Voices in Our Blood (73 page)

But this would seem a trifle disingenuous; after all, Resurrection City had not been planned by Dr. King as a showcase of the criminality of the poor. There had been talk of a “model city.” Haunting the failure of responsibility in regard to the security police situation and general welfare (the showers that never materialized, the less adequate than promised diet, for example) was the memory of the old faith, held most militantly by SNCC, that all the evils of this world could be cured if the poor people could only be put in charge. If you know the wisdom, the resources of strength, courage, and doggedness in the poor people of the rural South with whom the old SNCC worked (it being more clear in the South than elsewhere that poverty is not the fault of the poor, not a signal of failure, but the result of systematic repression, and the inability of the economic system to provide adequate jobs and wages), you can understand that old SNCC romanticism of the poor. I remember defending it to a friend in New York and having him, as we drove the intricate complexity of the expressways there, wave his hands about at all the arranged system of signals and signs, and say in exasperation, “Do you think Mrs. Hamer could run all this?” And of course I could wave my hands and holler, “Who needs all this?” But the point is, the main point perhaps of Resurrection City, is that we do need all of the social organization, social responsibility, humane planning, intelligent administration we can get. The one point on which the Right and the Left agree is that the social system is breaking down, like an old locomotive being driven at faster and faster speeds. We most likely will see it run off the tracks. But we won't likely see the system abolished. From what I have seen of the thinking that would make the revolution, we would end up with the same old malfunctioning society in new hands. Give Sweet Willie his choice of blowing up the Pentagon or becoming the head general in charge of it. His swagger stick and systems analysis would be the envy of the military world.

I went back to Resurrection City the next day, in the hope that seeing it on the morning after might reveal more of its truth, make it somehow seem less unhealthy. But the violence of the early morning hours, while I slept, was apparently the only thing that was left to happen there. In the morning's muggy sun and mud, that same silent torpor was upon it. Once more, I walked its length and back again: the same few unfriendly encounters, and the same unwillingness, inability, on my part to invade the privacy of the people. At the front gate, a number of the families, looking like Southerners, were gathered with their paperbag baggage: the stout Negro women, thinly strong Negro men, solemn-eyed Negro children of the rural South, apparently going home. Had they come only for the march? Or had they been there all along, and finally had had enough of Resurrection City last night? Or had they decided, like me, that the march proclaimed the end of what had once been the one bright hope in their lives? I looked into the fatigued, introspective eyes of one of those women, wanting to ask—but not able to.

A young guy demanded a cigarette, and then started in on his need for money. I heard my name shouted and then apparently his, and a laughing Southern voice saying, “What a pair to find here together.” It was Lawrence Guyot from Mississippi, the head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He had also been part of the Mississippi challenge at Atlantic City in 1964, which had been an earlier ending, the killing of the hope in SNCC, the final convincing evidence to them that you couldn't work within the system, between those lines of orderly progress, reform, and that you couldn't trust white people—from the most powerful man of them all on down. The other man, it seemed, was from Greenwood, Mississippi, where the bravest of all the voter registration campaigns had been double-crossed by the Kennedy Justice Department, where Jimmy Travis had been shot in the neck with an automatic rifle, where for the first time national attention had been paid to the desperate, child-starving poverty of the rural South—followed by a brief, fitful spurt of free food and clothing. That was in 1963. Some of the toughest SNCC workers had wept at seeing the people coming with rags tied on their feet in lieu of shoes, grateful for whatever had been given; the workers were also grieved to see the entirely to be expected results of privation that showed in some of the poor, the trickery, the taking any way they could some of them, more than their share of the Thanksgiving basket, missionary largesse sent down from rich America. Conditions were no less desperate in 1963 than in 1968 or the years between in the rural South. Now the nation's attention was attracted again. But the old SNCC was gone; they had killed all that good in it, that young, hard-boiled, tough good which, nurtured on the unexpected, stupendous success of the sit-ins, had for a time behind it the belief that anything—no limits, no caution—could be achieved, or at least tried. The good in the poor people could prevail. What organization now, what leader, could be said to elicit and speak for that good? Now, the violence that is built into the victim of injustice and neglect, the greediness that had so grieved SNCC, seems more likely to be the poor people's contribution to the new order. Guyot soon went his way, a good guy, full of talk about plans for the delegate challenge—this time in Chicago.

All morning the loudspeakers had been heralding a demonstration. It was to have started around lunchtime; I had resigned myself to another no-lunch day when it still had not started a good two hours later. People had formed their line; they were waiting for the word to go. In charge was Hosea Williams, a brave SCLC activist from Savannah, Georgia, as well as a self-promoter of prodigious energy, a man with a knack for antagonizing people needlessly, the kind of man you want in a revolution to lead troops but somehow not get back in time to help form the new government. Finally he gave the order for the line of about fifty people to start marching through Resurrection City, from the front gate toward the back one, and off we set, the old familiar formation: we reporters, notebooks in hand, off to the side; they marching, singing the good old songs—“Ain't goin' let nobody turn me 'round,” “If you miss me in the back of the bus and you can't find me nowhere, Come on up to the front of the bus, and I'll be driving up there,” “Come by here, my Lord, Come by here, oh, Lord, Come by here. . . .” It was to these very songs, in coincidental fact, that I had responded most in that personal religious experience which had been my introduction to Dr. King's movement, a long time ago. It seemed a mockery to hear those songs now, dodging along through the mud, seeing the blank looks that the vast majority of Resurrection City's residents gave the demonstrators and their song, summing up so many betrayals of good words, good people, so many disappointments, disillusionments.

The march through the mud of Resurrection City added no more than fifteen people to the little line. Hosea called them into a huddle in the grass just outside the rear gate. Then he strode over ostentatiously to the press contingent (consisting of me, a lanky young man from
The Washington Post,
and a very black young man from some African publication) and yelled, “Y'all go on over away from us so we can discuss things.” I stuck my hand out to him, said howdy. “Yeah,” he said in a tone suggesting he wished I hadn't stuck my hand out to him. “Y'all go on over yonder.”

I thought this would be where they called the march off, but no, it started off again, Hosea heading back into Resurrection City, and a tall young man who looked remarkably like Stokely Carmichael (but no kin—somebody finally asked him) in charge. We went through the field that had been yesterday's staging area for the march, up the hill toward the Washington Monument. They kept singing those good old songs, cops bumping alongside on motorcycles, motors roaring. We passed three Negro teen-agers with Afro haircuts, sitting under a tree; one had a saxophone, and blew riffs at the demonstration. “Get a gun, brother,” yelled one of the demonstrators, last of the legions of Dr. King's nonviolent army.

“Michael, row the boat ashore,” they sang, approaching the Washington Monument. I got my first inkling, then, of something else that might be considered a prime cause of what ailed Resurrection City. There were rows of tourists sitting on little benches all around the base of the monument, and the brave song of the little marching band wavered as they approached those tourists, sitting in their slick-magazine informal wear—melting-pot American families, American primitives, all kinds—and before the marchers had got past all those cold eyes, the song had died completely. The only sound was the flapping of all those American flags ringing the monument, so gallantly streaming. It was not like marching down to the courthouse, through the familiarity of the town square in the South, every inch of the way known, every nuance of the angry, hostile, sneering response of those ol' crackers just as familiar. In the South, we have shared the physical world, every town and city being two towns, black Atlanta, white Atlanta, the business section common property, and the rivers and the woods used separately but jointly, with all that intricacy of rules of separation over which so much of the energy of the Southern civil rights movement was consumed. Up here, godamighty, in the ghetto cities of the North, they don't even do that, don't share the land: this pile of monument concrete, these big, rich-as-a-bank-looking buildings.

The Department of Agriculture proved to be the target of this demonstration, the lair of that most evildoing of all the middle-class innocents, Orville W. Freeman, standing accused on national television of starving little newborn babies to death in the interest of showing his boss one of those two-million-dollar bookkeeping gains so dear to the boss's not at all innocent heart. The entrance at which the march stopped had marble columns (the big house of the plantation), and behind these, taller than a man, gates of close iron rods; then the building itself, tall, marble, intimidating. The cops were in clusters (I counted twenty-two at one point) across the street in the park (orderly and forbidding-looking, these parks, not like the woods, not like parks back home), and there were about a dozen men in business suits standing and watching the demonstrators in front of the building, no more than four of these newsmen, the others looking like cops, like FBI, like authority. One uniformed cop kept walking up close to the demonstrators, standing in a long line thinly stretched across the front of that wide building; he poked a Polaroid camera at one or another of them, and then stepped back quickly to peel off his print, as you might take a picture of an alligator as close-up as you could. A young Negro man who had made the march on crutches broke out in a sudden tirade, perhaps in defiance of the bigness, the business suits, the strangeness surrounding him. He hollered, something about America being the richest nation in the world, veins standing out on his forehead, and then his voice died out, like the song back at the monument, and, self-consciously, he hollered out: “I'm tryin' to tell it like it is, Brother.”

There was a little flurry of surprise, and style, when a gleaming truck rolled up, and, within a few minutes, a beautiful buffet lunch was laid out on a long table. The demonstrators quietly formed a line, and with no show of exuberance over this fine little fillip, with that same subdued mood of their singing, they filled their plates and sat down to eat around the entranceway of the place. Workers within looked down from high windows on the scene, blank, white faces. No one would say who had provided the food, paid for it. The truck was from a Negro-owned catering service; its three attendants were Negro, one of them a squat, big-shouldered man wearing a sweat shirt with “Black Liberation” lettered on it, and an inked-on design of stars and a crescent. While they ate, he stared with hating eyes, like white Southerners when they can catch your eye, at all the whites bustling around in their business suits. I long ago had learned how to avoid such eyes. My stomach was gnawing in its own faint, middle-class knowledge of hunger. In the old days, the press would have been offered food, would have had to make one of those delicate little decisions of whether partaking would impair the image, the myth of their objectivity (getting both sides of questions about which there can be no debate, like the right of Negroes to register to vote). Now none was offered.

The demonstrators were about half white, half Negro, all ages, the whites including a mother with her baby, and a stringy, tough-looking lady who looked like she was from the hill country. Their differences were eclipsed by the familiar larger separation of the two realities, the two worlds of such a situation: the demonstrators in theirs, a crisis scene of long-built emotion, one that was soon to culminate in a high, fearful, brave moment of life, maybe the highest of a lifetime; and the rest of us in ours, just a little out of the ordinary routine, doing the job, getting along, making a day, one in ten thousand of them. While we were waiting for the demonstrators to finish their lunch, a photographer spoke to one of the cops about how, thank God, in just two hours he would be out on a boat fishing, then about getting his daughter married the coming weekend. In the South during the Movement's past, these moments before the confrontation would have tremendous dramatic tension, for there was always a real sense of the drum-stir, the chain-rattle, the death-touch of totalitarianism, the shivering awareness that in this world, the limitlessness of human cruelty can be unleashed in licensed, uniformed, drilled numbers on the helpless, the hapless, the normal, decent run of no-better-and-no-worse-than-they-should-be humanity. Violence would victimize them all, the demonstrators but also the bureaucrats, the cops, the tourist come up with his green cap on to take a picture of this whole thing, his wife harping at him to get on up closer, ask that man to move out of the way. And this destruction of decency would be done at the will not of a monster, a De Sade, but at the behest of merely the type of life-hating, twisted, mean little son-of-a-bitch that we have all known, some stingy little storekeeper, some smirking little clerk. You can almost taste that meanness in your mouth, horrible and human, in the South, the George Wallaces squeezing their abominable ways up out of it every generation, the real horror of our heritage down there. But here in official, marble Washington, the potential horror had a further dimension, something purely mechanical and alien, a monstrosity of machines and mathematics that had moved on beyond any humanly evil origins, beyond human control—the efficient, functional
technique
that was starving Southern children, burning Vietnamese ones, and moving inevitably on to its own final and total solution.