edge (40 page)

King publicly refined grievance into several levels of confession. “We as Negro leaders—and I include myself—have failed to take the civil rights movement to the masses of the people,” he said. He also said, however, that he could not find “any statesmanship and creative leadership” in Los Angeles, and pledged to offer his findings directly to President Johnson.

J
OYCE
B
AILEY,
jailed Saturday on her nineteenth birthday, remained in a Hayneville cell that grew filthy into the week of King's tour of Watts—an exposed, stopped-up toilet close under foot, shrieks for a mop ignored, clean water shut off sporadically from the sink. Her job in the Fort Deposit pajama factory was gone. Her father, a relatively independent railroad worker on the Louisville & Nashville line, brought her mother's home-cooked food until the jailers turned away the bother of all visitors, including John Hulett's intrepid well-wishers and civil rights doctors out of Selma. Her two companions lacked the comfort of home sympathy, and prayed instead that their families would never find out what happened. Gloria Larry knew her stepfather would thunder that he had plotted a whole career of Air Force postings from Bermuda to San Francisco just to keep her
out
of her native South. As the sophisticated elder at twenty-four, Larry struggled to maintain a composed example above primitive ordeals that included tears and frequent screams from the youngest cellmate, Ruby Sales, who lay doubled up from ulcers. Defying Deputy Sheriff Joe “Lux” Jackson, who threatened to have the Negro trusty beat them or worse for the noise, they sang freedom songs to assure the male prisoners on the second floor that their spirits were intact.

Precocious at seventeen, Sales cajoled the trusty to prove a streak of independent humanity by smuggling her notes upstairs to Daniels, with whom she flirted about movement philosophy even though she still mocked his seminarian's collar. Rebellion against middle-class piety had swept Sales from “high” Baptist to skeptic and from head cheerleader now to jail, beginning with the freshman day trip to Montgomery during the Selma march, when she and her Tuskegee professor wound up inside King's former church all night. To her parents, whose ambition for Sales was such that they delivered her all through childhood to separate attendance at the elite First African Baptist of Columbus, Georgia, remaining content themselves in a missionary church, the signal shock of the movement was their daughter's switch from Tuskegee heels and stockings to SNCC overalls. Unable to fathom why anyone would dress like the poorest, most vulnerable people—on purpose—they blamed the young professor, Jean Wiley, who also had joined SNCC. Sales had opposed letting Daniels into the Lowndes County movement, but he proved too charming and too smart about religion for her to maintain the standoffish posture that preachers were opiate-of-the-masses hypocrites above solidarity with black sharecroppers. Daniels had driven with Stokely Carmichael to Columbus to address her family's worries in person, which impressed her father enough to plead with each of them to look out for her. If he learned of the Fort Deposit arrests, Sales feared he would yank her out of Alabama.

Apart from her stomach, the sharpest pain arrived with a note that Carmichael and Chris Wylie posted separate bail on Wednesday, the fifth day, breaking a pact to resist the unjust charges as a united group. No longer could Carmichael be heard calling out for a song, or shouting, “John, it's prayer time now,” to prompt a devotional from the devout young McMeans. The female prisoners did not believe a smuggled note that he was needed on the outside to raise money, having heard derisive scoffs at the same bail rationale for King, who at least did raise much of SCLC's budget. To fight nagging suspicion that the SNCC veterans got priority rescue, they were relieved to confirm that Willie Vaughn of the Mississippi movement remained in a cell upstairs. Sales came to attribute the separate bail to the stress she had witnessed in Carmichael from the night she first met him in Montgomery, when she had folded her arms resolutely like his, vowing to resist Martin Luther King's excuses for Bevel and his former trustees who refused to let SNCC run “second front” demonstrations from Dexter Avenue Baptist. In spite of themselves, they both wound up stomping and cheering King's oratory on the larger purpose of the movement, and Sales remembered Carmichael's unsparing description of his convulsive breakdown soon thereafter. Beneath the smooth exterior, she figured, Carmichael must be apprehensive of a second crack-up from his five years exposed on the line.

Opposing pressures grew outside the jail. The SNCC treasury was nearly empty, and just then was collecting a solicited gift of $5,000 from SCLC to meet its subsistence payroll. Silas Norman and Bob Mants, suffering a confused obstruction about bail procedures, had trouble finding lawyers willing to go near Hayneville. Attorney Peter Hall of Birmingham went instead to Montgomery and filed a motion for removal of the Fort Deposit cases into Judge Frank Johnson's federal court. Far greater legal jeopardy hit the Lowndes County courthouse with a triggering letter of intent, as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifying that the Justice Department was authorized to bring suit on “written complaint alleging a minor child is being deprived by a school board of the equal protection of the laws.” Although John Doar mistook the school superintendent for a man, his detailed grievance showed that the rejected Negro schoolchildren had gained hope of redress from Washington, which amplified fears in Alabama. Sheriff Jim Clark already warned by mass circular that the Justice Department would repeat the “criminal assassination” he said it had “planned, encouraged, executed, and helped” perpetrate on nearby Selma,
*
and Colonel Al Lingo of the state troopers issued a statewide bulletin during the uproar over Watts: “This department is now in receipt of certain reliable information that riots are scheduled for many major cities throughout the nation and in the south particularly.” Lingo's alarm, which fell on the August 16 date of Doar's letter to “Mr. Hulda Coleman,” urged sheriffs and police chiefs “to begin NOW to form sizeable reserves of auxiliary police, firemen, and deputies.” To buy riot gear, Coleman's brother Tom made a trip into Montgomery on Friday morning, August 20.

“Dearest Mum,” Daniels had written Tuesday on a scrap, apologizing for a “peculiar birthday card” that was barely legible (“This damned pencil is about an inch and a quarter long”), advising that he had been in jail since Saturday. “The food is vile and we aren't allowed to bathe (whew!),” he added, “but otherwise we are okay. Should be out in 2–3 days and back to work. As you can imagine, I'll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini.” Daniels was able to post the scrap homeward to New Hampshire in care of strangers who appealed the visitor ban late Wednesday, enduring a police stop and a traffic fine on the drive into Lowndes, persisting at the courthouse until Sheriff Frank Ryals, trembling with anger, granted permission.

The two Episcopal priests walked into a meal standoff along a fetid corridor of the upstairs cellblock, strewn with tins of pinto beans, fatback, and moldy cornbread that the hungry prisoners refused to eat or the jailers to clear away still untouched. Unnerved themselves, the priests were flummoxed to meet a prisoner as upbeat as his peculiar birthday card. Daniels, alone now that Carmichael and Wylie were gone, called for devotions from an end cell with a verve that was ambiguous to the priests. They could not tell whether he was deliberately or naively mindless of danger. His blithe mood was especially unsettling to Rev. Francis Walter, an Alabama native who had agreed late in July to consider taking up the religious mission in Selma when the seminarian returned to Cambridge. Daniels declined their offer of bail money from ESCRU, the Episcopal civil rights group, because it was insufficient to free all the prisoners.

Richard Morrisroe also declined from two cells over, so weary that he did not pull himself up to confer through the bars. He took shifts sleeping upright on the floor, rotating four bunks between himself, Jimmy Rogers, and six young cousins from Fort Deposit who spent much energy reliving the longest journey of their lives to Birmingham for a performance by soul star James Brown. They reverted to fantasy reruns of their stifled demonstration, speculating that conquest alone could answer the hateful frenzy of the white men they knew, and these conversations engaged even visiting clergy to suggest revised tactics such as surprise, buildup, or more cameras to subpoena the national conscience, until Willie Vaughn erupted from the middle cell. “Reverend, have you ever stood in a picket line and looked into the faces of your adversaries,” he yelled, “and watched them soften?” He silenced the cellblock with fierce, hidden desire, as though desperate to recover something pure from Mississippi.

Young John McMeans, who was a welder from the local trade school, told Morrisroe he had aspired to be a preacher. He shared a jail poem written in a small pocket notebook:

They passed the notebook back and forth so that Morrisroe could record occasional thoughts from his own “Kerry Irish bent,” mostly reveries. “My observations seem so to spin around me,” he wrote. “I sense little if anything that I have given to these my friends. I sense only what I have received. A year ago I knew a great deal.” Again: “Friday morning—a week in jail, a week chosen in a Saturday moment of Ft. Deposit bravado, a week unwanted, a vacation week wasted, spilled out…. Its elements will soon blend into a heroic memory. Bravado will return in recollection, in mass meetings and quiet starlit conversation, across pews, over tables, in beds.”

Deputies banged open the cell doors with sudden news of freedom early Friday afternoon, August 20, and twenty celebrating prisoners scarcely noticed their crusted bodies as they reunited downstairs to sign their own appearance bonds. It was all Jimmy Rogers could do to hold them briefly at the desk when he realized that bail was not paid but mysteriously waived, and that no lawyer or movement caravan had come for them. Pushed outside, they huddled in the jailhouse yard until ordered to disperse by Deputy Lux Jackson from behind and by Hayneville officers who came along in a patrol car. Willie Vaughn argued for their right to stay by claiming an imaginary federal stake in the property, then vainly pleaded that the group should not “walk uptown integrated,” but they vacated under expulsion past the Hayneville cotton gin to the seed warehouse at the corner of Highway 97, a block from the courthouse square. Vaughn ducked off to find a friendly house and notify the Selma SNCC office forty miles away, there being no telephone at the Lowndes County Freedom House. Gathered around a mimosa tree, the remaining nineteen decided against trekking for White Hall or Fort Deposit. Several remarked on eerily deserted streets and wondered why no friends seemed even to know of their discharge. Still, jubilation floated on relief in open sunshine. Parched, eager to taste something cold while awaiting safe transport, clumps of them ventured a block downhill to the clapboard Cash Store, owned by the courteous Virginia Varner, where they had bought snacks on registration days at the Old Jail.

Daniels begged a dime from Ruby Sales on the way. He climbed the two small steps to a narrow porch entrance and froze at a sudden command from inside the screen door: “The store is closed. Get off this property or I'll blow your goddamned heads off!” Daniels retreated a step, leaning to sweep Sales behind with an arm, before Tom Coleman burst forward behind a Savage twelve-gauge barrel fired so close that lead and shell wadding tore a ragged hole only an inch wide from the rib cage downward through liver into spine, hurling Daniels back across the sidewalk to land face-up over the grassy curb. Joyce Bailey was twenty feet away in full flight when a second deafening blast wrenched her hand from Morrisroe's as the priest was swatted down by buckshot spread over his back. Sales crawled madly around the store to hide. Jimmy Rogers and Gloria Larry dived to the ground near Morrisroe, then scrambled behind a hedge when they glanced back to see the man walk toward them from the porch, pointing the shotgun.

Coleman wore a holstered pistol. He stood in survey over each prostrate form, then walked to his car and drove slowly up to the courthouse. From the sheriff's office he called Montgomery, where his state trooper son served as driver and bodyguard to Colonel Al Lingo. “I just shot two preachers,” he told them. “You better get on down here.”

Joyce Bailey gave way to loud hysteria when Coleman was gone. “You traitors!” she screamed at the empty street. “You just ran off and left!” Heads appeared from scattered places. John McMeans came close and could not shake from his mind the image of blood running as copiously from two people as water when he washed a car. Fort Deposit teenagers banged on the Jackson Beauty Shop and nearby houses, but no one came to the door. Gloria Larry backed away helpless, ears ringing, unable to bear the unworldly moans of Morrisroe begging for water. Spinning around, Rogers locked eyes with several armed men on a path behind the cotton gin. “Nigger, if you don't git, you're gonna be lyin' right down beside 'em,” shouted one.

Rogers herded his companions away from the victims and from jailhouse reading books abandoned where shock had dropped them in the road—
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Native Son
by Richard Wright,
The Church and the New Latin America.
An hour later, when Dr. William Dinkins arrived from Selma in one of the ambulances used to take James Reeb to Birmingham, he could find no wounded nor anyone who would speak of a shooting. Coroner Jack Golson had hauled the casualties away in the county hearse, Morrisroe barely conscious of Daniels stacked beneath him on a short-legged stretcher.