Downtown (45 page)

I’ve done some of that, enough to know that I’m no leader of men, much less a pipeline from God. So I got my degree and went on back to St. Louis that spring to look around some, see where I might get a job. But all the time the Civil Rights movement was pulling at me; it seemed indecent somehow to just sit it out in St. Louis. I thought I ought to go somewhere and get a little taste of it, see what it was all about. The march on Washington came up that summer, and I decided to go. My father went straight into orbit. The last thing he said, as my bus rolled off for Washington, was

‘I hope you get arrested.’”

“Shit, that’s just what my old man told me when my bus left Baltimore,” Luke said, coming into the room. He slapped John Howard on the shoulder and walked over and dropped a kiss on the top of my head. I felt myself color. I looked obliquely at John Howard, and he smiled back at me and nodded slightly, as if he was conferring a benediction, but he said nothing.

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“Y’all met there,” I said. Luke had told me that much.

“Yeah, we met very elegantly standing in line for one of the outdoor toilets SCLC had put up behind their headquarters,” Luke said. “We noticed each other immediately. There we were, two skinny kids in seersucker suits and madras ties and brushcuts, standing in line with all the overalls and work shirts and peace pendants and sandals.

We looked at each other and started laughing, and I pulled off my tie and he did his, and we balled them up and threw them over behind the toilets and tied our coats around our waists and rolled up our shirt-sleeves, and walked over and shook hands with each other. Pulling that tie off and slinging it behind a Porta Potty was the biggest act of liberation I’d ever made in my life, besides getting on the bus in Baltimore.

I think it was for John, too. After that we went to hell pretty fast.”

“After King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech there wasn’t any doubt that I was going to follow him,” John said. “I didn’t even call home. I got on one of the buses that was going back to Atlanta from Washington and Luke came with me.

I didn’t know what to do with him; here was this skinny kid so white his face shone like new money on a bear’s behind, as somebody said about him on the bus, dragging his little Samsonite suitcase and all these cameras around his neck. I liked him, but I didn’t exactly think he was an asset on that bus. But he was like a stray dog; I couldn’t lose him. When we got to Atlanta I went on down to SCLC headquarters and found Dr. King—he was always accessible when he was in town; I just walked into his office—and told him I was a new lawyer and I wanted to work for him and he didn’t have to pay me anything until he saw whether he could use me or not. Luke was right behind me, saying the same thing.

Turned out they could use a photographer a lot quicker than they could a lawyer; Luke went out immediately with a bunch ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 364

of them to cover voter registration in Mississippi, and I got stuck in Atlanta doing pro bono scutwork. It was a year before they even let me get anybody out of jail. I ended up doing some assistant stuff over at Atlanta University, and some tutoring; it gave me a little money and a place to live.

I still do that, and I’ve still got that student apartment. Luke, as you know, went on to fame and fortune by getting his foot stepped on by a police hoss in Selma. And the rest is history. As they say.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “It literally is, isn’t it? And you got as close to Dr. King as anybody ever has. Why you, John?”

It was a presumptuous question, but I did not intend it that way and he did not take it as such.

“I think,” he said, leaning back and holding his glass up to the light, so that the pale gold bubbles danced and swirled,

“it was because he knew a penitent little elitist when he saw one. He’d been one himself. He wasn’t always a quote, man of the people, you know. He was raised a lot like me; he was sheltered and educated and pretty cultured. He literally made himself over so he could talk the talk and walk the walk; he became the ultimate common man so he could touch and move his people, do something for them. It must have taken an enormous act of love and will. And it changed me to be around him. I’ll never have his total empathy with the rank and file of the movement, but I’ve learned from him that they’re what it’s all about. They’re the important ones, the so-called little people. The poor folks. This is their fight.

Martin’s given himself to them utterly, and I’ve tried to follow in his footsteps. I haven’t totally succeeded, but it’s given me myself in a way nothing else ever could. Being with him did that.”

We were quiet for a spell. It was an extraordinary speech, I thought. The most extraordinary thing about it 365 / DOWNTOWN

was that he had spoken it so openly and naturally in front of me. I was moved nearly to tears, but said nothing. To have spoken would have been, somehow, both arrogant and callow.

“So,” Luke said. “How’d the rest of the party go last night?

Didn’t look like Tony and Rosser took to ol’ Sonnyboy too well. Who is he, exactly, John?”

John Howard made an impatient gesture.

“One of the new young ones that took up with Huey and Bobby out at Merritt, in Oakland,” he said. “I don’t know much about him beyond that. I think he was at Berkeley for a year, and then he got in on the hoohaw at the California state legislature. There are a bunch like him coming along; never been South, never marched, never sat-in, never did any jail time, never did have the foggiest notion what Martin is talking about. They’re too young and they’re all mad as shit.

They like the guns and the tough talk and the uniforms; it’s like playing war. Nothing’s real to them yet. I’m afraid by the time it is, they’re going to have done a lot of damage.

Things got really ugly last night after y’all left. I had to frog-march the little bastard out the back door before somebody beat the shit out of him.”

“What happened?”

“He said some bad stuff about Martin. Hell, that’s not unusual, nowadays. It’s just that he picked the wrong place to say it.”

“I thought last night the vibes were bad,” Luke said. “I told Smokes Dr. King reminded me of an old lion surrounded by jackals, or something.”

“The king must die,” I said, thinking of a seminar in classical mythology I had had in college. “You know, the myth that the king had to die, to be sacrificed ritually, and another had to take his place to insure that the crops came in and life went on. Almost all cultures have it in ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 366

one way or another. I thought about it when Kennedy was shot.”

John Howard looked at me somberly.

“Yeah, well, that’s almost exactly what Sonny said, although I’d bet my boots that dude wouldn’t know classical mythology from cat piss. What he said was, ‘King is dead, you know.’ Sat right there and said it as Martin was leaving the room with Tony and Rosser. I don’t know if Martin heard him, but the other two were back there like a shot. Asked him what the hell he meant, and he just smiled that jackass smile and said, ‘He was dead when Stokely raised his fist in Greenwood and the crowd hollered “Black Power!” He’s walkin’ around dead, only he don’t know it, and you all don’t, either. That was the beginning of the end for the old movement, brothers.’”

Luke’s indrawn breath hissed, and I shivered.

“Greenwood?” I said.

“Mississippi,” Luke said. “When Stokely Carmichael got arrested for pitching his tent in Greenwood during the Meredith march, there was a big rally. He came straight from the jail. Everybody was mad; it was a chickenshit arrest. He made what everybody thinks is the first black power salute that night. And some folks think that night was the first time

‘Black Power!’ replaced ‘Freedom’ as a rallying cry. Not that it really matters.”

“What a horrible thing to say anytime, but especially last night,” I said, thinking of the sense of joy and exaltation I had had last night at La Carrousel. “That’s his place. Dr.

King’s. The nerve of that little—”

“Yeah, I thought Rosser was going to kill him,” John Howard said. “He had him by the back of the collar and was fixing just to kick the shit out of him, but Juanita apologized and we pulled him out of there. She knows it was a bad thing for him to be there. She didn’t bring 367 / DOWNTOWN

him. He just showed up. I think he’s trying to ride on her coattails. She’s got a lot of friends in the movement still, and I think he’d love to recruit them.”

“Apparently she does have friends,” Luke said, and smiled mirthlessly at John.

“I’m not apologizing, Luke,” John said. “She’s a hell of a woman, no matter what side she’s on. She was one of the best we ever had. You can’t just write that off. And besides, they’re not all like Sonny Pickens. Most of them were us once. I try not to forget that.”

“They seem to have forgotten it,” Luke said. “You’re not going over are you, old buddy?”

“You know I’m not. All I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to listen to what they’re really saying, the meat below the posturing and the slogans. It may not be so far from what we’ve been saying all along. The end is the same. The means are different, that’s all. And they get things done. They accomplish things you can see and touch and point to. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that if we got closer together we could learn from each other. Christ, Luke, our way isn’t working. I believe with all my heart in our way, but it’s like all of a sudden it’s just stopped working. It got a lot of legislation in place, but nobody’s enforcing it. It’s like we’re walking in molasses. Ever since the White House Conference last year people have been mad; a lot of the foot soldiers came home from that disillusioned and cynical. It’s pretty obvious Johnson is just using the movement. Before that, I think we were mad about different things, the North and the South. Up there, they were mad because the promises haven’t been upheld. Down here, there just weren’t any promises being made. Now we’re both mad about the same stuff. Now the promises have been made, and we’re seeing that nobody in the government is doing shit to get them enforced. Don’t ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 368

you see? That makes all the…all the marching and beatings and jail and the shooting and the dying for nothing. Just for nothing, if they resulted in only promises that nobody means to keep. So yeah, I think we do need to look at what works.

We could work it out about the means.”

“You really think the SCLC is going to find something it can use in the Panthers’ camp?” Luke said. “You think Dr.

King and the rest of them are going to get guns and black berets and leather jackets and scarves and march around?”

“Don’t be a fool. Of course not. But you can’t deny that they’ve got an impressive organization. They’ve got this hot breakfast program going in virtually every major city they’re in, and day care, and black studies programs, and employ-ment programs, and food banks, and they’re teaching inner-city blacks how to organize for better breaks in their jobs, and better treatment from the police—”

“And they’re showing little kids how to shoot Magnums and they’re saying all the whites should butt out entirely, and they’re advocating armed insurrection—”

“I never said they had all the answers,” John Howard said.

“Not even many of them. A lot of what they say is bullshit.

But I think even they know that. It’s saberrattling, to get attention. You can’t do anything without the attention. And they’ve flat got it, especially from the media. We don’t have that anymore. With an organizational structure like theirs, and with the press they’ve got, if we could just move closer together instead of separating into factions like we have—Jesus, SCLC never did have more than a few thousand folks, and never much money, and now that SNCC and CORE have pulled away, we’re like David going up against Goliath, only without the slingshot. All I’m saying is that their

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side has things we can use, and ours has stuff they need. We need to let them show us what they could do for us. We need to at least listen. We can say no to the guns; they don’t really use them, anyway. I don’t think they’d even push it; I think that’s just bait. I think we may be closer together than we think, them and us.”

“Wow,” Luke said. “She’s better than I thought.”

“She never left us that far behind,” John Howard said levelly. “One reason she was down here was to see if there wasn’t some middle ground we could meet on. To see if we could talk. She hasn’t forgotten the Delta, she hasn’t forgotten Lowndes County. They’re not all Sonny Pickens, like I said. Most of them aren’t.”

“So what are y’all planning to do to bring everybody together?”

“She’s not planning anything,” John said. “She left this morning to go back home. She’s got a little girl in one of their day care programs in Philadelphia, did you know that?

Kimba. She’s three. Her father’s long gone. Juanita’s got more to think about than infiltrating us down here, no matter what some of the troops think.”

“Well, then, what are you planning?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I’m going to talk to Martin about it, though. One thing’s for certain, he’ll listen. That’s more than I can say for Tony and Rosser.”

Luke stretched. “It seems like such a long time ago. All of it. Like it happened to somebody else. Doesn’t it, to you?

Christ, I don’t ever want to be shot at or hosed again, but the spirit in those days—it was something, wasn’t it?”

“It was something,” John Howard said. The golden eyes were far away. “It was something, that’s for sure…”

There was a soft tapping on the door, and Luke got up to answer. He opened it and a short, square young black woman came in carrying a crystal platter with a ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 370

pound cake on it. It was still warm; fragrant steam wafted from it.

“Miz Strauss sent this for y’all,” she said. “She says save some for your company, Luke.”

Luke took the platter and put it in the kitchen. The young woman—hardly more than a girl, really, I saw on closer inspection—stood looking at us shyly. She was very black, and her head was wrapped in a bright cotton scarf with an African print, as Juanita’s had been last night. There were dark seed beads around her neck, and big wooden hoops in her ears.