Edge of Eternity (47 page)

George saw Fred Shuttlesworth, King's rival as leader of the campaign. At forty-one he was a wiry, tough-looking man, smartly
dressed with a trim mustache. He had survived two bombings, and his wife had been stabbed by a Ku Klux Klansman, but he seemed to have no fear, and refused to leave town. “I wasn't saved to run,” he liked to say. Although a fighter by nature, he was now trying to marshal some of the youngsters. “You mustn't taunt the police,” he was saying. “Don't act like you intend to strike them.” It was good advice, George figured.

Kids gathered around Shuttlesworth and he led them, like the Pied Piper, back toward his church, waving a white handkerchief in the air in an attempt to show the police his peaceful intent.

It almost worked.

Shuttlesworth led the kids past the fire trucks outside the church to the basement entrance, which was at street level, and ushered them inside and down the stairs. When they were all in, he turned to follow. At that moment George heard a voice say: “Let's put some water on the reverend.”

Shuttlesworth turned, frowning, to look back. A jet from a water cannon hit him squarely in the chest. He staggered and fell backward down the stairs with a clatter and a roar.

Someone yelled: “Oh, my God, Shuttlesworth is struck!”

George rushed in. Shuttlesworth lay at the foot of the stairs, gasping. “Are you okay?” George yelled, but Shuttlesworth could not answer. “Get an ambulance, somebody, fast!” George shouted.

George was astonished that the authorities had been so stupid. Shuttlesworth was a hugely popular figure. Did they actually
want
to provoke a riot?

Ambulances were near at hand, and it was only a minute or two later that two men came in with a stretcher and carried Shuttlesworth out.

George followed them up to the sidewalk. Black bystanders and white police were milling around dangerously. Reporters had gathered and press photographers clicked as the stretcher was eased into the ambulance. They all watched it drive away.

A moment later, Bull Connor appeared. “I waited a week to see Shuttlesworth hit by a hose,” he said jovially. “I'm sorry I missed it.”

George was furious. He hoped one of the bystanders would punch Connor's fat face.

A white newspaper reporter said: “He left in an ambulance.”

“I wish it was a hearse,” said Connor.

George had to turn away to control his fury. He was saved by Dennis Wilson, who appeared from nowhere and grabbed his arm. “Good news!” he said. “The Big Mules caved!”

George spun around. “What do you mean, they caved?”

“They formed a committee to negotiate with the campaigners.”

That
was
good news. Something had changed them: the demonstrations, or the phone calls from the president, or the threat of martial law. Whatever the reason, they were now desperate enough to sit down with black people and discuss a truce. Perhaps it could be agreed before the rioting turned seriously nasty.

“But they need someplace to meet,” Dennis added.

“Verena will know. Let's go find her.” George turned to leave, then paused and looked back at Bull Connor. He was becoming irrelevant, George now saw. Connor was on the streets, jeering at civil rights campaigners, but at the chamber of commerce the city's most powerful men had changed course—and they had done so without consulting Connor. Maybe the time was coming when fat white bullies would no longer rule the South.

And then again, maybe not.

•   •   •

The compromise was announced at a press conference on Friday. Fred Shuttlesworth attended, with cracked ribs from the water cannon, and announced: “Birmingham reached an accord with its conscience today!” Shortly afterward he fainted and had to be carried out. Martin Luther King declared a victory and flew home to Atlanta.

Birmingham's white elite had at last agreed to some measure of desegregation. Verena complained that it was not much, and in a way she was right: they were making a few minor concessions. But George believed that a huge change of principle had occurred: the whites had accepted that they needed to negotiate with the Negroes about segregation. They could no longer simply lay down the law. Those negotiations would continue, and they could go in only one direction.

Whether this was a small advance or a major turning point, every colored person in Birmingham was celebrating on Saturday night, and Verena invited George to her room.

He soon learned that she was not one of those girls who liked the man to take charge in bed. She knew what she wanted and she was comfortable asking for it. That was fine with George.

Almost anything would have been fine with him. He was enchanted by her lovely pale body and her witchy green eyes. She talked a lot while they made love, telling him how she felt, asking him if this pleased him or that embarrassed him; and the talk heightened their intimacy. He realized, more strongly than ever, how sex could be a way of getting to know the other person's character as well as her body.

Near the end she wanted to get on top. This, too, was new: no woman had done that with him before. She knelt astride him, and he held her hips and moved with her. She closed her eyes, but he did not. He watched her face, fascinated and enthralled, and when at last she reached her climax, he did too.

A few minutes before midnight he stood at the window in a robe, looking down on the streetlights of Fifth Avenue, while Verena was in the bathroom. His mind returned to the agreement King had struck with Birmingham's whites. If it was a triumph for the civil rights movement, die-hard segregationists would not accept defeat, he guessed; but what
would
they do? Bull Connor undoubtedly had a plan for sabotaging the agreement. So presumably did George Wallace, the racist governor.

That day the Ku Klux Klan had held a rally at Bessemer, a small town eighteen miles from Birmingham. According to Bobby Kennedy's intelligence, supporters had come from Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Mississippi. No doubt their speakers had spent the evening working them up into a frenzy of indignation about Birmingham giving in to the blacks. By now the women and children must have gone home, but the men would have started drinking and bragging to one another about what they were going to do.

Tomorrow would be Mother's Day, Sunday, May 12. George recalled Mother's Day two years ago, when white people had tried to kill him and other Freedom Riders by firebombing their bus at Anniston, sixty miles from here.

Verena emerged from the bathroom. “Come back to bed,” she said, getting under the sheet.

George was eager. He hoped to make love to her at least once more
before dawn. But just as he was about to turn away from the window, something caught his eye. The headlights of two cars were approaching along Fifth Avenue. The first vehicle was a white Birmingham Police Department patrol car, clearly marked with the number 25. It was followed by an old round-nosed Chevrolet from the early fifties. Both cars slowed as they drew level with the Gaston.

George suddenly noticed that the cops and state troopers who had been patrolling the streets around the motel had vanished. There was no one on the sidewalk.

What the hell . . . ?

A second later something was thrown from the open rear window of the Chevrolet, across the sidewalk, to the wall of the motel. The object landed right underneath the windows of the corner suite, Room 30, which Martin Luther King had occupied until he left earlier today.

Then both cars accelerated.

George turned from the window, crossed the room in two strides, and threw himself on top of Verena.

Her yell of protest was just beginning when it was drowned by a tremendous boom. The entire building shook as if in an earthquake. The air filled with the sounds of smashing glass and the rumble of falling masonry. The window of their room shattered with a tinkling noise like death chimes. There was a creepy moment of quiet. As the sound of the two cars faded, George heard shouts and screams from within the building.

He said to Verena: “Are you okay?”

She said: “What the fuck happened?”

“Someone threw a bomb from a car.” He frowned. “The car had a police escort. Can you believe that?”

“In this goddamn town? You bet I can.”

George rolled off her and looked around the room. He saw broken glass all over the floor. A piece of green cloth was draped over the end of the bed, and after a moment he realized it was the curtain. A picture of President Roosevelt had been blown off the wall by the force of the blast, and lay faceup on the carpet, crazed glass over the president's smile.

Verena said: “We have to go downstairs. People may be hurt.”

“Wait a minute,” George said. “I'll get your shoes.” He put his feet down on a clear patch of the rug. To cross the room he had to pick up shards of glass and throw them aside. His shoes and hers were side by side in the closet: he liked that. He put his feet into his black leather oxfords, then picked up Verena's white kitten-heels and took them to her.

The lights went out.

They both dressed quickly in the dark. They discovered there was no water in the bathroom. They went downstairs.

The darkened lobby was full of panicking hotel staff and guests. Several people were bleeding but it seemed no one was dead. George pushed his way outside. By the streetlights he saw a hole five feet across in the wall of the building, and a spill of heavyweight rubble across the sidewalk. Trailers parked in the adjacent lot had been wrecked by the force of the blast. But, by a miracle, no one had been badly injured.

A cop arrived with a dog, then an ambulance drew up, then more police. Ominously, groups of Negroes began to gather outside the motel and in Kelly Ingram Park on the next block. These people were not the nonviolent Christians who had marched joyfully out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing hymns, George noted anxiously. This crowd had spent Saturday evening drinking in bars and pool halls and juke joints, and they did not subscribe to the Gandhian philosophy of passive resistance favored by Martin Luther King.

Someone said there had been another bomb, a few blocks away, at the parsonage occupied by Martin Luther King's brother, Alfred, always known as A. D. King. An eyewitness had seen a uniformed cop place a package on the porch a few seconds before the blast. Clearly the Birmingham police had tried to murder both King brothers at the same time.

The crowd got angrier.

Soon they were throwing bottles and rocks. Dogs and water cannon were the favorite targets. George went back inside the motel. Verena was helping to rescue an elderly black woman from a wrecked ground-floor room by flashlight.

“It's getting nasty out there,” George said to Verena. “They're throwing rocks at the police.”

“So they damn well should. The police are the bombers.”

“Think about this,” George said urgently. “Why do the whites want a riot tonight? To sabotage the agreement.”

She wiped plaster dust off her forehead. George watched her face and saw rage replaced by calculation. “Damn, you're right,” she said.

“We can't let them do it.”

“But how can we stop it?”

“We have to get all the movement leaders out there calming people down.”

She nodded. “Hell, yes. I'll start rounding people up.”

George went back outside. The riot had escalated fast. A taxicab had been overturned and torched, and was blazing in the middle of the road. A block away, a grocery store was alight. Squad cars approaching from downtown were halted at Seventeenth Street by a hail of missiles.

George grabbed a megaphone and addressed the crowd. “Everybody stay calm!” he said. “Don't jeopardize our deal! The segregationists are trying to provoke a riot—don't give them what they want! Go home to bed!”

A black man standing nearby said to him: “How come
we
have to go home every time
they
start violence!”

George jumped on the hood of a parked car and stood on the roof. “This is not helping us!” he said. “Our movement is nonviolent! Everybody go home!”

Someone yelled: “We're nonviolent, but they ain't!”

Then an empty whisky bottle flew through the air and hit George's forehead. He climbed down from the roof of the car. He touched his head. It hurt, but it was not bleeding.

Others took up his cry. Verena appeared with several movement leaders and preachers, and they all mingled with the crowd, trying to talk people down. A. D. King got up on a car. “Our home was just bombed,” he cried. “We say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But you are not helping—you are hurting us! Please, clear this park!”

Slowly, it began to work. Bull Connor was nowhere to be seen, George noted: the man in charge was Chief of Police Jamie Moore—a law enforcement professional rather than a political appointee—and
that helped. The police attitude seemed to have changed. Dog handlers and firemen no longer seemed eager for a fight. George heard a cop saying to a group of Negroes: “We're your friends!” It was bullshit, but a new kind of bullshit.

There were hawks and doves among the segregationists, George realized. Martin Luther King had allied himself with the doves, and thereby outflanked the hawks. Now the hawks were trying to reignite the fires of hatred. They could not be allowed to succeed.

Lacking the stimulus of police aggression, the crowd lost the will to riot. George began to hear a different kind of comment. When the burning grocery store collapsed, people sounded penitent. “That's a doggone shame,” said one man, and another said: “We gone too far.”

At last the preachers got them singing, and George relaxed. It was all over, he felt.

He found Chief Moore on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. “We need to get repair crews to the motel, chief,” he said politely. “Power and water are out, and it's going to get unsanitary in there pretty quickly.”