But
winter, despite itself, despite the tenacity with which it held the world in
its icy grip, eventually released us into the quiet concession of a new season.
The spring run-offs flooded the fields, and small children - black and white -
skidded in the mud, fraying both their clothes and their folks' tempers, until
the color they'd arrived in had transformed to a uniform gray-brown. Only from
the length of their hair could you tell who was white and who was not. From
where I watched from the Radio Store window I could see life emerging once
more. It seemed like a new beginning, but somehow I knew that our time was
coming, and our time was not a new beginning, but an end.
In
May the boxer Muhammad Ali was indicted for refusing the Draft. That was a
premonition. He was black. He was famous. They could still kick his ass.
Nathan
Verney came to see me that day, and it was that day I told him of Eve Chantry.
I showed him the candlemoth, and as if in validation of my decision to hold him
in his confidence, the original decision to have Nathan Verney as my blood
brother, he was both enchanted and impassioned.
'She
was right, you know,' he said later.
I
looked across at him.
'That
you can only make the decision yourself.'
I
nodded.
'My
decision is made,' he said quietly.
I
didn't look up. I didn't want him to tell me. I wanted it to be mine and mine
alone, and to hear what he had decided could only sway my thoughts.
'I won't
go,' he said. 'I have decided that no matter what happens I won't go to
Vietnam.'
His
voice possessed such clarity and authority there was no mistaking his intent.
'It
isn't cowardice,' he went on - a phrase I would hear as the opening of every
explanation from every Draft dodger I would ever meet - 'it's the principle of
the thing. It is not my war. I do not wish to kill people. I don't even know
any Vietnamese people… I don't even know any communists come to that… so why
should I go out and kill them? What did they ever do to me?'
'Killed
your cousins,' I said.
Nathan
was quiet for a moment, then, 'Sure, they got killed, but they wouldn't have
been killed if they hadn't gone, would they?'
'And
if everyone said they weren't going then no-one would be dead, and there would
never have been a war in the first place… and then there would be communists
everywhere.'
Nathan
shook his head. 'You really believe that?'
I
smiled. 'No, I don't believe that.'
'Then
why do you think there's a war?' he asked.
'I
heard that someone bet LBJ a dollar that we would win.'
Nathan
laughed.
'I
don't know, Nathan, I really don't know. I also don't need to know why you have
decided not to go, but I wish you hadn't told me.'
Nathan
frowned. 'How come?'
'Because
I have to make my own decision and I don't want to be influenced by anyone
else.'
Nathan
smiled. 'Then you've missed the whole point of what Eve Chantry told you.'
I
looked questioningly at him.
'The point,
Danno, is that you have to stick to what you think regardless of what anyone
says whether you know what they're gonna say or not.'
I
shook my head. 'But -'
Nathan
raised his hand. 'But nothing, Danny. You think what you think and everyone else
thinks what they think, and you go ahead and do whatever you're gonna do
regardless.'
I
didn't reply.
He
was right.
More
often than not Nathan was right. His daddy was a minister and sometimes I
believed he had God on his side.
We
didn't speak of it again that day, nor the week following, or the week beyond
that. In fact, I can't remember speaking to him about it again until much, much
later, and by then words were as meaningful as the nineteen-year-old lives that
went out to Vietnam.
Nathan
had his wireless radio with him. He found KLMU on the dial and we listened to
Johnny Burnette and Willie Nelson.
The
mood between us changed, the challenge was gone, and I for one was grateful.
This was a subject so close to home I did not believe I could be challenged and
survive with my sanity intact.
Dark
times were coming, I knew that much, and still the decision evaded me. Perhaps
I believed in some small way that the war would skid right by me, miss me in
its hurry to collect the youth of America and slaughter them wholesale. Someone
was reaping children, less than children, and beneath the great sweep of its
scythe I would duck and become nothing for just a heartbeat.
It
would take just that long to be missed perhaps.
About
the same amount of time it took to die.
In
October the largest anti-war demonstration in history moved on the Pentagon.
There were two hundred and fifty arrests, including that of Norman Mailer. The government's
response was to step up the bombing of North Vietnam.
I
remember watching the demo on TV at the Radio Store. I don't believe I'd ever
seen so many people gathered with one united voice in all my life. With the
death of Jack Kennedy we wept as a people, but on this day we raised our
hearts, our voices, our fists in anger. It was a release, an impassioned and
desperate plea for someone out there to listen, to understand, to hear us. That
cry fell on deaf ears. Another 35,000 filed quietly up gangways and into
aircraft, strapped themselves into helicopters, checked their weapons for
operational status, chewed their gum, closed their eyes and remembered their
sweethearts' faces, said a brief prayer to a God they doubted could really
exist, and looked down at American soil for the last time.
In
most cases they were dead within hours; the rest got a week or two.
The
year ended as it had started. America felt like a clenched fist, a seized
heart, a twisted muscle. So much power, so little use.
And
it hurt.
The
strain was beginning to show.
1968
began with the indictment of Benjamin Spock for anti-Draft activities. He was a
hero, and though his voice was loud it was like the creaking of a door in a
hurricane. Only if you hid behind it could you hear it, and the protection it
would afford you was of no value.
In
February Richard Milhous Nixon said he would run for president. That face, the
expressive gesture, everything that would become more recognized than perhaps
any president before him, was not the image that we remembered from that time.
There
was a photograph. It leapt at us from the TV, from the newspapers, from the
human interest magazines: South Vietnamese Army General Loan holding a revolver
against the head of a suspect in a Saigon public square. The suspect's head was
tilted to the viewer's right, his face twisted in a grimace of horrified
anticipation.
General
Loan was quoted.
He
said:
Buddha will understand.
Some
people asked who Buddha was; was he responsible for the war?
Some
people asked why General Loan thought Buddha would want anything to do with
such a thing.
Some
people just turned away, sickened, repulsed, disbelieving.
The
picture haunted me for days.
Perhaps
it was that picture that gave me closure.
In
March LBJ said he would not run for office again. To temper the sense of loss
many would feel at such an announcement he sent another 35,000 to Vietnam.
Robert
Kennedy said he would run. That gave people a lift somehow. He was so like his
fallen brother.
They
came crashing to earth once more in April.
Like
Marty Hooper. Boom. Down.
Martin
Luther King was killed in Memphis.
Reverend
Verney, a sequoia of a man, wept openly in the street. He hugged his wife and
his son to him and they wept with him.
The
negro quarter of Greenleaf was deserted. In times such as these we had learned
there were no such things as divisions and quarters. United only in war and
grief it seemed.
I did
not understand the reality of what had happened.
I
knew enough of King to appreciate that all the progress made had been carried
forward on his shoulders. There was no-one to take his place, no-one who
could
take his place. I felt that the ignorant whites were responsible. The
same ignorant whites who'd started the war.
When
they named James Earl Ray I wondered why they always used all three names. Lee
Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray. John Wilkes Booth. Why did they do that?
And when
Nathan told me they were going to Atlanta for the funeral I knew I would go
with them.
I
considered it was not necessary to understand all the details to get the
message.
My
blood brother was a black man. We were different. Of course we were different,
we would always be different. But we were not so different as to justify
different streets and different bars and different jobs or houses or salaries.
Martin Luther King believed in what he was doing. I believed in him. I felt I
owed him enough to go to Atlanta.
There
were, in fact, about 150,000 people who felt the same, Jacqueline Kennedy and
Hubert Humphrey among us, and when I arrived in Atlanta in the back of Reverend
Verney's station wagon - tired and nauseous from the endless jolting - I sensed
a collective consciousness had arrived.
I had
never witnessed nor experienced anything like it in my life.
The
streets were impassable. I gripped Nathan's hand for dear life, and Nathan held
onto his daddy like our only connection to the shore. People wept and screamed,
people sang, people hugged one another and kneeled and prayed, and some folks
lay prostrate right there on the sidewalk and cared not that they were trampled
underfoot.
The
noise and heat and commotion tested both my patience and my lungs, but beneath
this there was a tangible sense of brotherhood and unity. I did not feel
threatened, either by the crowds or the police, and where I had assumed I would
be the only white man there, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people,
color immaterial. We were just people, grief-stricken, outraged people.
That
was the only important thing.
Until
I saw Linda Goldbourne.
We
had stopped to get a drink at a diner somewhere in downtown Atlanta. I was
weak, dehydrated and exhausted, and sweat ran off me in rivers. Sweat like a
fall testimonial.
Linny
Goldbourne stood at the counter. Her hair was long and dark, and around her
forehead she'd tied a beaded headband. She wore rings in her ears, a necklace
made of a leather lace with a stone tied to the end, and when she turned
towards me she knew who I was.
Images
of all those I had loved from afar in my own quiet way came flooding back, and
when she smiled - genuinely thrilled to see me - my heart leapt.
'Danny!'
she shouted across the room, and elbowed her way through the crowd towards me,
her arms wide.
When
we met she threw those same arms around me and pulled me tight.
'Wow!'
she said. 'Wow! Danny Ford! Christ, man, what are you doing here?'
I
turned and glanced at Nathan and Reverend Verney.
She
shook her head, realizing she'd asked the most obvious of questions.
'Of
course,' she said, tempering her enthusiasm for a moment.
I had
not spoken with Linda Goldbourne since 11th grade. I had seen her, of course,
the girl I believed would have been reserved for a far better man than I, but
we had never connected. Now, in that moment, there it was: a connection.