Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
But Dr. Smith kept talking, controlling the conversation as though we were being monitored. I sincerely doubt that we were. It could have been that he was offended by the criticism of the
medical facilities. Perhaps he had been reminded by administration officials that his letter from the previous October had made it possible for me to return. Or it could have been that he knew the
conflict was only beginning and that Ron Colburn would not be the last casualty.
In fact, there was another one that night.
There are casualties in every conflict. It gave me no pleasure to include the request that the campus physician be dismissed. The timing of the request, in the wake of Ron’s death, implied
a connection—that the doctor had been at fault. Actually, he hadn’t been involved in any of the three fatalities I had discussed in the chapel. The doctor was an old-school Lincoln man,
a graduate with a practice in nearby Oxford who lived on campus with his family and was available day and night. But I really had no choice. The doctor was having a battle with the bottle; he won
some rounds and lost some. A couple of his losses took place at the wrong time and influenced his examination of patients. One of those patients led a group of students into the doctor’s
front yard on Wednesday evening. He was carrying a papier-mâché dummy with a rope around its neck. The student threw the rope over a limb of a huge tree in front of the doc’s
house and set the dummy on fire.
The school doctor came out of his house to confront the crowd, screaming at them about his innocence, swearing that he had nothing to do with the deaths.
That’s when I arrived, walking slowly into a position between the excited group and the tearful doctor, standing alone in a T-shirt and dark slacks. I could see the doctor’s tears of
rage and sadness behind his glasses. So could everybody else. We had to look into the eyes of the man being burned in effigy, and see the wide eyes of his children staring out of the front window
behind him, watching their father’s impotent humiliation, perhaps fearful that their lives were in danger.
A cold flash scampered across the back of my neck. The whole scene had me spinning. I didn’t begin to relax until the students started backing away, scattering toward the dorms. I knew now
that the doc would resign. I got no joy from request number four.
As the week wore on, I saw Dr. Smith and others coming and going with supplies, taking packages of meds, crutches, bandages, oxygen tanks, halogen lamps, updated medical dictionaries and books
on the latest treatments, and even a few pocketbooks for patients needing to stay overnight. There were also new curtains, carpeting, and a new eye chart. And the infirmary was staffed every
night.
It was generally agreed that the highlight of the week, the most dramatic moment, came after the student body decided to continue the boycott. The last three points were not done. There was no
schedule of doctors beyond a day or two in advance, there was no ambulance, and there was no line forming to take the newly open position of campus physician.
On Thursday afternoon, I was wondering what I could do to pacify certain factions grumbling and mumbling about returning everyone to class. The rumor was that if we reached the weekend without
further progress, there would be no real reason to continue the boycott. People were warning: “We got all we could after the doctor quit. Extending this boycott thing is all about Spiderman.
He need to quit.”
It might have worked. Negative talk can produce a negative mindset. Which is why my heart did a little jerk as I stepped out of the lunch room. Parked at the bottom of the northside incline as
though just waiting for my nod of approval was a blood-red ambulance with a fresh coat of wax. The shine was strong enough to be seen by the blind, and the dishwater gray sky was momentarily
shocked into retreat by the energy of the red radiating from that vehicle.
The weekend passed and we reconvened in the chapel on Monday. This time I called for a vote, and the students voted to continue the boycott.
On Tuesday—day seven without classes, day nine since what was feeling more and more like a daring game of chicken began, day eleven since Ron Colburn had died—I was sitting in the
front seat of an administrator’s car, riding around the perimeter of the campus under a light rain. It was day one of the administration focusing fully on me as their problem.
“What is it you want, Spider?” he asked.
This brother, light skinned with glasses and a moustache, was one of the younger administrators, one who tried to relate. I’d gotten to know him when I stayed on campus part of one summer
to work as a counselor for a summer program. He was probably eight years older than I was, married, a ball player, and a Lincoln man.
“Just what it says on the paper, man,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“No, Spider,” he said, slowing the car. “What is it that
you
want out of all this?”
“You think I got . . .”
“Well, you know,” he cut in, “me and some others know you. We knew you when you were down here in the summer with the kids and there wasn’t none . . .”
“I was a friend of Ron’s,” I said. “As I am a friend of yours. There’s six or seven hundred . . .”
He nodded his head sadly, looking ahead through the grayness.
“You should have let it go last night,” he said.
Last night had been dramatic, and I had gotten the impression from a lot of people that there should never have been a vote; that I should have simply walked into the chapel, thanked the
students for their cooperation in applying the pressure that got us six out of seven of our objectives. Victory, essentially. Six out of seven was two more than the vets had foreseen, and nobody
thought we’d get it all. Therefore I should have come in last night and said, “We won, so go to class tomorrow.”
I hadn’t done that. And maybe it was somewhat chickenshit not to do that. Forget about the fact that on Monday night we were no better off than on Friday morning. There had been a feeling
of suspended animation on campus from the time after the tomato-ketchup, fresh-blood, fire-engine red ambulance had been parked so conspicuously in front of the student union building. That was a
real surrender.
“I couldn’t do . . . ”
“Yeah, you could have, Spider,” he said. His use of my nickname somehow reduced me from student leader to comic-book caricature. “And you should have.”
“I was supposed to just announce that, right? Some son of a bitch would have accused me of being a dictator.”
I felt like I was talking to myself.
“You started it by yourself and kept it going. You gave it the shape and strength nobody else on this campus could have. Anybody popular enough wouldn’t have had the guts, the
nerve.”
He paused and dropped his voice to tell me a secret.
“They spent last week with you kickin’ their asses,” he said, laughing. “They were kickin’ their own asses for letting you back in here. But other folks kept saying
that it wasn’t bad, because it wasn’t wrong, what you were saying. There was a mix of admiration and self-recrimination. We were students here, too. And we knew.”
Then he finished: “They’re over being scared. They’re gonna get you out of here.”
The question of who “they” were was never put to him. I got out of the car and trotted to shelter. He drove off.
I was still sitting in the basement of the student union building as night closed in around the campus, filling all the spaces between the few naked trees and colorless, spartan dormitories. The
classrooms and buildings where all the knowledge was stored and stacked were hidden behind fog. I was virtually inside a private one of those myself, focused in and fogged up when a young coed, a
freshman I recognized, walked up to me. I don’t remember enough of what she said even to paraphrase it, but as quickly as I could I was up the stairs and walk-running south between the
administration building and the security house. I crossed the street and went quickly to another house there, usually dark but now well lit.
Inside there was a smile for me from a handsome middle-aged lady. She introduced herself as “Dr. Mondry” as I reached to shake hands. She was interested in the job opening we had,
she said, but she would only take it with my approval.
Dr. Mondry saved my life.
May 1970
The laws of chance got bitch-slapped for sure one night when the artist had his back squarely against a wall. He’d been knocked out, and as he slowly, swimmingly came
to, there were the anxious faces of the six-foot-seven Robert Berry and G.I. Joe Sheffi staring down at him with wide eyes.
It started to come back to him.
They’d been about four miles north of Lincoln University on Route 1, a couple of miles from Avondale, Pennsylvania. One of the old Isaac Hayes—bald, dig?—tires on his ancient,
rusty Rambler, the left rear tire, had committed suicide. (Evidently it shot itself. They’d heard a loud
boom
.)
Unfortunately it developed into one of those domino-type incidents. With the death of the admirable left rear, now a candidate for becoming a million rubber bands, the Rambler convertible was
converted. From a ’65 white Rambler into a white Rambler with a black vinyl top and innumerable rust spots going into a skid at sixty miles per hour. Without benefit of brakes he dared not
even tap. And with a panoramic view of more or less rural America sliding sideways across his windshield as the two-lane blacktop changed to four lanes and they slid like a three-legged whale
across the double yellow lines and the soft gravel shoulder on the opposite side of the road, through a sizable piece of the parking lot of a local insurance firm, and soon after into a sixty
mile-per-hour collision with the corner of the insurance company’s local office.
More came back as the artist continued to come to.
The driver’s-side door handle was still in his outstretched left hand, though the car was now some twenty feet away. The door was behind him, serving as both a back rest and an explanation
as to why he had not become a smear along the local office wall. The car was smashed beyond further mobility. The artist was not.
By the eyewitness accounts of Berry and Sheffi—and sobriety was never an issue with those two—he had used the door as a shield when the old Rambler smashed and crashed against the
corner of the insurance company wall. The hinge of the door snapped like a number-two pencil and the artist went airborne. First the door and then his back slamming flat against the smooth
plaster.
He was conscious quickly enough to direct the removal of the rifles and shells from the car and trunk and have them hidden across the highway behind a barrier on the shoulder that resisted,
though did not restrain entirely, vehicles intent on plunging down a steep embankment on the east side of that two-lane entrance into Avondale, Pennsylvania.
He had not been bothered by the trickle of blood that was tip-toeing its way down an uncharted path from the long scratch two inches left of center on his forehead, which miraculously was the
only visible injury among the three of them. There was the truth that he had been knocked unconscious, but he overlooked that when he told the state trooper he was all right.
He was.
The three of them got a ride back to campus and the artist got a butterfly bandage for his head that made him look like a warrior wounded in the turmoil of college unrest when he appeared two
days later on the Washington, D.C., evening news, being interviewed by Max Robinson. They were all laughing about the expression on the state trooper’s face as his eyes flitted back and forth
between the door and the artist, who was denying the need for medical attention as blood soaked through the napkin he had pressed against the scratch.
“He was bug-eyed,” Berry exclaimed, folding his long frame nearly in half. “When he said, like, ‘You’re all right?’ It was supposed to be a statement, but it
came out like a question—with a little squeak on the end of it!”
“I was just glad he didn’t say, ‘Could I see your license and registration, sir?’” said the artist, chuckling.
Maybe the laughter was 75 percent nervous tension. The aftermath of an incident that could have had a lot more tragic consequences: the run they were making, the guns, the shells, the speed, the
beginning of a soft rain greasing the roads beneath the well-worn tires of the Rambler, the explosion of the left rear tire when it blew out, and their uncontrolled slide sideways across Route 1,
the calm discussion as they sliced the chain-link fence in front of the insurance building, the tension, bracing themselves with the artist’s death-lock grip on the door handle, and then . .
.
He had to admit that the thing had almost gotten out of hand. And almost is a valid operative because the great “March on Oxford” never became a real road show. It
would have been a real walking nightmare. And the artist had still been debating whether or not he could have, would have, gone along with the marchers if he hadn’t been able to turn it
around, if somebody hadn’t.
He understood that agreeing not to do anything was not the answer that satisfied searchers at the close of the symbolic sixties. During a peace rally at Kent State University in Ohio, the
National Guard had been called to campus to maintain order. When the marchers turned in their direction, they panicked and fired into the crowd, killing four. Then two students were murdered at
Jackson State University, a Black school in Mississippi, shot through dorm windows by members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol.
The problem the artist had was the muted reaction from Attorney General John Mitchell. Well, muted was generous. Zero is not mute. It is as silent as a stone. A statue with limitations.
Okay, the feds were responsible for the National Guard in Ohio and had no direct jurisdiction over the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. The problem was that nobody in Mississippi had control
over them either, and as the nation’s top cop, Mitchell had authority over whoever was not exercising authority in Mississippi. Zero.