Voices in Our Blood (65 page)

This had happened to him once before. In 1965, when he was fresh from the Nobel Prize, King had briefly opposed the war and called for negotiations. There was a violent reaction. President Johnson got in touch with him and persuaded him to talk with that wooer-of-the-strayed, Arthur Goldberg. Goldberg assured him that peace was in the air. Similarly, King admits he was stunned by the extent of the pressure and reaction to him. “They told me I wasn't an expert in foreign affairs, and they were all experts,” he said. “I knew only civil rights and I should stick to that.” So he backed down, feeling a little guilty and suspecting he had been told that it wasn't a Negro's place to speak on Vietnam. This continued to rankle him, and after the Great Neck meeting he felt that if he had
backed
the war he would have been welcomed aboard, but that if he didn't back the war it was his place to remain silent.

XII

Though King says he could never live under communism, he does not see the chief division in the world as between the communist and capitalist. His is a more U Thantian view, with the division being between the rich and the poor, and thus to a large degree the white and nonwhite (the East European nations would become Have nations, to the surprise of many of their citizens). His view of violence in Vietnam and violence in Angola are quite different. Yet he is also terribly American, more American than he knows; his church is Western, his education is Western, and he thinks as a Westerner, though an increasingly alienated one.

He does not particularly think of the war in Vietnam as a racial one (although the phrase “killing little brown children in Vietnam” slips in); rather he sees the American dilemma there as one of face-saving, of an inability to end a miscalculation and a tendency to enhance it with newer and bigger miscalculations. Because there is a good deal of conservatism in King, there was a lively debate among his advisers as to whether he could go into the Spring Mobilization. The Call to the march had the whole works, genocide and race war; and a number of King allies, traditional liberals, advised him against it. The old ladies in Iowa wouldn't buy it.

But after much negotiating, which King's people clearly enjoyed, it was finally decided he should go in without signing the Call. “I went in because I thought I could serve as a bridge between the old liberals and the New Left,” he says. He is still somewhat wary of much of the peace movement, however; he does not know all the people as he does in civil rights, and he lacks a sure touch for the vocabulary of peace. He is also angry about having been ambushed by the New Politics people who leaked to the press in Boston recently that King was considering running for President; he was not yet considering it, and he felt they were trying to push him faster than he wanted to go; he remains wary of some of the peace people, and he realizes they are all out to exploit his name for their own purposes.

His stand on Vietnam is not necessarily the most popular one he has ever taken. It is popular on the campuses, of course, but it has hurt him with the editorial writers (Vietnam and civil rights don't mix), gladdened George Wallace, hurt him in the suburbs, and it has made the ghettos a little uneasy.

Peace is not a sure issue in the ghettos. There have been wars in which the Midwest provided many of the boys, and the small towns rallied around them. There are no picket fences in the ghettos and the American Legion posts are weaker there, but right now
our boys
are coming from the ghettos, and so it is a very delicate issue. One radical Negro leader thought Vietnam would be an easy whipping boy until he began to hang around Harlem bars, where he found you don't knock the war (black faces under green berets) and so he toned down his attacks. But some of King's best friends fear that Roy Wilkins may be wiser than King about how Negroes in the ghetto feel about Vietnam.

XIII

But Berkeley is another country. We went there one sunny day, and they were ready for him. They came to pick him up early in the afternoon, a young Negro dean and some bright young students, and they predicted a great reception for him—a demonstration for a King-Spock ticket.

We rode out together and I relaxed while a young student editor interviewed King; she had her questions all written down (Declining U.S. moral status in the world? Answer, yes. Doing this because of Stokely? Answer, no). The ride was pleasant, and the students were talking about the dove feeling on the campus, and King said, “I guess it's not too popular to be a hawk at Berkeley,” and someone asked if he's for their right of dissent. “I'm too deeply committed to the First Amendment to deny the right of dissent, even to hawks,” he said.

On the campus there are a lot of young men wearing pins which say simply, “October 16.” That is their day, they explain, when all over the country they plan to go down to recruiting centers and turn in their draft cards. On the campus there are numerous signs saying “King-Spock.”

His speech there is an attack on American values; it cites Berkeley as the conscience of the academic community and the center for new values (“we have flown the air like birds, and swum the sea like fishes but we have not learned the simple act of walking the earth like brothers”). It is looser and more natural than the peace-march one, and the biggest ovation of the day comes when King denies that he and Berkeley are against our boys in Vietnam:

“We're for our boys. We're their best friends back home, because we want them to come home. It's time to come home. They've been away too long.”

A few minutes later, after answering questions (no, he will not run for President, though he is touched by their support; indeed he says they must be careful who runs against Johnson, perhaps it will be “Mr. Nixon, or your good Governor”) he heads for a meeting of the Afro-American students.

Suddenly a white graduate student steps out and blocks his way. “Dr. King,” the student says, “I understand your reservations about running for President, but you're a world figure, you're the most important man we've got, you're the only one who can head a third-party ticket. And so when you make your decision, remember that there are many of us who are going to have to go to jail for many years, give up our citizenship, perhaps. This is a very serious thing.”

King is stunned; this requires more than a half minute, and the student presses on: “This is the most serious thing in our lives. Politically you're the only meaningful person. Spock isn't enough. So please weigh our jail sentences in the balance when you make your decision.”

I have watched King with dozens of people as he nods and half-listens, and this is the first time I have ever seen anyone get to him. He waits for a moment, for the student to say more, and then realizes there is nothing more to say, and he finally says, “Well, you make a very moving and persuasive statement.”

That meeting had shaken King a little, and on the way back to San Francisco we talked about the sense of alienation of the students. At the meeting one of the students claimed that the white man was planning to exterminate all American Negroes, every last one, that the war in Vietnam was being used solely for that purpose as a testing ground for weapons. “He really believed that,” King said, “really believed that.” Another student was deeply committed to separatism—move away from the white community completely, forget all the whites. “What's your program?” King had asked, “What are you offering?” But all he had was more radical rhetoric. Another student had advocated more violence, but King had answered, “We don't need to talk mean, we need to act mean.”

In the car King mused that the trouble with the people who talk mean is that they're always gone when the trouble finally strikes. “They lead you there and then they leave.” Then he mentioned a confrontation with Charles Evers, the very able head of the NAACP in Mississippi. He said Charles had really whipped a crowd up one night, putting it to them on violence and the need for it, and King had finally said, “Look here, Charles, I don't appreciate your talking like that. If you're that violent, why you just go up the highway to Greenwood and kill the man who killed your own brother.” And they applauded.

The students, King said, were disenchanted with white society, there had been too few victories, and they were losing faith in nonviolence—this and a sense of guilt over their own privileged status. Some of this is good, the fact that they identify with the ghettos much more than they did ten years ago, but there is also the danger of paranoia. One of the white students had mentioned how influential the autobiography of Malcolm X is with the students, both black and white, and added, “You won't believe this, but my conservative old Republican grandmother has just read it and she thinks it's marvelous, a book of love.”

“That is what we call the power to become,” King said, “the ability to go on in spite of. It was tragic that Malcolm was killed, he was really coming around, moving away from racism. He had such a sweet spirit. You know, right before he was killed he came down to Selma and said some pretty passionate things against me, and that surprised me because after all it was my own territory down there. But afterwards he took my wife aside, and said he thought he could help me more by attacking me than praising me. He thought it would make it easier for me in the long run.”

The car finally reached the hotel. He had covered 3,000 miles in the last few days, and now he was ready to recross the country, five stops on the way. The people, the faces, the audiences, the speeches were already blending into each other; even the cities were becoming interchangeable. Only the terrible constancy of the pressures remained. One sensed him struggling to speak to and for the alienated while still speaking to the mass of America, of trying to remain true to his own, while not becoming a known, identified, predictable, push-button radical, forgotten because he was no longer in the mainstream. The tug on him was already great, and there is no reason to believe that in the days ahead it would become any less excruciating.

Martin Luther King Is
Still
on the Case

Esquire,
August 1968

G
ARRY
W
ILLS

Of course, Mailer had an instinct for missing good speeches—at the Civil Rights March in Washington in 1963 he had gone for a stroll just a little while before Martin Luther King began, “I have a dream,” so Mailer—trusting no one else in these matters, certainly not the columnists and the commentators—would never know whether the Reverend King had given a great speech that day, or revealed an inch of his hambone.

—
NORMAN MAILER

The Armies of the Night

“Nigger territory, eh?” He was a cabdriver, speculative; eyed the pistol incongruous beside him on the seat, this quiet spring night; studied me, my two small bags, my raincoat. The downtown streets were empty, but spectrally alive. Every light in every store was on (the better to silhouette looters). Even the Muzak in an arcade between stores reassured itself, at the top of its voice, with jaunty rhythms played to no audience. Jittery neon arrows, meant to beckon people in, now tried to scare them off. The curfew had swept pedestrians off the street, though some cars with white men in them still cruised unchallenged.

“Well, get in.” He snapped down every lock with four quick slaps of his palm; then rolled up his window; we had begun our safari into darkest Memphis. It
was
intimidating. Nothing stirred in the crumbling blocks; until, almost noiseless—one's windows are always up on safari—an armored personnel carrier went nibbling by on its rubber treads, ten long guns bristling from it (longer because not measured against human forms, the men who bore them were crouched behind the armored walls); only mushroom helmets showed, leaning out from each other as from a single stalk, and, under each, bits of elfin face disembodied.

At last we came to lights again: not the hot insistence of downtown; a lukewarm dinginess of light between two buildings. One was modern and well-lit; a custodian sat behind the locked glass door. This is the headquarters of a new activism in Memphis, the Minimum Salary Building (designed as national headquarters for raising the pay of ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and now encompassing other groups). Its director, Reverend H. Ralph Jackson, was a moderate's moderate until, in a march for the striking sanitation workers, he was Maced by police. Since then his building has been a hive of union officials, Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff, and members of various human-rights organizations.

Next to it is the Clayborn Temple, a church from which marchers have issued almost daily for the past two months. Marchers fell back to this point in their retreat from the scuffle that marred Dr. King's first attempt to help the strikers. Some say tear gas was deliberately fired into the church; others that it drifted in. But the place
was
wreathed with gas, and a feeling of violated sanctuary remains. Churches have been the Negro's one bit of undisputed terrain in the South, so long as they were socially irrelevant; but this church rang, in recent weeks, with thunderous sermons on the godliness of union dues.

I pay the cabdriver, who resolutely ignores a well-dressed young couple signaling him from the corner, and make my way, with bags and coat, into the shadow of the church porch. In the vestibule, soft bass voices warn me. I stop to let my eyes, initiated into darkness, find the speakers and steer me through their scattered chairs. They are not really conversing; their meditative scraps of speech do not meet each other, but drift off, centripetally, over each one's separate horizon of darkness. This uncommunicative, almost musical, slow rain of words goes on while I navigate my way into the lighted dim interior of the church.

About a hundred people are there, disposed in every combination: family groups; clots of men, or of women; the lean of old people toward each other, the jostle outward of teen-agers from some center (the church piano, a pretty dress on a hanger); or individuals rigid in their pews as if asleep or dead. The whole gathering is muted—some young people try to pick out a hymn on the piano, but halfheartedly. There are boxes of food, and Sunday clothes draped over the backs of pews. The place has the air of a rather lugubrious picnic—broken up by rain, perhaps, with these few survivors waiting their chance to dash out through the showers to their homes. Yet there is a quiet sense of purpose, dimly focused but, finally, undiscourageable. These are garbage collectors, and they are going to King's funeral in Atlanta. It is ten p.m.; in twelve hours the funeral will begin, 398 miles away.

They have been told different things, yesterday and today, by different leaders (some from the union, some from S.C.L.C.). They have served as marshals in the memorial march that very afternoon, and preparations for that overshadowed any planning for this trip. Some have been told to gather at ten o'clock; some at eleven. They believe there will be two buses, or three; that they will leave at eleven, or at twelve; that only the workers can go, or only they and their wives, or they and their immediate families. Yesterday, when they gathered for marshals' school, a brusque young Negro shouted at them to arrive sharply at ten: “We're not going by C. P. Time—Colored People's Time. And if you don't listen now, you won't find out how to get to Atlanta at all, 'cause
we'll
be on the
plane
tomorrow night.” The speaker seemed to agree with much of white Memphis that “you have to know how to talk to these people.”

And so they wait. Some came before dark, afraid to risk even a short walk or drive after curfew. Some do not realize the wait will be so long; they simply know the time they were asked to arrive. Most will have waited three hours before we start; some, four or five. I try to imagine the mutters and restlessness of a white group stranded so long. These people are the world's least likely revolutionaries. They are, in fact, the precisely
wrong
people—as the Russian fieldworker was the wrong man to accomplish Marx's revolt of the industrial proletariat.

People such as these were the first “Memphians” I had met in any number. That was four days ago. And my first impression was the same as that which nagged at me all night in the church: these Tennessee Negroes are not unlikely, they are impossible. They are anachronisms. Their leaders had objected for some time to J. P. Alley's “Hambone” cartoon in the local paper; they say, rightly, that it offers an outdated depiction of the Negro. Nonetheless, these men
are
Hambones. History has passed them by.

I saw them by the hundred, that first morning, streaming past the open casket in a hugger-mugger wake conducted between the completion of the embalmer's task and the body's journey out to the Memphis airport. I had arrived in Memphis several hours after King's death; touched base at the hotel, at the police station, at the site of the murder—dawn was just disturbing the sky; flashbulbs around and under the balcony still blinked repeatedly against the room number—306—like summer lightning. As the light strengthened, I sought out the funeral home police had mentioned—R. S. Lewis and Sons.

Clarence Lewis is one of the sons, he has been up all night answering the phone, but he is still polite; professionally sepulchral, calm under stress. “They brought Dr. King here because we have been connected with the Movement for a long time. We drove him in our limousines when he was here last week [for the ill-fated march]. They brought the body to us from the morgue at ten-thirty last night, and my brother has been working on it ever since. There's so much to do: this side [he pulls spread fingers down over his right cheek and neck] was all shot away, and the jawbone was just dangling. They have to reset it and then build all that up with plaster.” I went through the fine old home (abandoned to trade when the white people moved from this area) into a new addition—the chapel, all cheap religious sentiment, an orange cross in fake stained glass. There are two people already there, both journalists, listening to the sounds from the next room (Clarence calls it, with a mortician's customary euphemism, “the Operating Room”), where a radio crackles excerpts from Dr. King's oratory, and men mutter their appreciation of the live voice while they work on the dead body. We comment on the ghoulishness of their task—knowing ours is no less ghoulish. We would be in there, if we could, with lights and cameras; but we must wait—wait through an extra hour of desperate cosmetic work. We do it far less patiently than Memphis garbage men wait in their church. “Hell of a place for Dr. King to end up, isn't it?” the photographer says. “And one hell of a cause—a little garbage strike.”

When, at eight o'clock, the body is brought out, bright TV lights appear and pick out a glint of plaster under the cheek's powder. Several hundred people file past; they have sought the body out, in their sorrow, and will not let it leave town without some tribute. But not one white person from the town goes through that line.

Those who do come are a microcosm of the old Southern Negro community. Young boys doff their hats and their nylon hair caps—their “do rags”—as they go by. A Negro principal threatened to expel any child from a local high school who came to class with an “Afro” hairdo. Possessive matrons take up seats in the back, adjust their furs, cluck sympathetically to other women of their station, and keep the neighborhood record straight with bouts of teary gossip. They each make several passes at the coffin; sob uncontrollably, whip out their Polaroid cameras, and try an angle different from that shot on their last pass. One woman kisses the right cheek. Clarence Lewis was afraid of that: “It will spoil the makeup job. We normally put a veil over the coffin opening in cases of this sort; but we knew people would just tear that off with Dr. King. They want to see him. Why, we had one case where the people lifted a body up in the coffin to see where the bullet had gone into a man's back.”

Outside, people mill around, making conversation, mixing with stunned friendliness, readjusting constantly their air of sad respect. Again, the scene looked like a disconsolate picnic. Some activists had called him “De Lawd.” He always had to be given either his title (“
Doctor
King,” even the
Reverend Doctor
King”) or his full historic name (“Luther Martin King” one prim lady mourner called him in the funeral home, understandably stumbling over the big mouthful). Even that title “Doctor”—never omitted, punctiliously stressed when whites referred to him, included even in King's third-person references to himself—had become almost comical. He was not only “De Lawd,” but “De Lawd High God Almighty,” and his Movement was stiff with the preacher-dignities of the South; full of Reverends This and Bishops That and Doctors The-Other. No wonder the militants laughed at it all. And now, damned if he hadn't ended up at a Marc Connelly
fish fry
of a wake—right out of
The Green Pastures.

Connelly learned to read by poring over the pages of the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
and he learned his lesson well: he was able to create a hambone God: “Dey's gonter to be a deluge, Noah, an' dey's goin' to be a flood. De Levees is gonter bust an' everything dat's fastened down is comin' loose.” These are unlikely people, I thought at that sad fish fry, to ride out the deluge whose signs had already thundered from several directions on the night King died. But then, so was Noah an unlikely candidate. Or Isaac, who asked: “Does you want de brainiest or the holiest, Lawd?” “I want the holiest. I'll make him brainy.” And there was one note, at King's makeshift wake, not heard anywhere in Connelly's play. As one of the mammy types waddled out the front door, she said with matter-of-fact bitterness to everyone standing nearby: “I wish it was Henry Loeb lying there”—handsome lovable Henry Loeb, the city's Mayor, who would later tell me, in his office, how well he liked his Negroes; unaware, even now, that they are not his. Connelly's “darkies” do not hate white people: “the white folk” simply do not exist in his play, which was meant to fortify the Southern conviction that “they have their lives and we have ours,” an arrangement convenient to the white and (so whites tell themselves) pleasant for all. The whites get servants, and the blacks get fish fries. That whole elaborate fiction was shattered by the simple words, “I wish it was Henry Loeb.” Massah's not in the cold, cold ground. She wishes he were. These people may be Hambones, but not J. P. Alley's kind. They are a paradox, a portent white Memphis still must come to grips with—hambone militants, “good darkies” on the march. When even the stones rise up and cry out, the end has come for Henry Loeb's South.

The signs of it are everywhere—at the Lorraine Motel, where King died; it is an extension of the old Lorraine Hotel, once a white whorehouse. Then, when the neighborhood began to go black, it was thrown to a Negro buyer as, in the South, old clothes are given to “the help.” A man named William Bailey bought it, and laboriously restored it to respectability. King stayed there often on his visits to Memphis. It is now a headquarters for the S.C.L.C.'s Project Memphis, a program designed—as its assistant director says—“to make Memphis pay for the death of Dr. King.” Yet the Lorraine is run by a man who could pose for “Uncle Ben” rice ads—an ex–Pullman porter who is still the captain of porters at a Holiday Inn. He works for the white man, and does it happily, while he owns and runs a black motel where activists plot their campaigns. “I'm very proud to be part of the Holiday Inn family,” he told me. “Why, the owners of the whole chain call me Bill Bailey.” That's the Negro Henry Loeb has always known. It is the other side of him—the owner of the Lorraine, the friend of Dr. King—that is the mystery.

King made the mistake of staying, on his penultimate visit to Memphis, at one of the posher new Holiday Inns—in the kind of place where Bill Bailey works, not in the motel he owns. The Memphis paper gleefully pointed out that King
could
stay in the Inn because it had been integrated—“without demonstrations.” But the Lorraine is not integrated (except in theory). Neither was the white flophouse in which the sniper lurked. It is good that King came back to the real world, the de-facto segregated world, to die. He was in the right place, after all. Memphis indeed, had taught him to “stay in his place”—a thing it will come to regret. For “his place” is now a command post, a point where marches are planned, and boycotts, and Negro-history classes.