Voices in Our Blood (75 page)

They sang as they waited, in twos and threes blocking each of the doorways, to be arrested. A blonde girl, college-age, was among those going limp. A cop said, “I'd grab that broad by the hank of the hair.” Two Negro cops did the removal job at one of the doorways; talking to the kids, preparing to lift them, their faces seemed friendly. One of the kids did the little jerking motions that make such a task more difficult. “Don't act like a child,” one of the Negro cops grunted.

Faces were peering down from all the windows. You would expect them to be full of concern, or anger, or sympathy—or something. For the most part, they were not. As four cops lifted a young Negro, a pretty black girl looked down and smiled. While these arrests were taking place, other demonstrators had lain down in the driveways to the parking lots of some of the buildings. A car was unable to get out and the driver, a middle-aged guy with his gray-faced wife beside him, was sitting on his horn. I moved with the cops and the press toward this development, and in the middle of the street, I heard from above a voice of anger—at last—coming from one of the windows. A pretty blonde was yelling down, “No. No. You're not going to arrest them.” She was angry not because of the suppression of decency, of reality going on down there, but because the cops were getting the man out of his car. But it wasn't to arrest him. He had to sign something, a complaint, I suppose, so they could begin removing the driveway blockers.

A fat Negro man, spectator of all this, yelled up at the blonde: “Shut yo' mouth. Mind yo' business.”

She yelled back at him: “I work.”

It seemed to sum it all up, both sides of the shibboleth. I watched the orderly, systematic clearing of one driveway after another. In one, there were three girls and two boys of college age, black and white together, and a country-looking, older white woman. All their faces, so disparate—the white girls' full of that innocent bloom of assured middle-class security—had a shared calmness, coolness. Here is the best hope, I thought. Here is the other side of the prophecy made by my friend: the basis for believing that the young might free us, or help us find courage to fight for our freedom. The quiet calm of their absolute conviction was what struck this muddled and fearful middle-aged observer; this was the way it had been in SNCC, this was the way it must have been through history, for those who were able, really able, to resist tyranny and stupidity. They could laugh at what made me cringe; they could march through tear gas and get their heads beat with the same sort of apparent inner certainty that it doesn't matter that what they believe in will prevail. And what they believe in—here, around the world, South African whites among them even—has been so uniformly right: against war, against racism, against poverty; against the monstrosity of
technique;
and being for, in every conceivable context, the liberation and enhancement of the human spirit, I noticed that the elderly country-looking lady was right there with them. It was not really a matter of chronological age. It was a matter of the best in people coming out, quietly fighting, serenely sure. They won't kill this, I thought.

It was getting toward my plane time. I didn't regret having to leave, as once I would have—indeed would not have left, back when these dramas demanded the reporter's loyalty to see them through, to be there as witness to whatever might be the worst atrocity, to be there as witness so the worst atrocity might not occur. The press by this time was on the scene in great numbers. I chatted a few moments with Charlayne Hunter, who, after making news by integrating the University of Georgia, had covered a lot of these demonstrations in the South. “I'm leaving,” I said. “I've seen all this before.” As the arrests got started, as the bureaucrat Robertson jerked his stiff face around, as the cops pushed their pistol-strength into the demonstrators, as the inevitable white loudmouth heckled unhindered behind police lines, I had felt a good and healthy rise in me of Southern chauvinism, a desire to yell at the cops, the bureaucrats, “You're no better, no better than the worst of ours.” It was the first time I had seen this Northern ability to duplicate, down to the last self-righteous gesture, Southern racism, Southern dehumanization. In a few short minutes there, I had lost something, a part of my provinciality, the Southerner's collective inferiority complex: and I had lost something else, too—a little more of the respect for and confidence in men and institutions that is the glue which holds a society together. Long weak and watery in the South, the glue was becoming the same, evidently, in Washington and in the rest of the nation. Once the Southerner opposed to racism could console himself with the thought: I am virtually alone down here, but I am of the majority in the nation. No more.

I had left my bags at a friend's office near my hotel. I decided to take one last walk through Resurrection City, hoping maybe to get a better feel of it, or to get a better feeling about it, before catching a cab. But when I got to the back gate, a cop was there who refused to let me enter. I started to begin one of those contests of authority with him, using my press card, but realized it wasn't worth it, no more than trying to talk with those silent, bitter people.

I went away and sat in the cool green of Dupont Circle, watching all its diversity of types, like colorful and busy birds: the hippies; a boy on his knees patiently following a pigeon across the grass; the old people of both races; one Negro with an empty golf bag, not new, enigmatically on the bench beside him; the straight people, mostly walking through—a beautiful blonde baby-girl type, so young, so slim, carrying a big bag of groceries; a tall young man in his Haspel cord carrying a courier case under one arm, a shopping sack in the other hand, walking long strides, head back, a farmer, a pioneer. And there were even a few of those I sensed to be a new breed, a blend of what the hippies seek, what old people come to after finally getting their values settled, what the young straights have in the way of confidence and control: a plump young mother in an indifferent dress that sagged and rippled all around the hem, her black hair unfashionably long, watching her two fat babies playing in the sandpile; a young Negro with three Negro girls beside him, sketching the park scene. Someone began a loud, melodious, free whistling. This, I thought, is what a Resurrection City should be like: this tolerance in all these people in all their diversity, each for the others.

I went on to get my bag, and at the next corner, a drab little drama ensued. A slovenly young white woman was yelling at a group of six or seven people waiting at the bus stop. I saw that she was yelling at the one Negro among them, a stout, dignified matriarchal woman. “Communists,” the fat girl screamed drunkenly. “Communists. Why don't you go back to Africa?” All the worst of the racist insults poured out of the girl, anachronistic, almost refreshing in their direct ugliness. The Negro woman stood there, swollen with outrage. “We never come from Africa,” she said finally in that voice Southern Negroes use with drunks of theirs, with idiots and the insane, with unruly white children. When I came out of my friend's office with my bag, the fat drunk white girl was out in the middle of the street, the light against her. A young white guy at the bus stop yelled at her, “Hey you—you're the one breaking the law.” The girl wheeled back around: “Faggot. Faggot. You burned your draft card. You faggot.” She passed me at the next corner where I was trying to catch my cab, crossed with the light, and then stood, face blank with all her meaningless rage, as the light changed three times. She was still standing there, hulking, murderous, pitiful, when I got my cab.

The episode had the feel of the worst I had experienced at Resurrection City, standing by the main gate, listening to Murray Kempton, who was extemporizing his bedazzling sort of intricate instant analysis of everything I had been seeing. An old Negro man—thin, city-looking, defeated in his face—came up to us. Drunk, wine-drunk by the look of his eyes, he said to get out. We both had been through these minor moments of nastiness many times before; I from whites, mostly, but blacks in recent times, Kempton I guess, plenty of both, and we knew that the only thing to do was avoid any personal touch with this drunk, like avoiding the hate stare of the racist when you walk into a Southern restaurant in the company of a Negro. We moved away slowly, the old guy behind us, cursing us, his voice low, as though if he properly yelled, it would end the magic of our obeying him. We wouldn't look back at him, kept walking slowly, continuing our conversation. He came closer and put his hand on my shoulder, still saying to get out, cursing us, and walking in a pantomime of pushing me out, no force in his hand, no ability really to heave me the hell out of there.

The feebleness of his anger reminded me of the time I sat listening to a racist harangue from the state superintendent of schools in Georgia, shortly after the 1954 school decision. He was an old man, a good, gentle product of white Southern Methodism, a good educator by Southern standards, which meant that he really cared about the children rather than merely for the prerogatives and power of his job. His tirade was of that same weak and feeble quality as the drunk Negro's heave-ho; somewhere in the midst of it, he got Jesus into it, as was natural for his generation and his religious tradition, and I burst out, surprised at myself: “Leave Jesus out of this.” His old eyes were startled for a minute, and then hurt, and for a long time afterward I felt bad about hurting him needlessly, for he was old, and unregenerate on the race thing, and, I thought, harmless. Later I came to know how harmful such innocent old men in positions of power were to be to the South, to humanity, how ruinous the workings of the innocent were in America. And now I finally knew, too, that to burst out at him, on the most elemental of human terms, was better than not to—better than not to fight him, not even to look at him.

The radio in the taxicab described what happened to the demonstration after I left it, how it attracted other columns of marchers, more police, how it spread into the street, how the police had to use “necessary restraint with their billy clubs.” Some who were there later told me the cops started it; others said it was one group of Negroes bent on violence. Either way, it is the same: the violence is the thing, neither side anymore has any real control of it.

I read a few days later of Abernathy's final march and arrest, and of the expeditious way that they ran the few remaining people out of Resurrection City, and then destroyed it, and got grass to growing there again almost overnight. Out of that sorry episode, Jack Nelson of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote the best single newspaper story on the civil rights movement I have ever read—about how efficient the government was in enforcing the penny-ante law it used to clear Resurrection City out of the landscape and consciousness of Washington, D.C., but how inefficient that same government had been over many long years in enforcing the vital, basic laws (voter registration, protection of civil rights, not to mention human life; farm programs and job opportunities; the feeding of hungry children) that would make life livable for the poor. How sorry a record of incredible failure.

It was like reading about the old regime leading up to the French or Russian revolution: the Greek-tragedy sense of disaster drawing on, of forces and events out of control. I passed the White House on one of the nights there in Washington, and a Washington friend in the car exclaimed that he never had seen it so lit up before, spotlights like they use in prison yards illuminating every inch of the grounds, this bastion of the greatest of all the nickel-nursing switchers-off of unused forty-watt bulbs in America. We all surmised that he was afraid, that man in there, of the poor people down in Resurrection City, and afraid of all the gatherings of the innocents who had come spontaneously, out of the last saving remnants of decency and goodness within America. One of the main reasons he did not run again, I was told by a Washington friend privy to such secrets, was that he was afraid he would be killed during the campaign and not just embarrassed to death by those demonstrations that followed him everywhere the police and military didn't keep them out.

As my plane climbed above Washington, I pondered the valedictory feeling about the Movement that had been dogging me for the past two days and nights, the sense of an ending. It was not dead in its organizational forms or its plans and campaigns (John Lewis would come back from Washington two weeks after I did, quietly optimistic, telling of the fine new scheme for the poor people's embassy up there). It was just dead within me. It had acquainted me with a kind of hope, a universal kind of hope for humanity, that my generation had been conditioned not to know. My life, my work had fed on that hope through crucial years of my lifetime. Now that hope was gone. I had never, like the innocents, been a niggerlover. It seems to me that the premise underlying all that Dr. King knew and taught was that to love everybody without ever loving anybody is as meaningless as hating everybody. Black Power is deep in that meaninglessness, which the riots so graphically express. So do the assassinations. Black violence has not killed a single real enemy of black people, of humanity; it has killed its own. And the vehemence of the verbal violence of Black Power has been much less a threat than an advantage to these enemies, while only the true friends of the Black Powerists, black and white masochistically together, expect it to overcome.

It would be cathartic to draw lines and say I am the enemy of all these, Black Powerists and white niggerlovers, just as I have been the enemy of all the white racists in the South. But the Southern sun bores itself into your bones, sweats such dogmatism out of you. Like all liberals down there, Negro and white, Dr. King included, I know that humanity is too complex, too mysterious to draw rigid lines and expect to contain much reality in them. The lines have to be drawn on principles, not on people.

There was a time when just about every black person I saw agreed with me on principles, which involved essentially the Bill of Rights and the failure to exercise and enforce it where Negro citizens of the South were concerned. Thus I felt we were united in a struggle, the Movement, to achieve those principles, that enforcement, which denied to some were meaningless to all. This unity no longer exists. So now it is necessary to judge each Negro I meet on the criteria by which we judge all other people—a natural and, indeed, better way: some are with you, some are enemies of your most important principles and values. And so one looks among them, as one looks among whites, for those who believe in what is summed up in the Bill of Rights, and who are aware of all the ways the Bill of Rights is raped in America, not just as regards Negroes, but whites as well. This, then, has been Black Power's most constructive effect: that it has removed from whites the last shred of romantic, paternalistic, indiscriminate idealization of Negroes, and that it has removed Negroes from the obligations, the expectations unrealistically put upon them by whites, to do, in sum, the impossible.