Voices in Our Blood (66 page)

These garbage men are that new thing, Hambones in rebellion—and they have strange new fish to fry. The people who filed past King's body had said no to the whole city of Memphis; said it courteously, almost deferentially (which only made it more resounding); they had marched every day under their employers' eyes; boycotted the downtown; took on, just for good measure, firms like Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread and Sealtest Milk; and were ready, when the time came, to join with King in taking on Washington. Patience radiates from them like a reproach. Perhaps that is why the white community does not like to see them in a mass—only in the single dimension, the structured encounter that brings them singly into the home or the store for eight hours of work. These Negroes seem almost too patient—wrong people for rebels. Yet their like has already made a rebellion. A tired woman in Montgomery was the wrong sort to begin all the modern civil-rights activism; but Rosa Parks did it. King was drawn into that first set of marches and boycotts almost by accident—as he was involved, finally, in the garbage men's strike: “Dat's always de trouble wid miracles. When you pass one you always gotta r'ar back an' pass another.”

The buses were late. They were supposed to arrive at eleven-thirty for loading baggage (each man had been told to bring toothbrush, change of underwear, change of outer clothes if he wanted it, and most wanted it.) Besides, there had been talk of a bus for teen-agers, who were now giggling and flirting in the dark vestibule (surrendered to them by their elders). Jerry Fanion, an officer of the Southern Regional Conference, scurried around town looking for an extra bus; like all Negroes, he was stopped everywhere he went. Police recognized him, and they had been alerted about the men who would be leaving their homes for the funeral; but they made him get out of the car anyway, and laboriously explain himself. He never did get the bus. Later in the week, the teen-agers made a pilgrimage to King's grave.

Meanwhile, the wives in the Clayborn Temple still did not know whether they could go with their husbands. About eleven-thirty, T. O. Jones showed up, with P. J. Ciampa. Jones is the spheroid president of the sanitation local—a man too large in some ways and too small in others for any standard size of shirt, coat, pants. He is content with floppy big pants and a windbreaker that manages to get around him, but only by being too long in the sleeves and too wide in the shoulders. He is a quiet man in his early forties, determined but vague, who began the strike by going to the office of the Director of Public Works and—when the Director told him there was an injunction against any strike by city employees—changing into his “prison clothes” on the spot.

Ciampa is the fiery Italian organizer who came into town for the union and amused people with televised arguments against Mayor Loeb (who insisted that all negotiations be carried on in public). Jones and Ciampa have lost the list of men signed up for the buses; they don't know how many buses are coming, how many can ride on each. They try to take two counts—of workers alone, and workers with their wives; but it's difficult to keep track of those who wander in and out of shadows, doors, anterooms.

After an hour of disorder, it becomes clear that everyone can fit into the three buses if folding chairs are put down the aisles. T. O. had told me to save a seat for him, but the chairs in the aisle barricade us from each other. I sit, instead, with a sleepy young man who describes the route we
have
to take, and then finds confirmation of his theory, with a kind of surprised triumph, all along the way. The route one travels through Mississippi and Alabama is a thing carefully studied by Southern Negroes. After giving T. O. a check for the bus drivers, Ciampa went back to the hotel, T. O. swung onto the lead bus, and we pulled out.

In the seat behind me, a woman is worried over the teen-agers still standing by the church, hoping they will get a bus. “How they gonna get home?” she asks. “Walk, woman,” her husband growls. “But what of the curfew?” “What of it?” “I don't trust those police. If I hadn't got on the bus with you, I'd have stayed all night in the church.” As the bus rolls through downtown Memphis, on its way South, the woman sees cars moving. “What are they doing out during the curfew? Why aren't
they
stopped?” She knows, of course. Her husband does not bother to answer her.

In our bus, all the animation comes from one voice in the back. A tall laughing man I had watched, in the church, as he moved from one cluster to another, mixing easily, asked to sit beside me while I was still saving a seat for T. O. I was sorry later I had not said yes. As the riders shouldered sleepily into their chair backs, he joked more softly, but showed no signs of fatigue himself—though he had been a marshal all the long afternoon of marching. And as fewer and fewer responded to him, he moved naturally from banter and affectionate insults to serious things: “That Dr. King was for us.” The response is a sigh of yesses. “He didn't have to come here.” A chorusing of nos. As he mused on, the crowd breathed with him in easy agreement, as if he were thinking for them. This “audience participation” is what makes the Southern preacher's sermon such an art form. I had been given a dazzling sample of it three days before in the garbage men's meeting at the United Rubber Workers Union Hall. That was the day after King's death, and a formidable lineup of preachers was there to lament it. They all shared a common language, soaked in Biblical symbol: Pharaoh was Mayor Loeb, and Moses was Dr. King, and Jesus was the Vindicator who would get them their dues checkoff. But styles were different, and response had to be earned. The whole hall was made up of accompanists for the improvising soloist up front. When he had a theme that moved them, they cheered him on: “Stay there!” “Fix it.” “Fix it up.” “Call the roll.” “
Talk
to me!” “Talk
and a half.
” The better the preacher, the surer his sense of the right time to tarry, the exact moment to move on; when to let the crowd determine his pace, when to push against them; the lingering, as at the very edge of orgasm, prolonging, prolonging; then the final emotional breakthrough when the whole audience “comes” together.

Memphis is not really the birthplace of the blues, any more than Handy was the father of them; but these are the same people who created the form—the triple repeated sighing lines, with a deep breathing space between each, space filled in with the accompanists' “break” or “jazz.” That is the basic pattern for the climactic repetitions, subtle variations, and refrains of the preacher's art. That kind of sermon is essentially a musical form; and the garbage men are connoisseurs. When a white pastor from Boston got up, he gave them slogans and emotion; but without a response from the audience—he didn't know the melody.

Nor did all the black preachers succeed, or win equal acceptance. The surprise of the afternoon, at least for me, came when an S.C.L.C. delegation reached the hall, and the Reverend James Bevel got up to preach. He and his associates looked almost out of place there amid the “do rags” and scarred ebony skulls; they were immaculately dressed, with educated diction, wearing just the proper kind of “natural” and a beard.

Bevel was the fourteenth, and last, speaker of the afternoon. It seemed that earlier emotional talks would have drained these men of all response left them after the shock of the preceding night. But Jim Bevel slowly built them up, from quiet beginnings, to an understanding of what it means to be “on the case.” (This is a phrase he invented a year ago to describe musicians who are perfectly interacting; it is now an S.C.L.C. phrase of wide applicability.) “Dr. King died on the case. Anyone who does not help forward the sanitation workers' strike is not on the case. You getting me?” (They're getting him.) “There's a false rumor around that our leader is dead.
Our
leader is not dead.” (“No!” They know King's
spirit
lives on—half the speeches have said that already.) “That's a
false
rumor!” (“Yes!” “False.” “Sho' nuff.” “
Tell
it!”) “Martin Luther King is not—” (yes, they know, not dead; this is a form in which expectations are usually satisfied, the crowd arrives at each point
with
the speaker; he outruns them at peril of losing the intimate ties that slacken and go taut between each person in the room; but the real artist takes chances, creates suspense, breaks the rhythm deliberately; a snag that makes the resumed onward flow more satisfying)—“Martin Luther King is not our
leader!
” (“No!” The form makes them say it, but with hesitancy. They will trust him some distance; but what does he mean? The “Sho' nuff” is not declamatory now; not fully interrogatory, either; circumflexed.) “
Our
leader—(“Yes?”)—is the
man—
(“
What
man?” “Who?” “Who?” Reverend Abernathy? Is he already trying to supplant King? The trust is almost fading)—who led
Moses
out of
Israel.
” (“
Thass
the man!” Resolution; all doubt dispelled; the bridge has been negotiated, left them stunned with Bevel's virtuosity.) “
Our
leader is the man who went with Daniel into the lions' den.” (“Same man!” “Talk some.”) “Our leader is the man who walked out of the grave on Easter morning.” (“Thass the leader!” They have not heard, here in hamboneland, that God is dead.) “Our leader never sleeps nor slumbers. He cannot be put in jail. He has never lost a war yet.
Our
leader is
still on the case.
” (
“That's it!”
“
On
the case!”) “Our leader is not dead. One of his prophets died. We will not stop because of that. Our staff is not a funeral staff. We have friends who are undertakers. We
do business.
We
stay on the case,
where our leader is.”

It is the most eloquent speech I have ever heard. I was looking forward, a day later, to hearing Bevel again, before a huge audience in the Mason Temple. He was good—and gave an entirely different speech. But the magic of his talk to the sanitation workers was gone. It was not merely the size of the crowd (though that is important—the difference between an intimate combo and some big jazz band only partially rehearsed). The makeup of the crowd was also different. Those in the Union Hall were predominantly male. Men accompany; women compete—they talk over the preacher's rhythms. Their own form is not the jazz combo, but the small group of gospel singers, where each sister fights for possession of the song by claiming a larger share of the Spirit. In a large place like the Mason Temple, women set up nuclei around the hall and sang their own variations on the sermon coming out of the loudspeakers.

But that night in the bus, there was no fighting the jolly voice that mused on “Dr. King's death.” Responses came, mingled but regular, like sleepy respirations, as if the bus's sides were breathing regularly in and out. This is the subsoil of King's great oratory, of the subtly varied refrains: “I have a
dream . . . I
have a dream today.” He must have been a great preacher in his own church; he could use the style out in the open, before immense crowds. He made the transition more skillfully than Bevel had—and far better than Abernathy does. That very day, the Monday before King's funeral, Abernathy had paused long on the wrong phrases: “I do not
know . . .
I do not
know.
” He had let the crowd fool him by their sympathy; he took indulgence for a
demand
to linger. He did not have King's sure sense of when to move.

I suppose I heard thirty or forty preachers on that long weekend of religious eloquence; but not one of them reached King's own level of skill in handling a crowd. That was the mystery of King. He was the Nobel Prize–winner and a Southern Baptist preacher; and, at places like the Washington Mall in 1963, the two did not conflict but worked together. As the man in the bus kept saying, “He was for
us.
” (“Unh
-hmmn!
”) “He was
one
with us.” (“That he was.” “That he was.”)

But King's rapport with his people was not the natural thing it seems now. He had to learn it, or relearn it. The man's voice rose behind us in the bus: “You know what Dr. King said?” (“What?”) “He said not to mention his Nobel Prize when he died.” (“Thass what he
said.
”) “He said, ‘That don't mean nothing.' ” (“Sho' nuff.”) “What matters is that
he
helped
us.
” (“Thass the truth.” “That
is
the truth.” “
That
is.”)

In several ways. King was very bright, a quick study. He skipped two grades to finish high school at the age of fifteen. He was ordained at eighteen; graduated from college at nineteen. It was a fast start, for a career that is one long quick record of youthful accomplishment. He got his theology degree at the age of twenty-two. While a pastor (from the age of twenty-five), he got his Ph.D. from Boston University at twenty-six. And he went direct from graduate school to a position of national leadership. His major achievements were already behind him when he became the youngest man (thirty-five) to receive the Nobel Prize. He was dead before he reached the age of forty; and there are constant little surprises in remembering how young he was—as when Harry Belafonte, speaking in Memphis, referred to King as his junior by a year. Was “De Lawd” really younger than that baby-faced singer? And why did we never think of him as young?

He had the strained gravity of the boy who has moved up fast among his elders. That unnatural dignity is in his writing, too, which labors so for gravity that it stretches grammar: “President Kennedy was a strongly contrasted personality . . . trying to sense the direction his leadership could travel.” His acceptance speech will not rank with the great Nobel speeches: “transform this
pending
cosmic elegy into a creative psalm . . . unfolding events which surround . . . spiral down a militaristic stairway . . . blood-flowing streets. . . .”