Authors: Steve Stern
Though he was nearly a block ahead of me I kept him in view, following past the discount clothiers, package stores, newsstands, and five-and-dimes ranging from business as usual to locked up tight. Squad cars outnumbered ordinary vehicles in the street, and the nearer we got to Beale the denser were the sidewalks with quick-stepping pedestrians carrying signs. I saw the reverend take out a pocket watch then pick up his pace, scurrying down a sidestreet where he melded among others flooding the alleys on their way to the gathering place of the march. That’s when I lost sight of him, surrounded as I’d become by the hordes of people pouring into the intersection in front of the brick-domed pile of the Claiborne Temple. This was at the junction of Pontotoc and Hernando Streets just a few blocks off Beale.
Then, without the reverend for a bellwether, I experienced an abrupt failure of nerve. What the hell did I think I was doing so far from my hill of beans? Still, the atmosphere was unthreatening, even festive, the crowd reassuringly inclusive of every stratum of the Negro community: mothers with babies in strollers, skinny boys from the neighborhood in kneeless britches, pigtailed girls in jumpers turning cartwheels. There were ministers straightening clerical collars, business types adjusting horn-rims and foulard bowties. Strikers attempting to shepherd whole families were themselves called to order by designated marshals sporting megaphones and pumpkin-colored armbands. Smartly dressed ladies in stiletto heels accompanied aunties with cumbrous bosoms, their flinty-faced husbands in tow. Teenagers chanting the names of their high schools along with their opposition to the mayor were greeted with complicit nods from their elders. The only other white faces I saw were a smattering of union leaders and a group of tense women holding a banner reading
Rearing Children of Good Will Workshop.
But even the police helicopter flying low overhead seemed to contribute to the field-day mood.
While I consoled myself that I was ignored by most, caught up as they were in the general exuberance, I was aware of attracting a number of stares, some of which seemed a bit chilly. Again my resolve began to waver. Was this really my fight? I reproached myself for my pigeon heart, though I couldn’t have been the only one who detected unbenign elements in the throng. Among the omnipresent placards proclaiming I
AM
A MAN and NO DREAM DEFERRED were less circumspect slogans such as MAYOR LOEB EAT SHIT. The latter were brandished by unsmiling youths regarded misgivingly by the older marchers. A child riding the shoulders of a man in combat boots carried a branch dangling a noose with a sign attached reading LOEB’S HANGING TREE. But just when I was close to succumbing to a paralysis of irresolution, someone slapped my back, and I turned in alarm to be hailed by none other than Elder Lincoln. He was wearing a puff-sleeved paisley shirt, a beaded headband encircling his ’fro like a fence around a billowy black cloud.
“Hello, buckra,” he said, flashing his keyboard grin. “You lost?”
I was maybe a little gladder to see him than the situation warranted, and he perceived it.
“It’s awight, young white folks”—did he even remember my name?—“you among friends.”
You couldn’t have proved it by the phalanx of young men in their Invaders jackets backing him up. One of them wearing a sideways baseball cap had torn a stick from a pasteboard sign and was slapping it menacingly against his thigh. Another, the beetle brow I recognized from Beatnik Manor, asked pointedly, “What’s this crackerass mo’fuck doing here?”
Observing how his right hand was fisted in a black leather glove, I was ready to declare myself a gate-crasher pure and simple, then make my apologies and slope off into the wings, when Elder spoke up again.
“Be easy, Sweet Weeyum, the man’s here to see we get justice. Anyhow,” shading his eyes toward the sun peeping out from behind a dissipating thunderhead, “this a zippadee-doodah kinda day.” His genuine high spirits, it seemed to me, overruled the inherent sarcasm in his voice.
Then I was among them for better or worse, and we’d begun to push through the crowd that had itself started sluggishly to move forward. For the word had come down that Dr. King had finally arrived, and we could see the commotion up ahead where a white Continental had just peeled away from the curb. I could even make out the crowns of a few snap-brim fedoras and the tops of a couple of bare heads belonging, I supposed, to the dignitaries of the movement. One would be the reverend doctor himself, the knowledge of whose presence gave me a nameless sensation. They’d said he was played out, that Memphis was anyway an annoying diversion from more pressing concerns, but there he was and I felt my ganglia crackling like spark plugs.
He would be flanked by his retinue, among them his lieutenant, the hefty one with whom he was always shown arm in arm: Abernathy. I knew Abernathy and had heard of others—Kyles, Jackson, Young—heroes of a people who had only recently stepped out of the shadows. But I was ignorant of the identities of most. Of their trials—compared to which my own were kreplach, as Avrom might have said—iknew next to nothing; and again came the feeling of having trespassed an affair that was none of my business. But the smaller I felt, the larger seemed the moment I was in, and buoyed by the energy around me I couldn’t help it, I began to exult a little in the largeness of the event, wishing that Rachel could see me now.
As the march had started in earnest, the marshals strode up and down the line shouting through their bullhorns to stay in formation, keep the sidewalks clear, though no one seemed to pay them much heed. People were spread out all over the pavement, their haphazardness more akin to an unofficial parade than an orderly demonstration. The upstart clouds had parted, prompting the marchers to remove their coats and jackets, and I too welcomed the sunshine that dissolved the slight chill I’d felt earlier on. As we turned the corner into Beale, I relaxed in the moving current, and though I knew that negotiations between the city and the workers had failed, that Dr. King’s coming to Memphis was in fact a last resort, I thought I sniffed a shared sense of victory in the wind. I had an urge to take Elder’s arm but feared the gesture might be a liberty too far. Nevertheless I began to feel secure in the company I was keeping, its immediate members making their way through the crowd with more haste than the crowd itself was advancing toward Main Street. It was a joyful but restless multitude, everyone wanting, it seemed, to get closer to the front, anxious perhaps to be nearer their prophet, but Elder’s bunch with their sly expressions were pushier than the rest. Their obtrusiveness provoked the occasional irritated glance from their fellow marchers, and Elder, the adult among them, must have sensed the tension, because he assured me (or himself?), “My boys have done waited a long time to fix the world.”
Tikkun olam
, I thought, which was Pinchas Pin’s term for the efforts of the Shpinker Hasids to repair the rift between heaven and earth—though I thought also that Elder’s “boys” hadn’t waited half so long as most.
The signs bobbed above the heads of the marchers, many of whom had begun spontaneously to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Members of the procession joked with those standing by on the curbs, beckoning them to “join us, brothahs,” and here and there some vagrant would hitch up his trousers and toddle into the flow. There was even a cohort of idlers with conked hair and flashy suits hanging out in front of a pool hall who stepped into the passing humanity, so that I began to think the whole colored race might be eventually swept into that mighty stream. No pretense was made of staying in line, everyone strolling at his or her own pace (with the exception of the Invaders, who continued to muscle their way forward). I understood that the destination was the Civic Center Plaza, where speeches would be made before the crowd was dispersed and sent back to whence they’d come. Still it was easy to imagine that the whole Negro nation was on its way to entering Beulah Land. Then an extraordinary thing happened: Elder Lincoln linked his arm in mine.
“I mon’ edumacate you, son,” he announced. I recognized the condescension whenever he resorted to minstrel show dialect, and as for the paternal term of address, Elder—his name notwithstanding—wasn’t much older than me. All the same, his sudden bonhomie gave me a charge. “Gon’ introduce you to the various genus and species of the nigra,” he continued, his words turning heads despite the surrounding din. “Now that one,” pointing to an ashen-faced old party wearing his sign about his neck like a mug shot tag, “that’s what you call your common or garden shine. Don’t matter they ain’t much shine to the boy. And the lady there,” indicating a sallow-skinned woman in churchy attire, “she’s what you call a mustard seed. Them deacons with their process hairdos, they arnchy niggahs, not to be confused with the dicty. And over there you got your standard-issue spade.” He seemed to be pointing at random now, closing one eye as if taking aim over the barrel of his forefinger, a bitter edge having entered his voice. “You got your dinge, your boogie, the eight-ball, the ink, Uncle Mose hisself, and that one”—he grabbed my chin with his free hand to direct my attention toward a slack-jawed character in a shower cap—“that’s your bluegum niggah—an extremely dangerous variety with a poison bite.”
I didn’t see why he felt the need to harass me with his commentary; it was unfair given the clear commitment I’d made to the cause. Offended, I searched for some topic that would prove I knew more about negritude than he gave me credit for.
“Elder,” I said, “remember the lynched fiddler you said your grandma had relations with?” He made a face as if shocked at the reference. “Well, he couldn’t have been anybody’s daddy ’cause he didn’t have any balls.”
The musician scratched his scalp vigorously and flashed his ivories. “You didn’t know the colored man’s ’nads is uniquely re-gen-er
-a
-tive?” he replied, then instantly retracted his grin.
Meanwhile Elder’s crew were behaving more like a flying wedge than members of a disciplined protest, shouldering people out of their way as they forged ahead. Elder himself looked a little troubled by their increasing aggression, though he nonetheless lurched forward with them, and I with him. Fact was, everyone was walking slightly too fast for a body of that size: people bumping into one another and tripping over each other’s heels. Did they mean to overtake the leaders they were drawing ever nearer to? We were practically in arm’s reach of the vanguard that included the standard-bearer himself, though surely nothing could go wrong on a march led by him, his very presence guaranteeing the nonviolence of his creed. Even so, there was more cause for distress than the brazenness of my companions.
Some of the kids had broken ranks to run onto the sidewalk and beat with sticks on the plate-glass windows of the pawnshops along the route. They swatted at the hanging brass balls like they would at piñatas. At first the shop windows shivered but resisted the battering, which may not even have been intended to break them; then one of them cracked, glass splinters showering the sidewalk, and that was all it took. The previously elated faces of the marchers in my vicinity changed instantly to expressions of agitation and dismay. There were mixed cries, mostly rebukes of the young vandals, though some, as if finally released from constraint, egged them on: “Smash them suckahs, chillen!” It was the signal for wholesale pandemonium. The police, whose presence had been reasonably measured in the early stage of the demonstration, swarmed from all quarters. They moved in to cordon off the street between the mass of the protesters and the vandals, some of whom had begun attempting to loot the shops. Nightsticks were produced and one young tomfool dragging a sousaphone out of Cohen’s Loans was clubbed to a jellied pulp. A line of cops in gas masks and full riot gear had appeared at either end of Beale between Main and Third Streets, thus corralling the procession. Now there was the sound of shattering glass all around us, as the police began shooting canisters of Mace into the crowd. Screams went up, as much (I thought) in desolation over the aborted march as in fear, while a squad of the faithful formed a circle around Dr. King and his party to escort them out of the fray. Ignoring the calls of the marshals to walk don’t run, people began to take off in every direction, some knocked down and trampled in their flight.
The wail of sirens filled the space in the brain where rational thought might have occurred. Seeing was no longer believing: the cops left off beating the marchers only to smash the cameras of journalists. Then I saw Sweet Weeyum give the nod to his cronies, who smirked like this was the moment they’d been waiting for, and pulled bandannas over their faces. With his gloved hand Sweet Weeyum drew from inside his jacket a cobalt-blue bottle with a muslin tassel protruding from its mouth. He struck a match as Elder (shouting “Nah-uh, homes!”) reached out too late to detain him, and hurled the lighted bottle in a lofty arc through the broken window of Schwab’s General Store—whose interior blossomed with a
poof
into petals of mandarin flame.
Straightaway the heat were all over him. “Like stink on a monkey,” I heard Elder say in a mournful valediction, before he set his jaw and jumped on the back of one of the cops. The cop hunched his shoulders and flailed to no effect with his baton in an effort to shake himself free of his attacker, his eyes bugging behind his plastic visor from Elder’s chokehold round his throat. Having laid out Sweet Weeyum, several of the other officers came to the aid of their comrade and made to pry the Negro from his back, but Elder hung on tenaciously. They commenced to pummel him, the
whump whump
of their truncheons on his buttocks and shoulder blades lending a sickening backbeat to the shrieks that filled the surrounding air. I looked about for the rest of the Invaders, who were nowhere in sight. The drifting smoke from the tear gas was beginning to scald my lungs, and, coughing convulsively, I pulled my collar over my nose; I wiped my streaming eyes with a shirtsleeve and waited to be convinced that what I witnessed was actually happening.
The cop had fallen to the pavement with Elder still on his back, his legs clinching the man’s utility-laden waist while his fellows continued their cudgeling. They pounded him, the “apeshit nigger!,” with an abandon so indiscriminate that some of their blows struck the downed patrolman as well. Then, when it seemed that their battery was unavailing, that no amount of punishment could make Elder let go of his nearly asphyxiated victim, one of the cops—his angular jaw grinding gum—pulled out his semiautomatic. The gun went off with a hollow clap, a plume of rose-pink mist spouting from Elder’s head. It jerked, his head, as if he were trying to work a kink from his neck before he lay still on top of the cop, who rolled out from under him speckled in blood. Then I wish I could say I was compelled by impulse, catapulted into action by the gun’s report, but I fully understood the pointlessness of my action as I leapt astride the back of the cop who’d pulled the trigger. I rode him a few tottering steps of a heartsore piggyback before a chandelier burst in my skull.