The Essential Ellison Part 52

Straight from the heart is "Tired Old Man" (1975), which derives from a true experience at a New York writers' party where Harlan met Cornell Woolrich. Yet no one but Harlan remembered Woolrich attending. This is a straightforward, emotional portrait of one of Harlan's favorite writers, and its ending lets us share the inevitable hero-wors.h.i.+p response.

"Gopher in the Gilly" (1982) is Harlan's recollection of the three months he worked for a third-rate carny and the three days he spent in a Missouri jail, and from it is distilled one more lesson that we already know and yet never quite seem to learn.

"Strange Wine" (1976) tells us, quite simply, that this is the best of all possible worlds.

You'll find no feeling of emptiness in these pieces, no careful selection of words to lull us into complacency or dull our awareness with monotone. This is pa.s.sion: hot-blooded and raging, desperate and searching, but always in search of Truth. If the search is infuriating, so be it.

"I am a yapping dog with mean little teeth. I am often as wrong as you, as often silly as you, as often co-opted as you, as often soph.o.m.oric as you. But I maintain. As do you."

"Ominous Remarks for Late in the Evening," Introduction to AN EDGE IN MY VOICE, Donning, 1985 From Alabamy, With Hate Another Memo from Purgatory Thursday, March 25th, 1965. A walk through the country of the blind. Montgomery, Alabama-stinking in the heat of its own decay; sweltering in the viciousness of two hundred years of murder and bigotry and moral wretchedness; poised with the invisible artifacts of its hooded aristocracy: the hemp lynch rope, the 12-gauge shotgun, the befouled " separate but equal" toilet, the electric cattle prod, the killer caravans by night and the final paycheck by day.

Poised, waiting for the outsiders to come.

The 25th of March. Fifty thousand people walking the red-mud roads of Alabama, singing; the outsiders, come to tell a crazed bigot that the Civil War was long dead, that a house divided was soon to topple, that the stain of evil that Alabama had become, would no longer be tolerated in a United States.

The Freedom March on Montgomery, Alabama.

A biased report.

And if you weren't marching with us, go screw yourself!

There must have been n.o.ble motives in there, somewhere. I simply couldn't think of any. Plainly, it was time to go. It was time to stop all the parlor liberalism, to stop all the high-flown clucking about heinous crimes and rotten living conditions, it was time to act. Time to pay some dues. It was mea culpa time, and everyone was guilty. So I went. Along with thousands from allover the country, allover the world. Every state was there, New Mexico, Indiana, New York, Florida, Ohio. Decent men and women from Hawaii, France, London, Alaska. A blind man who had walked from Georgia. A wealthy matron in furs from Beverly Hills. A one-legged hero, who walked with the Original Three Hundred, all the way from Selma where men had died just days before, to Montgomery, where a despicable racist flew the Confederate flag as a gesture of defiance, and hid behind locked doors.

This time we weren't alone. This time the Great White Father in the Great White House had spoken. He'd called together a joint session of Congress-usually reserved for State of the Union addresses and national emergencies-and he had said it for all of us. A little late, a little slow, but he' d finally said it, he' d called Wallace's bluff: "The time of justice has now come," Lyndon B. Johnson said. "No force can hold it back." At last, for every thick red neck in the state of Alabama to hear and believe, the tide of history was being acknowledged. In a matter of hours it would begin to wash over the face of Alabama as the 50-mile trek from Selma to Montgomery was begun, and Johnson told them why: "Should we defeat every enemy, double our wealth, conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation."

He spoke for forty-five minutes, and he was interrupted by standing ovations thirty-nine times. "We shall overcome," he told them. But those were just words. Words had lifted on the air many times before. And still, the Reverend James J. Reeb had died under the clubs of thugs called police. Words had flown and yet three civil rights workers were found buried twenty-one feet beneath a Mississippi d.a.m.n (sic). Like doves, the words had lifted on the breeze, and in Birmingham little children were bombed in Sunday School. Even since the march, even after all the words words words, a Detroit woman was senselessly gunned down on that same road between Selma and Montgomery. Viola Liuzzo was another numbered corpse.

d.a.m.n them! d.a.m.n their twisted, stunted, warped minds, their rotten and corrupted beliefs, the frenzied and hideous doppelgangers of Hitler' s storm troopers. Even after they saw fifty thousand men and women flock to their sinkhole of a state to plead with their bodies and their time to let those people go, even so, still, with all the words, they killed again. And again. And it seems it will never stop till time has closed over the head of Man and he is no more, sunk in the ocean of forgetfulness, when there is no black, there is no white, there is no Man at all!

All this talk of Man, and on that march, so much talk of G.o.d. But where was G.o.d for the little church girls of Birmingham? Where was G.o.d for Reverend Reeb? For Mrs. Liuzzo? For all the nameless and never-known black men whose bodies have been burned and strung from ropes and violated by razor and knife and gun? Where is this G.o.d who allows hate to rule a land? I can't talk of G.o.d, I can only talk of Man.

For all I saw on that Montgomery march was man, at his most n.o.ble, at his most degraded. If you want specifics, if you need background, if you need history; it's all been recorded. This, d.a.m.n them, is a personal record.

The planes left from Burbank. Three planes from the Lockheed Airport where Bogart said farewell to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Three hundred clerics, students, actors, housewives, ribbon clerks, writers, truck drivers and poets. They had at first thought one plane would be sufficient, but two days before we were to leave, they had to lay on a second, and earlier that Thursday, a third. And still they were turning them away: The waiting room was a madhouse, people cramming against the check-in desk, don't leave me behind! Why were they fighting so hard to go? Why were they not taking this handy cop-out to avoid possible danger? Men and women who, if they had had their druthers, would gladly have gone home to bed, or to a discotheque. They fought and shoved to give their money for the flight. I was in the midst of them. I cannot answer the question.

Yet, on the plane, jammed together with total strangers, even though we were of one united cause, I felt an alienation: I was suddenly a.s.sailed by a strange and terrible thought. All these people, on this flight, flying toward brotherhood- What if we crashed, or were marooned somewhere, and there was no food save what we had brought in our knapsacks? Wouldn't we start pummeling that dapper Negro gentleman up front there, the one with the bag of fruit? Where would be all our brotherhood then?

And I realized: the frenzy at the check-in counters, the surly shoving, the being herded together...

That was real! That was people.

What we were flying toward, silent and unknown...what we believed in...what we were going to do...that was a thought. In a frightening and inescapable way, it did not exist. And I knew, really: these people did not have to like each other, or love each other; they were all aliens, moving toward a dream.

But dreams cannot be populated. Only hard realities can know presence. And I felt alone.

For down there in Montgomery, Alabama, was the reality. This was the dream, and the fact that it did not exist terrified me. The ones who lived in that state, did so all the time, not just for a day, or a week, and then away to the hills of Hollywood where there was safety; and I grew cold thinking that we were about to invade their reality.

We were to meet the original Three Hundred who had hiked the full fifty miles on U.S. Highway 80 out of Selma. All the marchers from everywhere who had come to this spot, were to meet three miles outside the city limits, at the City of St. Jude, a hospital and school. My first glimpse of it was chilling, for surely this must have been the impression given to the condemned of Europe when first they glimpsed Dachau or Buchenwald. Outside a high cyclone fence, members of the federalized Alabama National Guard (the Dixie [31st] Division) stood at parade-rest every fifty feet. Inside that fence, the bivouac area seemed somehow-wrong. The grounds were clotted with great clumps of people, two and three hundred in a bunch, ragtag, disordered. Mud was everywhere. The thick, sucking red mud of Alabama that had been churned to cream by thousands of feet walking over it endlessly since the day before. It was a concentration camp. Those soldiers, they weren't turned outward, to protect the people inside...

Once we were inside, I tried asking the troopers two questions. I walked across the empty corner far away from all the waiting people, and approached three standing together. Two walked away. "At what intervals have they s.p.a.ced you out around the fence?" I asked.

"Ah don' know."

"Are you elements of the federalized Alabama Guard?"

"Ah don' know."

Then he moved away. I stared after him. G.o.d save us from men who do what they despise doing, simply because they are ordered to do it.

Later, I was to understand even more clearly my fear and horror at these Southerners pressed into a service of hatred, for the only moment of genuine danger I knew came from them.

We were to have started marching the last three miles into Montgomery and the Capitol Building at 9:00. It was eleven before we moved. Stacked up in long lines, eight abreast, we stood in the mud, waiting, and then it started to rain, It misted down on us, and the umbrellas came out, the scudgy raincoats that had been jammed in knapsacks and bedrolls. A sound truck nearby suddenly began blaring...a Negro comic who did lousy impressions...and he wouldn't stop...he just kept imitating Wallace, FDR, Ralph Bunche, LBJ, Dr. Paul Tillich, and every few shticks were interspersed with snarling references to how "whitey" was a sonofab.i.t.c.h. It was ill-timed, in bad taste. All of us who had come to do what we could, to serve, to offer ourselves without any of the usual white man's impetuosity to run things. We stood there, and the comic rasped at us, till there were murmurings of marching not on the Capitol, but on the sound truck.

Then the Original Three Hundred in their fluorescent orange road-worker jackets, bearing American flags, began moving out, and with a sense of elation just to be afoot, we moved out after them. Wave after wave, rank upon rank, little children clutching hands, women still carrying their brown paper bags of food, black men and white men, all teeth and flas.h.i.+ng eyes, moving out onto the Jefferson Davis Highway. Sporadic singing broke out. We'd been on our feet four hours now. Ahead of me, one-legged Jim Letherer of Saginaw, Michigan, crutch-propelled himself forward, grinning.

A group of Montgomery teenagers had fastened themselves to a small knot of us from Los Angeles, and as we marched, for the first time we heard their songs: "In your heart you know you re wrong...

In your heart you know, you're wrong...

In your heart you know, you're wrong...

In Montgomery, Ala-bam-a!" And followed by a chant to which The Jerk could be danced. It was a strange, demanding chant-Hoop-de-hoop...hoop-de-hoop...hoop-de-hoop-and then a dire, threatening, challenging Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. It was the old strike-breaker's chant, warning and intimidating. We're coming. We're waiting for you. We want you to try something...go ahead...break out that cane and cattle prod, this time we'll see who gets a split skull hoop-de-hoop hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.

The march went down U.S. 80 and into the Negro section.

Picture every cliche of poverty and sadness. Let them steep in the cauldron of your most imaginative thoughts. They cannot approach the reality of the squalor in which the black men and women of Montgomery, Alabama, live. Houses that have never seen paint, gray slat-board houses without foundations, where it isn't necessary to use a dustpan after sweeping: the dirt falls through the cracks in the floor. Where wallpaper is made of newspaper, and you can stand inside that crackerbox and feel the March wind whistle chilly in at you. There were few fat people. There was a total absence of the bigot's treasured cliche: "They live in filth, but they all got big Caddys." There were no Caddys. But there were desiccated old men sitting on porch steps wearing clean but threadbare clothes. There were tiny children with their heads bound up in silk stockings to make "the kink lie back." There were filthy open sewers in front of every house, because the munic.i.p.al government didn't see any need for adequate sewage disposal. There were shockingly inadequate shopping facilities-little stores with their inevitable Coca-Cola signs that said JOHN'S GRO. under the advertis.e.m.e.nt. The only things in that section that were sharp and fresh-looking, the Coca-Cola signs. G.o.d bless American industry, the pervasive love of the Corporation!

A roadside sight: ten little tiny children, scrupulously clean, clapping their little hands and singing in small bird voices as a ten-thousand-year-old Negro man with a cane led them in "We Shall Overcome." And no smiles on their faces.

The smiling was all being done in the marching column. By the roadside, Negroes who were terrified they would be burned out, lynched or lose their jobs if they marched (as subsequent days have revealed to be accurate guesstimates), watched silently. From porches and sidewalks-euphemism for cracked bits of pale rock-they stared at the endless stream of humanity come to pledge allegiance to their cause. And as the chanting, singing ma.s.ses moved past, they would suddenly burst into a moment of hand-clapping or singing, then realize Fear had settled behind them, watching, and they would subside again. It was eerie, and tragic.

A toothless old woman, lushed out of herself, ran alongside the column, chittering merrily. She grabbed at me, tried to pull me out of the line, tried to hug me, just out of sheer delight that we existed, that we were there. "C'mon in, old mother! C'mon in, there's room!" yelled Paul Robbins, the photographer who had gone down to Alabama with me. Everybody laughed, and capered, and she clapped her withered hands in childlike abandon. We pa.s.sed her by, and she smiled gap-mouthed at others, who borrowed her suns.h.i.+ne.

A Montgomery high school girl marching beside me pointed to a beat-up commercial building with the sign LAICOS CLUB on it. "That's where we get to go for music," she said. It was a simple statement, but it was filled with hatred. That was the one place they were allowed to go. We turned a corner in the red mud and suddenly better pavement began.

The lower-middle-cla.s.s white neighborhood. The perceptible transition from n.i.g.g.e.r Town to Po' White Trash.

It was only a cultural half-step up from the shameful ghetto we had just left, but here we found the most vicious att.i.tude of all...

[When I was in the army, stationed in Georgia, I once had a dirt-dumb White Trash PFC explain something to me. "I'm poor," he said bitterly, "real poor, as poor as y' c'n get. And I got no education, and I got nothin' back home but gettin' laid an' getting old. I ain't better than nothin', man, nothin' at all. I'm just about as bad as mud, but there's one thing I'm better than...I'm better than a n.i.g.g.e.r, and I intends to see it stays that way." Nutsh.e.l.l explanation of the Southern States Rights argument against Civil Rights. ]

On a porch, a man and his wife, sipping tea, blissfully unaware of a freedom march. Their world was up there. And down on that road, there wasn't nothin' happening. There ain't nothing going on down here in Alabama, they said over television the preceding Sunday. Nothin' atall. What the h.e.l.l did he think all that going on down on the road was? Locust?

Past a Negro school. Children hanging out of windows, screaming jubilantly, urging us forward, teachers waving, crying with joy, give 'em h.e.l.l! The name of the school in bold letters: LOVELESS SCHOOL. Yeah.

Around a corner. Up on the veranda of a resident hotel, a gaggle of middle-cla.s.s white women, the cream of Southern womanhood.

"n.i.g.g.e.r-lovers!" the blonde screamed, harridan.

"Mother fu-" the words were drowned out by the chants of the "lower cla.s.s" Negro marchers, "Go tell George Wallace, go tell George Wallace, go tell George Wallace, ain't no one gonna turn me around..."

The third woman was so overcome with hate and the bubbling in-articulateness of the need to see us all dead, corpses strewn from one end of U.5. 80 to the other, that all she could do was turn her backside to us, wiggle, and pretend to be breaking wind.

"You got nothin' but cla.s.s, madame," I yelled. "K-L-A-Z." And we went past. Frightened? No, not then.

I wanted a gla.s.s of water. The sun had come out, and it was hot. "Christ, I'd like a gla.s.s of water," I murmured. "Why don't you go up on that porch and ask them white folks?" one of the kids gibed, a student from Tuskegee.

I grinned back at him. "Will it cause trouble for the march?" He shook his head, "No, but it gonna cause trouble for you."

I loped off out of the line as everyone in the vicinity pa.s.sed the message: the white boy's goin' up to ask for a gla.s.sa water...he'll never get it.

Behind me, the column slowed and halted, jamming up as everyone watched, waiting for trouble, almost anxious for it, perhaps. Down the street, at the resident hotel, the klaz women craned over the railing to see what was happening. I trotted up to the front steps of the house. There were three women sitting there in chairs. "Excuse me, ma' am," I said to the fat one, "might I trouble you for a gla.s.s of water, please." She stared at me uncomprehendingly. What the h.e.l.l was this Northern Jewish Communist asking her? She didn't speak, couldn't speak? " A gla.s.s of water, ma' am?" I repeated.

The redhead next to her leaned over, "He says he wants a gla.s.s of water. Please." The fat one heaved herself out of the chair, went inside the screen door. The redhead came over to me.

"We aren't all as bad as they tell you we are down here," she said, and seemed infinitely, genuinely sad about it.

"As bad as what, ma'am?" I asked, playing boyish and cute.

"Well, just like, you know, them others, like they tell you."

"Who tells me, ma'am?"

"You know. We just aren't all that bad, honest."

"Yes ma'am." I smiled at her. "But some of you are, and if you sit back and let them ruin your lovely state, then you're as guilty as they are. I came all the way from Hollywood, ma' am, just to see if I could help." She stared at me. I'd used a magic word. Hollywood. Then I wasn't a Communist. A black-loving Jew, probably, but not a Communist. And I had such nice manners, and I obviously wasn't a beatnik. The fat one came out with the water. I took a long, deep pull from the kitchen gla.s.s, and returned it. "Thank you, very very much, ma' am." I smiled, allowing the left-cheek dimple to show itself.

"You just tell 'em we gave you a gla.s.s of water," the redhead said, smiling, thinking she was sewing it up.

And if I'd been black? I thought. I didn't say it, because the idea was to show them there were other ways to do it, not to antagonize them. I loped back to the line of marchers and fell in, the line moved out again, and I repeated what had been said. They weren't all that bad down here. The Negro student turned a look of venom and truth on me. "Don't you fall for that okey-dokey," he warned me.

Hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.

We turned down onto the main drag. Dexter Street. Past the Jeff Davis Hotel. The whites standing at every curb, and the rednecks, the denim-clad, white-s.h.i.+rted men, giving us the finger. "Where you want freedom from, boy?" a redneck murmured at me from the sidelines. "New York? Philadelphia? Chicago?" I smiled at him...frig you, Jack.

Past the Paramount Theatre. Elvis Presley in Girl Happy. "That isn't one of ours," the Negro high school girl said. My heart went cold in me. It's so easy to forget.

Past the J.J. Newberry five and dime. The second floor housed the Montgomery Citizens Council offices. They had a gigantic poster hanging out the window. It showed Martin Luther King with some other people, and it said MARTIN LUTHER KING / COMMUNIST!

Hoop-de-hoop. Hoop-de-hoop.

A white waitress in a restaurant, peering out of the window at me. I smiled at her, winked. She grinned back. We flirted. If I wanted to stay down here for a few days, I could spread the gospel, seed the populace, lift that barge, tote that bale.

The upstairs window of the Pontiac Agency. A man in a gray suit. "Go back where you come from, you mammy-jammin' n.i.g.g.e.r-lovin' sonsab.i.t.c.hes...y' G.o.d dam..." Ah, South' n hospitality.

The kids behind us were doing a freedom chant to a tune that was ready-made for The Jerk. There was dancing in Dexter Street. Another dance. The Twine. And a third. The Shotgun. Yeah!

The last lap. As we came down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the end of the square and the Capitol, someone pointed and yelled. Atop the Capitol Building. No American flag. The Alabama State Flag, crossed diagonal red bars on a white field. And underneath: the stars and bars of the Confederacy. Governor George, Governor George, how does your arrogance grow? With shotgun sh.e.l.ls and lynch mob yells, and flauntings of America, all in a row!

We listened to the speeches, all of them. They droned on for hours, and in the parlance of show biz, they "lost their audience." But it didn't matter, we were with them all the way. They could have recited Jabberwocky. Until Jimmy Baldwin introduced King. Baldwin had once had training as a preacher. It told. shadrach and his kin went to the furnace once more, and from the heat came Martin Luther King, who said all there was to say. We had stood there, slumped there, lain there, sitting thousand upon thousand while the Army spotters on the rooftops stared down at us- put a machine gun up there on the Montgomery Safety Building, another on the roof of the facing office building, and a third set of two cross-rigged in the Capitol Building, and just track across, spraying, and we could spread them n.i.g.g.e.r-loving b.a.s.t.a.r.ds curb to curb in their own blood -and Wallace's head thug, Al Lingo, moved around the crowd, incognito. We were pigeons, had Wallace wanted to pull another sharpesville Ma.s.sacre. Added to it was the fact that those "protecting" Alabama National Guardsmen (with their flag of the Confederacy sewn over the heart above the US Army patch) were all facing inward, not outward. Protection?

Footnote: I submit it was a calculated bit of strategy, mobilizing the Dixie Division. Whether as a subliminal punishment-having to guard the very people who threatened their way of life-or as a warning to the invaders that down under that khaki even the troopers were Wallace's Boys. Whichever, let it herewith be noted that every one of them was gimlet-eyed, beast-faced, thick-necked, jaws twitching with restrained fury as King lacerated their Alabama bigotry.

And the singing...G.o.d, the singing! Fifty thousand, led by Belafonte. George was hiding up in the Capitol, peeking through the Venetian blinds. I wonder if Governor George enjoyed the entertainment as much as he had the darkies singin' in de moonlight?

Behind me, inside the sawhorse barricades, I heard an old Negro man and his wife talking.

"It ain't never gonna be the same here again," he said. His wife shook her head. "They ain't gonna lay down and die." Bitter realism, in the midst of a dream.

He shrugged, gently repeating, "Still, ain't never gonna be the same here again."

I pulled out a salami and a water bottle from the knapsack. Then I remembered the water bottle was empty, and borrowed one from James Goldstone, a television director who had felt it was time to pay some dues. We cut up the salami and pa.s.sed it around. One of the Negro kids grinned: "Kosher?" "It was when we left L.A.," Goldstone leered. We all ate, and pa.s.sed the water bottle. The Negroes would not drink after the white folk. Old horrors die slowly.

When it was over, we were directed to an empty lot where buses were supposed to come to get us, to shuttle us back to the Montgomery airport for the flight home. I had wanted to stay down several days, to see what the aftermath would be like, but they pleaded with everyone to cut out, quickly. Perhaps they knew something like what was waiting for Viola Liuzzo might befall us.

We waited in the empty lot a long, long time, three hundred and more of us. The buses did not come. The troops were s.p.a.ced out all along behind us, threatening, menacing. "I want a c.o.ke," I said to Paul Robbins. There was a gas station two blocks down. "Jeezus, don't go down there!" someone warned. There was no fear, somehow. We started walking down.

As we pa.s.sed the lines of army troops, they began clicking the safety catches off their old M-l rifles. Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, were they trying to scare us? I knew they had no ammunition in those pieces. They weren't even wearing clip holders for spare ammo. Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. And they muttered underbreath: "n.i.g.g.e.r lover."

"Go back where you come from, sonofab.i.t.c.h fuc-"

And one, as I pa.s.sed, trying to get to the gas station, stepped out with rifle at port arms. "Where you from, boy?" he demanded. I stared at him coldly. "I'm from New York, and I'm a Colonel in the United States Army Reserve, boy, and if you don't want me to call your C.O. over and have him put you on charges for speaking to me, you'd better get your a.s.s back in formation, trooper! Jump!" And he got back, and muttered surlily, "Y' gotta go around."

We walked down to the corner. I had to use the toilet. The white ones were full, both men and women. So I used the "separate but equal" facilities maintained for COLORED. I was white. That's a color. The station owner had a thrombosis. We bought our c.o.kes and started back. They had closed off the street. You have to go around. Three blocks North, three blocks West, three blocks South. Now I was scared.

There were five of us. We started back toward the empty lot by that circuitous route, which had been predicated for no discernible reason. The others scampered. I was d.a.m.ned if I'd let those muthuhs ra.s.sle me around. I sauntered. "Why hurry?" I asked the Negro member of the group. "'Cause I can't spend the night in the Jeff Davis Hotel," he said. A telling point. I scampered.

Cars and panel trucks slithered by, with obscenities hurled out at us. "We gonna get you tonight you buncha-" We got back to the lot, shaken.

The buses had not arrived. And then the troops were pulled out. "Protection till everyone is out of Montgomery," the government had a.s.sured us. But there we were, with night falling, and a disorganized mob, trapped in an empty lot, milling about. And the cars with the rednecks, circling, circling...

(Chance? Coincidence? Paranoia?

(Here's what we did not know: the bus drivers had walked out on the job. They would not drive us. A bus had warped in to the curb as a young Presbyterian minister walked up the street, a block away. The door had sighed open, and the Alabama hero had leaned out. "We gonna beat the s.h.i.+t outta alIa you mother-wording, sonofaword, word-word word word b.a.s.t.a.r.ds tonight, y'all see we don't!" and the bus had whipped away.

(And, inexplicably, the troopers had been withdrawn.

(Chance? Coincidence? Paranoia? Maybe.) They got three buses into service. Supplementary drivers were offered more money. The buses arrived. I dashed for one. Heroism doesn't go very far when the smell of tar is in the air.

On the ride back to the airport, jammed together, thank G.o.d, a small white-and-black dog ran out into the road. The driver could have avoided it without shaking up his pa.s.sengers. He held steady. The dog was ground under the left front tire, was whipped back and b.u.mpedb.u.mpedb.u.mped all the way to the rear. The driver never batted an eye. He merely glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch to record the time for the report to the bus company. It was 6:06 PM.

There was more, much more. They wouldn't give us a loading ramp to get into the plane. We waited four hours. They found a bomb on the plane. It was a nine-hour flight back. Viola Liuzzo. She was killed hurrying back from Selma to Montgomery, to ferry out people left stranded in an empty lot.

It was a lot closer than I care to admit.

And now it' s over. I did one day down there, that's all. No big deal, no special feat, no extra blue ribbon. One day, in a land where one Negro college boy summed it up: "We live in a state of perpetual caution. Even on the best day, the most ordinary day, you never know when you leave your house in the morning what will happen, what little thing, some redneck on the prod, something small, that will keep you from ever coming home that night."

I was coming home, and all I could think was: I/Please, please, dear G.o.d, let me the h.e.l.l out of this stinking place!"