Voices in Our Blood (74 page)

After lunch, one of the bustling little business-suit men came forward and took charge. He was a baldheaded gent who had stared with some puzzlement previously at my press badge, which said I represented
New South,
a publication not likely known in his circles. I had put him down at the time as a bureaucrat (a cop would have asked about the badge, or not been so obviously staring). He turned out to be Joseph M. Robertson, assistant secretary for administration. The leaders of the march told him they wanted an audience with Secretary Freeman. He said to give him fifteen minutes, and with ten of them still to go, he bustled back and said to the leaders that he was sorry but he had to report that the secretary would not see the demonstrators. Mr. Freeman would be happy to confer with Mr. Abernathy at any time but not . . . he didn't say “rabble” but the inference was plain.

The leaders, some of the demonstrators, the press, the cops, we were all gathered around him for the announcement. “But these are the people,” the young man who resembled Stokely said. “The people . . .” Robertson shook his head, the gesture signifying how entirely futile it was to argue with him; it was out of his hands. So the leader ended with: “I'll tell the people there's nothing you can do. This is just a small minority of the people in this country who are starving.” He threw the words at the bald, bland-faced Robertson, and I harkened to that, to the insult and accusation in his voice. Maybe it would move the man.

The confrontation was reminding me of a time when I had helped two men try to get a boat for Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. It was in a spring of the long ago in Washington, the very same time that the poor were first showing some of the less benign side of what hunger and hurt does to people, that time of the convention of the poor staged by the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty. Could it have been only two years ago, way back there in 1966? Two citizens of Daufuskie Island had come to the convention to try out a scheme they had. Their island lies just above Hilton Head, which is a notable new resort whose development in the 1950's resulted forthwith in that action of state and federal authority in mutual accord and purposefulness necessary to the construction of a causeway to connect it to the mainland and all its tourist money. I cherish the memory of Hilton Head and its splendid, entirely untouched beach, and the assemblage of tourists every day around the luxury motel swimming pool, their finely, fashionably tanned backs to the beach.

Well, Daufuskie had not yet been bought up for development and exploitation. Most of its inhabitants are Negro; some of the few whites there, like most of the Negroes, trace their ancestry on the island back to the days of slavery. The two citizens who came to Washington shared this distinction: the ancestors of the white one of them (a rough-hewn gentleman with a game leg, beyond middle-age, articulate in his coastal brogue) had owned the ancestors of the black one of them (a grave, elderly black farmer, articulate with his eyes and the wrinkling of his brows but seldom-spoken). Their island had no causeway, inhabited as it was just by poor people, and no other means beyond motor boats of getting to and back from the mainland. Daufuskie's two citizens in Washington wanted no part of a causeway; what they wanted was a boat, a big boat, big enough to haul crops and cars and the other heavy cargo necessary to develop farming on Daufuskie. The United States Government, they understood, had a lot of boats, just the kind they needed, sitting around unused in harbors. So, since they were up here in Washington anyhow for the convention, they thought they would just ask their government if they couldn't have one of those boats. They thought they would ask the President.

I got drawn into the boat thing by a friend of mine who had a penchant for this kind of situation, a feeling for the people we call poor, like the two Daufuskie Islanders, who fit none of the imagery of the word. In an ebullient mood, we bundled into a taxi and set off to see the President. All four of us were in the way of Southerners richly delighted with the scheme, capable of laughing at it and at the same time of believing in the possibility of confounding mighty Washington and all its ambiguous marble bigness and complexity by this specific, simple-minded need of a boat. Someday the rest of the nation will realize that it has been by this keen sense of the specific—the refusal ever to get embroiled in generalities, in dangerous abstraction, principle, ideals—that the Southerner has ever out-tricked them, out-traded them: losing the war but winning the peace; spreading the taint of systematized racism through the nation; corrupting, capturing, ruining the Congress; making fools of all adversaries.

The taxi driver was not amused, hearing us. They will put you'uns in jail, he warned. Better not try to go in his office. Find a phone booth and call him up. He deposited us at one, shaking his head. We spent the morning around the phone booth, the white man of the Daufuskie team doing all the calling, telling his story with its insulting threat over and over to startled receptionists on down a line (the President, it seemed, was gone to South America, darn the luck, he reported early on), not getting angry but being plenty forceful, emphasizing his words occasionally by banging on the metal tray of the phone booth with his stubby fist, saying loudly enough for us to hear once, “Well, don't you see, we want to be part of the United States, we're drifting off, we may wind up in Cuba.” The other member of the team stood straight as a pole, patient and solemn through it all, glancing occasionally at the sun, measuring all the time this was taking. I stood alongside him, thinking of a couple of former newspaper colleagues of mine who were now fancy Presidential correspondents, wondering what they would think to find me here, standing, waiting with the Daufuskie fellows, after a boat. Finally, the talker emerged, grinning. “The Vice President's gonna see us.” He had an appointment; there was just time for a gleeful, hopeful lunch.

Humphrey's outer office told much of what the world was later to learn from his actions about the essential gimcrackery of his soul. I recollect a replica of a wagon train; a lot of pharmaceutical paraphernalia; a number of those certificates and diplomas by which Americans convince themselves that they know more than they know they know, that they have achieved more than they know they have; and an Indian motto, appropriately engraved, something to the effect that you shouldn't criticize a fellow until you've walked in his moccasins. (How many times, one wonders, did Hubert Humphrey in those four years console himself with this wisdom?)

We presented the spectacle that we were, and our little story, to a receptionist who recovered her aplomb quickly, and said she was sorry to inform us that the Vice President actually couldn't see us but that an aide of his would—a very important one, she implied. We went on into his office, some of our impertinency having been chipped away by that same combination of big-building, big-people, big-nation awesomeness whose effect on the demonstrators I was later in my life to note. The Negro farmer of the Daufuskie team showed the effect most openly, the fingers of his big, strong farmer's hands clinched together, the knuckles taut knots, and his forehead wrinkled into an eloquent tight knot of concentration and, yes, awe.

The aide looked at us and listened to us with something of the air of a man suffering from the phobia that haunts a friend of mine, that his daily hangover has come at last to be of such severe proportions that it has snapped his mind, unhinged him at last from reality. At one point he said, “A
boat?
” with exquisite expressiveness, and at another, “Now let me get this straight, you say you need a boat?” The white Daufuskie Islander did most of the talking, telling the story straight through, about how the young people were leaving, a paradise for them lost, how the people who stayed were suffering, all for the lack of a boat, of how it didn't used to matter about not having a boat because most of the livings on the island were made by oyster fishing, but now there was only farming to do, and hence the need of the boat to haul the crops ashore, because the United States Government—and here was our punch line, our threat, our insult, and the old islander pushed it hard at the aide—had forbidden oyster fishing anymore because the water around the island is so polluted that the oysters will kill you if you eat them. It was a time when the administration of which Mr. Humphrey's office was so elevatedly a part was still claiming vehemently that it wished to do things about such domestic problems as pollution, and the story about the oysters had its effect on the aide, his eyes walling even more than when we walked in. He plunged into the kind of crisp summing-up questions and ordering of the facts of the case that is a ritual with his kind. At one point, all engrossed in the thing, he asked, “How many now are there of you on the island?” And being told, he asked, “And how many of these have incomes below the poverty level?” And being told, “Ever' one of 'em, ever' last one of us,” he exclaimed, “Good. Good.”

He sent us finally to a man in the Office of Economic Opportunity, a man he called with a great display of how important it was, how much it meant for him to call the man, not just send us over there. Seeing us out the door with his eyes still walling, he made a little joke about “have to be careful how you pronounce the name of that island of yours, heh heh,” which did not sit well with the two Daufuskie Islanders at all, impressed as they were, jubilant as they were. Letting out some of their steam, they pegged along, the game-legged one setting the pace, through seemingly endless tunnels that whistled with unearthly subterranean winds. “This is where they send everybody who dares to come up here asking for a boat,” said my friend who had got me into all this.

We ended up, the four of us and the high-ranking bureaucrat to whom we had been sent, on our knees on the floor of his office, studying an elaborate mariner's map of the island that the white islander had brought. When the bureaucrat tried to unsettle him with highly specific questions about the kind of boat he wanted, he was easily able to unsettle the bureaucrat with a knowledgeable, well-prepared list of specifications for exactly the kind of boat needed. We left with the man's words ringing in our ears. “Now I'm not sure, you understand, I can't say for certain, but I think it can be done, I think we can swing it—but don't get your hopes up, don't be too hopeful.”

Hopeful. Actually, he did swing it; Daufuskie did get its boat. I was in Charleston a short while before Solidarity Day, and heard how a fine brand-new boat and other improvements for the island had resulted from our venture. I was to read a short while later another bit of news about Daufuskie Island: in the Democratic primary, a qualified and peace-campaigning Negro candidate for Congress had run against the incumbent from their district; and all the islanders, “ever' last one of 'em,” had voted for the warmonger, racist L. Mendel Rivers. Maybe it was out of gratitude at getting the boat. I also read, not a long while after our call on the Humphrey aide, that he had been forced to resign, because of some indiscretion in the politics of his, and Mr. Humphrey's, home state. I like to think he was indiscreet on the side of decency, and that our confronting him with the reality of the need for a boat in the unreality of that office, that world he dwelt in, might have had something to do with it.

But all of that might have occurred in another age, even another country. Nobody at the Department of Agriculture (already implicated in just about every racist practice against Negroes in the rural South through every administration of every liberal President over the years) was about to be pushed around by any Southern specifics of starvation, any mere insults, any reality. The demonstrators huddled and very briefly decided what they would do: “We're going to go on to the next order of business,” they warned Robertson, and formed a line of march, singing “Do What the Spirit Say Do.” They were in a column of twos, and in the same bookkeeper's voice that would say it outside of a gas chamber, a minor bureaucrat said to the major bureaucrat, Robertson, “Now we've got a chance at last for a reasonably accurate count of them.”

I thought they were folding up—another demonstration, another day come to naught—and I asked a middle-aged Negro man if they were going back to Resurrection City. “Ask the man at the front of the line,” he snapped, in that almost shamefaced nastiness of any minor functionary under orders not to talk to outsiders. I trailed along as they turned the corner, not back toward that wretched place I guess they called home. I watched with admiration as they turned another corner and gravely began peeling off to sit in all the many doorways of the Agriculture Department buildings on both sides of the street. Somewhere along the way they had become supplied with the personal belongings that demonstrators take to jail, toothbrushes, combs, the like. It was well-organized, clean, efficient, as were the arrests that began quickly to follow. With the dignity and style of the old movement, the demonstrators passively resisted the police, some going limp, some walking slowly, one Negro man standing as he was frisked. Then, as he was led to a police bus, he began to sing: “Oh Freedom, oh Freedom, oh Freedom over me, Before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free,” singing over and over the old brave words, alive for a hopeful little moment there again.

I watched Robertson's face as he ordered the beginning of the arrests; he had the look of a man trying to clean rats out of his cellar. The white cops' faces had that look of grim, morbid excitement worn by their Southern counterparts in similar circumstances. One Negro cop was holding back people on the sidewalk while demonstrators were being removed from the door. A nondescript Negro man was among these he held back; he growled something about Black Power to the cop. This cop's face was flinty; he had the flat nose, the flesh tones of an Indian. He was angry—surely in part at being where he was, doing what he was doing (not what the spirit say do).