Voices in Our Blood (69 page)

“Keep On A-Walking, Children”

New American Review,
January 1969

P
AT
W
ATTERS

I had decided during the week after they killed Dr. King that I would go to Washington for the Poor People's Campaign—whenever it would be they wanted white people there. What prompted me to go was not my respect for Dr. King's life, the special feeling that Southerners in the civil rights movement had for his style and spirit. It was not even the sense of our loss, or the knowledge (never to be shaken) of all the hope—Southern and, in the way of Southern hopes and lost causes, naïve—which had been destroyed. In those nightmare days of the spring of 1968, I felt too despondent or too angry for these motives to have much force. Acting out of numbness, I went to find out what would happen now, what there was left to hold onto, what the future of the civil rights movement could possibly be.

There was a time of strong hope that what Dr. King preached—his grandly universalist faith in mankind, couched in a Southern Negro Baptist idiom—might, if not prevail, at least enter and renew the core of American culture. At the very least, the greatest of the Southern nonviolent demonstrations (and most of these were organized not by his SCLC, but by SNCC and CORE) had dramatized for the nation, like a man teetering on a high wire, the precarious course that American democracy had now taken, the fateful tension between the spirit that Dr. King preached and the spirit of obscene violence attracted to these demonstrations. The bullet through John Kennedy's brain signaled the breaking point of the teetering balance. From then on, violence—obscene violence—became more and more dominant, and the spirit that Dr. King embodied progressively declined until the bullet that destroyed him made us recognize that it was defeated. (I make a distinction about violence, calling “obscene” the kind which has come to prevail in the American psyche: a hysterical objectiveless, morbid, unrealistic,
neurotic
violence, in quality much the same as the Southern racist violence I happen to know well.)

Our poets know about the killing of the spirit of nonviolence, the capture of America by the spirit of obscene violence—especially those whose medium is journalism, whose muse is paranoia. They have told it, like the Old Testament prophets, over and over in the course of filing their suspicions, their distrust, their theories of national and international conspiracy. Whether the intricate webs of facts and surmises by which they weave their poetry are in themselves true or not is irrelevant: it is the metaphor these poets of paranoia make that holds the truth, and the nation, in its avid reading of all this stuff about Oswald, Garrison, etc., in its enthusiasm for the play
MacBird,
knows the truth of that metaphor. The CIA, it is often said in their poetry, engineered the assassinations, as it has engineered violent events around the world, for its own ugly purpose. This purpose, in sum, is to make prevalent and permanent in this land the spirit of violence whose medium is the Cold War, whose rationale is that there is a strategy, an ideology, more important than all and any human life, and whose ultimate obscenity is nuclear holocaust. True, not true—in the factual sense? Who is to say? True, metaphorically? Look about you. When they killed Robert Kennedy, when that obscene spirit killed him, if it said anything at all, it said: do not even allow yourself to hope, against all evidence, just to hope there might be chance for something else, for the spirit embodied in the words, the efforts, the life of Dr. King.

And when the time came to attend the sad finale to his efforts, the Poor People's Campaign, there was no longer even any of the rage I had intermittently felt; nor the idea of going there not as a journalist but as a participant—white, Southern, middle-aged, middle class, without ideology, really, not radical only radically angry—to show them, by God, they just couldn't get away with it, couldn't kill what Dr. King stood for. That was gone. For the knowledge was there, underscored by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, that they had indeed killed it, that it was gone in this nation, and that violence, obscene violence, unclear violence controlled.

So when I arrived in Washington on June 18, it was with much the same feeling that has hung over the liberal establishment for some time now, and has spread to those varieties of left-of-center people who had thought they were better than the liberals: numbness, let us call it, weariness, the sense of going through the motions because there is not even energy enough, will enough, to call a halt to say no more of this, it is hopeless. I had not understood this malaise in the liberals before, seeing diabolical motives in their willingness these past several years to keep on trying all those obsolete methods—study groups, pilot studies, conferences, papers—in situations that demanded drastic action, certainly not more words. But now I was in Washington, a notebook in my inside coat pocket, though stuck there indecisively. I had always gone to these events as a reporter—first as a newspaperman, later as a representative of the Southern Regional Council and its small magazine,
New South.
The Southern Regional Council is a civil rights organization whose role has been mainly fact-gathering, setting the record straight rather than direct action. Normally, I had worked with the conviction that trying to tell the truth had importance, could make a difference. But this time I didn't know that I would act even as a reporter, knowing that I wouldn't participate as a marcher—would perhaps just stand around, observe, absorb the full meaning of the thing.

“This will be the whimper,” a friend who had observed a good bit of the Poor People's Campaign heretofore in Washington during the spring and the summer had said, “with which the Movement will die.” I had once before just stood there and taken in the full impact of an event. That had been John Kennedy's assassination. Until a month before I had been a newspaperman for eleven years, and when the flash came from Dallas, my every instinct was to get up from my new job, rush out, and begin putting together a story. Instead I had to sit there and just feel what had happened. Journalism is a cold and callous calling; out of the necessity to get the news while it is breaking, the best workers have a conditioning and an ability to divert all the energy of their emotion into the skills of gathering information and writing it coherently. Sometimes this can be a blessing.

My notes on the three days in Washington reflect my inner ambivalence; they are fragmentary, disinterested, without passion. (On the first view of Resurrection City: “A-frame huts. Mud. Handball mud-encrusted in the middle of mudhole. Sewage pipes in mud alongside ditch. Mess tent: dried mud on plywood floor. Sign: ‘Please Brother, Clean Up.' ”) I was neither participant, fully feeling observer, nor reporter. On the eve of the Solidarity Day march, I stepped out of the Dupont Plaza (not the best of hotels but luxurious enough to make ludicrous the notion that I was there in solidarity with the starving children of Mississippi). Over in Dupont Circle a demonstration was being formed, a line of maybe two hundred ready to go, an even mixture of white and black, mostly young, excited, even ebullient. They were a contingent of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a group recently formed to organize welfare recipients. A young Negro had given fliers to a good-looking girl, and he was trying to get the older guy beside her on the bench—in a business suit, frowning, shaking his head—to take one of them. “At least read it, get both sides of things,” he was saying to the man. Conditioned by what I had read and heard of the Poor People's Campaign, the Black Power attempts at bullying the Indians and Mexicans, conditioned by encounters with Southern varieties of Negroes emancipated into an ability to express racial animosity, bad manners, or strong-arm predilections, I had been walking warily amid this crowd of demonstrators, as among Southern whites at a Citizens Council meeting or a straight political rally. I was waiting for one of those ugly, defeating episodes of inane nastiness which has become the coin of all social intercourse in our cities and has spread finally into the nonviolent movement that Dr. King founded. But here this young Negro, proffering his flier about welfare rights, was smiling, was sincere, was simply trying to get the guy to read the thing—truth in open encounter. The guy kept refusing it, the Negro looked at the girl, who was dutifully glancing over hers. “He with you?” he asked, as though she could do something about the other's intransigence, but she only nodded, sloe-eyed, smiling up. No intimidation here, nor white guilty fear. Just people. (In the next two days I would keep coming back to Dupont Circle—a circle of sanity, a place of the future where people might just be people.)

The line had started moving out, cops all over the place directing it, with gaps every twenty people or so. I asked the young Negro where they were going. “We are going to have dinner with Wilbur Mills,” he said, his accent Northern. The Welfare Rights people had just gotten to town for the march the next day, and were taking the opportunity to embarrass the member of the House of Representatives they held most to blame for their many, I am certain, just grievances. Mills lived, he said, about a mile away. I was to meet some friends who might be able to fill me in on Resurrection City; since I was going in the same direction, I fell in behind a segment of the march, my notebook hidden.

It was a good-natured crowd moving along the sidewalk, and the residents of the area (a lot of them, I was to learn, Washington's hippies and students) seemed to welcome the diversion of the demonstration and to support the marchers. But after we got about a block, the cops intervened and began to hold things up. I stood around awhile, and got to thinking it would be this way at every intersection, and felt impatient, then felt how futile it was to try to embarrass a man like Mills who would measure any such effort down to the most minute calibers of power, and conclude quickly that here was no threat, no power, that could affect him. (“Congress Wake Up To What's Going On,” said a big sign.) So I left the march, not having really joined it, and went over to the next block and watched it from each parallel intersection. An old crazy-hair lady stood alongside it at one intersection, hands on hips, not liking it at all. One of the friends I was to meet was watching it outside the restaurant, and we stood together as it went by, a segment singing weakly, “Ain't goin' let nobody turn me 'round,” one young man throwing his whole soul into the song, his thin shoulders squared, head thrown back, his pinched face suggesting the fanatical college student drawn inevitably to the Movement, but his close-clipped, home-style haircut belying this, suggesting that he was a bona-fide welfare recipient. “Ain't goin' let nobody turn me 'round,” and it occurred to me that nobody much but the crazy-hair old lady seemed to want to, she now moving on by us, muttering, stopping to pick up a bit of paper littered there by some bad citizen, then dropping it angrily, as she would like to drop the demonstration, in a garbage can. Later, I read in the paper that some of these demonstrators were arrested, in some technical contretemps with the cops over where it was improper for them to be.

There had been a familiar feeling about that walking out of the hotel into a demonstration. It was like arriving in Selma or Albany during Dr. King's direct-action campaigns, the plunging from the gray world of everyday into a world where everyday wrongs had been disinterred, brought forth for confrontation, the demonstrations a focus for seeing what is ordinarily not seen, for making tension and conflict the norm of every day (often every hour), as in a battle. Washington has known some of this, I thought, with the Poor People's Campaign. But then I learned that the march I had stumbled on was a rarity, not the minor skirmish I had supposed.

Much of the malaise afflicting Resurrection City, I was also to learn, stemmed from the lack of action for people who had come for a crusade of direct action. It was not the much-publicized mud, which was no different from niggertown alley mud, fragranced with garbage and excretion whenever rain comes in the South; no worse than ghetto filth. Nor was it the social pathology said to be stalking the encampment at night—sped by wine, drugs, and other torments. Nor was it even the cruel and heartbreaking irony of the discovery in the muddy misery of the place that their own “brothers” named to the role of security police, given clubs and power over them, became suddenly the beasts that all white cops were known to be. No, none of these. We know even from the pale empathy of print that the culture of poverty contains all of this and worse, and has its mechanisms—not only brutalization, the blunting of sensibility—whereby people deal with it, even as the culture of affluence contains its own versions of viciousness and has its martini mechanisms for coping. It was the lack of action that had sent so many away, back to familiar mud, and hunger and crime and
idleness.
The capacity of Resurrection City was three thousand. At the peak of occupancy around May 20, about a month after Dr. King's murder, there were 2,650 residents, and many more had been turned away. By the time of the Solidarity Day march, there were no more than eight hundred people left. Some had gone home; others had drifted off to the Washington ghetto; nearly all remaining were Negro, with maybe twenty or twenty-five whites, mostly from West Virginia, some from Chicago, still dwelling among them. Indians and Mexican-Americans, out of bureaucratic ineffectiveness, out of dismay at conditions, and out of hostility from the Negroes, never had lived in any number in Resurrection City, but had encamped in nearby schools and churches. Of 125 Indians who came, no more than fifteen or twenty were still there for Solidarity Day; of four hundred Mexican-Americans, two hundred were left.

Idleness, maybe we will come to know from the Poor People's Campaign, is, along with hunger, the bane of the poor. Robert Coles has written of an organizing instinct in the human mind which tries to impose a routine on the days of idleness, of nothing to do, of purposelessness among the starving people of the rural South. Murray Kempton, standing about with reporters (in our isolation) at Resurrection City, spoke of that sense of disorder that comes upon the ghetto, upon individual souls in the ghetto as afternoon starts, as the hope of the morning dies and the realization sinks in that here is another day wasted, another day that will come to nothing; this is the time that the wine-drinking starts, the pathology begins to stir. How much of what had moved the poor to far-off, unfriendly Washington, to Resurrection City, I now asked myself, was merely the hope of something to do, a surcease from futility? (They go, said my good friend who had helped recruit them in rural Alabama, because they know that things at the campaign can't be any worse than back home. We both had thought it was only food that they hungered for.)